by Corry Shores
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The following stories, appearing originally on the blog White Heat, were written by Corry Shores, who is not me but who is writing this text these words these very words you now read. The accounts to follow are dedicated to my friend and teacher, Ayşe Pekdiker, whose conversations made them possible.
The author unfortunately has recently departed this world, and in his last will he requested that I destroy this story, even though it is the only one he had ever written. Yet, despite my being entrusted the executor of his last will, by cruel necessity I hereby instead execute his story in negligent and illicit defiance to the author’s express wishes.
“On What is True,”
containing
“The Self-Execution”
by Corry Shores
“On What is True”
Prelude
§1
It is true that the man jumped on the block then built a house then his wife dies then he buys a convertible then he runs over a frog then he stops his car, gets out, takes the dead frog, buries it in the desert sand then gets back into his car, turns on the radio and hears “To My Friend” by Leslie West and is shocked that someone else knows this song and wanted to play it, because it was important to him, then the jockey explains at the end of the song that his wife died and he needed to hear that song, then the man stopped his car, got out, and dug a hole in the ground, then said a silent, wordless prayer, and buried nothing. It is true.
§2
The truth was revealed to me. This is what God said. The man jumped on a block and fried his eggs. He looked out the window to see the water sprinkling the lawn. The ground became covered in worms. They tied into knots and died. The man felt his hands shake. He took an old record and played it. He began to see his future. Everything he did not want to happen did happen in his dream, “but will it?” he wondered? He put on strong boots and went to his attic. Sun shone through a small window, illuminating the floating dust. He saw his old things. Everything that he wanted to happen, did happen, as far as he could see. He stared at his old things as the sun fell, not moving except for his mind. He was shocked by how many times he had died throughout his life. “It’s not fair,” he said aloud, banging his hand on something firm, “it’s not fair that there is an end to death.” This God did tell me.
§3
It is true that the man jumped on the block and split it in two, falling endlessly but this time by his own volition. “To fall requires a ground somewhere,” he thought. And truly he kept falling. All the prior times he fell it was because he sought a ground. He realizes now that he falls by his own force of propulsion. This is something we cannot deny.
§4
It is indeed true that the man jumped on the block and saw it was the last time. He was given three minutes to have his final thoughts. “What should I think about?” he wondered, “what could possibly be so significant to be justified as my final thoughts?” He began by thinking about how he could end his life even sooner than the little time that was left him. For, he feared more than anything that he would fail to think something worthy of these final moments. He picked up a rake and shook his head wearily. His final thought was “case.” This in fact is how it did happen.
§5
It is true that the man jumped on the block, triggering the sudden fall of the sun. Stomping desperately on the block, he succeeded in no more than to pump dim flickers on the horizon. The demons inside him saw their chance. Their only aim was to peek through his eyes. They saw thereby that they could do no harm to the man, who willed with all his might his complete erasure. We know this to be true.
§6
Yes, the man jumped on a block and wrote his book, On the True, the False, and What is Really the Case. He wrote it with his left hand, thinking it had something unexpected to say. He had no way to know for sure, so he trusted its originality. The final sentence it wrote was, “To be broken, to be humble, to kill, to die, all these we rejoice in. But to be the case is the saddest, saddest....” This all can be verified.
§7
It is not yet false that the man had jumped on a block. Three witnesses corroborate this account, with very little discrepancy between them: The man landed, then fell to the ground below him. He jumped again to the block, but forces pulled him back down. No matter how hard he tried, he could not stay on the block above. But neither the man nor the witnesses believe this to be true. They only know that this was the lie that made all the other stories become true.
§8
Unfortunately, the following is (not) true. The man did not jump on a block. The man walked against reality, and protected himself by walking against himself too. His motivation was simple: change as little as possible. Freeze yourself, but pretend to change. But curiously this fear of death placed him very often wanting to die, which in fact resulted involuntarily and at the least convenient times.
“On What Is True:”
“The Self-Execution”
§9
Regretfully I must remind us not to forget the following. After killing himself, the man was assigned his greatest shame, far greater than the one that caused his suicide. He was to be the sole eulogizer at his funeral. Those who attended did so very regretfully, forgetting that the normal social expectations of paying respect should not apply to the man. The man stepped before his corpse and said to the regretful attendees: “As you are all disinterested in the man, his life, and his death, and rightfully so, I will speak directly to him and not to you.” “You were a burden to the world, to God, and to yourself. We are glad you ended your life. God opened to you the doors of paradise twice, and both times you failed to enter. God regrets giving you that second chance after your first failure. Like the world and God, I must bear the consequences of your failure, even though you are gone. But to have left us, God, and yourself was necessary, and we are all grateful that necessity prevails.” Sadly this is all entirely true.
§10
Have no doubts. After the disinterested attendees filed out of the funeral, the man was left with the first real laborious task of his life, to bury himself. Looking at his corpse, he was unenthusiastic about needing to carry it. The body the man left himself was not very strong anymore, and he knew that carrying his body would be tiresome. He took his corpse from his coffin and dragged it out the front door. It was not his concern really where he buried himself, so he just found a nearby shaded place under a tree. He began digging and while appreciating the shade he realized that his work was made more difficult by the root system he needed to cut through. As he dug, he occasionally glanced to his corpse and was ashamed to be seen with it in public. After getting almost deep enough, he stopped caring about digging, and he rolled his body into the pit. Seeing his body collapsed and lifeless at the bottom made him feel empty inside. “Why did God have to make me be the one to bear that man? And why was he so unable to follow the Will and Grace of God? All he had to do was have faith in God and do God’s Will.” The man continued burying himself and when all the dirt and severed root were tossed back to the hole, he felt weary and headed to the man’s home. “It is time now to dismantle his life, piece by piece. It is cursed through and through.” This I regret to confirm is true, and as dark as it may seem, the nightmare to follow had not yet even begun.
§11
As you know, it is all still true that on this day, at this very moment, the greatest storm arrived. It was the final or greatest consequence of the man’s divine incompetence. The storm had no purpose. It simply had to come. It was hell on earth. The winds blew so hard they knocked the tree over and uprooted the dead man buried beneath. For a second the electrical energy and kinetic ferocity of the storm brought a glimmer of inner life into the dead man. He saw his storm in that brief but for his dead soul eternal instant. “MY STORM,” he thought, “my storm, you come for me, no death can escape you, and here I am at your complete mercy, lifeless and dead all I am; you rip at me and I have no animation to resist. I am your meaningless puppet, not worthy of pity but only disgust. How long will you rage? Why can’t I die? Why is pain no different from me?” The storm, not one to stay silent replied, “your storm is inside you. You are the storm. Your rage of pain is your undivine eternal damnation. You are worthy not even to enter hell. This is you. And it gets worse.” How I wish this were untrue, how I wish and wish and wish. But it’s so very, very true, is it not, my friend? Is it not?
§12
Our true story continues, with negligible inaccuracies. The dead man saw no way for things to get worse. If only he had looked inside himself to see what he could not imagine. The winds hit his lifeless corpse and began ripping off his skin. Worms spilled out, and nests of various insects scattered about simultaneously. The little bits that were left inside him were toxic, and the parasites learned not to poison themselves on them. “These parts,” said the man, “are the little that I was, and all the rest was my funeral dressing. Why did I fool myself and others with this costume now disassembled before me? Of all my truly unforgivable and unholy failures, my failure to destroy this only real part of me, poisonous as it is, is my greatest failure of all. How did I fail to destroy myself when nothing about me was worth saving?” The storm’s rain flooded his hollow corpse, and in that puddle of decay he saw a murky vision. He saw one Eye of God. It was solid blue with no iris. It looked not out at him but inward to his hollow. Just then, two tiny travelers began on either side of his hollow, walking toward one another. When they met in the pit of his corpse, God’s Eye became luminous bright. “20 footsteps each,” God called out, with a Mouth out of view. At that moment the man’s toxic parts started growing. They were awful cancers composed of knotted discolored tissues and slimy leaching fluids. The cancers slowly and gradually filled up his hollow as the water with God’s Eye became displaced. Then the insects from before swarmed upon him, collectively placing his skin over his new insides and chewing together the seams. Yes, the nightmare must now begin. Death was an insufficient punishment. The deadly man leaned up then rose to his feet. A crowd had gathered in horror and disgust. His inner cancers began spreading across his skin. “Don’t help me,” he said, “don’t look, don’t remember.” He felt his inner cancers rustle in agitation. They compose him now and propel him forward. As we know from our teachings, this is the one thing most true of all.
§13
We have documentation that after burying his corpse the man under his duties as executor went to his home to dismantle his life completely. Everything that the man cherished or even recognized as his own was smashed to bits. A display was than constructed. All the things the man was afraid of most deathly were cruelly put on display with bright and attractive illumination. Statues were then sculpted and displayed there as well, depicting the man at his most shameful, embarrassing moments. Other elaborate statues portrayed the man in all the ways he was not but wished so much he could be. Seeking lunch, the funeral-goers happened upon the man’s house and heard the cheerful and busy construction noise. Walking in and noticing the display, they broke out in an uproar of hearty laughter as they came to see how the man was just so ridiculously full of naught. The display lighting was rigged for show. One item after another took the spotlight in turn. With each new revealed item, the crowd’s laughter grew more uproarious. Getting no more than a third through the display, the attendees had been laughing so hard and for so long that they were lacking for air. The spotlight, being mechanical, ceased not its show, and the crowd soon self-suffocated, dying, prematurely, but willingly so, for this was their most joyous moment. These documents have been certified by our highest courts of law.
§14
The following comes from a credible witness. We have excluded details the witness was not entirely certain about. The man now covered head to toe and through and through with vile cancers, moving under their compulsion, journeyed through odd passages until finally arriving at the gates of paradise. The sight of them filled him with anguish as he was forced to recall vividly the two times God opened the gates and willed the man to enter, asking only that he destroy everything absolutely of himself first. Failing to do so both times and having to watch those gates crash closed haunted him nightmarishly now. From outside the perimeter where he stood he could hear squeals and grunts of utter delight made by the paradisians inside. But all he himself could feel was the sickness and unbearable discomfort that his cancerous composition made him suffer each moment without distraction. Just then a pack of hounds surrounded him. They too were cancerous creatures, hungering for a cancerous meal. Growling and drooling they closed in on him. He fell pathetically to the ground, covering his eyes so not to see the horror to come. With sharp snaps the dogs bit off chunks of his cancerous tissue, as he writhed in unbelievable agony and shock. Soon he was chewed down in most places to bare bone. But by some strange cause all this missing tissue regenerated, but not as cancers, not as normal flesh, but as extraordinarily dense clusters of raw exposed nerves, bundled together, making among one another painful mutual contact, sending signals of excruciating pain into his brain-stem. The hounds, now spying this new delicacy hesitated not the least to begin chowing on the man’s new nerve-bundle flesh. With just one bite alone, a dog would compress and mangle and soon rip off millions of raw nerve endings, sending a short circuit charge into the man’s brain, which from inside his head felt like a thousand lightning bolts from a tornado had struck down upon his cerebral tissues. What word can be found to describe this much pain? The man thought of Dante’s inferno and how no circle of hell rendered pain anywhere as severe as this. Oh how he envied the damned in the lowest circles of hell. How fortunate to be one of them, to suffer pain that was at least comprehensible even if unbearable. But this was not the end. As the dogs kept voraciously consuming his ever regenerating raw nerve-bundle flesh, his head was pushed and pinned to the side, placing before him a glimpse into paradise. He saw such exquisite healthy bodies of the paradisians, running to one another and making unbelievably satisfying love, so indiscreetly and shamelessly, in all the ways one could desire. He could even see well enough to make out their love organs, which although taking the normal shape, seemed composed differently than human anatomy. The same nerve regenerative forces must have acted on the paradisians’ love organs, because they had come to be densely riddled with raw nerves, as if being made mostly if not entirely of nerve endings. But when the organs made lustful contact, it gave them pleasure as extreme as the man’s chewed nerve-flesh gave him pain. Oh what unbelievable delight he saw them have as they copulated furiously. Such expressions on their faces the man never saw anything like. How divine and extraordinary their pleasure was. He saw it all! And heard it too! Such sweet, sweet music of love and ecstasy like nothing ever dreamed of on earth. That was to be his eternal ecstasy! God willed it! Twice no less, God willed him to have it! But he failed the Will of God and himself and his world. He failed. All this time the dogs never ceased chewing the man’s nerves, while the paradisians gave incredible pleasure to each other. At that moment the man realized just how limited Dante’s vision of hell was. None of the damned really suffered supremely, not even close, not at all. For none endured their painful torment while being forced to observe the inconceivable pleasures of those in paradise while knowing unmistakably that this pleasure was meant for themselves to have instead of their excruciating torture. Now, who will dare to deny that this is certainly true? What? Not even you, O Žižek!?! Not even you!?!
§15
An expert with a lifetime of experience in these matters assured me that all the main elements of the following can be trusted. The dogs having had their fill left the man in his painful condition. He arose despite the unbearable pain of the millions of raw nerve endings grinding upon one another with every slight movement of his body. At the same time, the man left his dismantled house after the display case of shame killed the funeral-goers by laughter. The man then by happenstance crossed paths with the man. Recognizing him, the man said, “I buried you.”
“Did you? How dare you leave the job unfinished?”
“How dare you leave your suicide unfinished?”
“I hate you. You are what I refused to become.”
“I hate you more. You are what I refuse to turn back into.”
The man then punched the man in the densest, rawest part of his nerve-bundled body, a clump bulging out slightly at his gut. “Good,” the man said, “good, keeping punching yourself. And why is that? Why are you hitting yourself?”
“I cannot stop it,” the man said to the man, “but why can you not stop it either?”
“Because neither one of us has power over necessity and even less so over the case.”
After the man’s nerves were pounded down to mashed tissues, the man departed from the man forever. Although the expert is recently deceased and can no longer attest personally to its veracity, he entrusted his son in his last will and testament to defend this account at all costs.
§16
Please reserve your judgment as I report the following to you. Despite the excruciating pain of moving his body composed of raw nerve-cluster, the man pushed himself forward to the only refuge he knows, his home. But upon arriving at its location he saw a structure unrecognizable to him, with bright light beaming out of every new window. He entered and was horrified to see the numerous corpses all with gleeful faces. Many were embracing as if having the time of their lives. “What could have caused all this gleeful death?” he wondered. The man then heard some groans come from a woman, doubled over and lifeless. He brought his ear to her mouth and she whispered in her last breaths: “You killed us, you killed us with your supernatural foolishness.” As her life finally gave way, the man’s attention was caught by the display-case spotlight. “That’s me!” he thought, but what he saw first were the statues of his most shameful moments, oh the horror! These things he thought he had forgotten, now so regretfully he sees them played out one by one. He understood now why the crowd must have laughed, oh the humility, no the shame, the pure shame to know how so many saw these statues. And worse still, some depicted disgraceful moments that he thought no one knew about but here revealed that there in fact were unseen observers, oh to think at those moments he was spied upon by such sniggering witnesses, in many cases people he respected and admired! The spotlight then moved to his fears, “ah what a coward am I, afraid of such harmless things, no wonder I failed in faith to God's Will! What a pathetic fearful incurable nothing I am.” All the while the man’s mind ached with mental and emotional agony. He realized that his brain had also grown countless new emotionally and psychologically sensitive raw nerves like how his body grew its clusters too. Too many times in his life had the man suffered the worst disappointments, self-hatreds, depressions, heartaches, urges for self destruction, but never ever at this extraordinary level which his raw nerve-brain now made him feel. Then as the light moved to the statues depicting what he wanted to be and could have become but failed to be, he felt such self-disgust and self-hateful rage throughout his nerve-dense body and brain. He was on fire, head to toe. How dare he be such a failure! With what right did he do such things, have such fears, be so cowardly, choose to be his lesser, more despicable self? Then the light moved to the final statue depicting what he could have been. It showed God, holding open the gates to paradise, and the man had made it inside, having so much pleasure and true mental and emotional happiness that the man could not even recognize his statue as himself, but all the signs were there that it indeed was he. That sight struck him down so hard he cracked the floor nearly open below him as he fell. It hurts me even to say it, but yes, my sweet, dear child, yes, it really happened so.
§17
Countless great prophets of various eras and locales tell one or another version of the following. Unable to rise, the man, lying on the cracked floor, saw a red light above him. It was the red Eye of God, staring down at the supernaturally broken man. He saw that the Eye, although a pure homogeneous red, was not solid at all. As he looked deeply into It, he could see that God’s Eye was composed of raw nerves. But there were infinitely many, packed with infinite density so only to seem like a solid mineral. The man could see that God being so composed was capable of infinite pain and infinite pleasure. From an unseen Mouth God said, “still you go on. But why? Tell me then, for surely by now you have learned, what is the true?"
The man replied: “pain.”
“Yes. And what is the false?”
“Nothing is false.”
“And what is really the case?”
“What is the case is that to any pain is the increase it beckons.”
Of all the man’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences thus far, this realization was easily the most painful, for it is the knowledge that under the right conditions, pain can continuously multiply without end, and he knew he in fact existed under those very conditions and could expect his pain only to increase unfathomably. With that thought, his pain at last was too much to bear. Paradise was closed off, so his self-erasure now would redeem nothing for him. But by necessity’s force, under this most painful realization, the man, né Corry Shores, being resolved and yet pushed involuntarily by the boundless depths of his pain, jumped on his block for the last time, finding himself not there. The prophets all finish this account with some variation of: “This is no end just as much as this is all true.”
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