Before the Cult by Sandy Masia - HTML preview

Before the Cult Essays

The following essays are concerning a range subjects pertaining to the novel – everything from influences, characterization to themes. My hope is that these essays will help you appreciate the book a whole lot better and spark some conversation. I will also tackle some of the questions in the Reading Group Guide in a way I believe the novel intended to portray. This does not mean your interpretations are invalid or my word is absolute and irrefutable. As far as I am concerned every interpretation works as long as it does not contradict itself or the whole, this is a piece of art so it should allow for some freedom and room to create meaning.

I hope you enjoy reading these essays.

Origins of Before the Cult

There are three distinct moments in writing Before the Cult that shaped what the book would be and what the book would be doing. Moments of inspiration perhaps? I don’t know, but I can trace a lot of what Before the Cult has become from those moments.

Moment One

My first year at university I took English Literature as one of my subjects. One of the things we did was study some post-modernist literature. I remember that morning when I walked out of the last lecture on Paul Auster’s City of Glass, I told my friend that I was going to write a novel, that something about that lecture had inspired me. I didn’t tell him what but I will tell you now. Before then my writing had always followed a tight formula or structure: you had in your stories a beginning, conflict, climax, resolution, and the end all tied together by one premise or another (in simple terms a beginning, middle and end). A lot of work went into each step, it required its own work and further elements to be tweaked and dealt with – you should have seen my graphs and the multiple sheets that I scattered on my table each time I had to write, ahh...it’s harrowing (I get the shakes from just thinking about it). It was so engraved in my mind that it made my writing process and the experience of it frigid and rigid. I even got to a point that the whole process drained my juices. That lecture made me realize that you didn’t have to follow a rigid path or formula and you would still be able to put your message through. This new sense of freedom led to a lot of experimentation and tweaking with how I wrote and how I dealt with my premises. I began writing to create a piece of art that breathed and flourished into what it wanted to be, from then my stories began taking a form and a life of their own (as far as I was concerned all the chiselling I was doing before was overboard and seeped the live and colour out of everything I wrote). For the first time in a couple in years, I was inspired to write something honest, something that gave an experience and something that would be its own. It was that sense of freedom that gave me a primitive idea of what Before the Cult would be. Thinking of it now, the idea is quite different to what the book turned out being.

Moment Two

Word was the world was ending on December 21st or something according to the Mayan calendar, at least that is what documentary “experts” claimed. I didn’t care if it did end, in fact I wished it would end one day in a blink of an eye. I wanted it so bad, although a part of me knew how unlikely and stupid the whole thing sounded I wanted it over. The year was 2012 and my depression was becoming more and more severe, exacerbating my other mental illnesses turn. Without getting into the gory details (says the guy who wrote Before the Cult), I was suicidal, I self-harmed and self-medicated to oblivion. I was a mess, although I was a year and over six months into therapy, I was still a mess.  The drugs weren’t working ( a reference to The Verve), and my psychiatrist had changed them two times now and I was getting tired.

I was overwhelmed by thoughts of suicide above anything else, I didn’t understand why everyone didn’t want me to kill myself. They all made a big deal out of it and again I didn’t think they understood how it truly felt to be in such pain, all the time. As browsed websites about depression  I realized all they did was list the symptoms and explain a little bit but they never went to the core of the experience of it. In fact out of many websites, over two dozen, there was only one website that did and after that there wasn't anything. I remember going back the next day trying to find it, but I couldn't. To this day I don't know what the name of the website was or how to find it again, I have tried but I have failed.

I had all sorts of thoughts about suicide. What made suicide so bad anyway? Is it because you will hurt the ones that love you? Well, if they loved you they would understand, it is quite selfish of them to keep you alive when every moment you spend alive is in agony. Suicide isn’t being cowardly, I thought, it is just what people say because they are hurt that you killed yourself, they hope by saying so they would deter more incidents. And to say people who commit suicide are selfish is just plain insulting and ignorant. Again nobody seemed to consider how attractive death/suicide is or can be. What about the fact that suicide is wrong? No, it isn’t wrong, it might be taboo but it isn’t morally indefensible as some acts are, for an example rape. Ethics often ponder what is right or wrong in relation to other people, that is what is often considered in moral reason that it becomes too difficult to talk about how one should behave or treat one’s self and to even offer grounds on which that is even acceptable. It seems we should be able to decide what we do with ourselves, we should be free even if that is harmful to us (as long as these acts do not affect the general public adversely as drug addiction and others might).

Boy oh boy, I was messed up. But it is these types musings that went into much of Before the Cult, those type of arguments. Ideas wearing masks and lurking behind metaphors, imagery and so forth, but this type of thinking is intentionally alluded to in Before the Cult. It changed what the book would become in a few ways, it became more about conveying the experience of being that depressive state in hopes of maybe helping others understand just how powerful  those inclinations and mental delusions can be. To make the experience wrought with confusion and all the other elements I thought were indicative of the experience (like being unable to understand other people's perspectives) I wrote the book in first person and gave the illusion it wasn't entirely in first person because when you are severely mentally ill part of that experience is thinking you know what others think or feel.

Third moment

The third moment which shaped Before the Cult was pretty serious.

The year was 2013, this was after the mental health hospital ordeal. So I came out with a less morbid and suicidal self than before. Things were great until July came, which is winter here in South Africa. I have always loved winter, it was very cold and I loved the cold. Then I suddenly fell ill, very ill. I don't want to get into the details here. Anyway, I was close to death, I knew I was going to die with striking certainty, I can’t really put it into words. This is when I had that near death experience that I mentioned in my interview. This experience itself is not that important. The most important part is that I almost died.

I went on to be sick until the end of the year, I naturally thought I didn’t have much time because although a lot of tests were run and the doctors couldn't exactly pinpoint what was wrong with me until later towards 2014. During this time, I was confronted by my mortality. I had never contemplated the meaning of life, what makes life a valuable life, what means it means to exist or the nature death that long and hard in my life. During this time I was also working on Before the Cult, I wanted to finish it before I die.

Although it wasn't intentional writing and rewriting the book in that frame of mind, it influenced the end product to a greater degree than anything that had come before. Before the Cult is filled with thoughts on death, the afterlife and existence. If life is valuable and what adds value to it. I was very pessimistic during that time and that is the strongest reason I can give to why the book ended the way it did. The conclusion, of the novel, is very counter-intuitive but it is what the character Sandy, being delusional depressive, would have deduced from his experiences. He came to the conclusion that we are nothing but matter, we are things trying to pass on as something other than what it is fundamentally. Life is a rejection of our most basic nature, a state of temporary denial from what we truly are, nothing. That is what we are. We are pure nothing trying to mean or be something. Death, the destruction of life, reduces us to our basic form and nature. There isn’t an afterlife, you just turn into atoms that will be recycled by nature into something else. That is what you are, without any more value above that. Your consciousness and self-awareness a temporary spasm or a blink of lightning in the vast universe.

If this sounds morbid and disturbing to you remember that was the whole point of the story, to provide you with that glimpse into a messed up mind like Sandy’s.  Although some might feel this portrayal of depression is exaggerated I would like to respond by saying we experience the illness differently. I would say it is unique, not exaggerated, because there is a lot that I can surely understand and identify with in Sandy, and there is a lot that is common with other depressives in there. My aim wasn’t to tell you that life is meaningless, personally I don’t think it is, it is just that all of the time I spent thinking about death I realized in the end we are all hopeless against it. That is perhaps why I permitted the ending we had. To someone in a situation like Sandy's that is the reality. It also makes understanding being suicidal a little better :  life = pain, death = non-existence, non-existence = no life. Therefore, the solution to life = pain is death, anything else is illogical. What about death being painful? As long as you feel pain, you aren’t dead yet. Dying is painful (perhaps), but death isn’t anything.

Maybe some of you readers are going, “Isn’t that what Sandy thought from the beginning of the book?

Here is what sandy thought at the beginning:

Life = pain, death = mode of transport to an afterlife of sorts (the crop/fields).

In this way there is still in an element of hope, however twisted, for a better mode of existence. He is not entirely hopeless, although being suicidal might send that message.

Here is what Sandy thinks in the end:

Life = pain , he then realizes that the afterlife = life(therefore pain). Those are the same therefore death is not a mode of transportation but the end. The only escape becomes annihilation. So death = non-existence.

This change in thought also illustrates a complete loss of hope.

Naming the Characters

It may surprise a lot of you, but I really did not name the main characters in this novel.  This means I did not sit down and come up with names for them, I knew these characters. When they came to me they already had their own names and all I had to do was get to know them.

Let me start with the simple ones, Macfearson and Macxermillio. I have known them as, wait for it, imaginary friends from 2004. I met Macxermillio in a dream. He introduced himself as Macxermillio and from then on I had an imaginary friend named Macxermillio. I was twelve years old then. Like from my childhood, I did not actively create my imaginary friends. It felt more like an organic process, the same way you don’t sleep and consciously construct your dreams although dreaming is a product of your mind. I knew the images I bumped into were nothing more than my products of my imagination, but I couldn’t sit down and make them do shit like they are my puppets; when I did they ceased being my imaginary friends but rather hollow images of my “real” imaginary friends. Therefore, I always treated them like persons with free will, rights, and independent personalities. So I had to get to know Macxermillio, rather than create him. Around the third time when Macxermillio paid me a visit, outside the dreams, he was accompanied by a fellow with white dyed hair on a black horse, wearing a red and black cloak. He introduced himself as, you guessed it, Macfearson. He was subservient to Macxermillio to an extent, either he feared or respected him. He wasn’t subservient to me though and he gave me a tough time sometimes. Then there was another version of me, it looked like me and spoke like me yet it did not think like me, feel like me or was me. He was always referred to as Lebohang, which is my second name, to avoid confusion of having two Sandys in a group. But everyone knew he was Sandy, I hated that to be honest with you. All of the imaginary friends were subservient to Macxermillio, this shows itself in the novel in some interesting ways, because Macxermilio is reserved, methodological and clever he isn’t very aggressive in his managing style or ostentatious about his power and position. He fairly takes into consideration other people’s views and comes up with the best decision for the good of everyone involved, so he is also considerably selfless and protective.

The band, Macxermillio, Macfearson and Lebohang, has been my imaginary friends for so long and actually been with me through difficult times. They studied with me, went to the hospital with me, looked after me when I was sick, and also encouraged me when I felt like giving up. There is only so much they could because they are immaterial, they couldn’t stop me from doing other harmful things from myself or from my suicidal attempts.

Now I’m sure you have realized how essential and important is the Macxermillio character, by the way the Macxermillio and Macfearson in the book are the same as my imaginary friends except in this novel I have put them in a situation for a purpose. I don’t know if this matters, but they agreed to it, we sat together and decided on it and everything. Instead of having the second version of me remain Lebohang in the novel I named gave him the name which is really his, Sandy. It did not make sense to call him Lebohang when the wasn’t going to be me in the book. So there wasn’t going to be any confusion. Since all the imaginary friends subservient to Macxermillio are “Macxermillian” in a sense. That is why Sandy is: Sandy Macxermillian.

I hope all of this makes sense and reveals why Sandy, in the novel, is Sandy. Now a main character in a novel having the same name as the author might have other effects and spawn a whole number of interpretations and I think that is okay. I have some things in common with Sandy, a lot, but he just isn’t me. And since the book is written in first person this relationship between author and main character gives the illusion of the story being non-fiction, therefore amplifying the story’s importance and intended function.

The Three Faces of Sandy

Although the ending of the novel allows for many interpretations as to what is meant by “imaginary friends” there is one thing that is clear. Sandy, Macxermillio and Macfearson, work as a single unit. Just how this trinity functions is the interesting part and reveals a lot about the nature of the main character(s) and illuminates some of the things that occur in the story and lends a lot of meaning to how and why the story ended as it did.

The trinity is modeled, in part, over the Freudian concept of the id, ego and the superego. For more information on these go online, I’m going to touch a bit on these here.

Id – the id it is irrational and fantasy orientated. It is pure desire and instinct, all it wants is to fulfill these basic instincts and desire not matter the cost or the consequences. It is the most primitive part of our psyche and it is largely unconscious and impulsive.

Ego – it is orientated around problem-solving; realistic and rational it is. It negotiates ways, between us and our world, which can fulfill the desires or urges exerted by the id while avoiding the most pain it can to the self. However, it does not have a sense of right and wrong. 

Superego – it is the voice of conscience and the source of guilt in most of us. It is aware of right and wrong, values and the society at large. If a person gives in to the desires of the id without listening to conscience, it can punish you by guilt and other uncomfortable emotions or thoughts; the reverse of that will be making us feel proud when we do something right.

Now the trinity itself is divided into these functions or a version of them. Instead of these functions being part of one psyche they are personalized and function as three distinct personalities who have their own psyches (or at least they are presented that way).

Macfearson  is the id, he is the most primitive and instinct bound of the trinity. He has these erratic energies and passions inside him, obsessive, impatient and not easily influenced by reason. He is brute desire and feelings. The only thing keeping him on check is Macxermillio who Macfearson is subservient to him largely because of the reasons I have elaborated on previously.

Macxermillio is the voice of conscience, reason. He is the superpergo and also part ego. He is the intelligent, meticulous, even-tempered and strategic one of the trinity. Without him, they have no direction and they are bound to self-destruct, he brings order to chaos, calm to the storm and direction to aimlessness. However, sometimes, although rarely, he can get side-tracked because of his tremendous responsibilities that is why he sometimes needs Macfearson to remind him of what they are about (a bit of passion). Macfearson needs him the most though, without Macxermillio he is bound to wind up in trouble; he requires the moderation. Macfearson without Macxermillio is oblivious to the consequences of his actions, he is race car without breaks.  Macxermillio without Macfearson is a machine without a soul.

One of the chapters that illustrate this dynamic is Chapter 3.2

Sandy is part ego and part id and he is also the axis at which these personalities meet. Since he is the one with a body, or the real one, the others depend on him to exist simply because they are ‘in his mind’. Contrary to intuition, that does not make him the strongest force in the trinity or the most significant. He might be the body that moves about in the world, but he is not in complete control. He, like Macfearson, is also subservient to Macxermillio. He is also drawn more to Macxermillio because, like Macxermillio, he is rational and pragmatic, at the same time Macfearson  is a part of him and he sympathizes with bits of his personality because after all he is half-id.

This is why the death of Macxermillio by the calling is important, it signals the triumph of irrationality, instinct, confusion and brute forces because the force that keeps everyone together and sane is annihilated, namely Macxermillio (the superego and half-ego). Why does that happen? What is it that takes away this element of common sense and conscience? The only element capable of understanding reality or society? The trinity’s, or Sandy’s, only hope of dispelling its delusions? Well, the simple answer is depression. The complicated answer is the calling.

Since Macfearson, being the personification of brute desire and instinct, is the most homicidal and extremely suicidal force, that is also obsessed with the fields/the crop, he is left to reign over the weaker Sandy, who is half-ego and id and no superego therefore no match for Macfearson. This is why the self-destruction creeps in once Macxermillio is removed and the novel takes a somewhat exaggerated erratic turn. There is no moderation, a voice of conscience or a sense of direction remaining. That is why the book ends like it did.

It’s worth noting that although Macxermillio is the voice of conscience and direction, he is a different kind of conscience that holds unusual values, beliefs and moral standards. This is because he is a conscience in a mentally ill mind. A mind that is warped and twisted. Perhaps the most important thing about him is that he represents the capacity to heal. He is the hope because he can initiate change and see the world as it really is.

The trinity, in a sense, is a state of perpetual internal conflict since the others are “imaginary friends” except Sandy. However, in a way, the trinity is Sandy Macxermillian and Sandy Macxermillian is the trinity: this is why I titled essay this “Three Faces of Sandy”.

The Calling

What is it? What does it do or how does it affect the characters? Why did Macxermillio call it “father”?  Well, this is a complicated answer. I sometimes get confused by it myself and I created it, this is because it has gotten so complex. To try and make this answer easy I will answer this question in the following sections:

• A Metaphor
• An Entity
• Influences and Relations
• A Worldview

A Metaphor

The calling is, as alluded to in Cheryl’s Notes, a metaphor of clinical depression and other mental illnesses that may come with it. Think of all the symptoms of depression, that is what the calling is. So every time in the book when the character’s say “the calling is getting stronger” or “can you feel the calling” what they are saying is that their mental condition is getting worse. Here is a list of the depressive symptoms prevalent in this book and are constantly referred to in different ways, sometimes indirectly by characters suddenly changing behavior:

• Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
• Loss of appetite
• Sleep changes
• Loss of energy
• Self-loathing
• Concentration problems
• Crying spells
• Extreme sadness and pain
• Emptiness
• Feelings of worthlessness
• Frequent or recurrent thoughts of death and suicidal/homicidal  thoughts (should be noted that homicidal thoughts are very rare)
• Neglecting hygiene
• Self-harm
• Delusional thinking

I feel there is much more than the list says, but I think you get the point. With self-harm, it is interesting to note that the characters use it so they may feel better for a while(to dispel the calling) but this act is nonetheless a symptom of mental illness. Self-harm can only get worse as it did with Calvin which the trinity refer to when advising Sandy about using self-harm to curb the “weight of the calling”(the psychological pain).

An Entity

The calling is also a personification of clinical depression and the mental illness that may come with it. In the novel Sandy speaks to the calling (Chapter 6.4), the calling is described as some enigmatic abyss-like creature when it kills Macxermillio(Chapter 11.5). They refer to the calling speaking to them and they do not know whether they should trust it or not. They wonder if it is their guide to the home or it is a product of the universe that is rejecting them since they consider themselves not belonging in this universe.

They did all the homicidal experiments as a way to test if the calling was to be trusted but that came to no avail that is why they tried therapy. More on this on the fourth section of this essay.

Influences and Relations

So Macxermillio calls the calling “father” when it reveals itself to him right before killing him. This exchange reveals that there wouldn’t be Macxermillio or Macfearson if it wasn’t for the calling. How so? Well, remember in Chapter 4 when Sandy meets Mafearson and Macxermillio for the first time? In Chapter 4.2 Macfearson tells him a story of “how it starts”. Read that and come back here if you can’t remember. What Macfearson is telling Sandy or what that reveals is how the depression started and the sense of alienation. The depression made him weird and, as a result, his peers, family and others rejected him or forgot him. Maybe because he was already in the process of alienating himself as people with depression often do. 

As a result of Sandy’s loneliness and alienation (depression) he creates “imaginary friends” or the “imaginary friends” come to him. Therefore the calling (depression) twisted and warped his brain and life until Macxermillio and Macfearson came out of him. In a sense, this makes the calling the father to who Sandy, Macxermillio and Macfearson end up becoming because it shapes their feelings, bombards them with thoughts, distorts their perception and filters their experience. A child who grows up depressed or with depression is very much molded by the illness(the illness influences their identity and what it becomes) if it is left untreated and that is what is being insinuated in the book.

In Chapter 11.5 Macxermillio calls the calling “father” when this insight is revealed to him and the calling calls him “son”. Why did he apologize to the calling? Because he hasn’t been a very good son, he tried his best not to listen to what the calling/depression orders out of him. Since the calling is the stronger force in the book it eventually beats common sense and rationality, aka Macxermillio, and kills him. This alludes to ways in which delusional thinking and some of the ways depression can affect our thinking, often killing rationality, distorting perception and keeping us delusional. That is why Macxermillio goes in the end, because depression, left untreated or not treated quickly enough, only gets worse and more powerful.

A Worldview

The calling isn't a worldview, but it is responsible for a worldview the same way it is responsible for Macxermillio and Macfearson. Because of the alienation created by it and the suffering Sandy/the trio started to believe that he does not belong in this world, not even in heaven or hell. In fact, he/the trio strongly believed that they came to exist into this world by a mistake. They even had a name for who they were, deathlings. They even had a name for where they belonged, the crop or the fields. But what does all of this really mean? To answer this, I am going to reveal to you their entire worldview/theory. 

It is important to understand realms of existence as Sandy/the trio understood them. When they refer to “this world”, “the universe” or “this existence” in the book what they are referring to is a realm of existence, they are not talking about earth, a country, a universe, a parallel universe or the town. What they are referring to is a concept that goes along the lines of a mode of existence.

What is a realm of existence?

The simplest way I can explain it is in this way. Think of all that exists or you know to exist as in our picture of cosmology today. Think of the universe, the parallel universes and multiverse. All of that, to Sandy/trio, belongs to this world. It is one mode of existence. What they have in mind is that our entire picture of cosmology is only one way that things could be or exist. Not only are there other universes spatiotemporally separated from ours but they are made with a different kind of stuff altogether (not matter as we understand it but something completely alien and incomprehensible to us).

There is a finite number of these realms of existence, Sandy/trio believed, and they are thinly next to each other like slices in a loaf of bread except that in between these slices there are membranes separated the modes of existence. These membranes are where all things are formed in their pre-existing state and according to the essence of the entities formed they send the entities to their appropriate realm of existence/homes. Occasionally, a mistake happens and entities formed in the membranes are transported to realms of existences which aren’t appropriate to them. And that is precisely, they theorized, what happened to them as deathlings. The simple meaning behind the term, as they used it in the beginning of the novel, was that they belonged in a different mode of existence altogether and the name of every intelligent being from that mode of existence is a deathling. They called that realm of existence the crop/the fields. They theorized that suicide done the right way might send them across into the membrane which might then direct them to their home where they belong instead of hell, heaven or the afterlife which still belongs in this realm of existence. That is what all the homicides(the sampling) were about in the novel, they were experimenting in hopes of finding the perfect suicide to transmit them to the crop/fields/home. Of course, they begin doubting and thinking their entire method is false, after killing Jay, and they regroup and try come up with an alternative while they figure things out, that is when the idea to see a therapist comes in.

They came to believe this because of the anguish that resulted from being depressed and mentally ill, and because of the delusions engendered by mental illness (the calling) they formed this worldview. In this worldview, their conception of death is transmittal unlike in the end of the novel when this view is shattered and death is an annihilator and they conclude that they are inanimate entities trying to pass on as living things, therefore, explaining their discomfort and anguish.