“I don’t know,” I paused, “is it okay to call you an imaginary friend? Are you even just imaginary in the ordinary sense? You and Macxermillio?”
“Are you actual in the ordinary sense, Sandz?”
“Does not feel like it,” I shrugged.
He nodded. “Well, there you go. We are both struggling to accept what we are fundamentally. You are just a material, an it, trying to pass by as person. And I am an idea trying to pass on as a person. Now we see. Now we understand what she wanted us to understand.”
“So that we would accept it?”
He giggled. “I guess so. She wanted us to see it for ourselves. To see give in to the mystery. The details weren’t important.”
“How sure are we of this. How sure are we of what we think we know now?”
He shook his head, wide and slow. “Not that sure, Sandz. Does not feel right or wrong. Giving in to the mystery has been the theme of the night, and perhaps the theme of all the hustle we have had with the calling all of our lives. Maybe the point is we are not really supposed to know anything else than the fact that our pains and woes shall disappear.”
He held out his hand so I may hold it as if he wanted to lead me somewhere. For a while, I did not understand the significance of the gesture or what it meant. Picking up on the clueless-ness, then he told me, "There is a construction truck coming from up campus. I think we should get closer."
I gave him my left hand, and we walked to the edge of the road. Peacefully, we, my remaining imaginary friend and I, waited in the rain as the bright headlights approached from up campus.
THE END
Dear Reader
Thanks for taking the time to read my book. I hope you enjoyed it. I love hearing from all of you and I take the time to read the emails and reply. Email me at
[email protected] . If you enjoyed this work please leave a review and rate it. Why? Because reviews help others find my work and that helps me continue writing. And also, I love knowing that someone has enjoyed my work as well.
Don’t forget to check out the Reading Club Guide for Before the Cult and the Before The Cult Essays, these were written with the aim to help you appreciate this work better and discover more. I would say one has never truly read the book if they didn’t engage with that material. All this material is included in the back.
Thank you
Sandy Masia
Other Titles by the Author
Into the Grey (an anthology)
Scarleton Series II : Pyre of Envy (to be released August 2016)
Connect with the author for updates and more
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/sandymasia/timeline
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/macxermillio
Blog : https://sandyauthor.wordpress.com/
About the Author
Sandy Masia is currently a student at Rhodes University majoring in Organisational Psychology and Philosophy. He loves music, books and all things art. He usually spends his spare time with his siblings and friends. When he is not at university studying he stays with his family in Kutlwanong, South Africa.
Reading Group Guide
These are just some suggestions of points that could be discussed, they aren’t all there is to discuss. These points of discussion are designed to help you the reader better appreciate the novel, even at a deeper level (from characterization, plot, themes and more). This isn’t the definite guide and more reveals and discussions will be had on my platforms. Enjoy pondering and appreciating!
Discussion Points
•If Macxermllio and Macfearson are imaginary how much of the story has happened and what are the implications of this fact?
•What does having imaginary friends reveal about Sandy Macxermillian’s character? Is he divided within himself, is this a helpful coping mechanism or does it worsen his delusions? What does it imply about his sense of morality or conscience?
•What does the death of Macxermillio and the scene signify/mean to the character and to the story as a whole?
•What does Kim Besert mean to Sandy and why did so much depend upon how she treats him as compared to Krissy?
•Why is what happens in the bar so significant to Sandy Macxermillian?
•In the end what is the most accentuated theme in the novel, the struggle against suicidal and/or homicidal urges, the search for belonging, social exclusion, trust/betrayal or death?
•What aspect about death is mostly explored in the story? (E.g. it’s ability to bring solace and comfort, a bridge to other modes of existence, a tool of complete annihilation, the liveliest thing about life etc.) And why is that?
•What seems to be the point of the novel?
•What is the meaning of the calling? What characteristics/symptoms does it allude to about the nature of mental illness, especially about depression, and suffering from it?
•What might have influenced the author to name the main character Sandy and what does it do for the novel?
•The author has said in an interview, about the novel, “it reeks of my struggle with chronic depression, anxiety and inattentive ADHD” and, about the period it was written, he had “a couple of suicide attempts”, he was “in and out of hospital”, “had a near death experience” so “death and suicide were concepts that occupied my mind”. Does this translate into the novel?
•What could be said the novel reveals about the nature of depression?
•Does the novel provide a first-hand account of being a delusional depressive? To what extent and how? What do you think?
•The end, Chapter 14, what is it all about or mean? How does it fit, if it does at all, to the whole story?
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 tak
ing 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 m
ay 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.