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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 19 November 1905
I realize in myself the perfect impossibility of reason: suffering great misery, I am as one who should have plumed himself for years upon the speed and strength of a favourite horse, only to find not only that its speed and strength were illusions, but that it was not a real horse at all, but a clothes-horse. There being absolutely no way—no conceivable way—out of this awful trouble that gives that hideous despair which is only tolerable because in the past it has ever been the Darkness of the Threshold. But this is far worse than ever before; for it is not a despair of the Substance, but of the Form. I wish to go from A to B; and I am not only a cripple, but there is no such thing as space. I have to keep an appointment at midnight, and not only is my watch stopped, but there is no such thing as time. I wish to make a cannon, and not only have I no clue, but there is no such thing as causality. This I explain to my wife, and she, apparently inspired, says "Shoot it" (i.e. the reason). I reply "If I only had a gun".
This makes me think of Siegfried and the Forging of the Sword. Can I beat my broken Meditation-sword in the furnace of this despair? Is Discipline the Hammer? At present I am more Mime than Siegfried; a gibbering ape-like creature, though without his cunning or purpose.
"Only, no water's left to feed its play" "Up with it on the tripod! Its extinct"
But surely I am not a dead man at 30!
A suitable discipline should include 1. Chastity or Sexual Exhaustion: I am not sure which. 2. Purging, and the careful avoidance of foods which give much faecal residue—a dysentery diet, in fact. 3. Perhaps confinement to one single article of food. 4. Silence. 5. Exercise including Pranayama. 6. No tobacco.
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