Author: Dinah Kolka

Unfortunately, we can’t just decide to die temporarily. The closest to this is sleep, but frankly, sleep is *too temporary*. Every now and then, I have a strong urge to be gone, to destroy everything around me and simply start anew. There is no stronger reflex. The best things are created post-destruction. Creation comes after ruin.

I suppose Marinetti understood this – he needed his car crash to feel rejuvenated. He proclaimed that everything needs to be destroyed in order to be born anew – the dusty museums, the old bones of the past, the libraries, tradition, everything swept away to make space for the new, the better, the faster, the more refined. And I say – he’s not wrong. 

Things stagnate, and life’s mundanity is so painful and thoroughly heartbreaking that one wishes one would throw oneself off the cliff just to feel something. Just to break the programming of the everyday. People are getting more bloated, more sedated, more obedient. If only they could disappear and feel the spark of The Becoming Again. But they choose to wallow in their own mundanity, they actively pick it from the Rolodex of opportunity. One should rebel against this instinct. The Becoming Again, the great sense of joy and the return to the things you once loved. How often do we claim that we are simply ‘not creative’! But it is simply in the act of creation that we find ourselves, the very reflection of our own soul. It never has to be good – it just has to exist. How often do we choose to go to the gym and run staring at the mirror, watching our bloated thighs shake gruesomely under the weight of our own half-baked effort? We watch those pale limbs, like a big pork shoulder moving up and down with each movement we make. We thus perceive that which is ugly instead of that which is admirable. How different would it be if instead, we chose to hike in the mountains! Surrounded by natural beauty, surrounded by the low and high incline of the sublime, that which is superior, which is so high above our own vision of ourselves that it makes us stronger, and eventually, more beautiful. But the garden needs trimming, you might say. To hell with your garden! Is maintaining the appearance of your garden actually there to feed your soul or make you one with your corpse-like neighbours? So I call to arms, I call for you to ditch that which does not nurture you and just leave. Put the key in the engine and hear the roar of the machine, make Marinetti your god for just a little while, only to embrace Transcendentalism in the very next minute. Without nourishing your soul, you rot and decay, often faster than you normally would. My reader, I urge you to go outside and let the vast landscape encapsulate you and make you feel anew. Embrace the contradictions within yourself to create a whole new being that is worth fighting for. 

Every now and then, you must allow yourself to disappear. For me, with strong tendencies to do this on a regular basis, waiting for the next cycle of productivity and silly projects, it is something that I hold dear. Being able to be gone for a while. A mini death. A ritual burning. And then, if you’re lucky, a resurrection. 

The Modern Soul is caught in the hellfire of the everyday. Your own soul whispers to you: You could just move abroad. You could just quit your job. Ah, but the ever-present fear! What if it doesn’t work out? Yet what if life is about trying and failing and restarting and redoing and the newness – the CRYSTALISED NEWNESS OF BRAND NEW LIFE. It’s in this daily rejection of the daily bread that we find ourselves the most alive, it’s in the fire of the ashes of our former life that we feel like we created something. 

And I am running to you with examples: 

Madame Bovary – her constant need for reinvention failed because she was trapped by dissatisfaction and mundanity that wasn’t quite working for her. ‘Sensational novels did it. ’ Perhaps, but there is so much at stake; you cannot truly understand a heroine unless you try to walk in her shoes. I see it as sensation novels being a symptom rather than a cause. She had the urge within her that nothing could satiate. This lack, this ever-present lack was what led her to her untimely demise. The attempt to fill the void, with religion, novels, love, and shopping sprees was all she was able to do. But the void could never be satiated, and it remained gaping until her very end. Think how little we actually hear about Emma’s mother! She dies and she leaves nothing of substance behind – not enough to warrant a presence or a footnote. Consider for a moment, what Emma’s childhood was like! No emotional nourishment, and being dispatched to a convent at a young age. Are we really that surprised about Emma’s honest pursuit of romanticism, of the constant search for that which is extraordinary, exciting, and life-affirming, if these could have been the particular qualities she was missing in her childhood!

Madame Bovary tries to make meaning of her mother’s death and fails to turn it into an event – turn it into a ritual, a mourning rite which fails to satisfy her. We see this in the way she treats her own daughter – like an afterthought. 

Scarlett O’Hara – the need turned her into a monster of her own creation. Everything has its price. Sometimes this price is your own soul. It’s fitting that the book finished with her own self-exile to Tara. The place she held dear, the final homecoming of a broken soul. But there is so much more to it – Scarlett is such a complex and often misunderstood figure! The act of self-exile is simply a conclusion, the consequence of scar tissue turning into festering scabs of her own making. For Scarlett, the only way to navigate this tragedy was to harden and create a thick shell for herself to inhabit. And Ashley – the perfect, idealized fantasy of a man who could make it all better and fix it. Ashley becomes Scarlett’s crutch. Whether he likes it or not, it is through Scarlett’s love for him that she explores the more humane parts of herself. Her help for his wife was not selfless in any measure, but it helped to ensure that she did the right thing. This type of love consumed and destroyed her, with her realising this too late. But in the case of Scarlett, her self-exile came much sooner than the very end of the book – seeing Tara destroyed, her home, her safe place; and how the childhood that ended too soon has contributed and brought change she was not ready for emotionally. When Atlanta burned, Scarlett had to change, in a way exiling her former self and thus she was searching for the spark in all the wrong places (Ashley). “What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. . . . There was no going back, and she was going forward”.

Her former self disappears and is replaced by a struggle intertwined with desire and nostalgia. This links up to my original point – sometimes the act of disappearing follows failure, and sometimes the erosion of the self happens much earlier than we assume. 

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – it is in the creative self-exile and the disappearance of the self that Stephen could be born anew. The old couldn’t contain him, it was no longer enough. And this is key to my point relating to the disappearance – sometimes the only way to contain your soul is to leave. Stephen knew that he couldn’t carry on creatively in his own country once he’d had his epiphany. The past needed to be discarded in order to start anew. 

In Stephen’s case, this act of disappearing is a necessary step preceding legitimate creation. The social isolation serves as a way to reclaim space and true creativity. And only through this act can he become what he was meant to be. The multiple attempts of his soul being taken from him, through the Jesuit order, Irish politics, or his suffocating household all strengthen his resolve to leave. And this is so important. We might assume that every act of disappearance is wrong, but sometimes it is the only way forward allowing us to be reborn. 

Kerouac’s On the Road – the road is a metaphor for escape from the normal, a way for the lost soul to feel something, in a world where no one feels anything.

For Kerouac, the disappearing is an act of rebellion against the feminized status quo, but it also serves as a function to reclaim your own space in the world. Precisely against the bloated and sedated laziness of the mundane that I mentioned earlier. It is in finding new experiences that don’t feel entrenched in severe commodification that one can find space to exist as oneself and with a true appreciation of the life that could be had. 

The act of disappearing is an act of courage. It leads to the embracing of the true self. It leads to rebirth. It is a necessary step in self-creation. If you are always there, always existing in society, you must abide by its rules. It is through an outright rejection thereof that we find ourselves on the brink of something more meaningful. Something actually worth living. We see this in the literary examples – Emma failed to satiate the void and so we learnt the consequences of entrapment both internal and external. Scarlett shows the consequences of premature emotional withdrawal and the severity with which one can become disassociated from oneself as a result of excessive nostalgia and a rapid loss of innocence. And then we have more positive examples – Joyce and disappearance as a way to reclaim self and Kerouac as an antidote to the stale status quo. 

So go on, disappear for a little while. Who knows what it can bring?

Daiches, David. “James Joyce: The Artist as Exile.” College English, vol. 2, no. 3, 1940, pp. 197–206. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/370369. Accessed 26 May 2025.

Barkley, Danielle. “No Happy Loves: Desire, Nostalgia, and Failure in Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind.’” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, 2014, pp. 54–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24389026. Accessed 26 May 2025.

Marder, Elissa. “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in ‘Madame Bovary.’” Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 3, 1997, pp. 49–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566333. Accessed 26 May 2025.

Elmwood, Victoria A. “The White Nomad and the New Masculine Family in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’” Western American Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, 2008, pp. 335–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43022587. Accessed 26 May 2025.

Dinah is the founder of Decadent Serpent and a graduate of Edinburgh Napier University with a BA(Hons) in English Literature. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Salisbury Review and The Mallard. She was also published in the Scottish Book Trust’s 2018 anthology Rebel. In 2023, Dinah self-published her own collection of short stories, The Search and Other Stories.