(The Moral Geometry of My Memory)
A debt is, at first, nothing more than a number written down. In the language of accountants, it may be settled, amortised, or declared “irrecoverable”. Once declared so, it is erased, as though it had never existed. That is the liturgy of conventional bookkeeping: to transmute what was taken and never returned into a line of losses and profits, neutralised by time.
I refuse that liturgy. Where the world says “it is prescribed, it is over”, I answer: no. Where the Christian whispers “I forgive, though I cannot forget”, I declare, as a Satanist: I neither forget, nor forgive, nor absolve.
For the true vice is not the failure to repay. Money itself is only a symbol, a token of energy once given. The true vice lies in the act of erasure — in forgetting the one who gave, in reconstructing one’s own good conscience by denying the creditor’s existence. To “forget” a debt is to say: you never mattered. That is the rot at the core, the corruption that cuts deeper than any missing coin.
I will not allow that erasure. I do not beg for repayment; I do not expect a miraculous balancing of accounts. But I record the figure. I inscribe the debt in a parallel ledger, outside of time, outside of the world’s convenient amnesia. There it remains, fixed. Not written off, not closed, never dissolved. It becomes perpetual.
And because I know it will never be repaid, it is also irrecoverable. Here lies the paradox: the capital will never return, yet it is not gone. It mutates into a kind of shadow-currency, locked away in the vault of memory. It circulates nowhere, buys nothing, yet gleams in the dark like a coin struck from absence.
Each such debt becomes a numerical stone. Cold, inert, but enduring. A human face disappears; in its place remains only a number. Those who sought to erase me by forgetting their debt are themselves reduced, in my memory, to that figure. They are affirmed as debtors, yet effaced as persons. This is my inversion: to erase without erasing, to let the number survive while the name fades into shadow.
From these numerical stones I raise a private edifice. A house of black masonry, where every wall is built from unredeemed obligations, from vices preserved, from betrayals turned to architecture. This is the Devil’s architecture: a structure of memory that rejects the consolation of forgetting and the softness of forgiveness. The Devil, here, is no external demon but the implacable law of debt itself — the force that insists nothing vanishes, that every act leaves a trace, that every theft carves its own epitaph.
Where others erase, I engrave. Where others forgive themselves, I reduce them to the bare cipher of what they owe. Thus rises the geometry of my memory: a cathedral of shadow, an edifice of figures and wounds, built not to reconcile, but to remind.
Arashi Wanderer Ryō
(Hōrō-sha)
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