Читать книгу The Boulevards of Extinction - Andrew Benson Brown - Страница 9
ОглавлениеMy Cat
I have named my pleasure, and this pleasure I call “my cat.” My cat chases rats around as they appear from holes in the wall. Its large green eyes are visible through even the darkness as it fixes its gaze upon its objects. It startles the subjects of its gaze at first, but initial fear becomes the driving force behind a rising sense of awe as the large unrelenting eyes fill them with a feeling of confidence. “This creature,” the rats say, “should have its way with me.”
My cat is quick and agile and I can never seem to lay my hands on it and train it to obey. It didn’t take long to think up this name, “cat,” but the question remains whether I own it, whether it is my pet name. Not because it doesn’t rightly fit me, but because it is too solitary to belong to me. Myself a solitary being, I sympathize with our common natures, and yet we are opposed in our mutual nobility. It is too selfish to be subdued by me, and I am too proud to do anything but let it run rampant. Chasing my cat like it does its rats demonstrates to others both that it is out of control—I am too clumsy and slow to catch it—and that I am just a poor imitation of my name, that I am not the real thing. The quality of my cat that bedevils me, that renders me powerless to conquer it—its elusiveness—is also the source of my respect for it. As I wear this name longer, I come to forget that I ever had any other name—that I ever could have any but this one.
More Is a Faster Lessening
Everyone praises the endurance of the ascetic, but no one appreciates the stamina of the hedonist. To laugh until the throat burns and smoke a cigar to soothe it, to black out but not pass out, to suspend love’s climax, to be immortal in the moment—what Stoic has such fortitude: to die upon the seizure and slump of orgasm? The sunrise is an unappealing reprise of “business as usual.” Only the stoic loves the morning light; he needs no promise to realize the protestant work ethic: life itself is full of good purpose enough. Prolonging desires well past the point of the modest effort it would take to fulfill them, self-deniers tremble from the tectonic shifts of suppressed impulses. They put their drives in park and suffer motion sickness. But the Heroin Heroine is a nocturnal creature: she knows all too well that nature is “red in tooth and claw”—her leopard jacket is stained with wine. She purifies the red inside her with the white, diluting blood with opioid milk. Survival is ancillary; it serves a higher purpose, and is relinquished before it is scurried after.
Where are the hagiographies of the great hedonists? The story of the old flaccid saint who, filled with the spirit in his nether-region, miraculously deflowered a hundred virgins? The example of the desert monastic who wandered upon a vineyard oasis and imbibed his weight in wine? After asceticism’s preparation for mystical grace one must adopt a method proper to its reception. Catholicism awaits the discovery of the lost dialogues of Gregory I, in which he advocates practicing the seven deadly sins as a test of resilience.
Ascetic when young, hedonist when old. —How much perplexity and grudging respect would be due such a person! And when the change comes, how much disappointment from those familiar with the original self. But can one blame him? It was not that he was making up for lost time; he had already saved it by preempting folly in his youth. In the end he dispensed with the wisdom he no longer needed—upon reaching a certain age he found that no one was paying attention to it. By shifting strategies grandpa became fun, someone the new generation could appreciate.
But after all this, ascetic and hedonist alike share the common value of uncoming. Each way represents an art of life, two roads leading unto one destruction, converging stylizations of the inevitable.
In certain periods one method predominates—to the forced inclusion of the other. In an epicurean society every act of denial which the lonely Stoic practices is mistaken for the nausea after the binge, every illustration of asceticism the fasting before the feast. Not seeing the whole of his life (for that he would really be shunned), observers see a slice of it and take it as an indication of the sickness surrounding excess. They accord him the respect of a master indulger, wishing they could someday be as experienced as him, eager to surpass his record of debauchery. At the same time they urge more indulgences upon him, pleading with him not to rest now when he is so close to that final indulgence that would enter his name into the hall of fame. It takes a man of mighty resolution to resist peer pressure . . . but what Stoic has ever not thrived on the public respect for his lifestyle, and has not hesitated to give it up when the tenor of the times calls for this final relinquishment? And so, surrounded by outstretched arms weighed down by fistfuls of spices and fruits, the Stoic embraces the colic that follows from eating after prolonged starvation. He undertakes this submission as his last victory over hedonism, and he has good reason to be proud: he did not want his accepted donations.
Sexually Transmitted Congruence
Goat bladder—Minos’s bedroom Minotaur.
Queen Anne’s lace—Hippocrates’s hemlock.
Pennyroyal tea—Dioscorides’s organ failure.
Pepper—Pope John XXI’s damnation.
Lemon rind—Casanova’s withdrawal from life into autobiography.
Cotton root bark—the Confederacy’s domestic war.
Diaphragm—veil of America’s second Gilded Age.
***
Sexual evolution has a new yardstick for efficiency. It no longer needs to rely on a society’s contraceptive methods to choreograph the dance between love and death. The spread of the HIV virus has finally harmonized Freud’s conflict of Eros and Thanatos. By not restricting itself to socially acceptable outlets, precisely by raging to satisfy itself, the erotic instinct undermines its own will to preservation and acknowledges itself as part of the same being as death. Love appropriates immune system failure into its bosom, purifying Eros into Venus, freeing its swooners of any mundane justification of oath-keeping and family duty. With civilization as judge and biology executioner, those unwilling to submit to monogamy are only too happy to mercilessly punish themselves with pleasure. In the name of conscience, life allows its aggressiveness to express itself unchecked against the promiscuous population as organisms bounce towards their end in a horizontal limbo. Then, at the height of gratification, Venus turns the lovers into daisies and flies away. Those who survive are without guilt over their sexual frustration, bolstering the status quo in a confused earthly approximation of Nirvana—the civil union.
Mirth’s Profession
Clowns entered the world laughing only to cry at the punch line of every joke not at their expense. They squeeze tiny feet into oversized shoes, hoping someone will step on them for the sake of being noticed; they wear a musical nose to attract fist notes as accompaniment to their sinus infection. That they are the saddest creatures in the world is a cliché; less well-known is that self-deprecation delights them in a world where everyone is taught respect.
Two Ways to Classify Common Sense
a) Internalizing the spirit of the age. Represented today by the man of economic self-reliance who watches team sports and possesses a sincere, feeble, and unconvincing sanguinity.
b) Perceiving the world as it enters the sense organs, packaged without bubble-wrap for return shipment. Possessed by few. Praised by none.
In each case interpretation is at a minimum. To the dreamy outsider, the laziness of the first group and the minimalist will of the second appear equally boorish, grounded as they are: the difference between fraternizer and realist is a choice between ant and beetle. The dreamer forgets that as a butterfly he was once a caterpillar and, on all but his best days, is still a chrysalis.
Elixirs of Flight
Work, politics, education, marriage and family life, church—the traditional institutions have ceased to provide fulfillment to its citizenry. Mother’s milk has turned to powdered formula, and after choking down our nutrition we suckle on tart tonics to wash the taste from our mouths. We soil ourselves with small pleasures, reimbursing our libidos with the time and effort sapped from the old ways. Carnage, erotica, exotica, fun-physic: in a time of tradition when leisure was not yet vocation’s stocking stuffer these things were no siesta helpmeets, but formed the bedrock of adventure. The knight errant, the buccaneer, the Casanova—before becoming the bromides of a drunken scriptwriter, such lovers of the blood were coagulations of reality into legend. Until the nineteenth century it was still possible for a man to be his own parable. But what was once a style of life has become proof of life—or if seen from without, a measure of likelihood. A vicarious experience is the only evidence of oxygen intake to the mouth breather. But to the voyeur of this spectator it is a sign of vegetation, the aerobics of comfort. As for one who despises the little things of life, who tires of rote stimulation and seeks vast pleasures—he is forced to live dangerously in a new way: through work, politics, education . . .
The Disciple
The teacher’s ideas crawling through his head, he got the nurse to check it for lice, but he found that being prodded with sticks was little better than getting beaten with one. That was enough to cure him of both learning and annual checkups. Having discarded two types of exams, the mental and the physical, only his therapist was left to give him discomfort. Making weekly appointments to blunt his emotions, he prepared for his inkblot tests by making hand shadow puppets in a free-association sequence. His passions being all he had left, he was forced to regularly guard himself from them.
Love’s Secrecy
To dare not tell; beyond this, the moment our partial nature is even implied, wholeness eludes us. A sad fate, as the truest love is a desperate love. Nonchalance only ever leads to an adjacency of two halves—a pie bisected before panning.
Eighth Heaven
We do not gradually ascend a train of thought from its sea-level beginning to its cloud-conclusion of inspiration, but dash there eagerly, overleaping any drops and creaky steps in-between. Paths of reasoning are outlines for flights of fancy. The stairway to heaven is too slow, too winding with the subtle and ambiguous; we require an elevator that lifts us to our biases without the effort of justification. Eventually a malfunction finds us trapped in the dark, mimicking the very pit we were trying to avoid all along. Only here, there is no privacy.
Ride to the Ophthalmologist
Optimist: It is on the slow ride that the heart beats fastest.
Realist: We would’ve snuggled on the Ferris wheel, it’s true—but only the rollercoaster could have made me scream.
Pessimist: Yes, we most wish to love those who bore us.
Idealist: Then why not live the excitement of your dreams?
Pragmatist: Fine, just don’t fall off the Ferris wheel in your simulated swoon—wear a seat belt!
Metaphysician: What for, when the fall would be such a short descent into heaven!
Brood for Brooding
If I ever have children I want them to be beautiful little fools. This way there will be no byproducts of an overly-developed consciousness to cause me embarrassment—whispers of therapy sessions, madhouse holidays, poetry readings. My children will simply want to have fun looking good, and they will bring me pride from the envy others feel for them. For what reason would a man want to have children, if not to reinforce a lifetime of intentional failure with a few successful accidents? Failure must not be undone, but augmented by its juxtaposition with success . . .
“Given the way your father is, it’s amazing how normal you turned out!”
Translation: “Why do great creative minds so often pour all their imagination into their work and leave none for the fruit of their loins?”—Could it be because they need to achieve some sort of conventional recognition in their own lifetime to give them the freedom to keep failing? One cannot push originality into a realm of elite incomprehension without the emotional support of ignorant and oblivious relatives. The remorselessness of condemnation—from connoisseurs as well as the general populace—needs its parallel in a close circumference of pity for the incompetence in which one has lived. Every offensive personality trait and repulsive feature of physiognomy that can be presented as evidence of being cursed by the gods is, so long as one has sired a few beautiful little fools, one more lump of dust under the carpet.
The Ground
Unlike Kafka, Joyce, or Pessoa, I have no native city to transfigure into literature. Nor, like Thoreau, will I assimilate the wilderness into picturesque descriptions. My only alternative is to channel my experiences of the in-between life, and only provincial writers do that—artists whose souls have shrunk to the size of a town census or sprawled out in pointless suburban languishing.
It has been said Pessoa is the “writer of Lisbon,” but it is a trivial thing to encapsulate metropolitan minds and manners. His was a much greater achievement: he is the flâneur of the sky. No one has ever captured its changeable oblivion as he did, how the strolling of storm clouds reflect his inner being. He looked without any intention of consuming the rain they had to offer—without any concern whether there really was any rain at all. He did not merely describe the sky, his inner being created it.
But where is the poet of the ground? The bottom half of Tiamat—that is something we are more familiar with. We were never intended to soar through the air; the sky is not high enough for our dreams. Our natural environment is the soil that ties us to one place even as we imagine others, the desolate beaches that tease us with their horizons, rocks that jut high into the air and, once scaled, make us want to fly. The poet of the ground would not describe personal dreams, but the trances and delusions of others as contrasted with their pitiful realities; he would not use the earth as a symbol for himself as such, but for the composition and granularity of his people. What is humanity, after all, but a rock at one extreme and sand at the other? The unbreakable exception is eroded by a lapping tide while the rest pour through God’s fingers.
Human Languishing
Of all life forms, only the plant possesses negative liberty in the fullest degree possible. Free from the hunt for nourishment and mates, liberated from work, desire, and friendship, it has all the time in the world to do exactly what it is incapable of—to contemplate. The counterpart of the plant in the animal world is the philosopher. Worse than the voluptuary—who through thoughtless pleasure descends to the animal life—the philosopher does not seem on the surface to be a depraved creature. He is free enough from the menial tasks of life to seek exactly what he can never achieve—vegetation. The first man to shirk off his labor onto the back of another, solving the problem of having to work, was faced with the new problem of what to do. The result was the synaptic tremoring of our vexations, thought thinking itself, the frustration of every action. This in itself involves no depravity of character: one is absorbed into an ideal of beauty or truth, with the form of the object becoming identical to the form of consciousness. But an exclusive focus on the task can only be maintained for so long until awareness divorces itself from the activity and creeps back in, time speeds up, and anxiety returns. Heightened consciousness impedes effortlessness. One can only be happy when not thinking of oneself. The philosopher’s contemplation—which he trumpets as the ultimate instrument of positive liberty, the crown of evolution which overcomes all obstacles—far from fostering tranquility (let alone eudaemonia, or even happiness), drives him into a frenzy of restlessness, discontent, and burnout. Thus does a total, unified freedom mock transcendence and become its own prison. It rockets one to the fullest actualization of his purpose and reveals it to be not only a limitation of life, but the very antithesis of his dream. Only when philosophers can grow into acorns, when their good spirit overcomes humanity to attain floral flourishing, will personality overcome destiny. The “man of character” is realized in one who relies on the weather alone. In the first stage of evolution we climbed; in the second, we slide.
If philosophy in it pure form is unable to address eudaemonia, as Williams concludes, what is it these thinkers are capturing when they advise us on values? Might such a willed negligence towards the lower affairs necessitate, not a “good spirit,” but a display of cacodaemonia?
Anderesis
Be a monster of imbalance. Deformity of mind makes up for even bodily deformity by hoarding the world’s ugliness. Amoral sense is the court of passion, the framework of daring. The earth’s consolation prize, it turns dismal failure into a badge of success. It woos evil obliquely, though evil is too confused to acknowledge the signs; with some knowledge, it simulates unknowing. Its lack is never noticed, while its opposite is praised with empty words and never followed. Its influence on life is seldom acknowledged, through everything good is a side effect of it.
Rise of the Anti-Villain
Most people are basically good. I speak not of Rousseau’s man in nature, but the modern goodness that thrives in a complex affluent society—one stemming not from willpower but likelihood. The goodness of non-interference, of deference to law and the division of labor. “Leave it be,” these good people say, “the firefighters will put it out when they get here. Everything will probably be fine.” But nothing is ever simply allowed to run its course, let alone flourish. Those who live and let live are vulnerable to the hunter in the shadows. A restrained Epicureanism, a “going with the flow”: it is this mildness of character, this apathy disguised by pleasure, which makes these advocates of peacetime morality basically good. Those who grow up among the Sybarites, their sympathies dulled by specialization and suffering at a distance, are quickest to revert to the survival instinct when available resources become scarce; at bottom both inclinations are governed by a radical selfishness. Whichever one happens to be dominant is simply a matter of macroeconomics.
No classical hero was ever selfless. Saving the life of another was a sideshow of his glory, confirmation of an antecedent arête. Chivalry is killed when laurels are handed out for small acts of altruism. Heroes are a psychological privation in a society that rebukes merit; the hole needing to be filled, it is covered with a rug. Replacing bravery with common sense, the statistical savior exploits a moment of rescue time during a red stoplight and wins the glory of an evening news spot.
To be superlatively evil: to have all the most civilized vices and all the most dangerous virtues—characterization too customarily human to be stranger than fiction today. From this breach the anti-villain emerges as a balance to the emergency-rescue citizen. His opposition is as much a product of randomness as the champion’s—casual irresponsibility of littering an underfoot banana peel to thwart the daring bystander rushing towards the crosswalk target. Cast in a supporting role without auditioning, the anti-villain is an antagonist whose only villainous qualities are neglect and incompetence. Not Darth Vader, but a storm trooper with a jammed blaster. His only threats are mordant remarks delivered to amuse a world without steadfast malice. With irony in his soul he commits feats of misdemeanors, deflating a murder mystery into manslaughter. Evil by default, he is the most fascinating character in the absence of a candid and upright protagonist. A bungling villain is always more interesting than an accidental hero.
An International Allegory
The foreign vices obtained passports to countries that had not yet learned to appreciate their subtleties. But upon going through customs they faced communication barriers.
Schadenfreude looked around, frowning . . . everyone was so happy. So deliberate. Not even an unfortunate accident to raise his spirits. So he stubbed his toe and laughed.
Ressentiment, correcting his upward glance, had learned to laugh at his inferiors for the sense of obligation they imposed. He gave careless orders, then waited for them to laugh at him—this is how he learned to admire himself again.
Esprit, long used to subjugating handlers to his method, had lost the autonomy of ventriloquizing his genius through prodigies. The prodigies had learned much from him and wanted to become their own masters, refusing to be dominated by their talent. The only type of mind that would now consent to be inhabited by him was an esprit faux, so he resigned himself to flowing through those who lack the rationality to govern him properly. To maximize his influence he formed an esprit de corps of misaligned minds who proceeded to escort wisdom down the ladder, presenting insights the populace could recognize as its own. Every nitwit he sanctioned became a twisted wit who amused the company with puns on truisms and trivia questions for troglodytes. Esprit did not know the answers to the trivia questions or grasp the puns. Surely, this did not mean he had been mitigated into a Petite Esprit; on the contrary, he was too elevated for his new vessels—this is how he reestablished a sense of control. But deep down he feared the approaching day when they, too, no longer needed him.
Desengaño had not always been seen as a vice. But when skepticism became the dominant attitude, he was suddenly reproached for being too sure of himself. He saw too much, it was said—this is how he stumbled. But he knew how to tell himself he still looked good after his accident. He put on glasses over empty eye sockets to feel the weight of his sight. If he could no longer be Argos, he would attach a knife to his cane to hear where he was going. If his other senses wouldn’t compensate with any Tiresian insights, he would shut himself indoors and metamorphose into Morpheus, sleeping all day, dreaming up new illusions and awarenesses.
Virtù, with the welfare of the people in mind, flexed his disposition to public opinion polls. Fearing the determination to do what is necessary would be mistaken for the whims and cravings of a tyrant, he willed himself to do what he wanted so as to be seen as intrepid. When Fortuna dealt him a sex scandal, he responded with a board meeting and a blowjob to give him the courage of denial, a womanizing jazzman aspartaming his alibis with a sip of Diet Coke. To crush charges of warmongering he summoned all the eloquence dyslexia could muster, and rallied a martial spirit to invade territories where liberation would be immediate and internal collapse postponed until the next term. His achievements sponsored by election fundraising, he maintained the state by employing speech writers and resolved international crises by taking diplomatic missions to golf courses. Virtù’s new strategy: the good citizen as good man, the art of filling a moral void with a power vacuum. The princes of the world deposed, statesmen rise to bow.
These vices had learned how to reason too much. They could no longer entice their common enemy—their only friend. For it was now up to man’s virtues to save the vices from oblivion, to nurse them back to their old forcefulness. Opposed to these new self-defeating vices and without the old evils to define themselves against, the virtues had no choice but to push themselves into their extreme forms and act as surrogates for vice: Salubriousness’s obsession with itself had driven it to the point of malnourishment; Amour became too intoxicated, Amicability too ulterior. Virtue wanted to revive the basic vices once again; the ambiguous modern forms of vice were too internalized to cause any real damage and took all the fun out of moral struggle. In the end the virtues didn’t have to do anything; the new vices simply faded away—no one knew how to pronounce their own bad intentions. Faced with holes to plug, the virtues proceeded to draw native vices out of their own degenerated states: Gluttony from malnourishment, Lust from infatuation, Greed from parasitism.
Morality, like everything else, needs to occasionally repolarize itself to fuel people’s need for taking sides.
The Anti-Hero
One can stand alone only by dispensing with the customary character traits. Heroes are a dime a dozen—I want you to be more singular than that. With a book that is a leviathan, I will make a goldfish of conscience—in proportion to its minuteness it will glow brightly and dazzle everyone.
Seneca formed a prudent person by heavily taxing Britannia, bringing about Boudicca’s revolt, and writing epistles about prudence in place of a diary of greed; Homer fooled the entire world into thinking he was a single great bard instead of a lineage of unknowns; Scaevola thrust his hand into the flames to make Porsena think he was willing to risk all—the truth was, he had always been left-handed; Judith beheaded Holofernes because she ended up not satisfying him in bed; Castiglione became a great courtier: first his ambassadorial incompetence in the Spanish court led to the sack of Rome, then he instructed everyone on how to be an ideal Renaissance gentleman.
Flourish talents you lack and conceal your vices—you’ll be thought a hero, all the while putting real heroes to shame. Let idealism and courage be practiced by the others—everyone is contending for dominance in those attributes, and they only end up badly. Nor should you languish or actively practice evil: even if you are one of the few capable of becoming competent in evil, it is just too much work to stay on the bottom. As an embodiment of amoral sense, you will practice the evil of just letting things happen, saving a few good effects of bad outcomes for yourself and letting the bad effects fall upon whom they may. Most are only indifferent to great evil; but you must be indifferent, too, to everyday goodness. Let no act of kindness go noticed.
Ignorance is the origin of everything that is thought great. Aim your wit below the belt: if it is too keen it will strike heads, and people will look up to see what flew over them.
Enflame hearts on an open grill, and their owners will invite you to dine on their compassion. Don’t reveal your lack of interest until after you eat their heart.
Having good taste means scorning the popular and the avant-garde alike. Praise what has been previously praised but is now obscure to all but the learned. Instead of Shakespeare or Baudelaire, claim Ronsard as the poet laureate of your gray soul. Be a member of the savant-garde.
Make the best out of what is worst, then yawn as you say of the best: “It is only the best,” or of the worst: “It is just worst.”
Always remember: no matter how much of a scoundrel you are, a well-written book will secure your good reputation.
Life Bonds
Plastic surgery—a beauty more natural than natural, a hyper-natural beauty; the perfection of nature, its correction where mutation and adaptation went wrong. Cosmetic reconstruction makes an aesthetics possible that not only enhances our form but reshapes our function as well. When the human look becomes passé, we can xenograft behavioral templates from those species closest to us: baboon facelifts to turn every smile into an act of aggression, bonobo sex-drive surgery to redirect our warmongering.
Like bodies, society too may be reshaped internally to prevent the failure of its parts. In annexing the dogmas of religion, kosher prohibitions are sidestepped with pig organs; pork no longer passes through us but is made part of us: larynx implants that will make rabbis and imams oink their sermons, bovine breast augmentations in Hindu women to prevent dairy shortages and encourage grazing past toddlerhood.
In preventing crime, primate liver transplants for alcoholics may decrease the longevity of drunk driving.
When these alterations go out of style, more distant species can be turned to: rhinoceros rhinoplasty, giraffe neck lifts; for amputees, praying mantis limb-reattachment.
Republicans versus democrats: elephant trunks versus donkey ears—incompatible sense organs would impede bipartisan agreement no less.
Business models: pack rat trading, gross margin wolfing, financial foxing. One does not graft parts here so much as substitute higher mammals for purer ones.
The rejuvenation of family values: filling children full of cotton to make them as charming as their stuffed animals. “Life” becomes a criterion of cuteness and obedience.
After assimilating every animal species into us, organisms from the Jurassic period are reconstructed to satisfy our need for anatomical novelty: pterodactyl wings, tyrannosaurus jaws, hair plugs taken from the Cladophlebis fern. We regress back through geological history to satisfy our craving for trendy new forms and reverse evolutionary functions. Eliminating back pain with trilobite exoskeletons; taking spoonfuls of primordial soup to treat chickenpox. In the act of absorbing Earth’s biological saga, future peoples will read its diary from our fossil remains.
Usurping Half of Zoroastrianism
Ahriman: evil spirit flowing through all other gods, god beyond gods, driving their ambition to create and rule. He is the Loneliness before the creation of the world, the egomania that craves something small to stroke it. The cruelty of Greek anthropomorphism, the better half of Ahuramazda. Yahweh’s irrational vengeance: going beyond repaying kind for kind to surpass the original affront; the original golden rule—the leaden rule. Backbone of Hammurabi’s code, founding concept of the social contract, guarantor of justice, precursor of lawsuits. And the god of the New Testament? Ahriman is in him too, killing with kindness.
What is Aristotle’s god but a cacodaemon? The unmoved mover—modern man’s goal, his ideal, a misplaced value resulting from insufficient contemplation. Aristotle’s god cannot make anything. He knows but cannot do, the possessor of a worthless knowledge. Longing to be a god of action, he envies the hands of man. Spending all his time contemplating us, he wants more than the same in return. That he does not receive more than this, that we merely contemplate him as he does us, signals the unwitting blasphemy of imitation. A life devoted to the worship of god—this is what he desires, our celebration. He is as jealous of Yahweh as Yahweh is jealous of him.
The life of creativity and the worship of a god—things on which Aristotle is silent but Ahriman embodies. The enjoyment of music requires a total lack of concern with the world, and Ahriman is always listening to nature for any out of tune notes, conducting his symphony of indifference. Capable of all the same feelings as Ahuramazda, he simply experiences them more intensely, in the extreme—but in regard only to himself, without sympathy. Wouldn’t flattery of this god be enough to ensure his favors? Not bound by moral imperatives, he is free to bestow his services lavishly on whom he likes.
Why did not Darius and Xerxes invoke Ahriman before their invasions? Would he not have helped them more than Ahuramazda, who could see their ill-will and punished them for bad judgment? Would he not have overrun the more limited allegorical qualities of the Greek gods with his all-encompassing one? If it had been a battle of deities rather than men, the advantage was with the Persians.
Why does Ahriman need Ahuramazda? If only he could have remained in his original condition—but then he would not have the opportunity to vent bad will. His weakness is that he, like us, needs first to Be so he can revel in negation, to suckle the supreme deity and throw a temper tantrum at the same time. So, for the sake of entertainment, he relegated himself to second-rate status.
Evil’s virtue: its prevention of the surfeit of “the good,” the banality of comfort, happiness, freedom—those highest incompatible ideals. The achievement of any one crowding out the attainment of the others, there arises disappointment and regret in not pursuing an alternative. To gain happiness without freedom is the complacency of the thoughtless and the misery of the conscientious. We feel we were meant for a wholesome existence, that the world was made for our advantage; instead we are constantly at tension with it, misaligned with its indifference to our hopes, attaining only pieces of our goal. Man is a bag of whims corked by the limits of his paycheck and the fruitlessness of his prayers; only in wine, in the ablution of the liver and fogging of the brain, can he exaggerate his powers and dream everything is within his reach—awakening unto a headache that fills him with a regret for dreaming. The grasper at ideals is a weaver of patchwork absences he never intended or desired. Embracing his disappointments, he casts off any expectation of self-betterment. Confronted by the absence of eudaemonia, he experiences the side effects of the moral lifeworld; twitching and nauseous, he regurgitates his former longings and bloats himself on air. Flatulating the heavens and belching greenhouse gases, the fantasies and opportunism of the sky become a matter of abdominal distension.
The Means Justify No End
Like drunken archers, people always find ways to keep the bulls-eye intact by making a potential target of everything else in sight. There are certain means which determine their distinctive character by frustrating their goals. The sheer pleasure of loosing arrows, making archery an activity-for-itself that it wasn’t before, a game of collateral damage. Frustrating the end by wallowing in present satisfactions. We in fact act like drunken archers all the time—what is left to hit after the bulls-eye? The peak of skill reached, the accomplishment gained, there is no further choice but to languish in the shadow of glory’s anticlimax or to die. In such a state, pleasure comes upon those with a large quiver: merging of arrow and man in vandalism, loss of self-consciousness in sabotage and defacement. Accidentally killing a bystander produces no regret in the most inexperienced archer so long as the wine flows—even an expert can renounce his aim and plead manslaughter.
And when the end is the activity itself, the means frustrate even that. Stepping correctly in the waltz, it becomes not a waltz, but a new dance entirely; one preempts the waltz, flies over the goal through the superior implementation of one’s own craft knowledge—a method that, designed to reach the end, establishes value for itself by conflicting with it.
Equality of Wisdom
People seldom meet a mathematician without baring their uvulas to him. They see his head in a halo of light, floating in a world far above their own limited comprehension. That they too, on a basic level, know some math, seems to escape them. Like all experts who have harnessed their talent, a great mathematician has simply, through long struggle, advanced beyond the basic level to a plane where they cannot follow: this winged creature has shodden hooves.
An ethical thinker, by contrast, receives only blank stares. Everyone believes they have full access to “The Good” simply by virtue of existing. The moralist’s liability is that he cannot fall into technical language without becoming absurd. Value, like knowledge, erects walls; but this labor being done by informed experience and not high learning, the average man has leverage over the professor. If people could read Greek letters they wouldn’t hesitate to dismiss the mathematician as a mailboy trolleying symbols into a row of cubbyholes.
But as long as only the moralist’s occupation is in doubt, he has not yet fallen as far as he can—as he inevitably will. In the realm of ethics one always holds its thinkers to a higher standard than in other fields: one expects them to live their ideas. Studying man from a plurality of angles, taking into account factors fugitive from naïve experience, bending logic to his use to the same extent that a mathematician draws on his intuition, he is expected to be his own case study. With intellect consolidating and rigorizing judgment, and judgment second-guessing intellect where it seems fallible, all the faculties of the moralist’s mind are focused on weighing his charitable donations against his volunteer work—and even then we are still suspicious of his good will. It would be absurd to demand of a logician, an epistemologist, a metaphysician, or an aesthetician that their lives be the litmus test of their theories. Nor does one think to measure the political thinker by this standard—the reader merely assumes the author votes on the side of his theory. One might weigh a religious thinker by prayers and almsgiving, if the mystic were not read chiefly because of his example—one has to have visions before he can gather a literate following of aspiring ecstatics to preach to.
Spinoza was the only ethical thinker to ever be judged good enough for his books. The others so often turn out to be inconsiderate (Schopenhauer), noncommittal (Kant), or, in the hypocritical case of the immoralist, a good man (Nietzsche). Not that readers don’t often lose respect for other specialists when learning of controversial aspects of their biographies—Heidegger’s Nazism, Wittgenstein’s cruelty, Leibniz’s cowardice and ambition. In these cases, however, one does not feel that their ideas are undermined as a result; the astute critic never goes so far as to make an ad hominem judgment. But when the ethical thinker is not a saint his thoughts crumble to pieces. This injustice is understandable: readers of ethics, unable to rely on any fundamental advances in the formulation of proofs since the Socratic dialogues, can only corroborate its principles by putting proponents through a trial by ordeal. In the witch-hunt of the moralists, an altruistic sacrifice is proof of innocence.
A statue stands with its finger raised in the air. Its admirers, fascinated by how the stone seems chiseled out of life, walk that way. Soon they come to another statue pointing in another direction. And so on. The history of morals is such a sculpture labyrinth, where people would feel lost among the paths of experience if earlier generations had not poured cement over their pedants, prophets, and polemicists. They don’t realize that in these cases life was animated out of stone, and the cement was merely added as a finish—capital punishment often serves as a protective coating.
Love’s Novelty
If first love is always young, every love thereafter is like the old woman in the rocking chair: enfeebled by experience and swaying to a memory. Love ends in the recline position, the skin still enjoying the bulk of feeling—this is perhaps true only of noble souls; with all the rest, every love feels original: they leave their pre-teen playmate to marry their high school sweetheart, only to refresh their bed at college enrollment. Every new season of life obliges a new excitement. The modern lover has internalized the essence of comedy: that happy endings always round off at the commencement of the relationship. Love becomes a fading echo. Without a right side to cast our nets over, we drag them through thinned, polluted seas, hungering for the succulence of perpetual novelty and surviving off of chunks from driftbones. When our life partner, passion, finally leaves us, comes the realization: that we should have held on the first time.
The Highest Necessity
“How delicious it smells,” the wino says, referring to the glass of tap water. “But . . . if I were lost in the desert I would spill it in a heartbeat for a good box of cabernet.”—It is when a man is most thirsty that he needs his appreciation. And in the wilderness, without anyone to praise his connoisseurship, he can at least savor the glass that will end his urgency. The moral principles of addiction will not permit infidelity; even in extreme circumstances gratitude to the grape is paramount, hydration the betrayal of a meager satisfaction. His is a disinterested dependence. Dying, he would set fire to a vineyard to spare its contents from being dried into raisins or shipped away fresh—to prevent service to a lesser obligation. “Oh,” whines the wino, “what a loss that would be!”
Feast or Famine
Taking our most cherished dichotomies out to brunch: eating cereal with sandwiches, mixing orange juice with champagne, leaving a generous tip with a poem, On the Virtue of Indigence, scribbled on the bill. White and black, good and evil, ugly and beautiful—all muddied somewhere between the hash brown casserole and the toilet. For as long as one is satiated, dualities will hold hands and twirl. But when hunger returns the senses lose their dullness and no longer see gray.
Plagued by Love
His clothes were moth-eaten, his stomach full of butterflies. Love, infesting one with a sense of homelessness and indigestion as it does, is only exacerbated further by the application of insecticide.
Moth musk—perfume for all those heading towards the bottom of the food chain. He buys a new shirt, pops an antacid, spritzes himself, and is swarmed by every flirter in a seven-mile radius. Cured of the feeling of love, he finds himself thrust into the phenomenon of it. Leper among Lepidoptera, he spreads drab wings in the clubbing hours, transformed into a barfly’s fuzzy ideal of beauty. Impersonation is his only defense, pollination of weeds his only purpose.
And to think that all he ever wanted was . . . a bug zapper.
Seasons of Womanhood
Virgins want to wait, spinsters to give it all away. After the petals of her youth have fallen comes the Autumn Philanderer, deflowering her honor by insinuating himself into her will. People who allow themselves to be cheated after their death are never said to have spent their life well. If only he had caught her in spring instead of winter! Still taking what wasn’t ready to be given, by introducing her into an early summer he would have saved her from the expectation of virtue.
The Workshop
Our “art of love”: apprenticed to the internet, we are members of passion’s craft guild. The monopoly on masturbation prepares us to become journeymen of jealousy. When we finally do produce our magnum opus of courtship and are promoted to master, we seethe and grumble and set up our own workshop, accepting students on a pay-per-view basis.
The ambidextrous masturbator: one hand’s fatigue is an opportunity for the other to show its tenderness. But eventually a man tires of the slow and gentle, seeking again the intensity that would rub him raw. Alternation has been the rule for so long that he never thinks to ask his girlfriend to use both hands at the same time. For the same reason, in his emotional life he thrives on a dialectic of abuse and babying instead of just bending over to be spanked.
Celeranimous
“There is a vastness there,” the foreign traveler reports—looking up from his map to point to our bellies. As we measure our lifespans, so do we hold and feel our largevity. But with spirit it is otherwise—that we swallow. Falling short of magnanimity, we settle for being “fast-souled.” In a society characterized by the vicarious lifestyle, alcohol and drugs are the most direct modes of secondhand experience: having no great events to give shape to existence, one resorts to the intravenous joie de vivre. But the real intensity is the man intoxicated by blood alone—his own and others.’ It rouses little to see red if you can’t also smell and taste red—if you can’t drown all of your senses in the nectar of life and death.
The Language of Modern Love
A polyglot love: forms of address that go beyond body language to the argot of objects: stale candy, flat champagne, unarticulated children. To know each liaison by a peculiar gift. A construction paper heart cuts wrists more painfully than scissors.
My Free Love Gave to Me . . .
Love quadrangles: four geese a laying, three substitutions, two confused goslings—twelve days of Christmas abridged in one seedy hotel room.
Hopping from bed to bed is as natural as channel-surfing, misplacing household trash, applying for a new baby while nursing a job, planning late bills while prepaying a vacation. A multislacking love hones all the senses in on distraction from many objects at once. One sheds condoms like snake skins and juggles diseases with the finesse of a hemiplegic acrobat.
Faithful to the Ideal
Idolatry, adultery: if the first is genuine, it overflows into the second. Zeal needs a physical outlet the more it achieves fulfillment. An object of mistreatment, a plaything to scorn, jealousy to encourage appreciation. If only both were socially acceptable at least one might be common.
A Dying Groom’s Wedding Speech
Beloved Wife,
You were to be both my restraint and my onslaught. As my ball and chain I would have flailed you about with the vigor of a medieval knight; together we would be safe in my castle. That these words we have exchanged would have been enough to tie us together fast, I am sure. But since this glass of punch has poisoned me and I have but a few moments left to express my love, I can only speculate what our life would have been like: me sitting on the porch enjoying my early retirement, the nanny tending to the children, you out in the world earning a living—I respect your modern ideals. A woman’s place is no longer in the home. She must know the virtue of a good work ethic. This is why, as you know, I only employ women in my household: chef, chauffeur, butler, maid—all female. I am only too happy to foster the advancement of woman’s position in the professional world. And whatever the temptations, I promise that you would have always remained my highest duty. Curse the bridesmaid who took revenge on my faithlessness; which one it was is anyone’s guess (though I myself have a working theory). Forgive me, I am still amorous despite my age. Though yesterday I wanted to experience my singlehood one last time, today I am yours forever, since tomorrow I will belong to the worms. I make a young widow of you, it’s true, but I hope you will take my promises into account and remain faithful to my memory: please, do not take another lover, but remain as chaste as I have always known you to be. I know you have the wisdom to come to this decision yourself, since it is the condition of inheritance in my will.
Alien Companionship
To wake up, find a stranger in your bed, and prefer it that way. Discovering more about your wife as she opens her soul to you over the years, she becomes not what you thought she was. Yet her habits endear her to you more than ever even as the reasons behind them escape you. Her estranged mind objectifies her, turns her into the yard sale doll you were always browsing for. You love her for the repetitive phrases that imply, with such apparent tenderness, you care not what. Dull, fat, slow, you pull the strings on the few movements she makes. Even her rebellions are cowed. As she reaches into her purse for lipstick, finds a stick of butter instead, and smears it on her facial labia, you know there will be something more than familiarity to relish about the goodnight kiss.
A Dying Bride’s Wedding Speech
Beloved Husband,
I am a modern woman, as you well know. While this makes me stubborn, it does not prevent me from loving. We would have been an equal match: you, old and with lots of money, I young and beautiful—a fair tradeoff. But since I have been poisoned by this glass of punch, I am prevented the satisfactions of living in your mansion and giggling when you praise my body. What can I say? Your best man was insanely jealous. I am sorry, I wanted to revel in my emancipation one last night. While I would have always practiced affection towards you and been faithful to you from today on (except maybe during your business trips—depending on the location, they’re outside the jurisdiction of the marriage covenant), you must know that I could never submit to you. Nor am I sure that I could ever have your child. Probably I would have gone to a clinic before I started to show. And why not? It’s my right. My sex has had the vote for almost a century now. We are strong. We are proud. And if I chose long ago not to take up a profession and buy a strap-on, it was only to put those qualities to use. A modern woman can show off her emancipation just as well with her husband’s credit card as through a high-powered career—it is what she owns, and not what she is, that distinguishes her from her poor past forms shackled to the hearth.
Love and Ambition
The power of naked ambition comes from commandeering love. It accompanies a relationship of unequal status, posing as affection and exposing itself the moment it can afford to. A tyrant that gathers flatterers to the feast only to slay them post-toast, it needs a shroud of benevolent excuses to be served a large dinner. The tragedy is that many realize no difference between the two passions and deceive themselves that they really are in love. Theirs is an inarticulate “wanting more . . .”
A love that would achieve its object cannot seem pure. The asthmatic sigher hits on success by anticipating a moaning suspicion and disguising himself as an easy breather.
Two Types of Minds
a) Simple minds—capable of only one great passion at a time. Emotions are greater when combined (one has to confuse the recipient); a solitary passion is too predictable, too subject to counterstrategy and rebuttal. The mediocre confuse love with ambition and pursue them as one. They are clocks that wind up and tick away.
b) Great minds—the computers that sit and charge and use up their battery-powered talent. Like the simple, they have ambition according to their nuts and bolts, and love according to their warranty. If great minds are recognized they can love after their ambition is spent—it was, after all, only a compensation for their loneliness.
Only Estranged?
Admirable is the criminal braving alienation from society, but more still the recidivist alienated publicly and from within—a systematic alienation. An uncaught criminal is a secret darer, victorious in his crimes. Estranged from the society he has betrayed and the neighbors who believe him an upstanding citizen (the truth is not invited to picnics), he is yet at one with the secret molding his criminal identity. But the recidivist does not even have this hidden retreat-as-triumph over the world. He is doubly alienated. Apprehended not just once but several times, his faith in his stealth shattered with his strength, he has nothing to do but rot. Staring out his window, he does not imagine himself jumping for joy in the great wide world, but only sees litterers, children with cigarettes, airborne germs strengthening the immune systems of jaywalkers. In his dejection he tries to inhale a star and ends up swallowing his tongue. He doesn’t need speech to represent him, after all—everyone knows what he is.
Hatred of the Outside
A homely love: looking out at the world through the television set, too modest for panes of glass; ordering a pet rock over the phone for the sheer pleasure of conversing; waiting for the right knock at the door and asking the mail carrier in for a cup of tea when her package arrives; staring at the floor as the neighbor’s cat gazes at her through the windowsill, proud that the salesman mistakes it for her cat. If she went out into the world she might have to discriminate, find a common point of interest, even have something to offer.
When she died the entire community attended her funeral. “She was just always there,” a distant neighbor said in the eighth eulogy, gesturing in the direction of her house. “I can’t say whether it was a passionate relationship,” the mail carrier said in the seventeenth. “But while I never saw her give it a lover’s kiss, there was a sort of mutual serenity.” After the community had spoken they wept as coffin and pet rock were lowered together into the burial plot. The next-door neighbor stayed behind after everyone else had left. He stared down for a while as dirt began to fill up the grave, then tossed in his meowing cat out of reverence.
***
First moral: One is free to love all, so long as one has never loved.
Second moral: A cherished object requites love to the lonely more than the crowded congregation bounces its sum amongst themselves.
Third moral: A cat owner can’t feel attached to what won’t submit to ownership.
Fourth moral: Get a dog.
The Limit of Judgment
The purpose of art is transcendence, both for the artist and the art lover. But they only escape themselves into something worse. Naïve consumer of beauty, the art lover wants to get inside the artist and experience “freedom” through his work—the artist’s solace, his militant daily routine. The art lover becomes self-conscious about the loss of identity involved in his consumption. His is the freedom of being lost in the Museum of Babel, where every combination of styles occupy a spectrum of infinite nuance, the subsections of wings folding in upon each other to form a labyrinth of periods. It is a freedom that ruins his enjoyment. Unable to casually detect the subtle differences between works, he is forced to study a style. Art appreciation becomes an endless homework assignment.
The problem of the connoisseur is that everything fit to be called “greatest” within his realm of taste, everything canonical, is, through no internal fault of its own, bound to become tedious when re-consumed again and again—Haydn’s string quartets. After one is familiar with the intricacies of the sheet music, with enough gradations of performances, one eventually gets exhausted with the obligation of always having to notice something more. One hesitates to admit that repetition is the death of love for fear of being branded an inept authority by his fellow snobs—something which, lacking the officialdom of the critic’s printed review, the connoisseur is already charged with by the resentful demos basking in the simple enjoyment of sensations. The connoisseur’s judgment, no matter how discerning, always occupies a precarious position. He eventually comes to discover a slightly novel personal meaning in every recital of “The Joke.”
The Coffin Coiffeur
If one has a wistfulness for robes, no need to browse a History of English Royalty. Barber shops offer the torso full protection from what gets cut off above it. To seat Europe’s last living monarch for a haircut and salvage such fine garments unstained . . . how proud Ann Boleyn’s tailor would be!
The Psychology of History
History distances us from humanity by presenting us with the psychology of implausible accomplishment. Psychology brings us closer to ourselves through case studies of deviants and morons—annals of weirdness and insufficiency the only key to unlocking the mystery of homo scribens. It is only when one of these freaks accomplishes something worth remembering that the rest of us feel insulted; he is no longer a safe object of comparison, an outlier that makes one proud to be normal, but becomes a fact to be memorized, venerated, and resented. History is habit writ large, madness made readable.
The Personal Is Political
—Insofar as the political represents the will of a dominant individual, expressing the destiny of a great man or the tyranny of a small one. But even here, the masses will stowaway as many private moments as their pockets can hold. The more transparent an individual is forced to be, the more he implies his opacity. Like the moon, a man shows us one face reflecting the light of others and keeps the other side of himself in continual night—no one knows what is beneath that hair. This reflective side is politics, and the public Confucianism of every person fuels a private Taoism by distracting from it. In the most refined of these identity obfuscators—congressmen and housewives—private is merged into public; Taoist stages are filled with Confucian props, the actors withdrawing into themselves in a Yin-yang spin cycle of duty. Picnic blankets are laid in rolling pastures, oil drills in deserts, and in the name of “right attitude” bellies and pockets are filled. In the most thoroughly confused individuals, character is made into an expression of nature, even as consciousness proclaims only “We!”
Mannequin Museums
When asked about our model of beauty, the tour guides of the future will say, “Confining their statues to clothing stores, it was a society that valued individuality of layering over form.”
“But why sculpt in plastic?”
“Thrift was their lesson to posterity.”
Imagination Bounded by Experience
One never bothers to wonder about the everyday life of some mediocrity, not realizing its comparative excitement when measured against those who enshrined themselves in cultural memory by escaping the glees of pleisure into a higher calling. Most people, lacking the innate sense of duty which talent imposes on its bearers like a destiny, instead fantasize about the status surrounding responsibility. They fill every particular image with the boundless delights which the supposed autonomy of the artist, the power of the politician, or the fame of the celebrity would bring them. In these cases, though, it is not freedom, power, or fame they imagine possessing, but the promises of their stereotypes: lack of surfeit. They can only conjure more of what they have already spent their entire lives in pursuit of, believing the difference between pleasure and joy to be a matter of degree.
Peering through the fence surrounding the pool of highborns, the eyelids of the talentless soon begin to droop from watching their betters drudge so much. Possessed of the naïve happiness arising from simply not being born genetic accidents, they take for granted their red-blooded impulse for excelling at the task of life. Natural supremacy is the privilege of the chained draft mule.
Mood and Memory
Although I have become too happy to be great, I still have the memory of my misery to drive me on—if not to attain glory then at least honorable mention. And yet . . . reflecting on this gap in status may, with any luck, be enough to destroy my happiness. But on my rise out of the dustbin of notability, I would hit this wall: the fond recollection of that happiness. The commemoration of a kaleidoscope of emotional states reroutes every thoroughfare; my fate is a beltway flanked by an overpass. What I need is a touch of karma, a demolition job, a gravel road—Alzheimer’s.
Laughter Is the Best Toxin
Let us outline the future of smiles, the upshot of every dimple display. Wouldn’t one rather have early wrinkles from stress and toil? Then at least there would be some appearance of a tangible goal, a point of respect for personal sacrifice. Instead, only a tombstone that reads “Here lies one who laughed himself to death”—needle in a haystack for the unfortunate family searching a cemetery of millenials. As president Garfield’s assassin chose a gun with an ivory handle because he knew it would look good in a museum exhibit, so do we embellish naked merriment with granite tributes to the placid soul.
Maximum Greatness
The secret of achievement? Moderation in nothing—but diet. Minimization of joy comes afterwards, the side effect of a dead social life. For what is there to talk about among friends without a meal between you?
Subaerial
Dirt . . . a gust of wind blows it into my eyes, it gets stuck in my boot grooves and I tread it into the house. Dirt . . . one descends to the bottom of the sea, hoping to find an answer, and one finds only clumps that fog up the water. We put mulch down, saying we want to prevent weeds from growing . . . when really what we want is to forget the dirt, our origin and destiny. One watches children playing on the beach, slapping mud together to build sandcastles, and realizes that we ourselves are constructed from this same playdough. Dirt . . . my only point of contact in-between volcanic churning and meteor showers, it shields me from upheavals and downpours. Though it follows me everywhere and is the closest thing to myself, I cannot even return to it when I die—my corpse will be too full of chemicals. Made of the blood of Tiamat’s second husband, I cannot seep into the dirt but will need to be separated from it by a casket to prevent polluting the earth’s excrement.
The Dispassionate Relation
“We’re such good friends!”
“Yes we are. The best.”
“I never expected to find someone like you. So generous, so much fun.”
“Nor I you.”
“We’re more than just familiars, aren’t we?”
“I would say so.”
“I mean, we just have so much in common.”
“We’re never at a loss for something to do together, its true.”
“You want to know something strange? Whenever I think of you I get hot-blooded, but seeing you for the first time in a few days, I turn white as a ghost. I don’t understand it, you just get my nerves going.”
“That is strange. Maybe you’re just thinking of that Ford 302 we’ve been working on. Picked up a crankshaft damper for it, by the way.”
“Did you have to bring that up now?”
“Why not?”
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation and all you want to do is talk shop.”
“Sorry. I thought you liked getting oily in my garage.”
“I do. It’s a good excuse to get away from the wife and kids.”
“Oh yeah, how are they doing?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, it’s just that I so seldom ask.”
“You have never asked.”
“All the better reason to ask now.”
“I still don’t understand the relevance of this.”
“I’d only like to know something about your previous history, your life outside of us and all that.”
“Please, no! Friends simply don’t talk about those things.”
“I’m getting a bit confused as to what we are supposed to talk about.”
“Us, of course!”
“Could we at least add a few more of us for good company? I’d like to show a companion of mine what we’ve been working on.”
“Oh . . . hmmm . . . no, I don’t think so. I’d be terribly jealous.”
“I see.”
“You seem upset.”
“Its only that I don’t know what to say.”
“Just promise me you’ll never move away, friend.”
“If we don’t finish that engine I won’t have a choice.”
***
If friends had always to be reassuring one another of their friendship, in what direction would this take them? —The bed, the dueling grounds, or the firing squad. If they don’t change sexual orientation they turn violent—against one another or the world. Either they agree upon a number of paces because their conversation can’t match the instinctive connections of erotic love or parenthood, or they strive to live up to Sentiment by proving their bond in a struggle against everyone, betraying their country not for a higher cause but a lower one, unwilling to sacrifice their pact with another individual for servitude to the collective. All this is why friends do . . . a relationship’s silence in regard to itself keeps it outside the bounds of nature, so long as there is no blushing involved. Abashment is as lethally persuasive as gregariousness.
Profound Tourism
Imagine a merchant who amasses wealth with an eye to posterity, desiring only that flocks of people will someday migrate to his native city to retrace the paths of his caravans. Ignoring the museums and decorative architecture, his ideal pilgrims look beyond the superficial. They are only concerned with what made everything else possible.
Now imagine a capitalist with foresight. The Wallflower on Wall Street: “Perhaps these price movements represent not company stocks, but the shuffling feet of their followers.”
The Deepest Bond
Orgy of friendship: each elicits a position in every other that would not have been possible between only two. With none of the jealousy involved in gathering your affairs together in one bed, friends can be replicated to the limits of room space, or until the motel investigates complaints about the chorus of angels in 118. And all you have to sacrifice is . . . the friendship.
Grooming
Unconditional love would be confined to a religious theme were it not for our pets. —What? A mother’s love? But that is the most dependent love of all . . . a triumph of antenatal depression, spanking, and Oedipal frustrations.
The Middle Way
Calm passion is a state of Being represented by one of the lesser deities. Neither Apollonian nor Dionysian, it stands between Olympus and the Bacchanalia, running messages from Mytikas peak to frenzied priestesses. City-states take only the flamboyant gods as their patrons; visitors question oracles not out of curiosity but fear. To be “Epiphronian” is to go unworshipped, though it is to the Epiphrons of the world—the prudent, the shrewd, the careful, those lacking in extreme behavior—that we owe our continued existence. Daemons of practical reason, they signify the complement of the herd instinct: not the mob, but the community organizers passing out fliers, knocking on doors for petitions. The offspring of Night and Darkness, their essential contribution goes unseen: to hold us at arm’s length from two primordial voids. Flanked by overbearing parents, the rest of us would otherwise allow ourselves to be coddled, longing as we do to bury ourselves in their open arms. Our saving grace, the epiphronian spirit connects us to the abyss through a primordial gene pool, so when the dam breaks and nothingness pours through we can blame it all on bad blood. The black sheep of the family, Epiphron’s failure was inscribed in his chromosomes from the beginning: Chaos begets Night and Darkness, who beget . . . sagacity?
Autocritique
The Cynic school was a thing of antiquity, but every subsequent age has had its lonely adherents: to satirize the very thing you depend on, to offer a way out but crudely and unsatisfactorily, too myopic with frustration and intoxicated by rebellion to admit there is no way out. Addicted to futility, you live in your barrels and keep up your search for the good man, laughing all the while. A noncontagious laughter that loops back upon itself, your only pleasure an insincerity. And yet you, like the Stoics, propose to live according to nature? Not so, friends! Your mockery can’t escape the interpersonal—and so you do live according to what is natural, just not in the way you thought. Deeply aware of status, you turn your scorn into a virtue, applying it more even than the dozing patrician, smearing it over yourself like cow-dung. If everyone lived in barrels you would smash yours and take to a house, decrying “the rolling estate.”
Gravity in Air
Candid shortcuts to profundity are too gloomy for us, so a comic veil is drawn to make the ideas digestible—and the prophet turns into the clown. Show me Fontanelle’s antithesis, one whose greatest pride is that he was never solemn—even in taking pride. Such a person would be much misunderstood and never respected. Why? For extolling openness to experience: the illumination of everything irrelevant deemed essential and the light treatment of what is unalterable. The comic selects society for adaptation and gives nature roles to play. Solemn natures need to be prodded with feathers to test their resolve, showing that in remaining unmoved they alone are ridiculous. The business deities are sober even when pouring ambrosia. In praise of folly, as the first true optimist titled it—a subtitle for seriousness. The comic highlights the serious side of life in a way the staid never can. What is everyday life, after all, but a series of repetitions, its actors commercial cogs toiling to put food on the table and leak urges with stolen time? Comic characters are the only vital machines, the only ones willing to show off their clockwork bowels. Exaggeration exposes the inescapable. The bizarreness of Beckett reveals our own strangeness. What is more alien to the Swiftian than a flexed mouth? The satirist finds nothing funny about creation—the process or the event. His is the pity of a “sudden glory,” throwing his arm around the first victim within reach and pointing a finger back towards himself—for when the hedonism nourishing his satire dissipates the last joke is on him. A dejected people facing their end, scrambling for the last cans of hope and happiness on the grocery shelves, can’t afford to attend to the fulfillment of his vision. Nor can the satirist—he is at the front of the throng.
The Eunuch with Two Members
I am the eunuch that refuses to reattach. Passion is something I am proud to have lost. I can be impartial now, an unflinching witness to the most affecting acts. This has the danger of making me an accomplice to crime and a suspect in every situation. But at least I will leave no snow tracks to be pursued by, no love stains that might compromise me. A cry, a thumb down, a thumb sideways, a meandering route—procedure for escape after refereeing a murder. That appendage, at least, will serve my nomadism well. Its erection proves I have not lost my self-concern, my fear. My thumbs keep me moving.
My situation is, to an extent, unspeakable: there is no word for not having a goal. Goalless, purposeless, aimless—all merely the negations of endpoints rather than a positive state of purposely not having an endpoint. “Lost” does not capture my condition; I know exactly where I am: at a point that I fully intended to pass through on an unmapped road. At best there are only words for the emotional states associated with not having a goal: apathy, disorientation. But these do not accurately describe how I feel about my life path. I am determined to keep hitchhiking. Where? Anywhere that is not where I am now. There is a peripatetic progress, a drifting that is committed to advancement towards—everywhere. I do not expect anyone else to understand; the others are too busy shouting “Yes!” or “No!” and chasing the straightest line to their desires. One has to be a eunuch to say “maybe . . .” or “I’ll see where this leads . . .” But eunuchs are scarce today. The times of harem guards and castrati are gone. The eunuch has no function in society. And in the case of accidents, science offers so many cures, so many surgical routes back to pleasure. There is no Christian purity to be found in castration; it represents now only the shame born of another reversal of values. A eunuch is beyond that deepest of connections to other thinking beings. His genes are destined to die with him. Heaven forbid I lose my thumbs! Then I would have no means to pursue my purposelessness. After I die I hope they will preserve my thumbs, pointing them in opposite directions to show the way for eunuchs of the future.
