The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

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.

      Part 3

Muses

      Heraclitus

      The sage—quiet, alert, proud—speaks out. He addresses the logos calmly but firmly. That harmony can only be brought about through dominance, a reigning element exacting proportion from the lesser ones: this is his message, the balance of hierarchy. But the wind is either too weak to carry the sage’s resolute tone or too strong for it to be overheard. So the world, instead of modeling itself on the sage, goes on recurring.