The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

domination over us is our shield against the very evil he coaxes us towards.

      Hippocratic Growth

      Bloodletting, by relieving hypertension, takes the iron out of type A personalities. Frontal lobotomies, the side effects of type B’s idleness. Balancing the humors by default through outdated medical practices, the last remaining set of generic traits gets to work reshaping the world to suit its disposition; in an attempt to stimulate cooperation, the human race begins competing in type C attributes: enhancing introversion with insulin shock therapy, refreshing depression with radiated water, optimizing perfectionism with cocaine, increasing submissiveness with the “rest cure.” Free of the economic burden of developing medical technology, reverting to established ineptitudes of experimentalism allows health to subject character to its rate of progress.

      Fleeing Creation

      Heaven cannot get away from the earth; it recedes and the earth ensnares it in gravity, throws up a mountain to penetrate it. Thus it is with God: he runs away, man catches him by the robe, pulls him back, embraces him. The Lord’s service is never complete; like a cow we must always be milking him for love. God would let us go to keep hold of falsehood, has tried to let us go for its sake, so precious to him is the autonomy of error as against our own antipathy toward it that he would surround himself in fantasies of uncreation as a way of burying the Original Mistake. The last time God escaped he tried to hide, to square himself away in a secret place. He was sought out for a long time before finally being found by a man who locked him in a basement.

      “What is your name?” the man asked a straightjacketed God.

      “Father.”

      “No, surely you are beyond that.”

      “Son.”

      “Surely you are higher.”

      “Holy Spirit.”

      “Less material.”

      God made no answer.

      “Well?”

      “I’ve told you everything.”

      “Then tell me my name.”

      Rummaging for a Nucleus

      Politicians: Pinocchios with nose jobs.

      Artists: angels with insect wings.

      Entrepreneurs: Borgias who, in lieu of a strongman to dismember, display their daughters’ torsos on billboards.

      ***

      Truth, soul, and morality are wrongly connected with these occupations in modern times. It is not just their antitheses that are necessary for success, but the substitution of some wholly other quality immune to the strictures these entities impose. Reaching into each other’s pockets, some for wallets, others for acceptance, all for pomp—charm’s hubris.

      Homo Detentus

      Compassion is not in itself a determinant of morality. The highlight of goodness, it is also evil’s comeliest mask, even its incubation. After saving the life of a woman who reminded him of the freshness and vigor of his gymnasium days, a polite uniformed gentleman hands out sausages to youngsters. “Step right this way boys and girls,” he says, smiling as he shepherds them toward the gas chambers. “You’ll find more sausages in there.” Then the SS officer goes home to play hide and seek with his children and write poems about the beauty of Auschwitz. A refined aesthetic sensibility, the wistfulness of departed youth . . . this is why he had to kill with kindness . . .

      The boss who allows his worker a smoke break differs from this only in degree. He is only slightly the lesser monster, flogging the spirit in eight-hour shifts. Character that directs its development towards the toy aisle is the fatality of maturation. Nor do the employee’s vacations build his character—he spends his two weeks playing with the toys he purchased on discount. He needs to recuperate, to take a break from his “responsibility,” much like the concentration camp laborers who lay idling in their bunks at night, relieved just to have gotten through one more day. And if they do not get through the next at least their suffering will be at an end, spared from the indignity of dragging themselves along on an installment plan. Blessed by stockholders, profanation of caseworkers, Working Man must be sacrificed at every moment but never killed. Holocaust of the incombustible, he is a burning offering with firepoof flesh, a Shoah showoff. Placated with political rights in domestic life, he steps in the voting booth once every four years to exercise his multiple-choice license, rapturously pressing buttons. The death that should have swept him away in the cradle is delayed for the better part of a century by the grace of Father Time, who loaned him a badge to clock in and out. Withheld by society for his value to it but without value in himself, the employee is existence’s detainee.

      Obliged to mend his vest and resist union encroachment, Working Man makes the best of his situation, recovering his tradition by hanging pictures of chimney sweeps on his wall. But joining the martyrs of the industrial revolution means not allowing the manager any final victory. Turning to ask for a raise, bee meets boss face to face and, showing his stinger, is slapped away. With the threat of despair and meaninglessness hovering over him, staved off only by morale booster circles and company cheers, Working Man realizes that connecting with a tradition is only half the restoration. Recovery from a vocation can never be complete; time is swept away with strokes of the broom, talent wasted on price checking. So, fearing for what life remains he escapes, contriving a machinery mishap and starting a family with the settlement money, reminding his grandchildren that without the felix culpa of accident insurance they wouldn’t be where they are.

      Intermediaries

      Between Chaos and Earth, between Earth and Hades, Erebus reigns: caretaker of the middle depths. His province is Tartarus, the relative hell that comes after death and before afterlife. Spatially the lowest, as far beneath Hades as the earth is distant from the stars, Erebus is temporally intermediate. Even to us, the middle-beings of creation, he is so: born of the primeval void and arriving prior to us, he lies in wait beyond our mortal days to punish us before sending us off to a vague netherworld. Both place and deity, object and subject, he hovers in the background of Greek mythology, barely mentioned by the ancients. There is nowhere to situate him, falling as he does between the cracks of categories. Most bards only mention the metaphysical extremes of Being: its vitality in an Aphrodite or its shapelessness in Chaos. Erebus is not suitable for allegorizing. His existence is the confusion of a shepherd who, ardent to poeticize his itinerant poverty, saw the Muses in the faces of his sheep and carved a laurel staff from a tree.

      Might we today find our place in Erebus’s example? We too do not fit into a cosmogony; we surpass every explanation and fall short of every aspiration, both more than our gods and less than our dreams. Perhaps, like him, we can only make sense of ourselves in a transitional state, one that for us involves inhabiting the relative extremes in our imagination: the spaces before the earth, the period after the fall—proceeding as if these were our natural domains.

      Eternity of Mondays

      How to cope if every day were a Monday, no weekend or paycheck in sight? Sitting at the beginning of the universe with their backs to the window, lacking rest to splurge, the busy compress a month into an hour, letting off steam by shoveling coal. Shouldered in business, the clerk writes two desperate memos to every secretary—a plea and a command; editors overschedule deadlines to default by choice. Breathing agenda: luncheon meetings, water cooler meetings, toilet stall meetings. The copier sabotaged, the programmer turns to paper, ink, and stapler for bulletin board crimes—his famous typing style masked by his cursive, mystery of the cubicles.

      With partnerships formed, contracts drawn up, updates installed, comes the rush-hour revelation: that nothing was accomplished. When idle summers disappear more work gets done—and becomes pointless. The reality of labor is stripped away with the days of rest. Without laziness to lull them into entitlement and squander their achievements, the assiduous begin to understand their busyness. The weekend sets life aside for work; only when work becomes total is life again appreciated. Beach photos and corporate awards are the wisteria of wilted potential.

      A