The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

“Postulate of Vulgarity” is not just a lens for historians to view the past, but a lens cap for society to obstruct even present sublimity. All that is lofty, grand, and noble, that appeals to the cerebral sensibility or is in any way genuinely great, evoking an awe beyond measure, a sense of wondrous mystery surrounding the origins of its manifestations . . . is too extraordinary to notice. Billboards being the cardinal model of communication for a gridlocked population, the infinite becoming of poetry takes on the limits of the prose caption’s word count cut-off in the margins of the audiovisual feast.

      Beauty finds itself twisted, extended, reduced to things it had never formerly consented to participate in: paintings of charming rustic huts, celebrity photos doctored for weight loss, or in the case of the really vulgar. . .a Strauss symphony. Even the dainty is trampled underfoot.

      The Apeirokaliac: one who has never been surprised by the beautiful is galvanized by shock of the coarse. Rather than being transported by the wonder resulting from the experience of novelty, the Vulgarian feels only titillation. Often afterwards, over an appetizer, it is mistaken for wonder, and in the retelling it stinks of garlic and onion flavoring.

      A discerning mind does not stop at merely spotting bad taste; he feels it his duty to condemn it as well. An ethical overlaying onto the aesthetic dimension, bad taste reinscribes as a species of morality what, for our age, has remained an autonomous sphere distinct from it.

      Champion of erratic locomotion, the Vulgarian turns banalities into anthems. Communers with the sublime having isolated themselves in their attics to concentrate and mope, the Vulgarian becomes by default the last patriot willing to carol his bawdy allegiances in the street. The abstract is subsumed under the mundane, to the libido’s mode of knowing, the sensus communis of the Roman holiday. Moving in the opposite direction of Abelard, he intends to be a sensualist and becomes thereby a nominalist—universals are matter for his tongue, which dies gradually from increasing numbness. In the end a quiet impotence results. There is no Historia Calamitatum, no hindered achievement—the Vulgarian’s life is the story of a lust affair with himself not worth relating. Not because he is totally naïve, but exactly because, in admitting his defects in the way of innocence, he continues to walk the path. There is often some degree of monastic reflection in the Vulgarian’s life—his vulgarity is not simply physical, but the animalization of the spirit. Metaphysics, too, is the province of a particular being. We are disgusted by his final confession: he just couldn’t help himself.

      Vulgarity: all that emerges out of the rectum which lacks substance. If the sublime is a mother-of-pearl cloud, the vulgar is a puff of flatulence. The fart is proof that aesthetics can ascend beyond itself and develop ethical connotations. Art cannot convince the nose of the legitimacy of art’s sake—its kingdom is the reptilian brain. The gas-passer’s stink gives off an aura of coarseness, a bubble of vacant space visualizing his lack of ingenuity—with a match, pyrotechnics could have redeemed the incivility of not excusing himself.

      Suburblimity

      Confronted by an infinite suburban landscape which we can imagine imperfectly only with the help of an aerial photograph and partially grasp with our intellect only through maps and blueprints, we shudder not just from the mere beholding of it but also from the consequences of its existence—terror over tasteless uniformity of living space mixed with queasiness of exhaust fumes and shouting children. We witness nature laid waste at our own hands: not bothering to refer it to our intellectual capacities, we vanquish it out of spite that its total conceptualization is beyond us; it melts away against the power of machines even as our lethargy fails to stir itself and gloat. It is a destruction we accomplished out of ignorance, experiencing the sublime only as an after-effect of negligence. The Sublime: a realization that setting no limits on ourselves is our fatal limitation, a feeling that presses upon us and does not allow our detachment—a jackhammer setting off a migraine, so relentless that skull and street become indistinguishable. Antithesis of Friedrich’s paintings in which we put ourselves in the shoes of subjects observing the sublime from behind, we instead find ourselves standing below a sea of smog, bending over and holding a mirror to our face, too apprehensive to crane our necks upward.

      The man who lassos the moon thinks only of harnessing lunar energy for his midnight paddleboat ride, contemplating it for the sake of itself only as it crashes into his reservoir. As he spends all his remaining thoughts pedaling for his life, the passenger he was so eager to impress finds herself lamenting her date’s moral corruption and wanting only the view they once had. But the sky will not be whole again, and against our denials of debasement the forces of nature are almighty. Mother’s laws are not our own, but higher than us, falling upon the world and crushing our audacious autonomy.

      Ward of the Flies

      Evil is easy. Only the first murder—obeying the command to pull the trigger—is hard. After that desensitization occurs rapidly; the will acquiesces, even justifies its acts and delights in cruelty’s conformity. The Milgram subjects, profoundly pained to administer fatal voltage, become eager Nazi soldiers—the singular refusal, the “good man” despite circumstance, is quickly dealt with. Invested with authority from the beginning rather than obedient to it, initial pangs of conscience are blocked by chemical surges of sadism—Zimbardo’s Abu Ghraib experiments. The brutality among children lost in nature is shamed by the amusements of commoners in imaginary status roles with real props. And after irreparable crimes of civilization are perpetuated from fictions, we go home to the lie of “the ordinary.”

      Where is the moment of innocence here? Before the first murder? But sin was always within us, presupposed, and after manifesting itself prompts no reflection—never innocent, neither is guilt admitted. Pure evil is unknowing—Death in The Seventh Seal—and its mortal instrument the antithesis of Antonius Block. A bureaucrat returning from a long campaign in the filing cabinets finds a plague of messiness spread over the land and takes up extreme measures to cure it. The need for justification—the attempt not to explain, but explain away—is fully realized in duty, abyss of the “why.”

      For some, duty isn’t enough; they overlay sadism and alcoholism to enhance the demands of expectation: the mind exempts itself from pain via pleasure as the body records all the suffering inflicted on others. In the end the torturer becomes alienated from his consciousness and unable to weather the physical ailments cruelty has imposed on him. The hybrid constitution of the torturer breaks down on both sides: ensnared in a libertine finitude, the will overasserted, sensuality and pride are denied through exhaustion.

      After the self, duty is all one has left; by the merciful power of grace, subjectivity is judged in accordance with the law and given the strength to keep going forward, an empty shell injected with larger purpose. The effort to clothe duty only consolidates its solitude—it does not permit a rivalry of motives, above all the temptation to kindness. Whereas selfishness only discounts the significance of others, duty excludes none: all, including oneself, have importance only insofar as they submit to the rule. Matter and spirit alike are surrendered as tools of obedience.

      Marketing Stickers

      “Child-friendly”: a label containing forgotten meanings and bygone values too dangerous to be recaptured, appreciated only by those unable to understand what they are bound to lose.

      “For singles”: the wild public inauguration to domestic life sought out by those who have outgrown their innocence.

      “Family-oriented”: seen clearly only by flesh-peddlers, the infertile, and the lonely.

      The New You

      Advertising rises to an art when it stimulates not a perceived need, but boredom. Generosity sweepstakes, patient repetition, diligent associations, claims of skyrocketing temperance—a cavalry charge of techniques weaseling the tedious virtues into subliminal consciousness to make people fidget in their jiggling bodies, necrohabits, and abusive relationships. This campaign of discontent would implant not a longing for this or that product, but a heartache to jump on the bandwagon of another existence altogether. To lodge ennui in the soul is to commodify life, to make a conspicuous consumption of unfulfillment.

      Levels of Senility

      We say that age