The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

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