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
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. Swinging between extremes of strife and languishing, chaos and melody, waters crashing over land and air settling to earth, it is deaf to the need to keep the home hearths lit, to the vigilance that is always ready to risk war to make peace last. If the sage had only whispered, or shouted. But then he would betray himself. So he just stands, an inimitable paragon.
Lao Tzu
To write one of the world’s greatest books, and not even exist: the most fully actualized author is the one who lives only on paper, a dream of his own creation.
That Lao Tzu didn’t exist—what a trite observation! The real point is that all those warring-states writers jotting Taoist poems thought he did and consciously imitated him, writing only what he himself would have written. Like the Jewish scribes of the Old Testament, they were vessels for the spirit of Lao Tzu; their creative acts were his creative acts. The fanciful being behind such texts, whether man or god, becomes a social fact upon being imagined by a club of admirers.
Publishing companies have recently discovered the benefits of caricaturing the method of the early Taoists: instead of attributing the financially risky work of their fledgling novelists to some legendary wise man, they choose a bestselling thriller writer. It is the first instance of evolution in authorship since the Old Master: after myth becomes man, man becomes industry. James Patterson is the only literary Over-Soul. As there is a difference between one and another hour of life, so with every subsequent serialization.
Aesop
Aesop used beasts to represent common human qualities; I will use humans to represent exceptions to the prevalent beastly ones—only the higher monsters of our nature are suited to furnish lessons. Which exception is represented will be a moral subject to interpretation.
