and yet we are opposed in our mutual nobility. It is too selfish to be subdued by me, and I am too proud to do anything but let it run rampant. Chasing my cat like it does its rats demonstrates to others both that it is out of control—I am too clumsy and slow to catch it—and that I am just a poor imitation of my name, that I am not the real thing. The quality of my cat that bedevils me, that renders me powerless to conquer it—its elusiveness—is also the source of my respect for it. As I wear this name longer, I come to forget that I ever had any other name—that I ever could have any but this one.
More Is a Faster Lessening
Everyone praises the endurance of the ascetic, but no one appreciates the stamina of the hedonist. To laugh until the throat burns and smoke a cigar to soothe it, to black out but not pass out, to suspend love’s climax, to be immortal in the moment—what Stoic has such fortitude: to die upon the seizure and slump of orgasm? The sunrise is an unappealing reprise of “business as usual.” Only the stoic loves the morning light; he needs no promise to realize the protestant work ethic: life itself is full of good purpose enough. Prolonging desires well past the point of the modest effort it would take to fulfill them, self-deniers tremble from the tectonic shifts of suppressed impulses. They put their drives in park and suffer motion sickness. But the Heroin Heroine is a nocturnal creature: she knows all too well that nature is “red in tooth and claw”—her leopard jacket is stained with wine. She purifies the red inside her with the white, diluting blood with opioid milk. Survival is ancillary; it serves a higher purpose, and is relinquished before it is scurried after.
Where are the hagiographies of the great hedonists? The story of the old flaccid saint who, filled with the spirit in his nether-region, miraculously deflowered a hundred virgins? The example of the desert monastic who wandered upon a vineyard oasis and imbibed his weight in wine? After asceticism’s preparation for mystical grace one must adopt a method proper to its reception. Catholicism awaits the discovery of the lost dialogues of Gregory I, in which he advocates practicing the seven deadly sins as a test of resilience.
Ascetic when young, hedonist when old. —How much perplexity and grudging respect would be due such a person! And when the change comes, how much disappointment from those familiar with the original self. But can one blame him? It was not that he was making up for lost time; he had already saved it by preempting folly in his youth. In the end he dispensed with the wisdom he no longer needed—upon reaching a certain age he found that no one was paying attention to it. By shifting strategies grandpa became fun, someone the new generation could appreciate.
But after all this, ascetic and hedonist alike share the common value of uncoming. Each way represents an art of life, two roads leading unto one destruction, converging stylizations of the inevitable.
In certain periods one method predominates—to the forced inclusion of the other. In an epicurean society every act of denial which the lonely Stoic practices is mistaken for the nausea after the binge, every illustration of asceticism the fasting before the feast. Not seeing the whole of his life (for that he would really be shunned), observers see a slice of it and take it as an indication of the sickness surrounding excess. They accord him the respect of a master indulger, wishing they could someday be as experienced as him, eager to surpass his record of debauchery. At the same time they urge more indulgences upon him, pleading with him not to rest now when he is so close to that final indulgence that would enter his name into the hall of fame. It takes a man of mighty resolution to resist peer pressure . . . but what Stoic has ever not thrived on the public respect for his lifestyle, and has not hesitated to give it up when the tenor of the times calls for this final relinquishment? And so, surrounded by outstretched arms weighed down by fistfuls of spices and fruits, the Stoic embraces the colic that follows from eating after prolonged starvation. He undertakes this submission as his last victory over hedonism, and he has good reason to be proud: he did not want his accepted donations.
Sexually Transmitted Congruence
Goat bladder—Minos’s bedroom Minotaur.
Queen Anne’s lace—Hippocrates’s hemlock.
Pennyroyal tea—Dioscorides’s organ failure.
Pepper—Pope John XXI’s damnation.
Lemon rind—Casanova’s withdrawal from life into autobiography.
Cotton root bark—the Confederacy’s domestic war.
Diaphragm—veil of America’s second Gilded Age.
***
Sexual evolution has a new yardstick for efficiency. It no longer needs to rely on a society’s contraceptive methods to choreograph the dance between love and death. The spread of the HIV virus has finally harmonized Freud’s conflict of Eros and Thanatos. By not restricting itself to socially acceptable outlets, precisely by raging to satisfy itself, the erotic instinct undermines its own will to preservation and acknowledges itself as part of the same being as death. Love appropriates immune system failure into its bosom, purifying Eros into Venus, freeing its swooners of any mundane justification of oath-keeping and family duty. With civilization as judge and biology executioner, those unwilling to submit to monogamy are only too happy to mercilessly punish themselves with pleasure. In the name of conscience, life allows its aggressiveness to express itself unchecked against the promiscuous population as organisms bounce towards their end in a horizontal limbo. Then, at the height of gratification, Venus turns the lovers into daisies and flies away. Those who survive are without guilt over their sexual frustration, bolstering the status quo in a confused earthly approximation of Nirvana—the civil union.
Mirth’s Profession
Clowns entered the world laughing only to cry at the punch line of every joke not at their expense. They squeeze tiny feet into oversized shoes, hoping someone will step on them for the sake of being noticed; they wear a musical nose to attract fist notes as accompaniment to their sinus infection. That they are the saddest creatures in the world is a cliché; less well-known is that self-deprecation delights them in a world where everyone is taught respect.
Two Ways to Classify Common Sense
a) Internalizing the spirit of the age. Represented today by the man of economic self-reliance who watches team sports and possesses a sincere, feeble, and unconvincing sanguinity.
b) Perceiving the world as it enters the sense organs, packaged without bubble-wrap for return shipment. Possessed by few. Praised by none.
In each case interpretation is at a minimum. To the dreamy outsider, the laziness of the first group and the minimalist will of the second appear equally boorish, grounded as they are: the difference between fraternizer and realist is a choice between ant and beetle. The dreamer forgets that as a butterfly he was once a caterpillar and, on all but his best days, is still a chrysalis.
Elixirs of Flight
Work, politics, education, marriage and family life, church—the traditional institutions have ceased to provide fulfillment to its citizenry. Mother’s milk has turned to powdered formula, and after choking down our nutrition we suckle on tart tonics to wash the taste from our mouths. We soil ourselves with small pleasures, reimbursing our libidos with the time and effort sapped from the old ways. Carnage, erotica, exotica, fun-physic: in a time of tradition when leisure was not yet vocation’s stocking stuffer these things were no siesta helpmeets, but formed the bedrock of adventure. The knight errant, the buccaneer, the Casanova—before becoming the bromides of a drunken scriptwriter, such lovers of the blood were coagulations of reality into legend. Until the nineteenth century it was still possible for a man to be his own parable. But what was once a style of life has become proof of life—or if seen from without, a measure of likelihood.
