Coital Glamor

"The novel ended with Flaubert and with James." -- Ulysses, Order, and Myth, page 177


Eliot is on point. We are evolving our way out of the primacy of aesthetic choice, killing language, killing writing as a profession except as it remains necessary for engineering, mathematics, physics, computer science, medical data, until such a time as our extinction. I had a geology instructor back in the day when I suspect pedagogy was not quite the science my former flame elocutes like worsted cotton out of his ear drums, who intoned to the class, "MAN can adapt to any conditions." And of course, this is what you tell adolescents to damper the suicide rate among them as a class, but that kind of optimism is illusory. Beneath all these things that add up to the human half, there is the animal, beneath the love of form, beneath the fact that cultural impermanence triumphs over memory, beneath the quest for intricacy, beneath the story, beneath the failure and the persistence of metaphysics, the Alawites and the Syrian Free Army engage in bloodshed, the Israelis invade Gaza, the Israelis occupy Lebanon, the Israelis have been engaged in constant warfare since Yahweh became a conceptual advance over pagan deification, and this spearhead isn't so much about the cost of the Semitic legacy to our species, so much as the Semitic legacy represents the fact that a chimpanzee is pretty much a chimpanzee, and like other species, primates are dangerous, brutal. Everything else, including the fact that we seem to think we now control the genome, is nothing more than distractions for the bipedal brain. That is why tensions remain dynamic in complicit intimacy between husband and wife in the representational fiction, and perfectionist niceties behind the camera, in The Brothers Rico. I'd argue, however, that some of these highly stylized films from between 1948 to 1968 offer us more insights into the cracks that have since been consumed into the post modern maw, than does the glaze over your eyes waiting for post modernism to transmute and close its bracket. The sex between Alice and Eddie Rico was great, but then there is this pesky business of your past as a bookie, dear Eddie, for the syndicate, with no allusion to what struggles Dianne Foster's character incurred in marrying such a man. Was the material status enough, never mind that from which her eye had to turn away? Or was Alice such a feminine catch that Eddie believed his moral compass was clean, for all intents and purposes? Was his history, their history, a case of willful blindness, all for the sake of style, a certain propriety that everyone achieved after the war in an implied contract? Alice does manage to worry about the implications of the communique over that telephone line, and Eddie equivocates those implications, which sums up the conflict of his character through the entire unfolding of the narrative.