In place of aesthetic fecundity, we have a frictionless expanse of the inoffensive. Ozempic shrinks the paunch the way methamphetamine used to hollow the pitted cheeks, which is, undoubtedly, a kind of metonym for the American pilgrim’s progress.

The frictionless expanse of the ineffably inoffensive kicks us loose from sense and nonsense. Daft hunks of meat speak with trumpet mouths into the bell of which a mute is forever lodged. Maximalists walk around with hammers for hands and see nothing but screws. They put their hands to ill use and make a mash of things.

The future we have lassoed unfurls only when desire is anesthetized. Excellence packets get distributed per the pro rata of prime numbers, lumping Pareto with the assimilating precision of Acronym’s inhouse speculative scribe. Consequently or independently - it’s hard to tell - an oily algorithmic residue clings to the cathedrals’ ceilings.

Come join me in the suffocating monotony of the online souk, which we would call dark ten years ago when USPS was a primary plug. But now the fentanyl sells itself. All of the dragons there were then have since become geckos and no longer spit insurrectionist fire but now grow new limbs on command.

This is how to supplant grandeur (or so nostalgia would have it) with seamless consumption (or so our less fortunate, more principled friends would frame their interdiction and tempt you to draw cold but aspirational comfort from believing in the virtues of making nothing new.)

This is how to buy into a compromised lot and foreclose on any schema of knowingness which has squatted on what to you ought always to be Terra Incognita in the desert of pure feeling.

The business of art is form, which sometimes is money. A tall bald man teaches that a cue card with a delineated process is the thing to catch the conscience of the king. With sorry on their lips, his proselytizers warp time to go back and make a magnanimous picture-talk feature. They can be overheard telling Philip to step out of the path of their sun, but no one in this canon’s dream realizes it was Alexander who listened and actually complied with their gospel. The focus on the weeping is misplaced - it’s the sound of the tear sliding down the cheek that does the underwriting, and without shame.

All of which is to say that aesthetic chastity, were it to exist, would not occupy a more privileged or more perspicacious position. The idea that comes only after the check cashes still stands or falls on its execution, and the jiggery-pokery criticism of the ascetic purists won’t prop it up or make it come crashing down, either.

Knowing this is ennobling. Just as poets create their predecessors, not all cynics’ skins can be scratched to mine cadmium squares. Heraclitus did not come to debase the coinage, but to call logos into being, into account. We would be fools to sing for a symbolic supper when the daily bread at hand is rising.