Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

She had festive nights of sweaty convulsions (suggesting, without a doubt, a rather Aristippusian character, at times), she had eruptions of over-powering ecstasy pulsating from a manhood so intolerable it pulsed through her body, she had ravenous tongues entwined around stiff nipples, pianist fingers stroking the organ of her womb so that she sang like a perfect alto great lauds to god, her lover, and life (explaining, of course, poor Joseph’s pianist envy). He was a whimpering ejaculator that purged himself of pent-up spittle like a geriatric bloodhound, he fumbled with her desire like a man juggling too many packages, he tried for satisfied lust but only left her inconvenienced.

The spies of his emotions, those flickering, honest thoughts that sometimes gave themselves like martyrs to his mind’s furnace, begged him to love her, his children and his positionary righteousness, like an abbot entombed within the sacred altar of an abbey frequented by royalty. They further entreated him to grow a lawn as green as emeralds and purge the havenly meadow of infectious nuisances that buzzed the family’s outdoor dinner table during the cruelest months, il miglior fabbro , and to these poor Joseph replied in bedded down consistency that he wanted so bad, yes in a childbed honesty that is the bedfellow of egotistical fantasies of school girls propositioning the beta boys with winking promises of virgin wine tasting below the old, tractor tires of the playground, along with all sorts of other implements that would allow him to better fulfill a role premoulded for him by the blank machine that chugged out the fallacies of his life in a million Roberson Jeffers hawks and stones, nor were they the Housman replies to pessimism, but the very optimistic responses of a recipe craftily prepared to rise like leaven bread, the chainsaws, socket sets, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, weed whackers (which is not a well cloaked allusion to poor Joseph’s sweet snatch yearning), ban saws, and all the like so that the garage was an unused treasure trove of a large department store’s entire home improvement section marvelously replicated. The same, of course, could be said of his other possessions, which Joseph, being the Mahound of a magic vessel ferrying across the great divide a lesser divinity, which would later pit him against a much more popular, if not better created by the clergy in undying supplications, lord, stocked in drawers, cupboards, pantries, closets, attics, and sheds like trophies of his own inadequacies, but truly revealed, in an almost pluralist fashion, his own chimera of faith.

Joseph wanted to want these things, he’d tried ever so hard to care about the purchases, which he oversaw like a puppet dictator murdered in a failed coup several days before and now stuffed and pickled and positioned for the display watching audience to appear quite compliant with the whole switch-over, but he simply gave a sea sand nod and pushed the cart with the failing right wheel in a misbelieving daze of rainbow packaging. It was the same, meaning of equal value or importance, not, as in the conventional sense, identical, with the advertisements his family salivated over during their evening ritual of prostrating themselves before the view screen (intending, of course, that the information imparted was of a McLuhanian context). While they responded as per the intent of the ad, which had been meticulously designed to provoke a response, using Pavlovian techniques the Russian physiological pioneer would have found invasive and arguably, a contortion of his work, especially, theoretically, his later labors (experimentally inducing neuroses in animals), Joseph did not. He heard the noise, associated it with thirst or hunger or sex or power or whatever the advertisement intended, but he, for a reason unexplainable, did not crave the product on display thereafter, rather Joseph, who would always be immune, would watch in horror as his wife or children became so ravenous for the product, to the point of Sartrian mauvaise foi (as if the logo was an icon, although their awareness of their freedom was questionable), that he would rush out to purchase it to satiate their appetites. However, more likely, the Moore family would have these products on-hand, and once the advertisement was finished, minding he remained out of the way, Joseph would observe his family, in a very Skinnerian fashion (since the end result shaped their behavior), as they consumed a pint of rocky road ice cream, or a gallon of soda pop, or cooked a tub of popcorn, or made an instant meal, on cue, without considering for themselves if they were hungry, really, actually craved ice cream for some physiological reason, or needed salt, for instance, or were still quite hungry even after the enormous dinner Norma Moore had prepared only an hour before. For whatever reason, even as Joseph tried to feel hungry or thirsty or amorous or tried to believe that a pair of pants would make him powerful or tried to accept that an automobile would suddenly convert him into a playboy without children, without a wife, and without anything to do on a weekday but speed down an empty highway towards the great ball of the burning sun, it never truly worked, he didn’t feel anything but the recognition that he was supposed to, and that, the particular Sorelian understanding that he inherently had, made him uncomfortable, because he wanted to believe in it, for no reason but to be unburdened from the Tocquevillian abilities he knew he had.

When Joseph had become callous, which is to say he was endowed with the rare gift of bearing the inadequacies of others, he could not say (the Schopenhaurerian aspects not escaping him). However, in retrofitting himself with this rather imperturbable persona, having been born in the house of Venus, incredulously a morning star misunderstood from its first appearance on the horizon, and associated rather disreputably with the fallen general of seraphim suicides, Joseph had relegated himself to a background prop within the family home. Which is to say, whilst his personality may hold up porch conversations on the pantheistic materialism of contentment derived from accepting his very individualized position in nature, Joseph’s ability to quell his wife’s overbearing middle mind opinions was far from even deficient. Thus, he was forced to spend his diurnal sabbaticals and sabbaths roving the lengthy aisles of shopping centers fulfilling the ever thirsty spleen of his wife, who’s very worth depended utterly upon her own aesthetic impression upon those people who would not give her a straight answer on the period in which she was currently existing. Why dear Joseph was married to such a stereotype, which is an indication of her fixed, if not exaggerated, and preconceived taxonomy in society, although arguably a prejudice and not a fact, save the repetition of her rather Lippman-like personal ticks, he, himself, “a transient, horrible fantastic dream” that put him in the very precarious position as a bedfellow of Death, itself, could reply with any more than a theological expostulation, or as they say, a fool’s method of destroying relationships.

Joseph worked (implying a Parkinsonian belief structure that was hardly true) so that his family would be comfortable, seeing that he was an aficionado of the mythology of labor equaling a monetary reward. However, it seemed, a rather witty way our hero comprehended the illusion of life, very Eastern mystic in its pure ignorance, that he would never be able to work enough for them to have all that they needed. Thus, the year, as he understood it, was a period of three hundred and sixty five disappointments, which were directly proportional to his wife’s annoyance and inversely proportional to his own fulfillment. There was always more to buy (an imperfect pun, to say the least) to better their lives and he had to get those things for them, he had to make their lives more comfortable, he had to relieve his wife of some of her duties, he had to make it so his children’s childhoods were pleasant, without problems, without difficulties, without psychological scars that would later haunt them. Joseph had to help his family receive all that they deserved, which is to say they believed they deserved far more than he had given them, an almost destiny-like philosophy popular with his contemporaries that included an omnipotent force presenting the virtuous with materialistic rewards but actually an idiot’s explanation for failures and a conqueror’s justifications for crimes against humanity. They had only three cars, their house was only four thousand square meters, the yard was not big enough for two dogs, they could not afford all of the viewing sites offered by the service, there were only two computers in the home, there were not enough books and magazines, his children did not have the finest clothes, they had to go to school without the proper fashions. Joseph’s wife did not always have the haircut she needed, she did not have the money to adopt a new wardrobe every season (four lengthy periods of further defeat), she could only go in for a manicure and pedicure on a weekly basis, she was still waiting for a new, self-cleaning, power range stove that would allow her more time for her children and better able to provide wholesome meals for the family. She did not belong to all the book clubs she should, she was only a member of a few consumer purchasing guilds, she held only a weekly homemaking party, she could not buy flowers every day to delight the kids and enliven their home.