The Easy Chain

by Evan Dara

  —Yeah and Lincoln hi!, she said, on the cell. The day after, and it was Auran calling. She caught Lincoln driving to a closing on North State Parkway. Her voice was chipper, strong.

  —She said that she had forgotten to mention something when they had gotten together on Thursday: that she knew a friend of Shelly’s. Faith Reinking, a great, real fun girl that Shelly had gone to Northwestern with. He had to meet her! Unfortunately, Faith was going through a rough patch just then, was a little depressed. She said she was going to look out for her …

  She said she, Auran, was the usual: busy busy busy, running around in circles. Though not too busy to hear that his event had been great. But she wanted to know: there was a reception on Friday night, supposed to be hot. And she was wondering, she said through the cell phone, if he was free. Maybe some interesting people, she said. You know, possible leads. Good ones, the cell phone said.

  —Auran picked Lincoln up just after 10 PM, as they were going away from center city, almost into Dupage County, and one car would facilitate. She drove due west, somewhere on the route to Downers Grove, and exited the 34 into a quiet-time suburban community of lamp-lit two-story homes and shrub-bordered lawns. The January gel kept the streets deserted, and darker-seeming even though coated with white and glisten …

  She negotiated several ribbony backstreets without pause, and stopped before a small mock-Tudor letting smoke from a chimney. Leaded glass in the front door was yellow and blue, and a large man answered, with a close-cropped beard and a low, charcoal voice. He wore thick knits and slacks, all black, and tinted, heavy-rimmed glasses …

  Auran introduced him as Raad Delling, and, hands shook, he led the two into his amber-lit living room. The couches were long and yieldfully soft, their facing tables lapped with mags. A tea service was already set out. And there burned the fireplace …

  So, Delling said. Auran tells me you’re a man of interesting engagements. That’s good here in Chicago. Don’t let the roughhouse stuff continue to seduce you. Nowadays, the culture here favors barquettes, watermarks, signal compression, beveled edges. The main parade has moved on …

  Auran had explained that Delling was of Norwegian origin, though third generation Chicagoland. He worked as a statistician for a regional division of the Department of Health and Human Services, crunching correlations between stop signs and migraines, roof slopes and uncontested divorce. His puffed, polished hands, while talking, slowly sculpted air.

  —But leave all that to one side, he continued. I am given to understand, he said unhurriedly, that you may have an interest, or may list in directions towards interest, in Group Giclé. Well, this is a very good thing. We are open, non-sectarian, non-denominational, indeed committed to renewal through out-in renovation. So we welcome these kinds of introductions – though, of course, we do not solicit them …

  The Group began – what – perhaps eighteen years ago, near the French hill-town of Uzès, in truffle country. It was an informal thing, without name, without intention. Just two men of similar kidney chancing to chat in a brasserie, and voilà. As of today, we are active in some forty countries throughout Europe and North America, and well into eastern-rim Asia, and so almost certainly represent the second or third largest association of promosexuals now extant. We are pleased with our progress …

  How to account for such impressive growth?, he continued, between lifts of breath. It derives, at bottom, from a love of surfaces. Indeed, some claim the entire promosexual project as one of collapsing surface/ profundity dichotomies. These thinkers contend that we stand at the vanguard of today’s vast, transnational movement towards reverencing the skin of the world, culture’s self-presentation, as its deepest essay, its very truth. Outward show as indistinguishable from inward riches. For as depths develop, do not surfaces somehow take on new nuances, richly complexifying lusters … ?

  I do not wholly agree. As Wysock has written, organisms, and agglomerations of organisms, exhibit plenitropism – an instinctive turning toward that which is most abundant in the immediate environment. This must be so: Aerobic organisms gravitate towards ever-more oxygen-rich habitats; koalas flourish when they learn to savor the eucalyptus leaves that lavish their landscapes. That kind of thing. And, again according to Wysock, eventually organisms convert this movement to generative purposes …

  And so we see here. What are the numbers? Some 60,000 people in contemporary America work in the world of education, while over 400,000 hold positions in advertising and the advertising-related disciplines. Inevitably, organically, adaptive modulations flow. By the current moment, ads have inspired and mobilized such untabulable bounties of erotic response that millions, entire generations, have converted to the service of producing them, reproducing them, expending their life-force and entelechy in striving to make, as if chortling offspring, just a few more …

  Naturally, one wonders just how this has come to pass, he continued. Approaches abound. One position hails pure Humean associationism. In our blessed cultural alignment, both the erotic and the promotional are all but ever-present, bringing about a plenary session of the psyche that virtually guarantees their constant collision. In this living laboratory of classical conditioning, eventually the two become blurred. No dog-and-bell show here, just the seep of interesting liquids upon the jinkle of falling coin …

  Alternately, Lahey takes a Darwinian/adaptive tack. According to this distinguished Michigan scientist, the ubiquity of publicity must reflect its role – entirely salutary – in selection and survival. In our national sport, the better you pitch, the more runs you score. In short order, erotic enhancements ensue. Nature helps us get the job done. When is the sexual not in the service of evolution? Certainly, in recent years, this position has generated broad popular equivalents. Nowadays, it is often heard said that we have evolved into a race of salesmen. Alas. Who cares to pronounce on the truth of this? At the very least, we have sold ourselves that idea. Still, there is much to be said for these insights …

  With a nod to Anna Freud, a group of Southwestern pocket scholars has begun to describe advertising as a collective defense mechanism, a handy, often tuneful means for a culture to shield itself from the untoward, unpalatable, even unendurable truths of every day. Faced with such distresses, our souls produce advertisements to swathe and succor the mind, and thereby make all things manageable. For such fine, analgesic rallying, one, clearly, must be grateful. But defense, of course, implies affront, aggression, war; and behavioral ethologists have observed, all throughout nature, how organisms react when plunged into a position of mortal threat: with an unslakeable urge to procreate, a feral, on-the-quick, deeply touching instinct to provide for genetic follow-through even if the present vessel perishes. Thus the rich harvests of bird eggs, insect larvae and the like routinely found in environments that had been wiped clean of its denizens, by predators, climate-shift or other perils. So, too, advertising provokes an equivalent – and highly valued – loin-flush and frenzy …

  Viewed thus, Group Giclé represents a form of emergent eros, a powerful new hybridization of emotional life. The yearning for such, unconsciously felt, is already present in the language: we speak of consummating a deal, and magazine spreads, and market penetration, indeed we live in the very age of mechanical reproduction. Further examples can be cited ad – if you’ll forgive the phrase – infinitum …

  Of course popularity, even omnipresence, makes no claim on virtue.

  But there are other reasons to endorse the promosexual program. Notably, p-sex promises continuance without despoliation. An erotic accord with the advertisement leads us to dreams of timelines the current dispensation cannot possibly deliver. From even before the early classical age of economics – that of Ricardo, and Malthus, and Adam Smith – we have understood that civilization is a by-product of commerce. Now that we are seemingly locked into the models of neoclassical economics, that purblind system of partial accounting, we are well advised to consider options that keep the industrial base growing
while, simultaneously, decreasing human effluent. Group Giclé has much to offer in this regard. For we, specifically, are invested in the prospect of increasing commerce without augmenting quantities of corporeal bodies. We endeavor, we yearn to expand culture without creating individuals, to promote economic growth sans additional ecosystemic stress, beyond the occasional hand-rag discard. The selfless gene, if you will …

  Again, we are clearly just the expressed aspect of a much larger trend. Recent demographics from much of the Western world, in particular Christian Europe and Russia, show a precipitous drop in fertility, to levels significantly below those needed for population replenishment. This began in the late 1960s, and continues, despite large-scale government interventions, with vertiginous acceleration to our day. As documented in some masterful work published late last year by Robert Blenheim, this initial falling-off in fertility, as well as its more recent violent expansion, correlates most magisterially, with margins of error running under two-point-two percent, with proportionate increases in the West’s production of persuasive imagery. Billboards, not blastocysts. More ads, fewer adherents. Need I belabor the point? We now prefer to fecundate the econosphere. The Pope is not pleased …

  Incidentally, it was Blenheim who made the most recent, and to my mind the leading, contribution to the debate on what, precisely, to call the fundamental unit of persuasion found in advertorial communication. That is, to provide a name for the irreducible atom of suggestion, as a means of quantifying the persuasive valence of, say, a full-page corn-chip pub, or thirty seconds of radio time extolling Bermuda. The ideas may reflect our particular bias, but contributions have been lively: from the libidon, proposed by Francois Bousquet, to the ardon, courtesy of Reginald James. Other contenders include the shiverly, the Marilon, and, perhaps inevitably, the eroticon. Again, I find myself inclined to Blenheim’s proposal, the conicon. Shapely, historically informed, assonant, sweet …

  Attempts have been made to determine and calculate contemporary, culture-wide conicon production, but, alas, to turn to that tired trope, the territory is forever outstripping our abilities to fashion a map. Computer strength is nowhere close. It is clear, however, that as the Cambrian era knew an explosion of speciation, we are now living the conicon equivalent. Unpredictable, uncontrollable growth. Undoubtedly, erotico-publicitarian synergies are driving these developments. In fact, thinkers as diverse as Matthews and Kiln have taken, recently, to calling our period the Coniconic Epoch …

  Others couch our movement as a quest for truth, or in religious terms. I am highly comfortable with both. Indeed, one must marvel at the evolution we have brought to our relation to the sacred. We have gone from a condition in which we could not look upon the Lord to one in which we cannot tear our eyes from Tiger Woods, coated in his flavor-enhancers. Who cannot applaud such progress … ?

  More mundanely, the neo-Freudians have weighed in. Some have found significance in the psychodynamics of promosexual exchange, where the advertorial’s appeal to unclutch coin is not followed by the act itself. It is the first instance known to that buff group where satisfaction is derived from a process of damming up learned response. In fact, they hail this history-reversing interaction, one where people are fucking the system, and not vice versa. Pardon my Roddy Doyle …

  He took a sip from his cup of still-steaming green tea. Lincoln leaned into a reciprocal sip, and accepted a glance from likewise-sipping Auran. But when Delling offered the plate of small, rectangular biscuits, he caught a glimpse of his big-face wristwatch and said Ah. It was later than he had realized, he said. Perhaps he had gotten overly enthused. So now he was wondering if they might be interested in joining him for an outing, a visit to Group Giclé’s gathering place. It was the local G2 club, modest but cozy, and no more than twenty minutes away.

  —In the car, they all sat in the back, with Auran sitting facing Lincoln and Delling – it was that kind of car, that big. They traveled through Delling’s suburb, but it was late now, and dark, and the windows were also dark, so it wasn’t really clear where they were going. But Lincoln guessed they were heading back toward town, from the greater number of streetlights and store or business lights that ignited in then skittled across the window. He wasn’t too concerned, because Delling said his car would wait to give them a ride back to Delling’s place, if they needed it. The driver was separated from them by glass …

  Delling offered them mints, which he kept in a little open tray in the door, and then also didn’t take one himself …

  He pushed his glasses, he was still wearing the slightly tinted ones, up a little on his nose. I hope, then, that I have provided a swatch of general background, he said. Personally, I came to the movement in my later twenties. It was the happy result, I suspect, of certain concordances in my earlier experience between the advertorial and the illicit. My dear parents, to whom I owe everything, limited my TV viewing to two hours per week, all filtered, and permitted nothing beyond curriculum-serving schoolbooks in my study room, in which I had to stay for a minimum of three hours each night preceding a school day. Good Lutheran discipline …

  In consequence, perhaps inevitably, a taste for the excluded marked my emotional development. Later loosed into an unrestricted visual-hortatory environment, I grew intrigued, then teased, by the time’s stalwart separation of advertising and editorial – the hallowed firewall, now, of course, fastidiously breached. But, during those early days, this to me was achingly similar to the full, often curtained, separation between those magazines set out in news stores for universal consumption and those labeled as reserved for Men. In short order, advertisements – demarcated, different, forcibly removed – took on, for me, heightened allure. And when this was superadded to advertising’s primordial content – sharp promises of pleasure, and release, and full possibility, life-improvement, self-perfection, total attractiveness, all of it easily accessible yet somehow glisteningly illicit – well, we were on our way …

  But the reasons need not be quite so … so abstruse, Delling continued, with a snip of a smile. Perhaps we just prefer the possibility of consummation one hundred times on the dollar. Perhaps we just like the feeling of someone’s hand in our pocket. The hand of the whole culture in our …

  Indeed, the advantages are limitless, he went on. Plump stacks of Yves Delorme towels do not move me much. But to see them in a bleed spread in House and Garden … !

  Magic!, he said …

  Profusions of typefaces, he continued. Or – or just the shape of parentheses. Think of the lushly furrowed skin that surrounds the adwoman’s eternal smile, or the loving lines that often embrace—

  And here he gestured …

  (Special Advertising Section) …

  The trademark symbol! Or – porelessness! Asterisked qualifiers! …

  He got quiet for like a moment …

  But why should it not be thus?, he went on. Such sentiments are certainly present in the counterflow. The great artisans conceptualizing and producing the adwork are likewise acquainted with lust, theirs, of course, for worthy lucre. Let us not be naïve. Such affinities mark all working circuits. With the post-Hegelian economization of human existence, proud and vengeful subspawn of the Enlightenment, the erotic response, so marvelously adaptive, inevitably leapt thereto. Survival itself, more often than not, requires such shaping. It is the great train of our time, from zeros to eros …

  This is why I call for a reappraisal of our viewed situation, he then said, and one far away from the occasional catcall of low-grade plutopathy. I am not alone among contemporary promosexuals in claiming that ours is a part of the margin that fully integrates with the mainstream, indeed that nails one to its crosshairs. In fact, our circle is regularly approached by ad councils, nationwide marketing associations, neo-liberal think-tanks, and the like, all offering funding – for basic research, investigative data, mere opinion …

  Accordingly, I take as our emblem the noble Pelagides, the jurist and engineer who fell in love with a goatskin
bearing an image of the goddess Ersa – the very same nobbly parchment that also called participants, athletes and spectators alike, to the Athenian games. For it was Pelagides, of course, who canalized the Cephissus and brought restorative waters to his parched proto-civilization …

  The car dipped and rose, real quickly, and slowed: they were entering some kind of lot, like a parking lot. And then the car stopped, and Delling nodded. He reached for the door handle …

  They were in front of a medium-sized building, mostly black and square but with some ivy on it and lights kind of angling up from the bottom sills of the windows, which were closed. Maybe ten other cars were parked around the concrete lot out front.

  —Several cars held liveried drivers, viewable in glows of dashes. Delling, tightening the belt of his dark overcoat, walked Lincoln and Auran to the black building’s front door. Standing before it, a uniformed man nodded, and opened. No tip was made …

  A wide entrance passageway led to the club proper, a large, British-seeming sitting room stocked with couches, tables and wing chairs. Soft lights, listing golden to sepia, created separations of luminance and shadow, within which more than two dozen persons, men and women both, sat or moved silently. All were dressed darkly; most wore glasses. Ficuses, corn plants, and other understated greens ruffled the grove …

  Delling led his guests to a corner huddle of chairs. Sitting, Lincoln started. The chair, comfortable-looking, held hardwoods under its thin upholstery. His elbows and spine felt as if they were balancing on stiff onyx knobs. He also noticed that, throughout the room, talking was sparse, and highly muted. Further, no one was reading; in fact, there was no printed matter of any kind. Rather, people were playing mah-jongg, or pinochle, or crazy 8’s, or the occasional game of checkers. There was also one man knitting …