The just keep making progress of evolutionism is matched by the dramatically inflated this will never end of grief. Like shouldering a friend’s casket and trudging toward finality, long-term image-shifting can seem Augean or Sisyphusian. Especially when trying to comprehend cultural life and death dilemmas involving pandemics, wars, and habitual hubris, the blues involved seem heavier than any mortals can hope to shift. The deadening feel of eternal drudgery that can accompany grief, especially when repressed, can carry even more weight than the fear of losing what is essential, resulting in a dramatic but arrested stasis. A grieving inflation and self-absorption accompanies the feelings of having suffered injustice that often accompany loss. Then this swelling subsides; there is something rather straightforward and un-operatic about simple continuance. Individuals cease but stories continue.

 

Short of the dubious relief of suicide, one does simply keep going, but not cheerfully. Given time, it is very likely that the sense, particulars, or contours of the stories which make up daily life will become provocative again in some respect. Bluevolution shares this straightforward aspect but in the way that one knows how familiar stories go, by drawing attention to the characters and tropes and wondering about what might happen next. Without struggling much beyond the level of nursery rhyme wisdom, life can move on knowing no more than that nothing good comes of ignoring what you know about how familiar story patterns turn out. Roles played and the genre of a piece give a good sense of potential futures, allowing differentiation between what works in a given narrative environment and what does not, as well as noting elements which do not seem to belong or follow.

 

In apocalyptic Christian stories, for instance, traditional notions of death and resurrection are very different from the Too Big to Fail trope in use by many nations that call themselves Christian. This becomes actively disjunctive in the national narrative of the United States, where most political figures must be believably Christian in order to get elected, because the expressed ideal model of leadership is not bailed out at the expense of the middle and working classes. He resists state control and undergoes the torture, death, tomb, and (depending on the tradition) descent into hell before transitioning into a new state of being. This collision of narratives may be behind accusations of election-cycle religiosity and reveal a difference between Christianity and “Christianism.” The latter involves the unreflective adoption and valorization of select, often conveniently self-supportive, metaphors borrowed from Christianity without the attendant, problematic, self-sacrificial, and power-challenging, social justice narrative at the core of the Christ stories. Christianism trades the work of a self-sacrificial God for a paean to personal triumph and a never-say-die spirit. This is too truncated to match the recurring suffering in human experience. It is a kind of hack-and-swap operation carried out by slicing out the frontal lobe and half of a heart from an ancient myth to power a more recently manufactured body of stories. The point, however, is not so much to critique the Frankenstein’s Monster of Christianism as to illustrate how Bluevolution addresses patchwork dilemmas through sympathetic attention to genre. Rather than dressing the monster in top hat and tails and trying to see if he can dance his way to the Oval Office, for instance, instead make horror movies and satires. Follow the downward impulse back into imagination and mythologizing.