 |
 |
A Study of History We have to go home and be bankrupt. Foodstamps, shelters … it doesn’t bear thinking about. So we don’t. Zelda and Scott had one last pricey fragrant haircut before they left. It’s funny how things once chic are no longer so. Maybe a farewell run at the casino; bet credit-cards, kids … But it’s being torn down. Or rather folded like a prop and stored for the next cycle. A sudden dusty light where it was reveals workers, some employed, about whom at last one needn’t feel sentimental. They glare at us, contractors, each other, anyone darker or lighter. Their minds are bricks. They pray. When they move they’ll move like an amoeba, devouring, first, Lady Fluff, whose all-transcending bray crashes like a tsunami over the *plage … Few credit nudity as well as she. It is as much a statement of freedom as her laugh is of idiocy. By the seawall we meet Lord F. He’s about to upload himself and her. They will ride out the storm of this era and trust in recurrence. He won’t demean us by offering to help monetarily, regarding us as he does as fellow intellectuals – thus, as he says Gramsci said, members of the class consisting of the alienated dregs of all classes. Instead he treats us to a drink and his wit, and breathlessly we assure him that if we were the masses and he in politics, we’d march for him across Asia … Embarrassed, he watches the archaeologists diving in the harbor. Much of what they’re bringing up is, with the decline of reason, gods again and subject to reprisal from other gods. Meanwhile the divers marvel at the straight roads and temples at the bottom of the sea.