The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries
I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger
vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer
almost absently: the riser, the tread, the measure of it long
hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back
in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted
rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sun-baked bricks
down and rose. Here we are again I say but where exactly
nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between
one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-
bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort
of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch
up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping
of thoughts to oneself – statistically improbable I know but
why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice
among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen
not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking
myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense
above but away from. Although to stand in either way will
imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step
back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower
under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as
that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect
smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming
just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have
come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more
or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing
the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens
to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt
by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.
It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets
itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead
of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death
comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.
In the abstract, on and off – as when hurrying past the wrought-
iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through
or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public – it’s hard
not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which
there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloudcover as if
inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely
manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so
reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear
whether the relationship between the two might be more
appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.
This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,
because much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone
telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all
comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance
I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option
on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders
at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping
forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects
include not only the gratification of our fondness for images
of proto-democracy but also the stimulation of our need to fill
whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance
means electing ourselves into the very position of authority
we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy
leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which
bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd
voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge
of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start
taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So here goes.
Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?
It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-
off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did
was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm
with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great
flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt
like good civic planning, too – but apparently the whole project
violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little shaky
with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just
some dressed up way of admitting I was really onto something.
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