Achilles As Earthwork

Achilles As Earthwork MARK RUDMAN ( With pointers from George Santayana, Frederick Law Olmstead, and, always, Robert Smithson) But I still say: no quarter. Small amounts, the amount of water a coral sponge can absorb, coral? the porous sponge we use in the shower, not the kitchen's function fixtures.No quarter. The beautiful death trumpets Santa Anna's troops turned on theAlamo, and the heroes, and some of theAmericans who went down at theAlamo were as close as America's gotten to a hero. And ifyou kill a hero you become immortal, like the ripped supple exemplary husband and father who took down Patroclus and got Achilles to take a cold shower, get out, armor up, climb the slope fromwhere he could oversee theTrojan army, and shiver the troops with a shout thatwould have burst a mortal's lungs. It came to Achilles: nature is a force inus, if we take hold we die our death is confirmed, we don't assume, we don't believe we're going to die, Thetis murmured, we know; ARION l8.I SPRING/SUMMER20IO 86 ACHILLES AS EARTHWORK and to know death, to know it through the bone's density is to have a shot at whatever's receding, sails visible like a whisper. 2. And he walked to the bodega on Broadway and couldn't decide what substance, Guinness, pale ale, Camels, chocolate, the enticing covers on the glossies good for tossing like a discus into the trash. He hasn't forgotten theword. He doesn't know theword. He knows what it is, though: destiny. And when he looks up at thewalls of Troy he sees the delicate spectacle of a people who had no word for compromise or playing it safewhen something, any thing, really mattered. Better, all new ideas; merge what the others consider disparate: beauty and the city.The light on the sandstone brick on theAztec facade at this instant. Another miracle of daylight savings time. Which doesn't know if midnight has a before or an after or justwhat happens. What happens now. Mark Rudman 87 3. "The End of Uncertainty" Just because. This is the phrase Homer's translators couldn't conjure because itwas right there, like breath, the next step, like the inevitable way the future recasts what has already happened. Even inKing Lear theworst has happened even though we're warned never to expect thatworseness in action hasn't even begun. The worst has happened but we have to reach the scene before we get there. Then itcomes, the propeller splitting from the copter that depends on itswhir, and with it the surety that ifEdgar hadn't bent his mind with too much Heidegger, he might not have had to dig himself of the hole that swallows everyone else? which probably isn't true but sounds more definite. 88 ACHILLES AS EARTHWORK 4. "Which leads to the next question ..." How much human behavior is an act, to get something sometime out of these casual brushings of shoulders in elevators, could reverse the disposition of the resident electrons; particles are sensitive; they don't have to give in; but they can't make the decision. Life as you are at this instant. Achilles and Hector knew that'swhat itcame down to: now, nowhere, here. Sacrificial histories to puff up impalpable myths, then taken to another island, it is close but it is not near. Within peripheral range is sanguine, when you are always here, when here iswhere you always are, tomorrows outside the range of these control towers, planning the escapes to go with how the blockades, watchtowers, and turrets, are disposed in that sluggish hour when the ambitious resist rest, a series of deep breaths, Mark Rudman 89 whatever stretches can coexist in clothes too tight to not reveal more than you'd conceived; enough for perspective to rearrange where things are on the surface of sky and earth. But consistency eludes eternal things. Which to be recaptured, have to be forgotten, shadow-worlded, ghosted, simulated, for the energy in there to emerge renewed. Renewal is all. 5. The Human Use of These Tautologies And paradoxes don't go down well in theUtah desert when it...

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