| Maybe there are reasons we fracture like
slate rather than, say, deteriorating like shale. Maybe there
are bones we have yet to discover, lurking under this organ,
behind that flap of skin that wasn't there yesterday. They
claim Hobbes penned his Leviathan on the move, having
an ink reservoir built into his walking stick and, I suppose,
amounts of paper stashed away in his pockets. It's the kind
of thing one expects to see when visiting the Taj Mahal. Or
those send-ups of the Taj Mahal one discovers along the byways.
In Oklahoma, say, when one is fleeing a past so cruel and
out of the ordinary, ballads spring up in its wake like flowers.
Petunias and snapdragons. After all, the flagpoles have no
angles for a reason. If we aren't sure, though, why something
behaves the way it does—why the garbage smells like
pine trees in the morning, and vice versa, why the giraffe
has to bend that way to drink—it's proper policy to
pretend like we understand anyway. That we have been in touch
with this truth for decades and wouldn't part with it for
a substantial amount of money. Which is not to argue for a
subconscious decision, but simply to point out where we have
allowed the globe to spin too closely to the fire and so have
inadvertently burned off otherwise innocent realms, like Madagascar.
Have turned the whole of civilization, in other words, into
mere pockets of respectability, places where you might find
a decent brie, if you go in for that sort of thing, but nothing
of real substance, like the triangles we remember from our
textbooks. Those with such elaborate lines and illustrations
placed within them, you couldn't tell if they were there for
your broad edification or simply to carry you off with the
carnival that was just then leaving town.
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