Let Me Be Unambiguous. I Prefer Not

Who Claims Truth, Truth Abandons. History Is Hir'd, Or Coerc'd, Only In Interests That Must Ever Prove Base. She Is Too Innocent, To Be Left Within The Reach Of Anyone In Power,- Who Need But Touch Her, And All Her Credit Is In The Instant Vanish'd, As If It Had Never Been. She Needs Rather To Be Tended Lovingly And Honorably By Fabulists And Counterfeiters, Ballad-mongers And Cranks Of Ev'ry Radius, Masters Of Disguise To Provide Her The Costume, Toilette, And Bearing, And Speech Nimble Enough To Keep Her Beyond The Desires, Or Even The Curiosity, Of Government.

It Is A Curve Each Of Them Feels, Unmistakably. It Is The Parabola. They Must Have Guessed, Once Or Twice - Guessed And Refused To Believe - That Everything, Always, Collectively, Had Been Moving Toward That Purified Shape Latent In The Sky, That Shape Of No Surprise, No Second Chance, No Return. Yet They Do Move Forever Under It, Reserved For Its Own Black-and-white Bad News Certainly As If It Were The Rainbow, And They Its Children...

Murphy's Law, That Brash Proletarian Restatement Of Godel's Theorem.

So The City Became The Material Expression Of A Particular Loss Of Innocence – Not Sexual Or Political Innocence But Somehow A Shared Dream Of What A City Might At Its Best Prove To Be – Its Inhabitants Became, And Have Remained, An Embittered And Amnesiac Race, Wounded But Unable To Connect Through Memory To The Moment Of Injury, Unable To Summon The Face Of Their Violator.

What Are The Stars But Points In The Body Of God Where We Insert The Healing Needles Of Our Terror And Longing?