The Nomadic Alternative – Page 50

of stone reveal the cold rationality of the lunatic. Before the

Nuremberg rallies, Hitler communed with himself in a subterranean

cell inspired by the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid.

All monumental architecture is abusive, bought in blood, the

token of past and future suffering. The War Memorial abuses the

memory of those who have died and horse-trades with their memory.

Imperial magnificence makes subject peoples cower in obedient

impotence to the will of the sovereign. "Mighty indeed", announced

Pericles in his odious funeral oration, "are the monuments of the

Empire which we have left." Bloody indeed were the final results

of the frigid architectural fantasies of the Athenians, financed

by money stolen from her unwilling allies. "Hope is by nature an

expensive commodity", Pericles's successors informed the Melians.

The latter paid the price of rejecting the unwanted Athenian

alliance with the blood of every single male of military age.

The harmonious proportions of the Parthenon did not reflect some

inner harmony in the minds of the builders, but merely announced

that an age of turmoil and demagoguery had begun. The man who sees

the reality of things will imagine a thin crust of blood to inter-

line each cadaver-white block.

Pyramids, Ziggurats, Towers of Babel, Civic Temples, Domes,

Spires, Sky-scrapers and Monuments of Martial Glory are the unfailing

marks of autocracy, of the supposed need to subdue the individual

to the needs of the state. The ziggurats of Sumer, painted the seven

colours of the rainbow, bore dedications to Anu and Enlil, gods

representing Order and Compulsion. The Pyramid symbolizes the

Primaeval Mountain; the fixed firmament rising above the waters of

chaos. The bricks of the Anu Temple at Uruk represent seven thousand

five hundred man years of hard labour. The taskmasters of the

Egyptians made the lives of the Israelites "bitter with hard bondage

in mortar and brick", as "they built for Pharaoh the treasure

cities, Pithom and Raamses."

Congealed and pommaded the corpses of the Pharaohs found rest

in miniature palaces in the heart of their stone mountains, secure

in the knowledge of their insurance policies. They believed they