The Nomadic Alternative – Page 59

around an obelisk or ben-ben pillar, devoted to the Egyptian Sun God and fetched thither by the Romans. Beyond, the doors of St. Peter's, like the Gates of Heaven, beckon the visitor to a paradise of gilding and precious stones. Avenues radiate from the Arc de Triomphe, and Le Corbusier's Utopia of concrete and glass was called La Ville Radieuse. The Ideal City of Plato's Republic was planned on a celestial archetype. But the Ideal City is a contradiction in terms.

In the past colour-starved peasants extracted leave, periodically and in controlled numbers, to escape their daily grind in the fields, as modern city dwellers escape the tedium of their lives in movies and light shows, and during their sight-seeing pilgrimages to the capital, for a few luminous hours or days the visitors peered at gilded domes, rose-windows, pinnacles, or turquoise minarets. They ogled at Imperial schatzkammers and shimmering images placed in shrines, and they were temporarily removed to those glittering islands of the mind, which, they were told, was Heaven.

When they returned to their inertia-creating work they were bound to their rulers in wonder and obedience.

The Soviet Praesidium is well aware of the value of its investment when it regilds the onion domes of the Kremlin. Peasants of the black earth or miners from the Siberian taiga gasp in wonder and disbelief as they progress round chandelier-illuminated galleries in the Hermitage, or circumambulate the red marble tomb of Lenin, itself a miniature ziggurat. In the Theban nome at the time of Tuthmosis III rich and poor jostled to say their prayers at the shrine of the Golden Cow, the mistress of longevity and "Heifer of the Constitution".

The memorial wings of American museums are vehicles for conveying a limited immortality on the rich. "BENJAMINUS ALTMANUS MERCATOR OPTISSIMUS ..." begins a memorial slab in the Metropolitan Museum commemorating the munificence of the New York millionaire. Up and down, the visitors genuflect before illumined showcases in adoration of the things of the past or feast their eyes on crashes of colour