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oneself—statistically improbable I know but
    why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice
    among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen
    not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking
    myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense
    above but away from . Although to stand in either way will
    imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step
    back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower
    under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as
    that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect
    smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming
    just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have
    come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more
    or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing
    the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens
    to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt
    by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.
    It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets
    itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead
    of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death
    comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.
    In the abstract, on and off—as when hurrying past the wrought-
    iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through
    or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public—it’s hard
    not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which
    there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloud cover as if
    inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely
    manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so
    reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear
    whether the relationship between the two might be more
    appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.
    This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,
    because as much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone
    telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all
    comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance
    I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option
    on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders
    at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping
    forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects
    include not only the gratification of our fondness for images
    of protodemocracy but also the stimulation of our need to fill
    whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance
    means electing ourselves into the very position of authority
    we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy
    leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which
    bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd
    voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge
    of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start
    taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So here goes.
    Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?
    It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-
    off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did
    was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm
    with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great
    flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt
    like good civic planning, too—but apparently the whole project
    violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little shaky
    with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just
    some dressed-up way of admitting I was really onto something.
    from A Public Space and Poetry London

STEPHEN DUNN
The Statue of Responsibility

    Imagine it’s given to us as a gift
    from a