09/03/21 • poem made from the handout for a lecture on the fragmentary historical sources and missing tomb of alexander the great
Text ID: (Pause.) history is a vat of honey,
gold coalescing over the tombs of kings.
while exploring This otherwise-impossible space, you may
encounter the body. (Pause.) it died in Babylon
in June 323 BCE, and was buried in a tomb
of narrative possibilities. every historian reinters it.
(Pause.) there is reason to believe that the body
deteriorated. in the sarcophagus where time
is embalmed, a pseudo-body took shape, unlikely
to have incorporated the self. (Pause.) uncertainty
opens up the tomb, but the body lies still—history
made tactile and called Alexander. And now?
what fragments of him surviving can be glimpsed,
when someone asks (Pause.) whose body is this /end ID
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