Perfect Need and Perfect Completion
Rough Translation
"I am the state."
Omitted
"The sun rooms and long showers, the culture of minerals beneath my skin, ancient monuments both fallen and erect – if it all were nothing then could we understand perfect need and perfect completion? Bodies vie for occupancy within my borders, but soon I will be distended and ugly. The depravities of man outweigh whatever else remains. If centralized, little recognizable is left. I am the carrier of a disease. Versailles is therefore something more. Nature is keen to disavow such incubation. Consequence, it seems, is slow to arrive. Until that time, my role will do."
Rough Translation
"He loved this house with a boundless passion."
Omitted
"The coldest of the palace's rooms were those that hadn't even been built yet, if the word 'built' is operative. We still don't understand their collective presence, where those long halls arrived from and how we had come to be within them. The Grand Stables, the chapel, the ornate nooks where partygoers would fornicate against plated bronze. Each insufferably cold. But he wore furs, the leggings of a thinner man. Danced in an ellipse, phasing the room silent, corner by corner. We’ve known the Sun God to experience transits of lesser celestial bodies. Architects of note. Interior decorators dusted with plaster and recommendation. Each shivering insufferably. He loved this house with a boundless passion. He basked in the chill with unmatched contentment. A new room each morning. Immobile against the tiled floor, regarding the construction around him less than if it were entirely still. Men stepping over his nude body, concordant with prior instruction, only a brief prayer to be whispered as their bodies passed. And so a home was built around our King, supine rather like a sundial. We several aids, ambassadors, beckoned or forced into carriages and brought to its steps. Years passing into slow spiritual divorce. Insufferable winters each."
Rough Translation
"Don't be so lazy, like some of the beautiful people at Versailles, who eventually had their heads cut off for it".
Omitted
"Their ghosts spurned by the chandelier maidens, locks rippling or bunned, holding infinite gold before the Hall of Mirrors. In a world without skin, even the viceroys can’t grind an interpretation from the twin expressions strung across the window light. They’ll scrutinize for hours and come up with givens, such as Don’t be so lucid. Don’t metabolize. Don’t be so confessional, like every omen expressed through the lattice, each eventually becoming rooms unto themselves. Wear perfumes and adopt the swampy greens of the Bassin d’Apollon as your state of mind. Hear our present intuitions fondling for ever darker blues and reds? Ignore those. Green and granite were the only colors to exteriorize themselves from this place, cradling us the same as anywhere else, only different. Groan, we several sainted with a role in History, because now that’s all we know how to do."
