"Aeneas watched the progress of the assault upon the palace from the top of certain lofty roofs, to which he ascended for the purpose.... This tower Aeneas and the Trojans who were with him contrived to cut off at its base, and throw over upon the throngs of Grecians that were thundering.... Great numbers were killed by the falling ruins, and the tortoise was broken down."
--Jacob Abbott, History of Romulus, 1854
First there were thousands, unruly thousands lining the boulevards, then a few dozen encouraged some stragglers to join in the fray, then there was ruckus as Aeneas, a real surround of magnificent blossoms of hot-to-trot courage, shot ardent, consoling glances at Shipshape, one of the recent stragglers, a canvas-covered lad of an overall sullen neighboring tribe.
Shipshape, telepathically: "I want to understand the way you dominate us and helm such a civilization as yours, Aeneas, which I understand is a mighty civilization in which we all participate as equal and present partners. My heritage is neither important enough nor slipping so much that I need to save it--not like a palaceful of gilt yarn over the edge of the sea, nor like someone screaming for help lashed to a chair gurgling comically towards the end of a river. No! Instead, I can gaze in a dry, even way, with mirth, even, into the eyes of Aeneas, wondering, 'How might it be that together, he and I could more widely undo the hosts of the wicked?'"
Aeneas, telepathically: "It is not often that I am so struck by one such as this, this cloth-covered lad, and in so uncontrollably open a way that I might invite doom, being a leader of men who depends for his strength on the esteem of the giant, grunting, deciduous monsters that are men of my tribe, which is a terrible tribe from up north, full of swearing, buss-cocking fucks in pyjamas, or pelts that look like pyjamas (and are often used thus on the streets of metropolises, so I hear, where the fad is to wear pyjamas even in the leavening-pits of the corners).... No, this is not a love to pass up, but is a dangerous, enjoyable love instead. Here, Shipshape (for that is your name), give me your hand."
Shipshape races up, knocking men over, and there amidst the thousands, Aeneas and Shipshape join hands and perch on the same ox to the catcalls of the boors of Aeneas's tribe that Aeneas suddenly realizes he's free from, his base of support being much wider now: he thumbs his nose, he wiggles his tongue, he bats at his Adam's apple and adjures the boors to envision highrises over their mothers' plots, may the plots sink a foot. Shipshape lounges categorically, without loss of a beat, upon the great shoulder, which gives a bit at the seam with the chest, which disappoints young Shipshape, who imagined a starker physiognomy to such grandeur. But he is soon overwhelmed with an epic, which noses its way into his mind as was the wont of epics of yore, before the boundary between epics and the minds of dummies was drawn in stone. For a while he stares into space, illiterate.
"Hello," the two call out in synchrony to the crowd, which waves in synchrony too, grand pattern, waving fleshtone plains, "hello." It is amazing how loud the two call, amazing the synchrony of the crowd. Suddenly the national history vanishes. Suddenly the purpose of the epic they belong to, the Aeneid, asserts itself in the air, great, cold, glassy truth: its purpose is to be pretty, itself and everything in it, which is everything. The crowd, the lovers, the air itself attempt to convey to the audiences they know will be theirs just how beautiful everything is, without aid, without work, without error-strewn wreaking on the part of the nations whose survival or lack of it leaves them quite cold.
A boy in Virginia hears them, looks up from his History of Romulus and farts. The master administers whacks with a ferule, the boy's knuckles are bruised and the difficulty of living in such contradiction impels him to die, whereupon he's reborn as a shack in Milwaukee, exposed to the sun after "Plump," the mulberry shade tree, is cut for the neighbors' view. The neighbors are nazis.
Many, similarly, are the sad and painful truths endured by all the peoples of earth thereafter on account of this hero and that non-hero, but ever so often the love of Shipshape and Aeneas arises and smarts in the wings of an ineffectual tyranny. There are many who would call this the effect of chance, or ill-defined patterns of action (or even patterns of chaos), but in fact it is all trigonometry.