In the hands of my friend Culp, what does the limerick do to history?

There once was a camp called Auschwitz,

where the Germans continued their Jew-blitz.

Their aim was the same

If they shot, gassed, or maimed;

while gold was reclaimed

from the teeth that remained,

and they sold off the hair for a few bits.

So I have written off the Reich. Shall I now write off life in a chair, that chair which held me while I explained just how and why the Holocaust occurred . . . cited that smelly assembly of circumstances . . . toured the disciplined buildings which hid all those soured hearts and misshapen hopes . . . apportioned blame like pieced pie?

O, it would be a domestic epic indeed, and unique in the literature, one that took place entirely in the mind—on the john, in a bathtub, chair, or darkened room, upon a sleepless bed; because historians never leave Congress or the president for the simple white houses of home. Their firmament must glitter; they believe in the planets, and neither cottage nor hut has chandeliers, satin women, canapés; but time goes by in gas jet or candle flicker just as evenly as under crystal; bulb light and lamp shadow can serve as sun and dial where the real clock is a dirty dish; any steady leak will do to die in, inasmuch as time circulates in the local manner of our blood, through this and that particular poor body constantly; it does not pop in and out of things like the dime-a-day novels of a lending library, nor does it flow through the veins of the chess club or any other artificial body—prick them, they will not bleed.

Ah Culp, my compulsive rhymer, the difference is considerable. You see, I say, sloshing coffee around in my cup, for the first time . . . for the first time in history, I admonish him, an ordinary people’s private life has had massive public consequences. That’s true, Herschel says. I wish the simp would shut up. The masses have tilted the world before, Planmantee says. I think he is right: during ages of ice. Let’s start the meeting, please, Governali says, Oh sure, I say, oh sure, they’ve weighed—fluff weighs, water weighs—they’ve weighed because circumstance has cut them down like grass, baled them like hay . . . At last, Plan exclaims, an agricultural theory of history. Light lies in puddles on the table. I cannot explain its liquidity. The windows are as gray as the sky. Culp’s long brown fingers intertwine. Culp has a sheaf of notes in front of him. Culp? Notes? Planmantee will read a prepared statement from a tablet. Famine is a public, not a private, fact . . . Why can’t Governali but his briefcase on the floor like everyone else? The masses . . . Why does he wear a tie if he’s always going to loosen it? In the old days they were merely bellies big with bloat, I say. They had historically insignificant insides. Let’s start the meeting, please, okay? Plan never learns, Culp says. Who’s not here? We’re all here. We’re only the executive committee. Ah, so it’s easy for us all to be here. The masses . . . they . . . Governali is reading his mail, smiling as if every envelope contained a compliment. Planmantee is going to sit across from me. That means I’m going to be hectored. I refuse to be ignored like this. Herschel is blocking his hat—some Russian thing that looks like an elephant’s muff. There are puddles of snow on the floor. Good, Plan has set his case in one. It’s a burgher’s world we live in now, I say. The dust of the shop is its visible air. Im Haus is where the porridge waits for Goldilocks. Did you bring that memo, Henry? the new one, the . . . The spirit of our age . . . Ja, in das double Bett is everything prefigured and prescrewed. Culp loves to butt in—the swinehund. Okay—I called this meeting because—okay, let’s—So if . . . There seems to have been some fundamental difference of opinion— . . . we must study the fascism of the heart . . . Ah, a glorious phrase, Governali exclaims, folding a piece of flimsy pink paper, and reinserting it in its square blue envelope. And the resentment of the foot, too, I imagine, Planmantee says, lifting one of his, for so it was that the boot brought comfort to the Hun’s hoof and war to us, nicht wahr?