"Rude Mechanicals"

1.
If sand dollars are the most insipid of the animals, it is because they barely have space to be animals. I've never seen the flesh of a sand dollar, no doubt because I'm not meant to; they are intended as inert tokens. Of what? A vacationer's manna.

They are only made as animals because there is no expedient geological means to produce them. Their flesh lives its term to produce the shell, and having done so has the grace to melt away. The fleshly sand dollar, then, is a little sort of stagehand.

2.
In the common imagination, construction workers heckle the rest of humanity as they make their buildings. They are lusty and fearless; while they are never seen to work the results of their work are more evident than anyone's. These workers, then, act as the visible exemplars of a split between the careful performances of the social realm and the dreamy acts of the workaday. They can be seen to directly build humanity's haptic unities out of its wispier notions and fancies.