The Great Architecture (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

1

Sizing up the 60-story office building outside the window, Donny shook his head.  The rectilinear black-glass behemoth impressed only a feeling of immensity on the mind, lacking even the basic intrigue of the Egyptian pyramids.  Is immensity an aesthetic?  Donny often considered the pyramids.  So many workers killed in the making of those giant death shrines.  Why did they do it?  Of course they were enslaved… I wonder if some of them liked it.  Liked having something so immense and religious to construct.  

No, what a fucking privileged thing to think.  

But still… it would have been something big.  Something beyond most people’s imagination purely on the basis of scale.  That bigness of mission gives the project a point.  The pyramids have points, even if they’re idiotic ego shrines for a few rich guys.  

Looking at his triple-screen (three flatscreen t.v.’s) display spanning the wall, he navigated using a touch-scroller on his phone.  A great building stirred and shifted in the screens, rising into focus.  It was immense.  In a way that put the pyramids and skyscrapers into the category of miniscule.  But as Donny zoomed further in, the details stood out in aberrant and absurd patterns, an aesthetic never quite before realized, as if the architecture in its whole consisted of hundreds of styles, continually finding and losing themselves.  A whole wing of baroque Persian architecture would run for a while, but then at a certain point, as if ridden with a disease of morphation, would begin showing signs of Greek architecture.  First just an odd-fitting pillar or two, but then full blown triangular roofing and Parthenon-like segments, until Greek aesthetic fully dominated.  This process of gradual merging and distorted parts spanned the entire breadth of Donny’s great architecture.  He thought to himself At least this shrine houses something worthwhile, even if it’s dead.  

Donny navigated until coming to a dramatic entryway modeled after the Taj Mahal, with a long rectangular pool of water rolled out from it like a carpet of glass.  Clouds amassed and passed on the thin surface.  The camera flew in, like a low drone shot, to the massive entryway.  Looming over the mountainous entry gates was a black marble halo, veined with pale white.  In thick gold print, each symbol as high as a 10 story building, was the following sequence in hieroglyph.    

Naturally only a handful of living people could interpret this.  Donny was drawn to the hieroglyphics for similar reasons to the many wide-eyed foreigners who had come before him.  No language before or since has so obviously been designed to charm the mind with symbolism.

The first four hieroglyphs denote death; the last four the living.  In its grammatical entirety the line reads “DEATH IS FOR THE LIVING.”  

Donny paused there, in front of the enormous gold on the black marble, projected across the three T.V.’s.  His face bore a satisfied, serious look.  He moved his mouse to the corner of the right screen and a bar appeared with the file name “Taj Diaspora.”  Donny x’d out of the program and turned off the screens.  He stared at the dull office building outside his window and sighed.  

For the briefest of flashes, an instant less than an instant, Donovan thought he saw a white form in the blackness of his rightmost screen.  He jolted his head to look behind him but there was nothing in the room.  The screen was still and dark.  But as he looked back on this moment later, if he could have said what he thought he imagined, he would have said he saw a girl in a white, plain dress, her hands clasped behind her.  

2

Donny hadn’t risen from bed once today.  It was 7pm.  He felt three things, really, physiologically.  

One was an anxious tightness caught in his sternum, another was an intoxicating rush of infuriated force in his pectoral muscles, and the last was a full-body languor, signified especially by a slack drop in the lower half of the face.  It wasn’t often these days that any motion of his life was not, in some axiomatic way, calculated out of one of these three states.  But today it was the languor, thick and parasitic, like the humid night air in Alabama settling dankly amid locks of Spanish moss, that took command.  

He glanced down at the white light of his phone, brighter than the fading sunlight that still limply reached through his blinds.  He scrolled through a Discord conversation.  

Donny_thearchitect 

3

[Donny watching within a Fate Projector]

Marigold Clips:

6 years old: 

Marigold sat on her mother’s lap like a miniature saint, brown-golden hair curling like stray eddies in a river.  They sat looking at four ensconcing walls of books, a miniature home library— one of the few outward signs of wealth that Marigold’s parents had taken care to cultivate over the years.  

Currently they sat reading a book on gardening, turned to a page on growing basil.  A little black planter, a bag of soil, and a seed packet rested on the wooden table in front of them.  

Suddenly Marigold looked up and asked “Mummy, how come we have a library but Tommy’s family doesn’t?”  

“Well, because we like books better, I suppose!”

Marigold paused and thought.  

“Can Tommy come and take books from our library?”

“I suppose so dear.  That’s awful nice of you to think about Tommy like that.”  

“And let’s put a sign outside so anyone who wants can take books when they want.  It’s not fair that just we get to read them.”  

“Well we probably can’t do that my Marigold, lots of these books are important to to Daddy and I, and we wouldn’t want them to get lost or hurt.”  

Marigold didn’t talk to her mother for a week.  

10 years old:

After reading a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. from the library one rainy Summer afternoon, Marigold had an epiphany.  She knew full well how much her parents cared about her education.  

She walked up to her Mom and Dad sitting in the living room and announced majestically “I refuse to read another book until our library is open to the public.  And you know it’s the right thing to do.”  

Marigold’s Dad began talking about private property and the importance of having some things that belong just to a few people but Marigold just looked up with a stubborn, piggish determination and raising her clenched fist, said “Free Books Now!”  She stomped to her bedroom.  

Her parents didn’t believe she could be away from books for so long so they thought it would be best to let it blow over.  They would not be the first people to underestimate the righteousness of Marigold Eyern for marketplace stubbornness.  

During the three-and-a-half weeks of her nonviolent resistance movement, Marigold outlined her demands clearly and specifically, so they would not be mistaken for a vague and pestilential revolutionary gesture, and starting in the second week, expanded the scope of her resistance to staying up past bedtime and not playing cards with her parents.  

Marigold took the spare time she would ordinarily have been reading to increase her prayer life.  She remembered MLK saying that it was his religious connection that got him through the hardships of his protests.  To her disappointment she didn’t really feel anything, which she attributed to her inexperience as a no-good prayerist.  That would change later on.  

Nicholas Clips:

22 years old:

Nicholas slipped his phone out of his pocket and saw he had three missed calls.  A text was incoming: Ari is dead.

22 years old: 

Nicholas sat in a window seat of a plane flying for Japan.  The clouds outside the window spread out, a rolling white kingdom.  Nicholas looked at them and counted his breaths.  In 1, out 1; in 2, out 2; in 3, out 3; in 4, out 4 … He could see the Osho Center in his mind’s eye.  The sensation of pain in his heart passed dimly in an inner fog.

Marco Clips: