Plowing the Dark

37

The room of holy wisdom spreads its tent beneath the dome of heaven.

Wood will not do, for its wooden parent burned. The building draws its stone from the farthest throws of empire. It cannibalizes for parts the world's great temples: columns from Ephesus and oracular Delphi, from Egyptian Heliopolis and Baalbek in the Levant.

It steals its palette of marble from the whole spectrum of imperial provinces: pink from Phrygia, Lydian gold, ivory Cappadocian, green from Thesselia, pure white quarries of sea-girt Proconnesus. Cut and dressed, the stone veins fan out to meet their mirror shapes at each facing's joint, picking up and echoing, like a stilled kaleidoscope, hints of heavenly device and earthly emblem, painted incantations, living creatures bolting through the symboled undergrowth.

The floor plan is a daring cross of conch and loggia. Basilica and hub — church architecture's two great streams — here flow together in a new confluence. And soaring above all, the dome rises to its awful altitude, climbing upward not to a point but cupped like the gentle firmament itself, a helmet resting on air, crowned in a crucifix, the world's

protector.

The dome bends over a gaping hole wider than its engineers should know how to span. Nor is the day's faith great enough to make up the shortfall. The emperor himself, at the building's christening, stumbles dazed into the vast vacuum of the eastern apse, dispenses with the prepared Deo Gratia, and blurts out, Solomon, I have outdone you!

Mosaic saints man the walls at strategic points. Deep-color tile squares of hammered gold leaf dusted over a layer of glass tesserae and finished with a layer of glass paste become the world's first bitmaps. Up close, their resolutions pixilate into discrete rectangles. But from down below, at the eye's prescribed distance, the folds of a gown hang full, and faces escape the waste of history into some stilled, further conviction.

Under the monstrous dome, empire draws itself tight into a hardened chrysalis. This room will fall first to Christian invaders, absorbing into its galleries the crypts of those crusaders who pillaged it. Later, from the conquering infidels, it will adopt calligraphic Arabic disks and minarets, and a subdued mihrab slipped into the east end, tilted slightly on the axis to Mecca. Another faith will command those mosaic saints to be destroyed, but fear and awe will leave them merely plastered over, protected for blasphemous mass viewing, centuries on, in the age of global tourism.

The world's ongoing project will fling itself upward, amassing public works so huge that this one will shrink to nothing in their wake. But something in the race yet chooses to build this one, here at the world's turning point, at obscene expense, to lay out a crippling percentage of the gross domestic product — greater than the sums it sinks into any other item in its governance — to raise this fixed navigation beacon for sailors breaking apart in the Hellespont, this vast, cupped dome huddling over the destitute, this omphalos, the Earth's navel, its cut umbilical cord.

Ringing the dome run these words, cut there by the supreme callig-raphers, this room's most recent owners:

God is the light

of Heaven and Earth.

His light is a niche in which there is a lamp,

the lamp enclosed in a globe of glass,

the globe of glass a shining star

lit from a blessed olive tree neither of the East nor the West…

The room of holy wisdom is a ruin. The world's largest, as large as the ruinous world. And propped against the stripped arcades, amnesiac, disinherited, illiterate in the unreadable wreck, you pitch your home.