The Nomadic Alternative – Page 60

ascensional
suspended on the walls matching their excitement to the flutterings
' and soarings of the art market. The great museums are the looting
houses of the future. The vitreous splendour of Park Avenue is the
Salle des Glaces of the Twentieth Century. Both are as sinister
and lifeless as the pink granite paving slabs that line the
marshes of the Neva - above the skeletons of the serfs. The lifeless
regularity of these places is sure token of mental bedlam.

Earthly Paradises are the peculiar obsession of the settled. The
ancient peoples of India believed in a paradisial land beyond the
northern horizon on the far side of the Himalaya, which they
described in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They called it Uttarakuru.

It was a thornless place. The trees flowed with fresh milk or oozed
with nectar. There were lakes and crystal tanks full of golden
lotuses. The surface of the earth was encrusted with diamonds and
the feet ran over smooth nuggets of gold half-hidden in the sand,
while the cities of that country shone with jewelled brilliance.

The window frames were hammered of beaten gold and the windows were
lattices of diamonds.

In building the Church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople the
Emperor Justinian attempted to petrify Paradise here on earth - at
the heart of his mouldering empire. The church was the Cosmic
Pillar round which the renovatio of the Roman Empire might revolve.

A word from Heaven commanded the Emperor to build it. Indeed the
incandescence of the structure seemed to prove the immanence of
the Creator. "He cannot be far off", wrote Paul the Silentiary in
his description of the Church, "but must especially love to inhabit
the place he has chosen." The brilliance of the building aspired
to the brilliance of Heaven. As the eye of the worshipper travelled
over the vitreous golden surfaces of the dome, his heart travelled
to communion with God. "The golden dome seems not to rest on solid
foundations, but to cover the place below as if suspended from
heaven by the legendary golden chain ... the church is so full of
light and sunshine you would imagine that the building generates
its own radiance, not that it absorbs the rays of the sun." And