Older Plans

One day at lunch at the university, I opened my notes on the table and, over an hour and a half, we designed a hospital--though it could easily also have been a hotel or an apartment building--in the form of a unicursal labyrinth. That is to say that there is only a single path to follow from entrance to exit. It was deceptively so. A patient or visitor is meant to feel that she is wandering the halls freely, never even leaving the ground floor, but eventually to find herself facing something new in a place she has expected to find only a wall. It is a large stained-glass depiction of Saint John, chosen partially because of his significance in my life--parenthetically if you will, in possibly an open-ended sense, as I was born in St. John's in Santa Monica--but also to signify the revelation of path. Though the wandering patient feels she has been wandering, she is now made to see that she has been on a singular path. Having never believed herself traveling anywhere, she has ended up on the highest floor of the building. This understanding, once bestowed, will have one or a few of various effects upon her, determined not by our design but by her state of mind upon the moment of revelation, and of course by her wealth of experience that she has brought with her to this place.

It might be natural to hesitate when confronted with something unexpected. To consider whether or not it is dangerous. To begin slowly to investigate the surroundings. To look for signs of treachery, betrayal, abandonment. And of course she would not be blamed for turning around and following the path back to its beginning. The main problem then being that irksome knowledge that there are questions that will always go unanswered. Security and comfort can be forms of decay. But that is for her to say, and not for any of us.

It was our hope that her discovery would also be ours, each time new, a true revelation always being something internal, reflective, a discovery of self rather than of anything external. Our hospital only being a catalyst for the germ of thought. The appearance of the saint, not a call to salvation or spiritual ascendancy, but instead a call to ruminate, to stew, to stir, to overflow with self and to watch as that fullness reflects in those she encounters from that point forward.

But our design was flawed. It would never be constructed. I opted instead to design a city grid, the streets and waterways a model of a neural network of a person attempting to remember something he saw when he was seven, continually unable to do so. To find this image would, for him, he believes, reveal the true nature of love. Not merely the signifier tossed about across cultures or between gentlemen and ladies. It would be that perfect connection to the true thing, and not just the shadow of it. It is why he chooses to use long sentences to describe small ideas, because he believes the simple terms have been infested with meaning to the point of meaninglessness. And so in the city I saw built, it might take a man an hour to travel from his house to the nearest corner store, and it would certainly take him a lifetime to find the great center of it. Though perhaps only a moment or two to catch a glimpse of the park, the acropolis, the mall, the expansive library, the entrance to the zoo, the place where the children ride the trolley while a man dressed in lavender pinstripes calls out stations, there are no exits or entrances, only miniature models of other cities. And the children, they are children for an eternity, or at least until the city crumbles. They were designed this way. They are memories.