The Taj Mahal

What is the shape of the universe? If we could stand apart from all that is, and view it like a cool stone in the palm, would it be symmetrical or asymmetrical, ordered or chaotic? I don't know. I don't know if an involiable structure and physical law prevail, or if all is finally random, senseless. I can't see how a trajectory of stars, a ham sandwich, a single life, or an absence of life can possibly be explained. Is there a Theory of Everything? Is there meaning? Maybe. Maybe there are reasons for how and why, but our scale prevents us from glimpsing them, so we fear senselessness and nothingness is all there is. We create lavish worlds for assurance. Then again, maybe all is just matter in a cosmic tumbler, being dusted over ages, to vanish.

The Taj Mahal is a believer's response to the fear of nothingness; it is our collective aspiration for meaning, rendered by calloused hands in simple white marble. From the earth but no longer of it, the Taj resides in the three-AM fear that wakes you up, choking, tasting your own end. The Taj is an illusion: you can walk to it, reach out and have your hand fall through its light. A residence of death whose curves soften death: the Taj is an answer, a braggart-Queen. Sure, her boasts are sweet-tongued jasper and ruby inlay, crenellated arch, gracious geometry, delicate magnificence. But like all braggarts, her boasts belie an inner insecurity: "Is what I am saying true?". The question drips from every studied line: in many ways the Taj overstates her case, and in so doing, reveals the ambiguity that plagues all monuments. If Shah Jahan -if we- were truly certain of meaning we wouldn't need the Taj Mahals, the grand cathedrals and riotous temples to reassure us. But we are not, so we do. Somewhere between what the Taj professes, with absolute conviction, as true, and the fear she both masks and is motivated by, we find her vulnerability, her grace.

All of our monuments are in some sense memorials to those who made them. What of the smashed thumbs, crushed limbs, the whips and worse? Proletarian concerns, no doubt. Rumour has it Shah Jahan mutilated the hands of his most talented stonemasons to prevent them from ever building anything to rival the Taj. What is this terrible relationship we find everywhere, between grandiosity and suffering? Between beauty and suffering? Or, more to the point, between meaning and suffering?

I have a hobbyists's interest in the architecture of 20th Century fascist states. Most of their early (modernist) inspiration came from Islamic architecture. Islam, being iconoclastic, prevents naturalistic depicton of either its God or its prophet. Divine truth in Islam's sacred spaces is embodied in the geometry of its construction. The symmetry of the Taj is no accident: it is an Islamic embodiment of perfect order, perfect life, perfect death: the divine order of the cosmos, God. As in Germany's Nuremberg, all is subsumed in a larger vision, a design we (the flawed! the imperfect!) can only hope to emulate. This is, partly, what is so refreshing about postmodern architecture (at its best): it is willing to expose its uncertainty, fallibility, flux. It says somehting positive about our culture that we can admit, through our cultural productions, what no other culture in history has: that we don't have all the answers, that we are unsure. It is a kind of tenuous freedom that places us at a large remove from the rallies of Nuremberg, or the crystalline false certainties of the Taj.