The Second Lighthouse (#12)
Hello friends,
Time races. Already we’re at the end of section two, concluding The Lighthouse Project. Apprehensively I’m still running about laying the groundwork for the long and tumultuous section 3: The Great Architecture. This final section will require the most from me, in terms of future vision, confrontation of darkness, and the satisfactory spiking of the volleyballs setup by the first two sections. I promise there is a thread behind this all. We’re close to it now.
Thank you for tagging with me,
Jake
The Second Lighthouse, Part 2: The Lighthouse Project
By 8pm, when Nicholas still hadn’t returned, Marigold stepped out her door to go searching for him. She wound up and down the streets and paths, in and out of downtown, until she reached the rock where Nicholas said he meditated. It was near dusk, not entirely without light, but what light remained issued like weak silver strings from the ocean’s end.
At the precipice of the rock the dark form of a man sat upright and cross-legged, a sentinel over the waves.
“Nicholas!” Marigold prompted.
As she continued to walk nearer, the man turned his head around in response. As he did so, Marigold saw a messy bunch of hair flip with the head. It couldn’t be Nicholas—almost buzz-cut. And as he looked at her, his eyes—she could swear it—his eyes seemed to glow with a true light against the surrounding dusk. Suddenly she felt a tremendous power emanating from the man. And not realizing it herself, her eyes glowed back across the distance between them. It was the nocturnal, flashing stare of two snow-leopards meeting in the night.
“I was beginning to think we’d never meet.” The man’s voice rolled out musically. He looked curiously at her. “It must be the moonlight, but your eyes seem so bright.” He chuckled. “Now look, I’ve gone and become a poet.” At that moment the clouds pulled loose and the moon did shine fully down on the rock, turning the gray ground around the two figures luminous.
Marigold looked up at the moon, startled, then back at the man with deep recognition. “Marco! You’re Marco!”
Marco grinned. “The one and many.”
“Where’s Nicholas?”
“No clue—I came here looking for him.”
“He came here looking for you, and when he didn’t come back I came out looking for him.”
“What a goose chase.” Marco laughed. “But I’m not worried. For some reason I feel incredibly loose. It’s like someone got between every particle of my body and put more energy and space inbetween. I woke up in bed an hour ago and it felt like I had—”
“Slept a hundred years?”
“Yeah.”
“The same thing happened to me, Marco. That’s why I wasn’t around when you and Nicholas met. I had no idea where I was or what happened to me. But when I woke up I was suddenly full of this radiant guidance and connection.”
Marco nodded slowly, thinking.
“Interesting. Have you noticed that the three of us were invited to this island but haven’t all been together once? I have a feeling we weren’t supposed to meet earlier.”
“But why would we be split into pairs like that?”
“It’s hard to say. But it feels right. In fact everything feels right now, ever since I woke up.”
“It’s the same with me. And—” Marigold paused with a funny look on her face. “And I ought to tell you that the other day a boy was shot in front of Nicholas and I and I healed him.”
“Like magic?”
“Like magic.”
Marco shook his head. “A few days ago I wouldn’t have believed you but it feels entirely possible now. I don’t get it. You know, this is like a deus ex machina.”
“A what?”
“It’s a literary device where something inexplicable happens in the plot that rearranges everything.”
“How is that different from grace?”
Marco laughed joyously. “What a point, Marigold! That is just how grace and revelation and enlightenment works. You think you have something to work on and really the thing is working on you.”
“Yes! That’s exactly how I feel. I used to have this constant feeling of absence…the absence of goodness that I had to work toward. But now I just know that I am good and will be good and will do good and must be good.”
“Beautiful, beautiful. This is good! I also feel no desire to create anything. It’s hard to describe but as I look at everything I feel its architecture; the arising and dying of beauty. It’s not that I don’t want to create. It’s that I feel very much in the middle of it all—of all creation—not at one end of it. So there’s no hurry, just pregnant time and space everywhere! But—” Marco’s face twisted with curiosity. “But does this mean we’re done? You’ve performed a miracle and both of us feel just right with the cosmos.”
“That’s what’s so peculiar, Marco. I feel perfect but I sense that there’s something more. Something that doesn’t have to do with my problems. I keep thinking of that message: find a new spiritual truth. Why does that matter? Isn’t truth forever?”
Marco laughed again. His laughter had always been big—but now it had a quality of purity in it—like he was laughing with life, not against it. “What a Christian thing to say! In the arts, in the imagination, the truth must be reborn every day. When Moses declared the name of God to be “I am” he did not change God but he changed our relationship to God. I think that is what it means to find a new spiritual truth.”
“I see…but if I have the power to heal, then what am I waiting for?”
“What are you waiting for?”
Marigold felt deeply into her heart. “It’s not the message I’m supposed to bring back. As wondrous as it is. It’s somehow incomplete.”
“Yes. There’s a reason the three of us are here together. That must be it. Really what you have is an old spiritual truth—the truth of connection to God and the healing miracle. We know that story.”
“You know, Nicholas told me that when you got here you thought you had us all figured out as case studies in repression.”
“Sorry!”
Both laughed.
“Well, he ended up thinking that you were on to something and that maybe that could be the first part of the solution. Because it puts the three of us in relation to each other. Nicholas and I have both struggled with repression as part of our spiritual life. So he wrote down in his notebook “no striving,” since the two of us have struggled with shoving too much action into life. Do you think there’s anything to this line of thinking?”
Marco ran a hand through his dark hair and lay down on the rock, cool and firm, staring up at the moon’s disk.
He said slowly “It makes sense as a system. There’s something solid in it. But frankly it’s dwarfed by your healing miracle and whatever has happened to both of us. Isn’t it true that spirituality starts and ends with something ineffable and single, made to help everyone in need, not with a mental abstraction?”
“That’s the truth. Both laughed. Aren’t we noticing, though, that we’re here because our spirituality has been too limited, even in its fullest expression? I don’t think Jesus and Buddha and Michelangelo would have understood each other very well. We’re too small. Even the biggest of us. We’re too small to do this alone.”
Marco repeated this phrase quietly, over and over “We’re too small to do this alone…”
“So let’s just dance around with this. No repression, no striving—what is it that I would choose for the two of you…” After a second Marigold smiled with compassion. “No isolation.”
This interrupted Marco’s reverie. “That’s spot on. I’m not convinced that it matters but write that down. No matter the spiritual tradition, practice, or person: No repression. No striving. No isolation. Marigold got out her booklet. Marco heard a gasp.
Having flipped to the section titled “Marigold’s Solution,” Marigold saw that every page was filled with writing. It wasn’t English, or any script Marigold knew of, but had something of the ideogramic qualities of hieroglyphics and chinese.
“This is incredible. I don’t know what any of this means.”
Catching on, Marco pulled out his own book. The same mysterious script sprawled across “Marco’s Solution.” Moving together they cross-referenced. The texts were not the same. They both sat back down like tree stumps.
“It’s hard to tell with the foreign lettering, but this looks like my handwriting,” Marco said.
“Mine too.”
“So this happened when we blacked out. That makes sense. And our solutions are different, which means Nicholas must have his own as well… Do you know what an emergent property is?”
“What do you mean?”
“It could be that, when each of our solutions come together, what we will be left with is not the sum of the parts—Marigold’s spirituality, Nicholas’s spirituality, and Marco’s—but some new property will emerge. The new spiritual truth responding to the interaction of our previously segregated historical fulfillments.”
Marco’s brow furrowed, then he chuckled. “You know, Nicholas was teaching me how to meditate. Let me meditate on this for a while.” Marigold nodded.
As Marco rose to his feet Marigold thought she was hallucinating. The moonlight on the rock rippled outwards like water from where he stood. As he walked to the edge of the rock the moonlight continued, with each footstep, to send waving circles outward from where he touched the stone. Marco’s body took on a charge like dark fire, surrounding him in a perimeter of authority and voltage. He appeared unaware. Rather than sitting down in a meditation posture he walked to the very edge of the rock and held his arms out horizontally with open palms, victoriously accepting the dark cliffside and water, sky, continents, and cosmos beyond. Realizing what was happening, Marigold sat silently, with glowing white, learning eyes. Suddenly she felt a softness brushing against her arm.
First one, then five more jaguars stalked past her. Their spotted coats rippled with deep muscle. They emitted low but unthreatening growls. Padding up behind Marco they began playing and dancing in a circle, rolling, splashing in the liquid moonlight.
Vines stretched of their own accord across distant trees above the rock, bearing ripe clusters of dark grapes. And a great number of tropical flowers sprouted and bloomed on the bare stone. They blew eerily with a breeze, dark in the slight, silvery light.
And then just as quickly the jaguars began to decay before Marigold’s eyes. First their movements became sluggish—then they flopped to the ground and went still. The fur fell off, revealing the raw flesh beneath, which cracked, spilling the soft organs and intestines. The bodies of the six jaguars decomposed into lumps of rot and then dirt surrounding their white bones.
The same happened with the vines and flowers. Clusters of ripe grapes plummeted like hail and the flowers turned to ash. The whole scene around Marco was one of death.
Without a moment of pause the entire process reversed. Rising precipitously from the dirt the jaguars leapt back from death and deconstruction, new grapes fattened on the vines, and the flowers sprung up from the ash like from a magician’s sleeve.
After a minute of growth and life it all disintegrated again, only to integrate again. Watching the spectacle, Marigold began to grin quizzically. There was something a little absurd, a little comedic about it all. She understood why Marco laughed so much.
As if reading her mind, Marco turned around, threw his head back with his hair manically waving and coiling in the sea-wind and laughed with pure joy and power. “This is amazing! Isn’t it Marigold? Now this is what revelation looks like.” Saying so he spun out a glowing length of lasso from thin air, reared back, and cast it into the sky. Marigold couldn’t believe it but the bright strand went up and up until it wrapped around the moon. Yanking the taut rope downwards, hand over hand, the moon itself lurched towards the earth. “Yeee hawww” Marco shouted. As the moon came closer and closer its size diminished, until, with the sky above black except for the stars, the moon levitated in front of Marco about the size of a grapefruit.
Marco snapped his fingers and the spectacle of decaying and metamorphosing life on the stone vanished. It was a clean slate.
Looking at the moon he clapped his hands. A sun-star, just slightly larger than the moon, appeared floating in the air beside it, bright white, pulsing and radiant. Finally, floating out from Marco’s chest, a burning ball of flame joined the other two lights. A moon, a pure sun, and a crackling flame.
They set in motion—each lightsource distancing itself from the others in an equal triangle marking the perimeter of a fifteen foot circle around Marco. Then they began to spin. As they accelerated the space within the circle began to fill with light—some mixture of the moon’s glow, the sun’s radiance, and the flame’s lick. Marco was sweating with the heat, his face half-angelic, half-demonic, hair plastered to his head. As Marigold watched, the three lights became almost indistinguishable in their whirl around the perimeter. She couldn’t tell if the sun, the moon, or the flame was the form appearing at any point in her vision. A bright light pierced, vector-like, in all directions. Marigold shielded her eyes. The last thing she saw was Marco ecstatically holding his arms in the air, forming a receptive oval.
As the light receded Marco stood starkly alone on the edge of the rock. He was cradling something like a baby. He turned around, his eyes with a slightly feverish burning still in them. In his arms was a soft sphere of total, unnerving, impregnable blackness.
✸
Nicholas dashed northward. Up and around the verdant, foliated edge of the coastal ridge. His unbuttoned flannel flapped behind him as he alternated striding and jogging. He moved inexorably through the dusk, swiftly displacing ground. He would be seen from above like a shadow on a mission.
The lighthouse played out its sweep every few seconds over the seaside and inland, cutting a broad plane of light through the darkness. Its source appeared to be just a half-mile up-coast now. Nicholas still couldn’t identify the actual edifice—an imminent treeline rose too tall.
He stalked through the thicker woods, pushing aside shrubs on a shabby, elevated dirt path. On either side mangroves and screw-pine palms sank their vertical roots like robotic veins into the salty coastal marsh. The darkness darkened beneath their partial canopy. Strong wind from the open sea rustled the palm leaves against one another in a humid rasping. A hint of danger sparked in Nicholas’s veins as he felt himself advancing through the night-marsh in the stifling presence of the unknown. He couldn’t discern any light through the thickness of the plant-mass. He must be close.
Thunk. His foot suddenly made a hollow clump. Nicholas had stepped onto a wooden bridge. Water sloshed around beneath it. The scent of fresh salt filled his nose. As the marsh gradually disappeared into a coastal pool the trees thinned. A flash of light blazed again in the diminished canopy, sourced almost directly above.
There—at the end of the maybe three-hundred-feet wooden bridge—a white, cylindrical lighthouse rose from the low rocks of the outermost coast. The glass chamber at its top veritably overpoured with light as the contraption within spun.
In a trance, Nicholas stepped slowly but readily across the bridge. His eyes fixated on the white lighthouse. It was a stark artifact against the surrounding shades of darkness. As he neared the edifice the surrounding water slapped the bridge heavily and sloshed onto its edges. Finally he stood before it.
Facing the lighthouse now, Nicholas saw with some mixture of surprise and dream-like traction that there was no doorway—just a wide, open entry. Within, a black-steel staircase curled like a corkscrew. The lighthouse’s circumference was about forty feet.
Nicholas felt his feet lurching forward, his hand brushing like a ghost’s against the cold steel railing, and his body ascending upwards. Halfway up, he peered down—the height was dizzying. His hazy legs continued moving him. Above, he could see light flooding downwards from the hole where the staircase emptied into the uppermost room that contained the beacon. This is it. Excitement flared in Nicholas’s chest, obliterating all fear.
He stepped off the staircase into the radiance above and examined the room. An expression of awe followed by deep puzzlement landed on his finely featured face. He looked particularly monkish surrounded by light, staring out with divine curiosity.
At the opposite end of the large room the whirling bulb of mirrors and metal sent its focal beam out across the cylindrical wall made of viewing-glass. But the light within—Nicholas could clearly discern it was like no light he had ever seen—floated inside the bulb with no hint of any source of chemical or electrical burning—absolutely steady and pure in its luminosity. Awe came over him.
But what confused him was the remainder of the room. Between him and the lightsource a great, square grid of tiles lay on the floor, slightly aglow with their own substantial light. Nicholas was standing before one corner of the diamond, where the grid began. There were 99 tiles. He noticed that the contraption containing the light was situated at the opposite corner, where the 100th tile would have been.
Noiselessly spinning, the light sliced a fine ribbon out of the ocean, then the sidelining trees hanging on the coast. Nicholas dully apprehended that it would soon hit him. His eyes widened. The levitating, glowing source continued its inevitable arc. Nicholas felt the light pierce through his eyes, body, and mind. His chest opened and lifted, like a slave overturning a barrow of stones and walking off.