By Micah Nathan of Consortium9

In this essay, Consortium9's Chief Story Officer Micah Nathan ponders architecture and immortality in the city of Khora, the de jure capital of the NOR platform.

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.
—Le Corbusier

Some Background

In 2021 Brooks Brown founded a company called Consortium9 and asked me to join in my capacity as a novelist. He had an idea for a videogame centered on an immortal populace living in a billions-of-years-old city named Khora. The name Khora was inspired, in part, by the word khôra, whose original definition referred to any territories outside the cities of the ancient Greek polis. The idea of naming a city after a distinctly non-city place is one of the many paradoxes that attracted me to this project. Another paradox is that our Khora has nothing to do with the Greeks, ancient or otherwise. Still another paradox is the absence of an actual city in the videogame–our Khora would be a visual metaphor of our in-game economy, more thought experiment than actual place, but I needed to imagine the city as though it were real.

There’s a Zelig quality to the word khôra. It keeps showing up, a chameleonic guest at dozens of philosopher’s homes. In Plato’s Timaeus, khôra is a formless interval whose formlessness is necessary because it contains copies of “all things intelligible and eternal”. Neoplatonists saw khôra as the space between the three elements of the Trinity. Heidegger defined khôra as that “…which means neither place nor space but which is conquered or occupied by what is there.” Julia Kristeva’s khôra is a “nourishing maternal space.” Jacques Derrida described khôra by referring to an “absolutely figurable” receptacle that “does not let itself be captured by any figure.” Deleuze defined khôra by making its meaning wholly emergent, i.e. by cheekily redefining what it means to define a thing–which almost makes his attempt my favorite–but I’ll take John Caputo’s khôra: “…a play of reflections in a black pool. Khôra is its sur-name, its over-name, the name we inscribe over an abyss.”

Let me add to the confusion: our metaphorical city of Khora is not khôra, but it’s also not not khôra.

My Role in All This.

Narratively construct Khora. Consider the implications of its immortal populace (Khorics) living in the same city for billions of years. Consider the city’s unifying architectural theme. Consider an architect of that theme. Remember that Khoric immortality is the key. Khoric immortality is why, and how, the whole thing falls apart.

The Architect.

Now think of a million civilizations. Multiply those civilizations by a near-infinite number and spread them across the eons; unto the ages of ages, as the old Greeks might say. Imagine every one of those civilizations cycling through their existence within the borders of a single city. Populate that city with folks who look a lot like us, who could be mistaken for us, except they’re immortal and ageless. Immortal, not invulnerable—kill a Khoric and they’re reborn somewhere within the city, fully healed, memories intact, sense of self intact.

After a few thousand years everything in Khora becomes rote. You’ve finger-painted on every cave wall. You’ve fished in every stream. You’ve roasted every boar. You’ve read every book and heard every song and watched every movie. You’ve taken every drug. You’ve played and won every game. You’ve had sex with everyone and everyone has had sex with you. You’ve murdered. You’ve been murdered. Everyone has been murdered, everyone has committed suicide, everyone has died in every way possible, everyone has tried to escape, and they always come back. Immortality allows for Borgesian twists: at some point you were the cave wall touched by your own finger; the stream that holds the fish you caught; the roasted boar you ate, the author of every book you read, the composer of every song you heard, the director and star of every movie you watched. You were the knife in your own heart, the poison on your own lips, the bullet in your own brain. Still you come back. You can’t escape yourself, you can’t escape Khora. The curse of this immortal society isn’t greed, selfishness, fear, pain, disease, bigotry, or cruelty. The curse is boredom.

To combat this boredom, a few supremely gifted Khorics find an idée fixe, a monomaniacal focus on a singular vision so complex and subjective that the pursuit of its mastery has no end, not even in the context of forever. Among the immortal Khorics there’s an architect of rare talent and ambition who made himself the official architect of Khora. This architect doesn’t need a name; names are for millennia, not eons. We just call him the Architect.

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Immortality is only interesting within a mortal context. Given enough time living as an immortal among immortals, any mortal context eventually fades, which means the experience of immortality is doomed to uninterestingness.

I think the Architect’s greatest fear is uninterestingness. Camus’ Sisyphus found a measure of solace once he accepted the futility of his task, but our Architect, locked into his own Sisyphean pursuit, never finds solace because solace isn’t the goal. The goal is perfect design. Perfection in an architectural context grows from faith in architecture’s power to shape society, and implicit within that perfection is everlasting interest, beauty, and a structural permanence meant to match the immortal Khorics who live therein. But entropy prevents perfection–this becomes obvious after immortality’s first fifty thousand years (or so), when the Architect witnesses everything he’s ever built crumble into dust. At first, the Architect blames himself. He redesigns and rebuilds and this time it takes two hundred thousand years for everything he’s built to crumble into dust. His methods improve, the cycle extends. His creations now last one million years, now two million years; between the rising and falling of his structures he searches for compensation of a different kind. Maybe he explores Buddhistic passivity, the impermanence of things being their only permanence, until those infinite regressions consume themselves. Maybe the Architect develops an aesthetic of decay, a Piranesian embrace of things beautifully falling apart, but the aesthetic itself falls apart. Decay on an infinite scale requires sufficient instrumentation to watch the atomic obliterate into the subatomic into even smaller than that: the quark as a planet.

Increasingly desperate, the Architect’s idée fixe shifts so slowly that he doesn’t notice himself changing. His commitment to self-awareness and self-critique becomes its own delusion. You might say the Architect passes through himself. Maybe he becomes his own khôra: a receptacle whose contents simultaneously determine the shape of the receptacle and are shaped by the receptacle itself. Only there is no original shape of either the receptacle or its contents. The Architect becomes a metaphor for the Architect.

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Still, the Architect believes proper design will make immortality a blessing instead of a curse. Paradise by way of geometrical collisions. His quest brings him to experiment with all styles, theories, and combinations thereof: he expands and retracts the limits of structure and material, embraces maximalism and minimalism, decoration and brutalism, glass, metal, wood, sunlight, haze, and dark. He campaigns against free expression and censorship, elitism and collectivism, the primacy of form, the primacy of function, industrialism, animism, hard surfaces, soft corners, allegiance to the centralized, the linear, the radial, the grid; pyramid, sphere, line, curve, cube; then over the span of meaningless centuries he demands destruction of all his previous work, a madman stalking the streets he once sketched, raving against all manifestations of his previous selves.

Given the vast expanse of time in Khora’s never-ending existence, the Architect has no limits placed on his monomania. While his fellow Khorics descend into apathy he rebuilds the city to his ever-changing specifications, accounting for weather, behavior, the inconstancy of personal tastes. The Architect searches for patterns as predictors as guarantees: he records his fellow Khorics as they sleep, monitors their appetites, bowel habits, sexual proclivities, ideologies, and traumas. He conducts surveys and interviews. He eavesdrops. He spies. He builds. He’s always building. Cathedrals of bone. Roads paved with Khoric skin. Canals of blood, sputum, and aqueous humor. Monoliths of teeth. Landscapes of hair. Sky-spanning webs of fascia. Nothing is metaphorical. Metaphor is the shortcut to understanding but there’s more than enough time for the literal. The Architect needs no blueprints.

Picture the Architect sitting on the floor of his windowed living room high above the city of Khora. This is during an era where the Architect embraces living rooms and windows. He sits and watches the cycles of civilization: the present becomes the past becomes a palimpsest becomes another variation of whatever came before, or the cycle itself shifts into something else. The Architect believes he’s the only Khoric keeping score; he might be right. It doesn’t matter. The city burns, the city collapses, the rebuild commences, the eternal return happens again.

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We must ask if the city of Khora contains everything that was, is, and will be, and if this includes mortality’s return as part of its endless cycle. The Architect realizes that even immortality itself can’t be immortal—time is the brute above all brutes. The Architect, as the preeminent worshiper of himself, as both topic and vehicle of his own metaphor, wonders if another Architect will take his place. He doesn’t know, which interests him, which encourages his not-knowing. Yesterday he sat on his living room floor and basked in the grief of his singular genius; today he’s a man trapped in a cursed city where, given the fullness of time, he suspects that even the dimmest Khoric will eventually match his output. Monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare; strip-mall developers, mechanical pencils, Corbusier. During the unending eons the Architect wrote this sentence at the end of this essay and believed himself the creator of his own fictional existence.

Works Referenced/Hinted At:

(1) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Penguin, 1964)

(2) Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction (Fordham University Press, 2020)

(3) Richard Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday Toward a Micro-Eschatology,” in After God: Richard Kearney and the religious turn in continental philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2006)

(3) Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi (Blackwell Publishing, 1986)

(4) Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (Dover Publications, 1986)

(5) Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (NYRBC, 2011)

(6) John Manoussakis, “Khora: The Hermeneutics of Hyphenation.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, vol. 58, no. 1, 2002 (JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40337673)

(7) Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Opposition Books, 1984)

(8) John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus (Indiana University Press, 1999)

(9) Mauro Senatore, Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida (SUNY Press, 2018)

(10) Junichiro Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows (Vintage Classics, 2001)

(11) Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1977)

Bio

Micah Nathan is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His novels "Gods of Aberdeen" (Simon & Schuster) and "Losing Graceland" (Penguin/Random House) were translated into several languages and received critical and commercial success. He's a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Kinfolk, The Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories. Micah received his MFA in Fiction from Boston University, where he won their Saul Bellow Prize. He taught fiction writing at MIT for several years before co-founding Consortium9.