The City is a Sacred Text

While traveling I listened to many episodes of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a podcast series. Along with excellent content, the two hosts have done something remarkable with the podcast's approach: active re-treatment of a text. Since JK Rowling's reputation for trans-phobia emerged, the Harry Potter series has fallen in status among my generation. My friend Emily tipped me off that this podcast is disaggregating the words from their author, much as studies of the great religious texts can regard them as stand-alone objects regardless of their authorship.

In such analysis, the critical reader assumes purpose within every detail and encourages reflection on small things. After all, it is small things that make the whole. (These religious studies / literature practices, moreover, are in accord with neighboring academic "turns," such as how in object-oriented philosophy all things [including texts] are assumed to have irreducible qualities shimmering within and around them; or how in The Dawn of Everything contemporary anthropologists are arguing for an acknowledgement of self-conscious political design within ancient societies.)

Meanwhile, Serenella Iovino and colleagues have done striking work to draw attention to the "text-ure" of cities. They show off what she calls "storied matter": substances with history and agency inseparable from local ecologies. Here in Venice I see mussels glued to the edges of small canals, which are lined with marble and supported by a foundation of petrified wood put down ages ago by the city's first architects. This in turn acts on everything in the city: how goods move around, what plankton swim in the lagoon, why tourists flock to this place. Small things that make the whole.

Combining these two lines of thought, we reach the title of this post: the city is (or can be) a sacred text. There's a sign along the Rialto right now: "NO MAFIA! VENEZIA È SACRA." The notion of "sacredness" is related to, but distinct from, ideas of "purity" and "naturalness": a set of human-nonhuman relationalities that have defined (white American) environmentalism for decades. At first pass, I really like the sacred as an emergent attitude to ecological thinking. If Venice is deploying the idea to set a kind of holy boundary around its city against a state of corruption that still hounds Italy, who's to say the idea isn't also popping up in campaigns against cruise ships or in climate marches? Indeed, climate activists tend to invoke questions about the lives of the next generation (which is quasi-appropriated from the "seven generations" idea among North American Indigenous folks, such as described by Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass): a notion that children are sacred.

Unlike these other ideas I named above, the sacred makes possible a deep engagement with space and time. Reading the city in a sacred way starts with contemplating the details, but it scales up quickly. As we see in, say, Harry Potter, a single verb can suggest something about a character's journey, their virtues, their vulnerabilities. And so with a city: the mussels along the canal are an unseen center of sacred Venice. To paraphrase Tim Morton, an earth-magnitude shift to ecological thinking requires a religion-scale response – what else inspires hope and faith across the globe? I am resolving to consider the city as sacred where I can, and wondering how to talk to others about it in this way too.