Why so many things in life happen tangentially, I do not know. Sometimes, my life is bit of a watered down version of Family Guy, where two diametrically opposite things happen within very short period of time. This summer, I had a conversation with my cousin which started with mirage, followed by a smack in the eye and ended with a discussion on public space and religious structures. For your info, my cousin is 12, so what I write here is partially comes from my poetic license.
One night, as we went to a restaurant, my cousin asked me to explain what a mirage is. Since I am no mirage-ologist myself, I tried to explain what i could without saying something stupid and wrong. So I said, due to dehydration, people’s brains start working funny and they begin having hallucinations. People who are stranded in a desert often see oases where there is water, when there is no oasis and no water. And then my cousin (by the way, same cousin who talked about lagina) said: “So people see what they want to see, like water?”
“Yes,” I replied, “or striptease clubs”. By that time, I was in a jolly mood, not because I’ve been drinking, bust because feeding time was approaching, and I’ve survived the day’s grueling hike. My cousin then proceeds to smack me in the eye (which he says was accidental, he meant to hit me on the cheek, but I was stupid enough to try to duck) . He said that striptease doesn’t square with his religious beliefs. After having him admit that there is no “Thou shalt not strip” in the Bible, he added that there is a bit in which the body is described as a temple for the Holy Spirit, which should not be violated.
I beg to differ. Any architecture student would be able to tell you that it is quite the opposite. Temples, are, or at least used to be, considered public spaces. A look at the famous Nolli map will show you.
Here you see Rome of the 18th century. Notice the temple of Pantheon. It is white, the only solid space is its ground-plan. By depicting the city’s churches thusly, Nolli shows that temples are de facto as public as streets and squares, even though not legally so. Therefore temples are places people could enter, where they would go to conduct business, where they would come and go at different times of the day (all puns strictly intended). Nowadays, these public spaces have been replaced by shops, restaurants, whatever… But the last time I was in Leiden, one of the churches was actually used to house some stalls selling books (there was a market on).
And all that stuff about modesty of one’s body is obviously bullshit. One look at St Peter’s in Rome, Gothic cathedrals, or baroque churches in Austria shows that temples need to be shown off, be carefully constructed, in order to impress. We might argue that while some people have a body like St Peter’s, it’s a masterpiece and they show it, while some people prefer their bodies to be modest chapels, which are only ever entered by a few people. The temple metaphor therefore applies very widely, and is not limited to the whole modesty, meekness, and no striptease policy.
As Frank in Educating Rita said, every analogy breaks at a given point. It’s just this analogy breaks right away.
Peter S
PS: You might like to know, that my cousins and my brother remained unconvinced while the proof is clearly on my side.
