Plesch intriguingly points out the dual-phenomenon of graffiti at the Arborio, where writers, in “appropriating the public realm,” left behind “soul-fossils” that will outlast “the brevity of a life, indeed forever” and thus became themselves inserted into the fabric of a holy place (7, quoting Dupront; 17). It is further intriguing that this conversational process
Plesch then cites Leach’s proposal of “time” as conceived by the Ancient Greeks as not a succession of epochal durations, but rather a fluctuation between opposites. The point of Leach’s idea seems to be that religions such as the Abrahamic faiths understand time as a succession of epochal durations because this enables us to construct and emphasize a continuum between life and death, rather than have to consider the unsavory notion of death itself. The Ancient Greeks and some other primitive peoples, by contrast, understood time / existence on some level as a fluctuation between states such as night / day, life / death and the coital ejaculation of man / the giving birth of woman. Leach’s note is somewhat bleak, but makes sense given the extremity of primitive mythologies, including Greek mythology, which center on cycles of life / death, men / women and love / war.
Of course, most civilizations still had practical ways of temporal communication, such as our modern “tick of the clock” which represents 1 / 30780000 of the Earth’s revolution about the Sun.
Leach notes that given such a perception of existence, there must be a third “thing” which does the oscillating. Plesch interestingly claims that this is Arborio itself. My understanding of this claim is that the ritualized conversation between worshipper and sacred space in the liminal zone of the Arborio support constructs a culture which proceeds along a continuum of epochal durations even as individuals may die. I think that the overall analysis of Arborio is fascinating.
Although, I wonder if emphasizing the continuum between birth and death is not the result of an inability to cope with either, but rather a rational response to the fact that one cannot do anything before one is born or after one is dead?