Postscript: City of the Homeless
The modern city is often seen as a massive instantiation of the principle of enframing, as ‘the city spectacular’ or ‘a container for spectacles’. But can there be holy places, sacred space, beyond the reach of enframing in such cities? Heidegger spoke of the graveyard as a place of remembrance within the flux of planetary homelessness, but even the traditional graveyard has been overtaken by contemporary practices for disposing of bodies. If one’s transience is accepted, in spatial and temporal terms, the city can still give scope for another view of ourselves and, as in Edwin Muir’s eponymous poem, become a place of transfiguration.
Keywords: city, spectacular, space, Heidegger, graveyard, homelessness, Muir, transfiguration
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