Poetry and Permeability

I

A discussion of human permeability might usefully begin with its delimitations in archaic legend. Plutarch, in his “Life of Romulus,” has an evocative description of the preparations for the construction of Rome.

Romulus . . . set to building his city; and sent for men out of Tuscany, who directed him by sacred usages and written rules in all the ceremonies to be observed, as in a religious rite. First, they dug a round trench about that which is now the Comitium, or Court of Assembly. . . . This trench they call, as they do the heavens, Mundus; making which their centre, they described the city in a circle round it. Then the founder fitted to a plough a brazen ploughshare, and, yoking together a bull and a cow, drove himself a deep line or furrow round the bounds; while the business of those that followed after was to see that whatever earth was thrown up should be turned all inwards towards the city; and not to let any clod lie outside. ¹

The ritual separation of what would be enclosed from what would be excluded required the kind of punctilious attention embodied by those following the plough to move all the upturned earth within the furrow. The walls that would ensure the security of the future city were indeed sacred because its survival depended on their strength, and because the founding of a city traditionally reenacted the original creation of the cosmos, whose center this place now becomes. The Comitium at the center of the city was itself surrounded by a trench called “cosmos,” Mundus, and the trench is to the outer walls as they are to the rest of the circular world.

Just how sacred was the boundary around the future city had already been indicated in Plutarch’s text by a famous incident immediately preceding the passage just quoted. Romulus’s brother Remus, angered by a stratagem whereby his twin had won the right to build his city, could not resist a scornful and sacrilegious gesture which cost him his life: “When Remus knew the cheat, he was much displeased; and as Romulus was casting up a ditch, where he designed the foundation of the city-wall, he turned some pieces of the work to ridicule, and obstructed others; at last, as he was in contempt leaping over it, some say Romulus himself struck him, others, Celer, one of this companions; he fell, however” (30). To leap over the ditch was to disregard the taboo that protects a ritual work, and was apparently perceived to justify fratricide. The killing of Remus stands at the beginning of Roman history as a symbol of the sacrosanct character of the communal enclosure.

But another feature of this legend more pertinent to the theme of permeability is the distinction made between walls and gates: “With this line they described the wall, and called it, by a contraction, Pomoerium, that is postmurum, after or beside the wall; and where they designed to make a gate, there they took out the share, carried the plough over, and left a space; for which reason they consider the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are; for had they adjudged them also sacred, they could not, without offence to religion, have given free ingress and egress for the necessaries of human life, some of which are in themselves unclean” (31). If the walls are sacred, their openings are profane and dangerous, since these permit a commerce inwards and outwards of those potentially unclean things humans need and produce in order to survive. Passage in both directions is essential, but is reduced by walls that confine passage to delimited spaces.

The city, any preindustrial city, needs to make itself capable of access, but not too capable. It has to keep its integrity as a specific locus with a name, but to endure it needs modifications to its integrity in the form of openings to the hinterland. When all access is choked off by a siege, the gates lose their function and the city is threatened by extinction. But if there were no walls to enclose and exclude, the city...