Civitas

Acts of love have material effects. For a woman tending the sacred fire, these include the risk of becoming an extinguisher of flames essential to civic life. It is a burden to put out what others hold as central to faith in coherence. Acts of faith have material effects — a Vestal Virgin touched by encounter must be buried alive, a beautiful metaphor for shame itself, which squirms even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead learn too late that devotion should be unidirectional, a straight line from here to suffocation. Love must not bleed at the edges, must not meet others in the banal spaces of civic life. It is a burden to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site of the sacred, its material effects are destruction: burning, consumption, constant hunger for more wood. Acts of destruction have fantasmatic effects. For a body surviving encounter, these include civic life, shame; the risk of being a proxy — tender of the hearth belonging to the public, by way of the goddess, who embodies a dream of faith in coherence. Material effects extinguish themselves, eventually, as when a woman touched in the correct way undoes the burden of love and puts out, taking the goddamn city in and under.