This post originated as an email to my friend, Kieran Kramer.
Okay, continuing on the theme of Greek and Roman mythology, here's why Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had to get married in Madison Square Garden. First of all, they had to get married there for security reasons. Even the most remote island in the world would have been susceptible to paparazzi hiding in the bushes and flying drones overhead. Madison Square Garden is like a fortress. But it is also like a temple. It is the precinct of superstars, modern-day gods and goddesses, and it is the center of the Universe.
The center of Western civilization has migrated over the millennia, from Babylon to Athens to Rome to Paris to New York City (to today, arguably, Hollywood, leaving aside for the moment the notion that we are essentially living in a centerless world, where anybody with an internet connection can conceivably be a center). Rome, of course, was the dominant center of the ancient Western world, through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
The ancients believed that the Universe was a perfect sphere, that all of the stars existed on the same spherical plane—the dome of heaven—and that the Earth was the center of the Universe. Rome, as the center of the Earth, was thus the center of the Universe, symbolized by the Pantheon, the temple to all of the gods. The late Vincent Scully, in his seminal study Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991) writes that the perfectly spherical interior space of the Pantheon was a literal microcosm of the Universe.
Madison Square Garden is the circular building in the current center of the Universe. (It also encloses a circular space. Scully reminds us that the Latin root for "temple," templum, refers to a space, rather than to a building.) As I've said, Taylor Swift is Athena, Venus and Diana all wrapped into one, and Travis Kelce is Ares, with his red uniform and violent profession. (I know I'm mixing up the Greek and Roman names. I use the ones that I feel sound better. Athena sounds better than Minerva, to my ear. Venus sounds better than Aphrodite. As an Aries, I naturally prefer Ares to Mars; if my name were Mark, I might feel otherwise.) And there was a host of other gods and demigods in attendance: Steven Spielberg, Stevie Nicks, Tom Hanks, Greta Gerwig, the list goes on and on. And on. When people say "anybody who is anybody" was at an event, they usually mean it figuratively. For the wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, literally anybody who is anybody was there.
You will recall that there was a heat dome over the Northeast that Fourth of July weekend, centered on NYC. I feel like this was the result of the Universe concentrating a massive amount of energy towards this cosmic event. And shortly after the vows were spoken, the heavens opened up with torrential rain, followed by a rainbow over the center of the Universe.
