Oaxaca Cemetery, Memento Mori

The cemetery in Oaxaca, Mexico, carries this inscription above its tall wrought-iron gates:

Postraos: aquí la eternidad empieza, y es polvo aquí la mundanal grandeza

Bow down: here eternity begins, and here mundane greatness is dust.

For whom is this profound observation made? What does it tell us about the attitude towards death of the people who built this cemetery? It is certainly the exact opposite of the Cimitero del Verano in Rome. The Verano tries to beguile us by its claim that death is not sufficient for mortality: that as we live, we can also be dead.

In Oaxaca, in the wonderful Mexican unmorbid fascination with death, the cemetery is not a memorial of achievements in life, but a perpetual memento mori, a reminder of mortality. Montaigne suggested that we should live overlooking a cemetery and never forget that this was our universal destination, echoing Ecclesiastes: “do not all go to one place?” This too is the Oaxaqueñan affirmation. Nothing remains of our earthly glory, not here, but dust. The cemetery itself is the ultimate leveler, in which the same fate awaits all and everything. In a necropolis like Verano on the other hand, the cemetery is filled with the vanity of individual greatness, a greatness which tries to generate a social order it had had in life.

We visited Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead. One evening we asked the hotel receptionist where he was going that night, and he said “To the cemetery, to have dinner with my grandfather.” The cemeteries in Oaxaca, at around midnight, are a riot of noise and colour. In one corner groups of mariachi bands were playing, sometimes in competition. On the other side, cramped under a candle-lit catacomb-lined colonnade, a full orchestra and choir were sweating their way through the Mozart Requiem. Some people were dressed-up festively as skeletons while others had come plainclothed, alone or with family, to an ancestral tomb to meet and remember the dead. Over some graves families ate picnics, over others pagan-catholic rituals were being performed. A pram, covered as all babies seem to be in Mexico in a large and thick fleece blanket, had been parked atop one grave's slab.


Each and every gravestone is garlanded with cempasúchitl, the orange and pink marigolds used only during Day of the Dead, and with ribbons, candles, sugared skulls and papier-mâché skeletons: there is no such thing here as an abandoned, forgotten tomb.


Skulls and skeletons are everywhere, hanging from rear-view mirrors instead of furry dice, as cakes, as masks. Outside the cemeteries are funfairs with dodgems, shooting arcades and candyfloss, full of dressed-up children and adults well into the night.

Above: A Day of the Dead procession, a comparsa, from a local school. As well as devils and skeletons, corpse brides were the most popular costumes. Right: This little Dracula was particularly convincing.

There are many comparsas run informally and institutionally. As well as these for children were wild midnight processions with allegorical characters and mezcal flowing freely.


The Day of the Dead has both a public and a private aspect. It is a national holiday, a celebration and a spectacle, a party which has the effect of reclaiming death from the mystical realm and placing it firmly into the processes of life. It is also a time in which personal mourning is condoned and encouraged. Privately, away from the crowds, or during the day, people engage in genuine acts of remembrance - eating together as families with the deceased, talking, drinking, feasting, dancing, laughing, praying, all at the grave itself.

If only we were as uncynical about the macabre. Then perhaps, as the hotel receptionist in Oaxaca had done quite naturally, I could have dinner with my own grandma, by her stone and her yew, in a Sussex graveyard. I would be thrown out by the neighbourhood watch. Like Foucault’s essay arguing that the Victorian obsession with repressing sex was in fact evidence of their compulsive perversity, is not equally the determination to back away from death evidence of a paralysing and obsessional morbidity? Is it more morbid to want to actively remember the dead, or to forget them and shrink from any such memorial communion? The more an activity is tabooed, the more attention we draw to this activity. To fudge our response to death reveals a greater and more abnormal fixation than to embrace it. We owe ourselves to be honest and positive, to demystify death, place it as a part of life, and cast off this embarrassment of communal remembrance.

One great print by Posada, the Mexican artist who effectively created the calavera images of dancing, living skeletons, is headed by a poem:

Gran fandango y francacela
De vivos y calaveras
En el Panteón de Dolores
Con música y borrachera

Great salsas and revels
Of living and skulls
In the Graveyard of Sadness
With music and drunkeness.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of intense grief and solemnity and wild careless abandon is one of the great and unique characteristics of Mexican life and culture. The closest equivalent is the Irish wake. While a wake is given for the deceased only once, Day of the Dead is an annual and nationwide act of remembrance. Perhaps because wakes are the sole condoned opportunity for 'positive grieving', they often tip from the celebratory into the nihilistic. The finality of the moment encourages the desire of drinking oneself too into oblivion.

Expressed in cemeteries across the country on November 1st through this deeply historic quasi-pagan practice, such 'positive grieving' is not taken literally to be communication with the dead like some macabre graveside seance. While transubstantiation may be possible according to some, literally contacting the dead would be nothing but superstitious esoterica. But positive grieving (such as partying on a grave) is not esoteric at all because it is not literal: it is symbolic and therapeutic. It is a reflective act of re-incorporation and closeness, a friendly way to remember parents and grandparents, to maintain the community of the family across the divide of life and death. They have the courage to acknowledge that this community always exists, and that it is far stronger than the filigree membrane of being alive that separates the bereaved from the deceased.

The Fortress of Mystery: Socrates and the Artist

Life is not about being in the know,

it’s about being in the mystery.

It can be seen in works of truly great art that each creative thought has been subject to, and transformed by, the intense pressure of the imagination of the artist. In this the artist is displaying a unique singularity of purpose and direction. Eckhart Tolle might say that the great artists achieve such pressures by relieving the mind of its power, and trusting instead an instinctive natural power, the animal being, the universal energy from far above and beyond the mere human. In this forge alone can the pressure and temperature required for creation be generated. How many artists describe their inspiration as not coming from internal choice, but coming from beyond them, traveling through them? For most of human history, this force was called God.

But doesn’t it seem to us so self-evident that production is done not through some mystery from the beyond, but through attention, thought, and application? Is this not our ethic of production, as humans, as animal workhorses? But perhaps this kind of personal immersion, the go-it-alone intensity of thinker-as-hermit, is not a channelling of power, but a disconnection from the energy of the real world. Perhaps this is where Socrates was as he stood motionless, so lost in the labyrinth of his own thought that he remained unrousable for several days. Would this kind of distance from universal power, and instead a reliance on earthly human thought alone, not bring forth this most aggressively literal and logical father of philosophy? Nietzsche recognised Socrates as a merely “theoretical man”, and so eventually a nihilist who cared not if he lived or died. Benjamin describes the Socratic method as “the erection of knowledge”, which “hounds the answer as dogs would a noble stag” (Socrates, 1916). They both identify in Socrates an element of paltriness and pedantry, of submission to the mundane. Socrates does not channel the power of God and release it in the world, he locks out everything but that which he can name and debate. In place of the great tragedies, mysteries and contradictions that had formed until then the backbone of human culture, he brings dull reality, clear transparency and the supremacy of truth.

Or have Nietzsche and Benjamin fallen into the trap (as did Lessing and accordingly all art historians and critics since) of defining their theory by their own taste? They find something vulgar about Socrates, something common. They see in him the twilight of man as a mystery, and the dawn of man as an animal, and they hate him for this. He lacks subtlety, he lacks complexity, he seeks to undo the metaphysical knots in which academicians love to tie themselves. Really he frightens them: he can cut them down to size, castrate them, he can expose their webs of pseudo-enlightenment as froth and sham. These philosophers who lack his rigour inhabit an elitist fortress of mystery into which only the great and the good have access. He strips power from those who hold the reins of subjectivity, and democratises thought. He is not an artist but a politician.

As for me, Nietzsche is my co-pilot, not Socrates. This fortress of mystery is not for some intellectual elite: each of us lives within its walls and we cannot know what lies without. When we look at the world we see only our shadows silhouetted (our “I”, which never leaves us) and we call that shadow truth. We can no more hunt down the truth than we can trap our own shadows. Why not leave the shadow to its own devices – it will look after itself.

After all, life is not about being in the know, it’s about being in the mystery.

Cimitero del Verano, Rome, a true necropolis

Verano, a huge cemetery in south east Rome, is a necropolis in a quite different style to the other necropolis I know well - Highgate Cemetery in north London. Highgate Cemetery is designed to evoke the expectation expect death and the dead, it plays up to and exaggerates our need to create distance between life and afterlife: a deliberately eerie city for ghosts and ghouls, a macabre folly of catacombs and crypts, stoking the visitors’ romantic sentiments of otherworldliness.

Highgate Cemetery

Verano on the other hand feels like a living city, with streets and pavements lined neatly and consistently with tombs as suburban houses line arterial roads. Like in an endlessly repeating city such as Los Angeles, most of the tombs are utterly unremarkable, each with its own built-up and landscaped plot; but scattered amongst them are grand and wild mausoleums of another age, like the villas and palazzos of LA’s Golden Era, commanding art deco ziggurats frocked by palms, for those who in death wrote in stone their ambitions in life.

Ennis House, Los Angeles

Verano Cemetery, Rome

Yet unlike suburban sprawl, in a cemetery each tomb is remarkable. Each one is a specific life now turned to dust, a physical location in which an unfathomable and now intangible event is recorded. And how to record it? At Verano, a cemetery in which one can sense the whirr of a living city, humans sought the safety of immortality not just through a preservation in the stone of monument and mausoleum, but from the corresponding fossilization of the social stratum itself in which they lived. Like the urban living, these urban dead can live on as tiny placeholders in their own new metropolis, through a living social structure. Pine-lined avenues, roads and pavements, bins, cleaners and bin men, policemen on patrol, hawkers selling dried flowers, local visitors, relatives and tourists all accumulate to veil this dead space with the accoutrements of the living world. Yet a city is place where people live, so this city of the dead is a cemetery in denial. Those conditions of metropolitan functionality, the pragmatics of social living, have been transcribed into a place whose inhabitants have no need of them: they have already sold up and moved to the country. If ghosts are said to remain in the living world to make amends for tasks not done in life, then this cemetery in denial is a ghost town in reverse. Here, the living continue to haunt the dead, stalking their quiet tombs and avenues, building them the perfect city as if endlessly trying to repay to them some impossible debt.

A boulevard of the Verano Cemetery

For whom the cemetery?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are alive.

It must be commonly understood that our rituals of death are no longer done for the dead. Maybe they never were. Ancient cultures, on the surface, performed rituals on their dead whose purpose was to assist them in their ongoing journey into the afterlife. These were rituals of preparation, providing the deceased with tools, weapons and bribes to see them through whatever would follow in their new quest - the quest for eternal peace, a peace which was not automatic, but had to earned in death as success had had to be earned in life. Once Christians introduced the fixed polarities of heaven and hell, the afterlife became a question not of journey but of destination. No longer were careful rituals of preparation required, since once the soul had crossed over to the other side there was no further doctrinally-verified journey to the final resting places of the dead. The dead Christian was faced with an instant judgment instead of an ongoing journey: his inverted meritocracy had sealed his destination already. He will arrive at the pearly gates to find his name already inscribed in one book or the other. There was now no space for the hero to battle his way into Elysium. Accordingly, the elaborate rituals of the pantheists and pagans were no longer needed and elaborate and morbid rituals of taboo performed at the point of death started to disappear.

Now, in the beginning of the psychological age, it is legitimate to say that all rituals for the dead are done for the benefit of the living. These rituals do not prepare the dead for their own afterlife, but prepare the survivors for their own life after the life of the deceased. Rituals form a symbolic closure to existence, and prepare the living for the journey of bereavement. Everything we do for the dead is not for them, but for us. This by no means belittles it: in fact I think it gives our actions in the face of this unknowable state a particular propitiatory poignancy. But it does mean that we can see, in our treatment of the dead, a reflection of ourselves. What we do for them is in fact what we do for ourselves, and is therefore what we want or need. Through actions for the dead we expose our own values and define our self-identity. In this light, what do we find out about ourselves in the remaining rituals surrounding death? What do we respect about ourselves in the way we respect our dead (even that we respect our dead)? And finally, what is our relationship to the necropolis and the cemetery, something we claim for the dead, but we make for the living?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are still alive.

The 'Uomo Universale' and the Zen Master: Therapeutic reflections

On the one hand the Zen master: he wants for nothing, wills nothing and takes nothing. He is actionless, has made no-thing into the only thing he needs, and is always content. For him each moment is the best moment: in one arresting parable, a strawberry is equally delicious eaten in a palace or eaten while plunging to his doom. On the other hand the Renaissance man says yes to life, his aspirations and determination know no bounds. He is all-sided, entering with intensity and action all life around him, sensitive, dignified, a lover of beauty and a pursuer of the perfect. Such is his aim to fulfil himself and engage with life that he truly believes that man can do all things if they will.

Where can these two poles interact? Both love the world. The Zen master loves what is: without judgement, his love comes through acknowledgement, of the immeasurable depth, space and energy which courses through him irrespective of life situations. The Renaissance man loves what the world represents: possibility, breadth and expansion. He is an eternal optimist, judging each thing, absorbing what is good and seeking to alter what is not. Both act from within, driven internally by an unending thread of certainty. One is water, who contours to what is presented to him, shapeless and yet indestructible. From his core emanates acceptance. The other is a forge, who takes what exists and manipulates it until it fulfils his definition of beauty. He is driven by integrity and self-belief.

Which are you? To whom should you aspire? Perhaps it is a question of ability. One could say that there are two types of people. Those who can achieve all they desire should not compromise in the unwavering pursuit of fulfilling their will. Conversely those whose vision is not matched by their determination or by ability or life situation, whose will is destined to be unfulfilled, should adopt a position of zen-like resignation. The latter must be merely happy with what is, the former can aspire to what could be.

This is the dangerous old analogue mistake of dividing the world into doers and not doers, affirmative and negative, on and off. Really these two poles should be seen as simultaneous, as by-products of a different and universal condition: the obligation to act from within; to have both self-belief and acceptance; the integrity to act and the integrity to yield. If the Renaissance man is active and strong but lives in a perpetual state of becoming instead of being, so that fulfilment is always one more achievement away, he will never live well. He however who can do out of love, but also love that which is not done, is always in communion with all that life is.

We may think of each person as being like a spinning wheel in motion. We have an external part, a rim, an outer level which is always in contact with the ground, the face which engages physically with the world. This moving part could be a wheel of fortune over which we have no control, or it could be our actions, our will manifested as movement. But we also have a hub, an internal fixed point. While moving physically through space inside the wheel, itself it stays motionless while all around it whirrs. This point does not move but allows movement, it is the fundamental into which everything is anchored, it is the stillness within. The Zen master lives having seen only the stillness of the static core and aspiring to that state; the Renaissance man sees just that the wheel goes round and aspires to become the dynamic edge.

We are profoundly each of us both an internal peace and an external restlessness, a static core and a dynamic face. Ultimately we must aspire towards both states, to have an outer purpose which orbits around a nucleus of integrity. But the hub, the crux, must be prior: there cannot be good external movement without internal stillness, as a wheel’s rotation will not be true around an insecure hub.

Reflections on fate: choice

Most people have a strong instinct for the existence of fate. At the most superstitious level this amounts to a belief in some divine interventionism, the fixed unfolding of the universe, the preordained: it is insh’allah, God’s mysteriously wayward benevolence. It is the promise of true meta-human intelligence, that mighty beyond at which are somehow aimed whispered prayers and wailed incantations, sacrifice and libation, in the hope for recognition and influence. It has been promised that fate will seek out the good man and reward him.

Less superstitiously, fate can be thought of as the timely presentation of opportunities, in which reality is the secondary manifestation of potentialities, spaces ready to be filled out by action and choice. Fate is the intersection within reality of the timeliness of a chance, and the possibility of an action. It is a progression of opportunities to be taken, voluntary actions to be performed and life events to be realised. Fate is the memorial evidence for the unending will of man.

I am sitting at a cafe table alone, it is hot and cobbled, I have a coffee, an ice-cream, an empty seat and a vacant evening. How nice it would be to share this with another. On cue, a spark-filled woman silhouettes towards me. Divine intervention, perhaps gaia’s munificence, the universe unfolding as it should. Or an opportunity in which life is dangling a carrot in exchange for a reckless tilt at humiliation? I think the latter and do nothing. She walks past. I tell myself once is a coincidence, a statistical inevitability. But...if somehow our paths cross again...then that would be fate, that would be the universe’s way of telling me it was meant to be. A moment later she does walk back, déjà vu, a fighter jet who missed its target, the postman, again. If I do nothing, it is not fate but just a girl changing her mind about her destination. If I act successfully, it becomes providence, I have made God’s choice by acting it out: all I need to do is act. But I do need to act.

This fate is not determined by external reality, but is voluntarily created. This fate is a potential energy, a coil of reality as yet immobile, but ready to stretch and spring. It is not in the world, but perhaps a semantic montage of potentials, possibilities, choices and actions; as a cause in itself it can only emerge later as a contrived postscript. Like morality, fate is reverse engineered, a story told backwards. I can fulfill providence’s gift, take fate by the balls and shake my future out of it; or wait for it to come to me, until I can see the whites of its eyes, until I can read the writing on the wall.

There is a unifying, if esoteric, standpoint available: that fatefulness emerges when action is in alignment with the universe. To be fully in contact with reality, to be really plugged in, is to always inhabit the reality which the universe presents. All that is required to answer perfectly the questions posed by life is to be aware there is a dialogue. The space opens, unfolds, and you must enter it, moment after moment, as if always guessing the right key for the lock. To continue is out of choice, of agency, but of an agency which is one with fate. Fate, in this state, is doing exactly what you are doing, nothing more, nothing less. The world turns, do you turn with it?

Existential Therapy and Zen

Lookout kid, it’s something you did,
God’s knows when, but you’re doing it again.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Existential therapy is the conversational manifestation of the spirit of Zen. The focus is the now. The unique strength of existential therapy is that the therapist must focus as much as possible, at all times, on what is presented in the here and now. The now is acknowledged and treated as the only available and reliable entry point into reality. The relationship as it is presented between therapist and client becomes an archetype relationship, and furthermore, each moment, each now, present in the session becomes an archetype for every other now that the client will encounter. In this way the therapist prepares the client into the idea of staying consistently in presence, and uncovering the depth and richness of the present at all times. Since life’s mistakes are repeated, enacted and re-enacted, they are always ready to emerge in every new relationship: a story is not even required, just two people. In one of many wonderful Zen parables, the master tells his disciple "wherever you are, enter Zen from there." And where is it that we always are? Here.

Introspection is always retrospection, everything is always right here, and what more immediate and fresh place to start than in the only moment that exists, this one.

The Wheel of Fortune

Siena cathedral, 1372. A king sits looking down from his architecturally permanent throne, dressed in robes and holding a globe. To the East and South men are clinging on as they plummet towards rock-bottom, their robes and wild hair billowing and blowing, at the West, with great toil, his legs wrapped around the slippery wheel and his arm gesturing upwards, a man is emerging from his nadir, reaching in longing for emergence and salvation.

Looking at the image, one cannot tell whether it is the wheel that turns, the men merely able to cling on wherever it takes them, unwittingly emerging in the courts of kings and then inexplicably being cast down again, the relentless comedy of their lives as inevitable as the repeated crushing of an ant stuck to a wheel; or if it is the wheel which is motionless and the men who endlessly pull themselves along, all their effort spent in seeking the next summit, yet disorientated enough to be unaware of whether this summit is above or below. They crawl along this Sisyphean track, round and round, this way and that on the möbius of life, in their own cycles of fulfillment, hubris, calumny and infamy.

The king alone seems secure, seated as he is, uniquely stationary, poised, phlegmatic, as you may expect the patron’s image to be. Or perhaps of all men he is just the least aware of the nosedive which inevitably awaits him, blindfolded by hubris, oblivious to his imminent fall: as The Fool skips gaily to his doom, The King sits still as his mundane greatness rotates and is ground into dust, half sunk, his visage shattered.

The Pantheon

The Pantheon in Rome is shockingly old. The marbled floor is on a noticable camber from centre to rim, no doubt the great walls, which conceal the buttresses and arches required to hold up the dome, are sinking into the ground of the Piazza della Rotunda like a biscuit mould cutting through pastry. In typically solid Roman proportional architecture, the dome is as high as it is wide, given the peculiar sensation of being inside a circular cube. Above is a great occulus, a skylight through which a pole of light traces a parabola around the floor. This occulus is the manifested absence of the Roman keystone. In a normal two dimensional arch, the keystone is the key stone, supporting through pressure on itself the weight of the building. The key stone is the physical and conceptual focus of the arch, the confluence of the building's weight. But when translated into three dimensions, the point can be transormed from thing to nothing. The defining presence of the keystone becomes its own absence. In the place where all the pressure of the mighty dome concentrates there is a hole, a void. A ring of keystones all press inwards on each other, focusing all the energy and weight of the mighty dome invisibly into nothing but air. It is a triumph of lack, an existential vertice, the imperceptible point of total connection, before the weight is conducted, spreading and dropping down through the solid walls.

The occulus eyeing idlers in 1911.

This momentary suspension and expansion of matter is like the gap between the fingertips of Adam and God on the Sistene Chapel, the spark of life is channeled into an unseen stream, compressed for a heartstopping moment, and then bursts out again made flesh, a living thing.

The entrance is wide, high and free. The stanchions and capitals, the freezes and cornices have become the trunk of the world's architectural tree of life, so that the family resemblances to all other buildings are so strong as to blend ancestor with infant and make their profiles habitually indistinguishable. Tourists sleepwalk, staring upwards at the columns and portico they have already just passed. The interior is full of people, energy and chatter, like the foyer of a concert hall in an interval, or an airport arrivals hall, or a grand Victorian bank that has been converted into a pub. There is no sense whatsoever of a temple, even pagan. The building was consecrated by the Catholic sect to their own worship over a thousand years ago, yet the proportions are so ancient and unlike the vaulted barns of churches as to compromise its monotheist rebaptism as a tomb for artists and tyrants. The tourists too lack the feigned reverence for God they may show in St Peter's, itself not so much a church as a supertanker performing some endless turning circle.

Instead we gape and chat, photograph, step around, bump into each other, watch. This must be more like the forum, some ancient marketplace of exchange, debate, meeting. It is called a church but there is no sense of religion. People come who do not call themselves pilgrims. But they are pilgrims to their own experience in this miraculous primeval space. Instead of being reverential to some other being, a divine presence extant in holy places, the pilgrims are reverential to their own presence in the building. This is a secular existential pilgrimage. The presence of being there, inside these walls, in a space made possible by that the sublime building which encloses it. These walls make us flesh. We are not reverential of a divine presence, but of our own presence.

The Tower and personal growth

Some people increase in confidence as they get older. In others the spark seems to dim. The former gain experience and wisdom step by step, gradually building up a sense of right, an impression of good action, creating an instinct. These people start from the ground up, in the beginning they have nothing, the nervous boy at school, the poor public speaker, the distinctly unremarkable, shy of responsibility. There is no thought of immortality, no need to look at greatness. Things are as they are, each grain of life is just a grain. From this base, this grounding, foundations can be built, a sense of the real, and steadily built upon by experience, eventually reaching peaks of fine ability, confidence and originality. Darwin is a fine exemplar of this.

Others start with a strong sense of action and right, of self-confidence and bravado. Children who seem to speak like adults from a young age, the precocious. Youths with grand ideals and full of vision and determination from the word go. Instead of experience becoming a source of growth, it becomes an attritional reality. Through experience they get things wrong, make poor choices and mistakes, and confidence is gradually eroded. The sense of self is then one of insecurity, shaky judgment, untrustable instincts. The knowledge and action upon which they thought they could depend turns out to be a sham, and empty arrogance, the utterly unfulfilled. Truly the inhabitants of The Tower; built on unsteady foundations, starting from the top down, paradigm of the flighty, the unsustainable; lives of hubris, for whom the only way is down. They fall either through some catastrophic event, the lighting bolt, some experience of boundary and mortality, being cast headlong towards the earth, or the fall happens through stumbles down the stairs, mis-step by mis-step, one by one to the ground.

If we all need firm foundations on which to build, shouldn't those who have risen without them hasten their own downfall? Instead of waiting to arrive at the bedrock, why not fling oneself towards rock-bottom? Deliberately make poor choices, disregard right action, follow nothing but the basest instincts. Those who think they can fly must crash before they can walk.