The Tomb of Shelley

Having died at sea, Shelley’s tomb is inscribed with Ariel’s song from The Tempest.

Shelley had originally planned to have himself buried in the old part of the Non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, near to his infant son. The story goes that in Shelley’s presence the supposed site of his son’s body was dug up so as to ensure its location. Instead of the body of an infant, the body of a grown man was found. Shelley, who must have been distraught at the implications of the absence of the boy’s body, was therefore forced to abandon the wish to be buried with his son, and had to settle for an approximation. In 1822, a year after Keats’ death, Shelley too joined him under the shadow of the Cestius pyramid. After only a few weeks there, “Byron’s Jackal”: Romantic hanger-on, groupie and all-purpose wild man Edward Trelawney exhumed Shelley’s ashes and had them reburied in another part of the cemetery, buying up the adjacent plot for himself, where he himself was buried nearly 60 years later. Trelawney seems unable to have kept his hands off Shelley’s remains: he had, during Shelley’s cremation on a Tuscan shore, reached into the pyre and plucked Shelley’s heart from the decomposed and flaming carcass.

Trelawney with Shelley as Severn with Keats: the surviving and less famous friend contrived to have themselves buried next to their heroes, ensuring that not just their remains but also their posterity will ever be undivided. A century later Gregory Corso, a beat poet, began riding the same coat-tails, successfully convincing the authorities to carry out his request to be buried at "the feet of Shelley". Somehow this grovelling-in-perpetuity, a search for reflected glory, has been mistaken for an achievement of linked memory. Why not quote Shelley in his epitaph if his intention was purely memorial? Now the story has overshadowed the man: Corso's tomb is not a testament to Shelley or indeed to Corso, but is an act in itself whose history supercedes its interred. It has become a memorial to itself, to its own assumed vanity.

The tomb of Shelley had recently been given an artless “makeover”, one of the cemetery’s proud expat volunteers told me. The “ugly old ivy” had been ripped up, and the whole thing surrounded by bark chips, like a children’s playground. A small ornamental maple (I would've called it an acer) had been planted on his grave. She had no idea why they had chosen a maple to plant on Shelley’s grave.

This intervention on Shelley’s tomb is a gross act, lacking in tenderness or meaning. The aesthetic taste of the current crop of volunteers, namely of late twentieth century horticultural bourgeoisie: gardens as decking and woodchip, has been imposed onto Shelley’s memory into posterity. A maple tree for no particular reason will now entwine through his bones. In one sense, for those whose understanding of the world is of a place that doesn't have quite enough right-angles, this is an improvement of Shelley’s grave. But in another, more accurate sense, it’s an act of staggering short-sightedness and arrogance. If the intention was to somehow improve Shelley’s grave, I fear the cemetery committee are labouring under a misapprehension. It is not possible to improve a grave qua grave, other than stopping it from falling into complete disrepair. As a site of poetic pilgrimage, this grave’s purpose is to be a focal point for those who wish to remember Shelley. As such it should allow a space for connection and reflection, a little doorway into an imagined place in which we the living can summon some ephemeral sense of the departed.

Gone from here the wild violets and ivy of old, the wild memory of Shelley: the eloping lover, the romantic poet, adventurer and soldier, cremated on a Tuscan shore, laid to rest amongst the rambling idyll of this place, under the shadow of the pyramid, shepherds reposing nearby (cf Keats). Welcome instead Shelley: tidy and material, bijou yet deceptively spacious, benefiting from a dual aspect and enviable transport links, refitted, brushed-up, unsentimental. Shelley’s tomb, through the wanton contemporaneality of a few people, no longer suggests anything rich or strange.

Decoding "Should": Self Denial and the False Subject

“Should” is just a word. Words do not hold meaning, but are signifiers, signposts that point to things we want to express. Our use of words is so familiar and expert that we can bury, in words, deeper intentions that we may not even be aware of. The word “should” is not just a signifier for obligation, it is a tool of self-denial, a harbinger of inevitable anxiety and failure.

There are several different ways we use “should”. We say: “I should give to charity”, “I shouldn’t spit on other people”, and “I have everything I want, I should be happier." These examples seem to vary in the origin of the obligation they demand – the first two external, the third internal. Actually they all involve a pressure whose source is external, but which is imposed on the self from the inside.

As an external pressure, “should” is like a straightjacket, a tool of self-denial. “I should be…” always implies “I should be how I am not.” As a reducer of self, it is one of the most damaging words in the our language.

But who is the real subject of this sentence? Who is this “I”? A Freudian might align this "I" with the Over-I (normally translated as the super-ego): the critical parent, the social norm. Lacan would elegantly sidestep the locus, asking instead, “For whom are you identifying with someone you are not?”

The “I” in “I should”, is not located in the self. “Should” is such a dangerous word because it stealthily imports a subject which is not really the agent. The agent, the I (Freud's super-ego) is not the self but the other. The “I” in “I should” is not really the self, not really “I”, but a projection of the other onto the self, by the self. Hence when you use the words “I should...”, you are substituting the other as the agent of your own life. Put another way, you are relinquishing living how you want, to live how someone else wants. Hence “I should be different to how I am” is self-denial. You might as well say “someone else is who I am”. Here self is handed over to the other to be justified externally. It is a clandestine transfer of power and a denial of self-worth.

Each time you think “I should be…”, you are importing a value which you do not naturally have. If you had it naturally, accessible to yourself without any external static, you would just say “I am” or “I must” or “I want.” In importing this value unnaturally, you show that you have not yet identified oneness-with-self. Instead, choices are coming for without: you are attempting to live someone else’s life. He who lives outside himself will always have some latent and uncomfortable sense of self-betrayal, at least a low-level anxiety, an existential guilt in which he can recognise that he denies himself but cannot locate this denial.

These imported values, this should-content, is set in another person’s, or society’s, register. If you aspire, unconsciously or consciously, to fulfil these values, these expectations, you will inevitably fail. This failure will not necessarily be caused by a lack of competence, but through category error. The should-content are expectations sourced from another set of experiences, another set of desires and forged by a potentially alternative value system. One’s own life cannot resonate meaningfully with this instrument. Anxiety comes from trying to locate the subsequent failure in the self, when in fact there is no failure at all. There is only self-denial, located in “should”.

Equally the voice of the critical person: “You should be different.” While this seems to be taking power from the other, it is a merely a projection in which the critical person is saying “I do not believe that worth can be located in the self. You should be different because I should be different.” Thus all criticisms of others are self-criticisms. As should-content is exported, it is reciprocally imported. It is well known that people who are critical of others are crushingly critical of themselves.

In most areas of daily life, people within the same civilisation share conversant values, so following your own values mostly corresponds with following society’s or parents’ value systems. Hence thinking “I shouldn’t spit on other people” normally doesn’t involve low-lying existential guilt and anxiety. Perhaps we use Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or some other a priori value mode to create values from within. It's not really important: trying to unearth a priority has always been the category error of philosophy – where things come from is not as important as that they come from somewhere: not all truths need justification, and a priority does not reveal itself to us when questioned.

For whatever reason then, most people within a given society share values, and hence are able to exist with seemingly external should-contents, like "I shouldn't kill my neighbour", without a sense of self-betrayal. These in fact, for whatever conditioned or a priori reason, come from within, not without. Most things are bad because we sense so from within, not because society imposes badness on them. In the cases where values are imposed from without, perhaps something like 'weight-loss is always desirable', we collectively know it to be wrong, do it anyway, and accordingly suffer under an element of collective anxiety.

Naturally, even within society, individuals' values are not completely homogeneous. There are many value-divergences between individuals within the same society, whether they're "I should watch less TV" or "I must pray five times a day". We tend to come up against these dilemmas at life-crossroads or crises. When given a new option we wonder "what should I really be doing with my life." Using “should” is a way to deny individual choice at a time it is needed most. Instead of asking ourselves “what should I do?”, our real inner voice is trying to ask “what do I really want?” If we relocate our solution back into the society’s murky fog of contradictory values, we beckon on an ongoing sense of failure.

Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, implies this with respect to writing. His querent searches outside himself for justification. He asks for Rilke’s opinions on his work, perhaps he has asked Rilke explicitly “Should I write?” Rilke responds:

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself… Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity.

Instead of searching for an “I should”, Rilke counsels to simply know the “I must”. Act only from within, and disregard that which comes from without - in the case of the young poet, to be above reviews and praise. "Should" reveals that something is not coming wholly from within, or at least is not acknowledged as such. This is the content we do not need, and whose presence burdens our honesty and our self-worth.

If you are not sure about the truth or the meaning of what I have written here, test it and let me know. Try avoiding saying “I should…” and see how it feels. You may find it instructive, highlighting how much we all, without realising, locate our values outside of ourselves. It may also be liberating, giving you a new strength to take back those values and reclaim and rename your desires. Overall, it may allow you to read between the lines of what you really want.

Instead of “I should…” try saying for example:
“I want…”
“I will…”
“I’d feel better doing…”
“I might…”
or as Rilke suggests, “I must.”

Equally, instead of “you should…”, trying saying for example:
“you could…”
“do you want…?”
“some people think that…”
"most people..."
“it’s kinder to…”

I crushed my spirit over the last year, spending a long time feeling a failure for not enjoying a life I felt I was living in the shoes of someone who had themselves loved it (as I was led to believe). The possibility that this divergence of experience of the same place was in fact just a reasonable divergence of values, was hidden by my over-reliance on “should”: I said out loud "I should enjoy this because someone else did, someone else would be". I now see the self-contempt this sentence conceals, as I was telling myself internally: "I hate being me because I am not someone else", and "It's my fault that I am like me, and not like another". I was denying my self and losing contact with my core values, or even blaming these core values for my state. Instead of loving and following my values, they became an albatross around my neck. Now I realise - if you are not holding all the cards, you're in the wrong game.

Evolving out of “should” is one step towards not repeating self-denial, and for rebuilding an authentic “I”. Finding the “I must” amongst all the “I should”s helps construct authenticity and allows self-worth to grow.

The Spectre of Reality: The Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome

Two views of the beautiful Non-Catholic Cemetery, with the pyramid in the background, before the dawning of the brutal reality

The Non-Catholic Cemetery appears at first sight to be idyllic: intricate, bright and green. The tombs are tightly packed, reminiscent of the Tikhvin Cemetery in St Petersburg. Tall cypress trees add the most beautiful verticality to the horizontal rows of tombs: trees which really strain upwards like gothic spires, or needles injecting the earth into space, the mortal into the spirit world. The ludicrously picturesque Roman pyramid of Caius Cestius abuts one wall.

The cypresses, towering over the tiny gravestones, vaulting like the columns of a gothic cathedral above floor slabs .

A Piranesi drawing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius

It is also a cemetery of eclectic peoples, beliefs and symbolisms. Keats is buried in one corner, and Shelley too. Gramsci, father of Italian communism, Marxist atheist and closet Christian, is interred near the ossuary, his grave garlanded with red flowers and red ribbons. Many of the gravestones are truncated or collapsed columns, indicating the grave of a child or young person. Amongst the gravestones can be found several Stars of David, including the Fischer brothers, buried beneath the same stone: one Christian, one Jewish. Orthodox and Lutherans, Cyrillic, German, Greek, Estonian and countless other languages and denominations lie side by side, interlaced in a unified non-Catholic firmament.

The shared stone of the Fischer brothers, with cross and star


The tombs of children and the young, symbolized by half-finished columns


A grave reading only: "Mother"

In spite of endless solicitations for donations and claims of being on the brink of collapse, it is easily the most industriously maintained cemetery I have ever seen. It took a while to realise, washed over as I had been by the graves of the poets and the scent of the pines that, staffed by tireless and ruthless volunteers, this cemetery is a deeply restless and intrusive place.

As I walked around, perfectly intact graves were being scrubbed, renovated, and even dug up; plants and trees were being uprooted and re-planted; lengths of hose, wooden planks and electric drills could be seen and heard. I was told that a large grant had been squeezed out of the German Embassy for the continued upkeep of the ‘German grave’, which was being brutally power-hosed and re-carved, and that the Cemetery committee was now pushing the Russian Embassy for cash to renovate their national memorial. So much for resting in peace.

Remains being exhumed

Perhaps the most ruthless example of this hard-headed intervention in the cemetery’s fabric is the inexorable exhumation of the remains whose families have not kept up with the required payments. On burial, a family can choose to buy the plot in perpetuity, or to buy a 30-year lease after which time their family will be asked to extend or the bones will be moved to the ossuary and the plot made available to the next customer. The cemetery committee wait, like parking wardens, for your time to expire. The volunteer relayed to me, utterly neutrally, how a young woman had come seeking her grandfather’s grave. She had seen a photo from the 1940s in which her father was standing by his father’s tomb. The young woman was told she was too late: the body had been dug up, the tombstone gone, his bones in the ossuary. The volunteer said they had either failed to contact anyone in the family or whoever they did find wasn’t interested. Little consolation to the man’s grand-daughter, who had made the personal pilgrimage to Rome to find and remember him.

Only a few years ago my family discovered that my great-great-grandmother, someone about whom we knew little, was buried in the Ancient Jewish Cemetery on the Lido in Venice in 1913. We were eventually able to find the grave, collapsed and overgrown, forgotten for nearly a century. Visiting, discovering her, was a privilege. We went on, as a family, to remove the ivy, have the collapsed columns and split flagstone fixed, and have new ironwork wrought. I know that at least materially it, she, will last till well after me and my children have forgotten it. No such privilege would be afforded us in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. As I walked around I came across two graves currently being dug up. I felt deeply sorry for those descendents who would come to seek their family in glorious and romantic Rome, the eternal city, and search in vain, finding corporeal reality in the place of sacred history.

Before and after: the tomb of my great-great-grandmother at the Jewish Cemetery on the Lido, Venice. On the left, as we found it, nearly destroyed; one the right, nearly finished. Not improved, but repaired.

As if perpetual interference in the repose of the dead were not enough, here the living must suffer it also. The sound of Rodrigo’s guitar concerto was wafting over the fragrant pine air. What was going on? What were those blocks hung on the walls of the cemetery? Not speakers? And then: “Ladies and Gentleman, the cemetery will close in 15 minutes, please make your way to the exit…”. Does the willful intrusion upon the peace of this cemetery never end? After five minutes of Rodrigo the guitar faded into a midi Air on a G-String. Over the next 15 minutes the announcement repeated multi-lingually until the we were informed that “the cemetery is about to close…”, and the large and expensive-looking electric iron gate, beeping and flashing like a reversing lorry, started to shut. It felt like some faceless public space: an airport or supermarket, where the presence of the individual is deliberately negated. We, mourners or pilgrims, were being treated like interlopers whose presence was resented but unfortunately necessary, herded around as if the intricate and personal symbology of making memorials were some material process like shopping or checking-in. Imagine if such invasiveness reared up during a moment of profound private contemplation. In spite of all the glamour of being buried in Rome, I would hate to be here.

Unfortunately, maintaining or repairing something is not synonymous, as the cemetery’s current crop of meddlers seem to think, with improving it. To maintain a grave is to stop it being destroyed by time; but to improve a grave, on the other hand, is a concept bordering on the oxymoronic. You can’t improve the grieving or memorial process. A cemetery should be a place of rest and calm, not one of change and improvement. Improving is not interchangeable with planning for the future: these improvements serve only to violently introduce the terrestrial present to a place where this reality should be excluded. Cemeteries are for us to remember the dead, to reflect upon them and upon us. They could be grand like Verano, wild like Highgate, intense and historic like Tikhvin, alive like Oaxaca, but they must allow in some way the dead to rest and the living to engage with them. To do this they should nurture a sense of timelessness, allow the past to continue to be somehow just also present, where the gossamer membrane between the bereaved and the deceased is momentarily dissolved. A cemetery should somehow act as a metaphorical rope-bridge which momentarily and temporarily allows us to cross over to the other side, be present there, and return to reality. In this resting space a psycho-spatial fissure opens in which the living can make communion with the dead. It must allow us to develop inside of us a place where we can locate our memories and feelings for those we have come to see, letting the spectre of reality loosen for the visit.

It seemed to be really fundamentally getting death wrong to treat a cemetery as a kind of pet project for a group of bored expats, an extended ornamental garden onto which to project merely contemporary tastes onto what should be a lacuna beyond time. Being deep-cleaned, power hosed, renovated, replanted and modernized drags the cemetery out of the timeless sacred and into the mundanity of the present. The despoilment of Shelley’s tomb is a gross example. The spectre of reality has infringed on the actuality of non-existence. The dead are beyond our human need to update and re-enliven. To re-introduce the real world into this place where living reality must be suspended is to deny the dead their identities, and in so doing, deny the role of mourner or pilgrim too. For who is a mourner if the deceased is stripped of the existential properties of restful death? This cemetery’s future is not secured by its zealous upkeep, but endangered.

The Tomb of Keats

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The tomb of Keats lies in a corner of the old part of the cemetery in the shadow of the steep, flat Roman pyramid. The stone was organised by Keats’ friend Joseph Severn, who is buried next to him. Severn died aged 85, 58 years after Keats’ death at 25.

It is truly an idyllic spot, and the surrealism of the rich grey pyramid evokes further the scene of some ruined elysium conceived in the mind of Piranesi.

Indeed, Severn wrote in a letter that he came to visit Keats only to find a shepherd asleep, “his head resting against the gravestone, his dog and flock of sheep about him, with the full moon rising beyond the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. One long moonbeam stole past the Pyramid and illumined the outline of the young shepherd’s face.”

Keats’ grave doesn’t record his name, which is only revealed on Severn’s grave adjacent. On Keats’ tombstone is engraved a lyre only half-strung; his poetic voice perpetually incomplete. The dedication is to "A young English poet". Below, the epitaph reads “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. This monumentally touching grave is a colossal act of self-denial. Its power comes from here, from Keats' knowing subsumption from the individual to the undivided. In death we can no longer hide the subtle communion we are always taking with the world, a communion Keats in life had the art to describe. Unfortunately not everyone can appreciate that great power can come from great subtlety, and Keats’ subdued relinquishment of selfhood does not pass without comment. Nearby can be found a Victorian acrostic attempting to redress the ingloriousness of Keats’ epitaph through a kind of hyper-Keatsian overdone romanticism: “…if thy name be writ in water, each drop has fallen from a mourner’s cheek…” and so on. Keats follows introspection to the point of vanishing into the totality of life, beauty and reflection from which he had hardly felt separated. He was not afraid of this self-knowing doom and did not see it as a weakness that needed bolstering. Unfortunately the commissioner or author of this doggerel could not let Keats' silence be the last word. In case the visiting pilgrim was in any doubt, we are informed that Keats is “Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!” Not everything that it true needs to be said.

The Phenomenal Phallus and the Existential Womb

Existential therapy does not use the phallus to attempt to explain human behaviour. In a nutshell, existential therapists work with the premise that our activity and our competition is driven not by the phallus, but through fear of death. Our competition is driven by fear of loneliness and isolation. Our anxieties are driven by fear of responsibility. What we do and create are not acts of phallic competition, but are to cloak our essential aloneness, particularly at the moment of death: the pervasiveness of oblivion. We are terrified by the apparent meaninglessness of living, and in order to escape its futility, we act to endlessly clothe ourselves with a veil of meaning.

In fact, by replacing the phallus with the womb as the sublimating force, existential therapy and psychoanalytic theory might be made to dovetail.

We are always terrified of death, but there is one way to cheat death – birth. Our existential fear is not solely that we are frightened of death, but we are frightened of the prospect of not living on, of not giving birth. In this way the womb becomes an existential signifier for cheating death. Women have one, men don’t. The phallus is not an existential signifier: it is a phenomenal signifier. It signifies the phenomenon of creation, it is a tool of the phenomenal. A man can cope with the phenomenal through phallic discourses. But existentially, a man must somehow cope with the lack of womb. This lack of womb is an existential lack: the inability to cheat death, the absence of this uterine escape hatch.

Men are required for procreation, but their role is strangely distant and ‘hands-off’. In failing, at a deep and meaningful level, to acknowledge their true role in the collective escape from death, men become the architects of our world, attributing time for all activities they may need (As in this passage from Ecclesiastes, which may be discussed as a man-driven sublimation of the birth instinct, in a forthcoming post). All evidence of what Freudians attribute to phallic envy is in fact the manifestation of man’s attempt to defeat death in lieu of not having a womb. Of course they fail, as they can only recourse to use the phenomenal phallus, manifested in activity and ego, to approach the existential fear of birth (and its complement and counterpart death), manifested in the womb.

The Phallus and the Womb

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus,
but from the absence of the womb.

The human phenomenon that psychologists seek to explain is something like: Why do we behave how we behave? Why, for us alone, does doing seem to be so much more important than being? Why do we create, why do we strive, why do we compete, why do we destroy? What’s really going on?

Freudian psychoanalysis has a clear reason. The root is the phallus.

From birth the phallus, or lack of phallus, obsesses and possesses us. If we have one we are frightened we will be, first literally, and later metaphorically, castrated. If we don’t have one, we are covetous of the father’s phallus, and later give birth in order to produce a male heir and therefore possess this phallus. So powerful is the phallus, that women want to reproduce in order to get their hands on one.

In adulthood, this phallus continues to grip us (rather than the other way round) with its subversive demands. It pervades our desires and our actions. So suffuse is its power, according to psychoanalysts, that in an effort to maintain this Theory of Everything, they may tie themselves up in strange concepts and images like: “the woman has taken the phallus”, and “if you speak you may be castrated”. Most clients find such interpretations at best reductive, undermining the complexity of their experiences; and this jargon, these ex cathedra explanations, patronising. At worst it is incomprehensible or offensive. Some clients may find these interpretations powerful perhaps more from the graphic imagery than from any deep instinctive resonance with personal experience.

But if there is some element of physical sublimation, perhaps it is not the phallus, but the womb, wherein our fear is born.

A fact is that women give birth, men cannot. A woman (although not all choose to), can know that they have a purpose utterly fundamental for everything to exist. Reproduction is the definition of life, and women manifest it. Men can never experience the miracle of childbirth. It is this colossal inadequacy which triggers all the activity of men.

Why does culture exist, why do we create art: why was most of it done by men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we seek answers, why do we hunger for scientific progress: why are most scientists men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we cluster together into social groups, compete, build, organize, create laws, and rule: why are most rulers, philosophers and architects men? Because men don’t give birth.

Our fear is not of losing the phallus, it is an existential fear of death without reproduction (more on the existential connection to the womb forthcoming). This fear is not exclusively male, but it is men whose proximity to reproduction is not quite tangible. Having sex is not solely reproductive, and men are conditioned to want it without twinkles in their eyes. Pregnancy and birth are not normally present concerns to men. The whole process of insemination and childbirth is kept, as it were, at arm’s length from men. Women on the other hand are reminded monthly of their ability to conceive and of their virility.

So the fear of being sexually or phallically inadequate is in fact an existential fear about death and meaninglessness. Hence “castration anxiety” is in fact “sterility anxiety”. “Phallic competition” is in fact “reproductive competition”. Half the race feel disconnected from the reproductive purpose of life. They know this, and they know they will die. This is why being is not enough, and they revert to doing.

Instead of children, men give birth to the things they create. It is in this that they must prove themselves. They seek to suppress their anxiety of not having a womb by reproducing endlessly in the material world. Men cannot rely on any inherent tangible meaning, qua men. They have no qualities. So every activity becomes a need to prove one's worth. Life is a debt. Women can pay it off by giving birth. Men must pay it off by earning their value, proving their worth. This is the competition between men. It’s not the size of the phallus, it’s the size of the offspring.

To extend Freudian concepts, girls do not want to sleep with their fathers because they covet his phallus, but because they can reproduce with him. They are themselves evidence for his reproductive powers. Girls compete with their mothers not for the father’s phallus, but for his sperm. Boys do not want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers because of phallic envy, but because this would be the fastest and most obvious way to reproduce. “She had a baby for him (I am it), and now I overcome him and she will have a baby for me.” The notion of competitive dad is not about the fear of the son castrating the father, but that the son is virile and the father sterile.

How did Freud miss this incredibly obvious fact that women alone give birth, and attribute as the crux of his theory to the phallus and not the womb? Perhaps mostly we can attribute this massive oversight to his culture. All around him (and us) stand the works of men, the characteristics of men, great competing creations, artificial phalluses. Women were so rarely thought of that perhaps he simply overlooked them. So complete is man’s sublimation of his reproductive inadequacies that his creations and powers at the time of Freud (and all before him), had undermined the importance of women until they had no powers and little influence. As he looked about him, Freud saw the fruits of his gender’s loins. He saw sex manifesting as art and creation, death manifesting as destruction, and he saw it all happening at the hands of man. Of course therefore, it would be to a male characteristic that he would attribute all this. Men create, so it must be in man the cause of the creation. But it is not. Women, not men, hold in them the manifestation of the will to life.

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus, but from the absence of the womb.

Originality is Relative

Originality is relative, not absolute. Originality is a personal best, which is also necessarily a global event. To be original is to do something for the first time, not to be the first to do something for the first time. If we valued absolute originality as much as we think we do, we would not aspire towards known greats: to be compared to your heroes would be an accusation of plagiarism. We would be encouraged not to even have heroes.

A cliché does not become false through overuse. Each time we find in ourselves some new resonance, it is a true and genuine moment of personal discovery. Each awakening is original and important, irrespective of how many other people have had the same awakening before. Turns of phrase may be clichéd, but the content to which they point are original each time they become valid to each person.

Every baby is in absolute terms unoriginal, in relative terms unique. The birth and rebirth of cultural movements are the same. Cultural originality is also a gift which needs a mother. In absolute terms, Michelangelo was the least original of all artists. He stands on the shoulders of giants. He did not give birth to the new art of the Renaissance. The ancient artists gave birth to him.

Nude vs Prude in the Vatican Museums

On the left, a 2nd century BC bronze Hercules in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, dressing to the left. On the right, a similar Hercules in the Vatican Museums, chastened. Around half of the Roman and Hellenic nude statues in the Musei Vaticani have had their genitals crudely covered by fig leaves. These peculiar blotches are visually incoherent. They interrupt the continuity of nude musculature and rather undermine the effect of the nude as a representation of human beauty. They are also conceptually weird, floating, glued or perhaps stapled on. They lack the symbolism imbued by the artist to each other object in the production of allegorical art. As with all censorship, in the end it is the censor who exposes himself. There’s nothing funnier than an enraged prude, and above all these sheaths show to comic effect the self-defeating nature of censorship, in this case intended to sustain the decency of the Papacy. They have surrounded themselves with cocks and fannies, eye-catchingly prominent by their conspicuous absence. In fairness, many have been uncovered, but only in the sculptures which are deemed to have particular artistic value. 

The Victorians are just as guilty or this inverted perversity. Unfortunately for the majority world, while Victorian values cling on only in a few outposts (by-passed rural islands, public schools) the Vatican continues to dictate half the planet’s policy on sexual health and gender issues. From a theological perspective, this prudishness serves to place men firmly outside the garden, into a place of sin and shame. The Ancients, the creators of these works of art, had lived in paradise, before Adam was cast out, before God hated men. These Ancients were not ashamed of themselves, living with philosophy, culture, debate, democracy, tragedy, games, as well as nudity and occasional sexual freedom. The Papacy, graphically and literally, imposed shame upon them, defrocked them of innocence and beauty, and dragged them into God’s new fig-fringed repression. The natural state of man, they claim, is not a Greek ideal: the hero, the youth, the philosopher or athlete, but the sinner and the guilty. Having enforced on men self-embarrassment, this doctrine can then monopolise self-worth through confession, indulgence and absolution. Thus the same cause spreads the illness and then sells the cure, like an itinerant quack with the lurgy.

A post-Freudian overview of culture, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century

Artistically the Renaissance was the rediscovery of a classical ideal: the reintroduction of beauty, through art and form, as an end in itself. The modern world developed in homage to the ancient world, exhuming a new spiritual depth, a new humanism. This development of the individual, a global coming-of-age, and its ensuing expansion of refinement and sophistication, cannot be said to have widely occurred before the 14th century. Philosophically, the Renaissance is driven by a new translation of a complete set of the works of Plato, by Ficino in Florence in the middle of the 15th century. Until then, throughout the Christian Dark Ages, Aristotle had taken up practically the entire horizon of Western philosophy (then really theology). With the dissemination of Plato, the scholasticism of Aristotle was supplemented by the pantheism and spirituality of Plato. This appealed to the renaissance Italians as they sought to rediscover pagan Roman and Classical ideals, which in turn would ignite the development of the Uomo Universale and the new individuality. Such was Plato’s resurgent influence that already by 1511 Raphael considered him to be Aristotle’s equal and his counterpoise, painting the two of them as the twin axes of Western thought in The School of Athens. A few rooms away, Michaelangelo’s re-imagining of a much wider developmental theme is being born on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel.

The School of Athens by Raphael, in the Vatican. In the centre Aristotle, in blue, gestures in benediction to the ground. On his right Plato points towards the heavens. Raphael is symbolically contrasting their respective subjects of inquiry.

After this new dawn of subjectivity came the need to quantify what had been uncovered. Once self-consciousness had developed around the sophistication of individuality, it needed to be understood. This is the rebirth of the objective. The Enlightenment was the rigourisation of this process: the development of the possibility of objectivity. Descartes is the philosophical justification, the theoretical underpinning of this process. Descartes finds the creative humanistic impulses of the Renaissance (and the Classical world) insufficient foundations for the truth he sought, and in The Meditations of 1641 locates these truths in a new space: the thinking mind. Here begins the disconnection of humanity from its shadow self, which had driven our culture, in the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare and the Renaissance artists. This disconnection still shackles us today. Not until Sartre is it realised that the terminal error in “I think therefore I am”, is that his “I” is just only the thinking “I”: the “I” who thinks is not the same as the “I” who is.

The Enlightenment, starting with the ruthless Cartesian pursuit of first principles harking back to Socrates, reached adulthood with the applied logic of the Empiricists. This pursuit of knowledge and its appropriation by an educated elite saw its physical manifestation in the founding of the academies of London and Paris. This was in turn challenged by the social and cultural inversions undertaken during the French Revolution. From the late 18th century a new tendency grows away from objectivity, back to the human, towards the irrational and the subjective. This movement is called Romanticism. Between the French Revolution in 1789 and the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1839, Europe sees the centre of gravity of genius shift from political philosophers and rationalists of the Enlightenment like Samuel Johnson, Gotthold Lessing, Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Locke, Franklin and Jefferson, to a new kind of revolutionary humanist. Socially, this period saw the Great Reform Bill, the Utopian vision of Fourier and the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Kant, and later Hegel and Schopenhauer, give birth to Idealism, introducing the transcendental in addition to the phenomenal, and placing contradiction, not rationality, at the heart of philosophy. Now the Artist was rebel, pioneer and psychologist - Goethe, Beethoven, the Brontës, Blake, Turner and Byron. These Romantics sought to blast through the empiricist petrification of truth into mere knowledge, and to instead reclaim the Classical and Renaissance ideal that instead:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

As the wheel turns these ideals too get overtaken. The zeitgeist shifts back, thanks in the main to the Victorians, to a new industrialisation, Empire, construction and vigour. In 1839 the invention of the Daguerreotype spells the elimination of artistic realism. Mass production crushes the relationship of the consumer to the artisan, isolating both. The age of steel was emerging from the age of stone.

In wide perspective, we have two repeating poles: the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the materialism of the Industrial Revolution, and the humanism of the Renaissance and the irrationality of Romanticism. Finally, at the start of the Twentieth century, Freud is able to reveal these poles as the flints whose sparks charge the dynamo of the human experience. By internalising the irrational, psychoanalytic theory makes sense of these opposites. The irrational (or individual) and the rational (or social) are different evidence of the same phenomenon. They are translations. The move from Renaissance to Enlightenment to Romanticism to Industrialisation can be internalised: the human contains within him the irrational, which, in order to become rational, projects onto the material. These internal states occur historically only in virtue of being projected from Self onto Other. It is towards the reunification of this dichotomy of the human self: from mutually exclusive states occurring consequently to complementary states occurring simultaneously, that we now evolve.