Lucent Comb

At the Musée Rodin, Cariatade tombée

2010-09-14T09:09:00.018+01:00

Cariatid tombée portant sa piene, 1881-1882
Fallen Caryatid carrying her stone

Auguste Rodin

The fallen caryatid is serene and perfectly balanced, yet the conflicts inherent in her physical and psychological state create a study of vulnerability and a work of great tension. The young woman is seated on the ground with her legs half crossed. She is leaning her head to the right and resting it on her left hand, which is extended across her body. Her eyes are closed and her expression is placid. At the apex of the composition is her stone, rough and unfinished, supported by her right hand on the exposed left side of her neck and shoulder. Beneath the block her body is quite asymmetrical and is coiled into a complex, inclined, and delicate tangle, her drape fallen into her lap. Her equilibrium is only just maintained between her head, bent to the right extreme, and the fall of her left leg and her left-leaning back and hips. Overall she is reaching forward and down, in an unfurling foetal position.
The caryatid has fallen but we know not at first in what state she has found herself. She may be about to spring upwards with rediscovered strength, or she may crumple further under the weight of her burden. Above all, she looks vulnerable, certainly yearning for the safety and innocence of the womb. Her eyes are closed and her visage and her body are utterly still. The only sign of movement, or of any visible physical tension in her, is a curl upwards in the big toe of her left foot and the gentle grip of two fingers of her right hand in the locks of her hair.

The composition is run through with dynamic tensions. The pressure downwards of the stone battles against the potential upward thrust of her body. The block’s heaviness and substantiality draws attention to the intricacy of the caryatid’s posture and the space between her limbs. Its unsculpted texture and irregular shape upset the caryatid’s softly contoured musculature, her unusually undefined hair, her polished skin. Her humanised delicacy and the vulnerability of her position evoke a different world to that of the freshly quarried block whose roughness suggests the burden of her architectural, grandiose, duty. Her sleepy comportment, with her eyes closed and her head resting on her hand and shoulder, compromise her current task of supporting herself and a large block of stone. The taut vertical potential of the stone conflicts visually with the curved horizontal potential of her body, her elbows and knees dropping forward and to the side.
The tensions in the composition suggest that beneath her placid expression a tumultuous transformation is taking place. The index finger of her right hand is separated from the rest of the fingers and is holding back a lock of her hair, closely reminiscent of another sculpture whose enigmatic posture suggests the moment before or the commencement of an explosive and terrible act - the Moses of Michelangelo in San Pietro Vincoli in Rome*. The enigmatically serene and yet unsustainable position of the caryatid also suggests the onset of a new act, yet her act is not dramatic but intimate – it is the moment she will gain consciousness and be changed forever.

This caryatid has failed qua caryatid. She no longer holds her assigned entablature in place, she has given up her role amongst the male atlantes who support human creation and the world of men. She is inadequate for her place in the pantheon of human achievement and has crumbled under the weight of the made utopia on her shoulder. For this she looks down and away from us in shame. Yet she invokes our sympathy. She has rediscovered to herself and to us a greater purpose, a greater truism. She is not just an incidental flourish within the Neo-Classical vernacular, but a real flawed human; not just a butch atlantes, but a woman, sensitive, fragile, beautiful, shy, downtrodden, long-suffering, guilt-laden. Failed in her task she is still strong, still strong she is yet vulnerable, at once both defeated and on the verge of a powerful rebirth. We are witnessing her in the process of a momentous evolution, at the inception of her transformation from thing to being, the animation of the inanimate. Incarnated in this collapsed and beautiful image we see the profoundest of humanist moments: the instant before a consciousness emerges newborn in to the world. The energy implicit in the twitch of her toe will spread across her body and through her tensile limbs, and her eyes will open onto a new dawn, the beautiful indistinct mystery of consciousness. In her failure she has become human. She has revealed to us the beautiful broken honesty of her essence, beneath the imposed grandeur of her existence.

Art, progress, the dreams of a created utopia, manifested in the idiom of Classical architecture, are magnificent triumphs of human creation. Yet more truthful than these triumphs of mankind is mankind itself: the failure implied in the heroic acts. And it is this honesty that makes the work beautiful. Rodin has presented in a single image not just a technical study in the visual expression of dynamic tension, but a dialogue of humanity more direct than any philosopher could convey, on the consequentiality of defiance to failure, of failure to truthfulness, and of truthfulness to beauty.

* This work was beloved of Freud, who read into it the moment of inner conflict between Moses’ instinctive drive to destroy the golden idol [the destructive urge of the Id], and his capacity to forgive [through his superego]. At the same moment the tablets of the Ten Commandments can be seen slipping out of his fingers. Michaleangelo has depicted simultaneously two monumental acts, smashing the tablets and destroying the idol in a fury. Yet about neither of which can we be sure the state of Moses’ true desire, or his intention, unconscious or conscious.

Fragment on Dreaming

2010-09-08T09:19:00.003+01:00

As a child he had believed, facing them close as a breath, that cats could sleep so deeply and their dreams be so all-consuming and real (a truth which could readily be seen in their flickering eyes and twitching bodies and the misty undulations of their unconscious noises), that waking them from such a state would risk killing them. He would look at his sleeping cats when he was a little boy, marvelling at how vulnerable they became in their stupor, when to dream was perchance to die, and wonder how cats could ever grow up, so waspish was their nightly hazard between life and death. As an only child he had never slept in a room with siblings. He had never, growing up, lain awake next to another human, staring wide-sharp through the gloam at the flickering eyelids and twitching body, convulsing perhaps with the images of unknowable dreams projected somehow onto their retinas from behind. Had he seen such things he might have guessed the story of the cats to be nothing but a myth spread in the invented certainty of the playground. More likely though as a child he would have concluded that humans too, like cats, risk their lives each time they fall asleep, their souls drifting far away, far away from their day-side oculi, far away inside the vast basemented house of the mind. Could he, a little boy, in waking them, sever the filigree ropebridge over which they travel each night into that dark continent, leaving the sleeper stranded forever on the nocturnal side, under some grudging moon, reaching out in longing for the further bank? Each time he terrified tried, the cats would flinch and start nearly before he touched them, jerked awake by a jolt experienced solely somewhere in the tiny balancing reservoirs deep inside their eardrums.

Fragment on falling in love

2010-09-07T11:18:00.008+01:00

Her eyes were dark, not black but brown, a high-pitched D minor, the colour of antique patina. They washed over the manifold of his experience as a truth dawns over an uncertain consciousness. He felt as if he was falling and simultaneously rising, the same momentary sense of disorientation a passenger feels when a railway station unhooks its tethers and pulls away from a stationary train.

The first time he was untethered by the concordance of her eyes it seemed there could be no possible alternative in any possible world. It was now an immutable Law of Nature, as unquestioning as the wind, that in the same room they would broaden and lift their eyes, touch fingertips, conduct invisible electricity to which other people mustn’t have access; electricity latent among all people, housed deep inside them, inaccessible to choice, coursing and twisting in endless random spasms, the will driving us all now forwards, now backwards. And like the wind the currents which drew them together were not capricious but purposeful, disposed of a certainty of movement, not blown here and there like leaves, but forever being sucked as is the air, sucked from a place of high pressure to a place of lower pressure, rushing across the globe unconcerned and without effort. No-one else could be like that, all those others whose lives bob up and down like corks adrift on a great invisible ocean of hidden desires. In amongst the spinning quantum particles whose tiny yet endless labyrinths we have no hope of navigating as they sublimate our unconscious desires or draw into consciousness the illusion of our choices, in amongst synapses clicking into being doubt and surprise and disgust and charade, a pair of eyes looked at him with the sound of bells, wide and deep, and undercut choice, undercut doubt, straightened into certainties everything that was hitherto pulsing and unpredictable.

It was at this time, sucked as air across atmospheres, in violent covenant with love, that he would suddenly become aware of the inside of his ribcage, as if his internal organs had dissolved and melted to the base of his abdomen leaving his heart in remainder, suspended and helpless. This, he told himself, is happiness. A new bright-lit objectivity. This must be how god himself might part the clouds with his wrinkled white fingers to look upon the tumult of his creation, himself safely suspended high in the firmament. Other times the dizzy gutted sensation made him feel sick: sick and weak. Then his chest wall was not dissolving himself into a unity, but had become insubstantially thin, nothing but a cowardly evaporating membrane between his heart and another synecdoche too tightknit to undo: these unyielding eyes, shining brown lights which did not invade his body piercingly, but through their benign overwhelming power caused his sternum to crumble, his viscera to atrophy and his gut to surrender to a force against which it had neither means nor desire to resist.

San Lorenzo, A Story

2010-02-16T23:41:00.003Z

Long after we had lived in Rome together, my old friend and colleague F. told me once, so strangely and erratically did he withhold and divulge his innermost thoughts, that as he walked through the streets of San Lorenzo, a beatnik student enclave to the East of Termini station, an area charged with the naïve honesty of the authentic anarchic movement that still pervades so much of Southern Europe but which has long since petered out here into a peculiar kind of nostalgia reserved for the bad-old-good-old-days, he found that these muralled walls and ever-trickling street-fountains, cars on bricks and graffitied shutters so totally overpainted in Marxist slogans and clumsy satires and peopled with knot-tops and punks with mongrel dogs on leads, created such a sense of quasi-reality that he felt himself to be walking not through a Roman street but through a cartoon itself, as if pulled out of actual physical contact with his surroundings and dropped into the foreground of a hand-drawn comic strip. Even his gait would become an idiom of animated movement: jerky and lop-sided, his right arm pushing upwards unevenly and repetitively with each step, as if walking on the spot while a raggedly illustrated streetscene is reeled behind.

This hyper-coloured reality was to him a stronger, more convincing one than what we take for the actual. As he stalked these sulphur-lit night streets he felt as if the world had been safely wrapped up, as if this life was just a youthful idealistic runthrough in which nothing could be broken forever and the stains and smudges of foolishness or fate could be erased and redrawn. Even motion itself was imbued with an inbuilt narrative direction: travelling horizontally, reassuringly from left to right, from beginning to end, granting him a security of meaning and purpose that real life withholds. He felt that the distance created by the depth of field between the protagonist and the background in the cartoons of his childhood, and now in the super-imposition of himself into this living comic, defines more clearly the remoteness between the experience of self and the experience of other than anything in what he was decreasingly inclined to refer to as mundane reality ever could. So safe he felt, he told me, walking through this animated life, in which he drew and redrew himself, that mundanity, if he allowed it to fog over again what he described as the clarity of the unreal, seemed to reveal our humdrum lives to be made up of little more than such acts as the endless folding and unfolding of tea-towels.

Corpus Domini, A Story

2010-02-16T11:16:00.011Z

At the time that I took a spring in Italy, I was trying to escape a terrible time in my life. Whilst giving myself this sojourn in which to be alone, with total freedom and independence, I was simultaneously engaged by email in a crushing breakup, the causes of which had occurred so far in the past that the events themselves had lost their original meanings, revealing in retrospect not just that the protagonists had ceased to communicate or understand each other, but perhaps also the utterly solipsistic nature of all arguments, as if it is only through a long process of losing touch with objectivity that we can finally arrive at a truth that all reality is subjective and that the external world is nothing but a cloudy, indistinct projection of ourselves. And here in Italy in springtime, bodily facing outwards and with a self-experience of moving forward in time, I was engaged chasing arguments backwards, deeper and deeper, piercing not into the truth but only into my own heart, as if possessed by a determination to accumulate more and more suffering, an expression of human greed in its most self-destructive form. I felt stretched by two wild beasts lashed together, fixed so taut that I might eventually perish like an old rubber band.

With this unvoiced feeling lurking within me, in small Tuscan and Perugian towns not in the hills but on the fertile plains, towns suffused with knowing workadayness, I would await the change of trains by going in search of an internet café in order to do nothing but sit for a moment to check my inbox, as an injured man might pummel his own wounds as if he were convinced his body had a limited supply of pain which could be exhausted through a dedicated course of self-infliction, or as an addict might attempt to cure himself through blindly consuming his vice into oblivion.

In one such town, in a state of headiness from the dusty alien light and in a state of ritualised anxiety, I left the station and walked across the municipal square, towards the centre, following the age of the architecture backwards into the past. I came after a little while to the main church, out of which a procession was flowing like a human mudslide. This, I discovered, was the Sunday after Corpus Domini, and the devout came out of the cool darkness of the church brightly-coloured and unhesitatingly, reminding me unavoidably of colourful handkerchiefs pulled endlessly from a magician’s nose. Since the majority of the town’s adults seemed to be emerging from the church, the thin layer of onlookers must have been none but the wives and children of the participants. I watched in the shade of a triumphal pillar. After a while I found myself pulled in the wake of the marchers by their collective momentum. I was inclined to move with a marching band that emerged out of the church portal into the afternoon light, wishing, as I had once played in one, to examine the subtle differences which demarcate shared pursuits: the cadence of their footfall, the tightness of their turning steps, the presence or absence of little music stands welded onto their instruments, the colours of their straps, socks and gloves, the age and carriage of the players: their commitment or disinterest. So dragging my luggage behind me, an encumbered procession of one, I continued awkwardly alongside, tripping up and down the high pavement edges, with my wheeled bag clipping ungracefully lampposts and ungraciously the heels of onlookers, quite out of time to the music, the bombastic Fascist brass writing that seemed oddly not to have been wiped out in Italy as it had been in Germany since the war. Seeing a few blocks down that the marchers were looping around the town, and becoming fed up with the cumbersome bag I was dragging through the narrow crowd, I decided to cut down a sidestreet and rejoin the processioners nearer the station square. Seeing on this deserted road an internet sign, I ducked in, sensing the certainty of another crushing rebuff rising up in my gut.

The white-tiled floor was filthy, unforgiving strip lighting bathed a scatter of plastic garden chairs in a fuzzy institutional light, the chairs clustered into clumps rather than aligned with terminals, as if placed in order to be obstacles to a convenient entry or a hasty escape. The sound of the plastic legs being pushed around was heavy with moisture, perspiration seeping off the two-dozen or so Chinese teenagers, off their foreheads or through patches of their unbranded cotton tshirts, grey-lit by screens, standing around, or seated or betting at some game of cards, arguing. As I walked in those not involved in the card game looked up with contempt, those at their computer games remained in utter stillness, all controlling a figure, their lifesake, who runs endlessly on the spot as his landscape moves under him, a planet rolling round and round and from side to side, forever curving away beneath, the exact inverse of a mouse in a treadmill. The sweat-bright yet somehow poorly lit room, tiles grimy, accumulations of foot-swept dust and hair at each desk and in each corner, felt like some weirdly upgraded voluntary workhouse, and brought a sense that someone had flicked some switch in reality, as if the train that carries us on through life had been suddenly diverted to the wrong track by a group of delinquent teenagers throwing down the point. I sat at a screen. Everything was in Chinese. I could recognise all the symbols but I was unable to make anything work, as if the computer itself was some parochial bureaucrat pretending to speak only Chinese, innocently and stubbornly refusing to comply with my requests. I got up flustered and overheating, and left quickly without paying, knocking aside and dragging my bag waist-deep in the plastic garden chairs, giving a undefined gesture to the staring adolescents, signifying nothing but confusion and the acknowledgement that I had wandered into a place I didn’t belong.

Outside the pale orange dusty light of Tuscany hovered just above the stench of incense and the stench of patriotic music which housed the otherness of Catholicism, as the parade marched perpendicular across the end of the road. As I stepped from out of the room and in to the street, the contrast of these two evident realities was so great that I seemed to have made some deeper transition, as if stepping out of the inside of one person’s imagination into the imagination of another, as if these two tableaux were nothing but furnished rooms in the memories of people whose lives I would never hope to know or understand. I stood feeling a little high, a little dissolved, in this desert watching the shifting dune of the devout blowing down the street as if carried on by the winds of the certainty of salvation. It seemed to me on the other hand that the notion of certainty itself was an act of faith, and that I might dissolve into the fissure between the two opposing realties either side of me, realities of such incongruence as to defy the very possibility of a single self that could encounter both. Seeking to escape back into my own reality I headed directly to the train station to await my connection to Rome.

At the metaphysical Event Horizon

2010-02-06T15:30:00.007Z

A review of Pure Reason (for David),
in
Pure Reason, Poems by Nikos Stangos

As a manifestation of both reason and passion, humanity blinds philosophers: it is the sun in to which we seem unable not to stare. Analysis is blunted by our contradictory compass: the self-evident truth that we are both proud, thinking, striving and yet wretched, fearing, loving things. Nikos’s poetry exists in that philosophic interjacency, humorous and connected, a membrane under which to dovetail the bifurcated strands of earnest Kantian dialectic with honesty, love and obsession. In Pure Reason (for David), Nikos, like many essentially unbelieving students of philosophy, will not expunge reality from the metaphysical mission. He must reconcile “year after year” the “whole culture of human reason”, with the erotic, cloudy humanity from which all our experiences, moreover all our lives, must be drawn.
The conflict is beautifully and dramatically portrayed by the twin “you”s to whom the poem is addressed: by turns our transcendent or our human foils. Kant is our metaphysical guide, scolding Nikos for “my impatience, my laziness, my lack of perseverance”, and being ribbed in return:

“‘Necessary’
you are. ‘Strictly universal’?”

The other “you”, love, life, returning inevitably, seeps sensually and luminously through the fabric of the text:

“The walls define your size, the pools of
light explain your colours, the rooms are tuned to your voice, our bed
admits to your weight.”

The dramatic and philosophical centrepiece of the work is the denouement and collapse of the metaphysical project. As “obscurities strain to become clarity” (a quotation from Falsetto by Eugenio Montale), like “the inaudible sounds [of] cats’ dreams”, we approach the limit of experience, the boundary between what is empirical and what exists beyond the reach of empiricism: pure a priori knowledge. Here my sensation is of being drawn into an experiential black hole. Physicists describe the brink of a black hole as an ‘event horizon’, where not only light and matter but their conceptual counterparts, speed and weight, are described, in an evocative piece of scientific baptism, as ‘smearing’ together.
At the event horizon of this Kantian black hole knowledge and experience are severed, reality and ideality are smeared together, “anarchic”, “turbid”,

“opposites, the antinomies, lose their prescribed
definition,… …sound has become silence,
silence sound, movement is now stasis, stasis movement, your
appearance is always certain when you are absent, the previously
invisible concepts are now most concretely visible”.

Kant could not have imagined his preciously constructed analogies of experience: permanence, co-existence and succession, the building blocks of what can be known to us, greased into one another, his architectonic dissolving helplessly into that which it was designed to prove.

To search for the harmless-sounding “knowledge a priori” conceals the mystery, the fear and emptiness of the unknown that might exist beyond the limits of our possible experience. What “general truths” could we find “independent of our experience”, and how could they be “clear and certain by themselves”, if to find them is to journey to the limit of reality and have our perceptions smeared along the metaphysical event horizon? Kant was flying into the sun, forcing the impossible to become necessary. If we come to the brink of this abyss, what could we see?

Recoiling, we fall back to Earth (“The seasons have lost their clarity.”), burnt out, dejected, surrounded by merely our own discrete purities: “We have failed. Each of us keeps to himself.” But a paradigm shift has taken place, a Copernican revolution: no longer analysis, but “you provide the focus.” We are in Nikos’s home, feeling and touching, meeting his cats and their naïve philosophical convictions; but also experiencing absences, the truly and only human uncertainties of safety and calm, of reciprocal need, of loss and isolation. It is these experiences which are prior. This colour, this life fills the gap, or replaces the fear, of the metaphysical black hole.

And closer, smaller, more simple and pure, is “you”: “you precede experience”. The humane “you”, left on earth, waiting, being, “the analogies of experience” as intended: a becoming moment by moment; a permanence even in absence; the inevitable immediacy of touch and taste—unspoiled, indissoluble, a wholeness available only to those, to us, who experience.
Purity is not to be gained from a rationalizing simplification, “a dangerous, a suspect / obsessive drive to ‘reduce’ things”, but from an

“inward necessity, simple and certain in itself:
to make this our categorical imperative.”

This revelation, “your pulse, the thumping heartbeat as I hold you closely”, is to be the fixed centre on which “we can build our solid edifice”. And this experience of love, of other, of life can spin the particle antinomies “resolving themselves as if by magic, and fabulous marriages will take place among them.”

Not the inaccessible high windows of a truth beyond experience, but “’a fluidity of colours, these in music’” are “this ultimate knowledge”: the only “pure reason” which we can both aspire to know and are granted to achieve.

January 19th, 2008

Political Evolution 1: Nature

2009-12-02T23:37:00.004Z

Evolution is not failproof. Not all adaptations are successful, no fix is final. Evolution may be said to tend towards increasing complexity, yet there is no inherent superiority in complex solutions to the questions posed by environment and competition. Complexity does not secure survival any more than current existence secures future survival. Complexity may bestow increased size, firepower, strength, intelligence, and many other eye-catching traits, but the infinitely slow steamroller of natural selection has no preference for dazzle and show: in the long term, it is the most simple organisms which are the oldest and the most pervasive – about half the world’s biomass and the majority of its diversity comes from the prokaryote, far and away the most successful adaptation to life under the circumstances provided on this planet.

In the same sense that the most heavily armed man is not the most likely man to survive, the global catastrophe of human behaviour is an unpleasantly intimate reminder that increased complexity does not lead to increased chances of survival.

The process of evolving is not linear with a start and a finish. Natural selection does not make civilised aesthetic judgements about relative states of evolution, that is to say, natural selection isn’t bothered by ipso facto improvements, only by success through survival. Seeing evolution as some kind of cosmic upgrade is a merely human, typically and shamefully anthropocentric, assumption. Nature doesn’t renovate, regenerate, civilise; it bodges, guesses, fails, fixes, and improvises. As an incomprehensibly small twig on the giant tree of life, humans lack all perspective in a self-analysis of their own position in the world. Being chronologically the most recent addition to our branch we can only see in one direction: backwards. Whichever way we look, we can only see back, down our bough, towards the trunk. We are unable to place ourselves anywhere but in the most exalted position. We can barely see all the other branches, older, broader, more diverse, longer lasting, more firmly established, better adapted. We seem to ourselves to be not just another mutation, but a special, final, ultimate, purposeful solution. It seems that our existence is enough to validate our triumph.

But a tree’s goal is not to send its branches as far as possible from their roots: it is just to exist. Nor is their altitude any triumph on the part of the application, dedication and sheer intelligence of those lofty twigs. Nor does it guarantee them survival. To manufacture a teleological programme from the inevitability of natural expansion is a delusion in which we mistake ourselves for something other than chance mutations, a category error of animal and angel, reminiscent of the unaffected hubris of a Grimm fairy tale, the kind of hubris a child can recognise but cannot name.

In the courtyard of Southwark Cathedral, Saturday 26th September 2009

2009-11-22T01:18:00.009Z

The low autumn sun stipples green-blurred branches.
Chatter, trains, bells: the vibe alive.
A group of women and tourists stand amazed,
Joyed-up by childish discovery.
Disbelieving they show their friends:
A mouse moves under a bench.

This city:
rich-mucked, new yet old.
The bell-ringers’ unashamed practice.
Jaunty hats play in a sea of gold-flushed slanting forearms,
straightened hair and oversized sunglasses.

At trashy pink tables,
speakers,
eaters,
writers,
eavesdroppers
absorb and expel.

Fish and chips,
glass-bottled coke.
Moustaches, scarves, yellow tights.
Accoutrements of show and feel.
Trains swerve out of view only,
revealing glimpses, betrayed by their crash and squeak.

The bells peal kinaesthetically;
scales falling like sunlight,
auditory confetti,
3-D campanology.

An octave and a half, relentlessly tipping and tumbling down,
a confusion of light in a race to the ground,
reliably always arriving.
The sun chimes out its warmth across convex cobbles.

It was always so, may it always be so.

Bouncing hair and shock-pink grins,
practical jokes, beardy discussions,
epithets and inscriptions deep-cut.

Deafening light, blinding noise;
eyes, ears, heart.

Only blood moves the heart;
Only blood leaves the heart unmoved.

The bells’ scale has rioted:
leaping, loping, pealing,
resolved unsystematically,
book-ended by octaves.
Gradually slowing,
it becomes the five o’clock bell.

Time to go,
in body,
but never in spirit.

On Williamsburg Bridge, Tuesday 13th October 2009

2009-11-22T00:03:00.011Z

Shock-silver clouds and flash-silver rails; the sky a leaking of electrical blues, pushed ever upwards with the sun in pursuit; impossible autumn-green parks, fluorescent once-a-year-green parks, like italic quotations in the city’s grey prose. Rivets, girders and cage, the industrial bridge a thoughtless, careless pink.

Rich handpainted view, a moving freeze-frame. Superfine definition creates illusory motion. Every pixel coming forward, coming out. Real has become hyper-real, vivid, false. It has been veiled in the bright sunlight of consciousness. In the end the most beautiful thing is to be conscious.

The city's too-close horizon an urban Rousseau of vertice and plane. Winking gilded roofs peep out, sun-blasted brownstone blocks chessman-neat. Distant thunderstorms rollock and billow.

An Introduction to The Humanist Bible Project

2009-11-14T23:29:00.002Z

Let us assume that there is no God: that this is a given of existence. A crumb-collecting theologian may want an inquest to decide if its death was murder, old age, suicide or most likely, an antediluvian stillborn.

A question for the humanist is: what we can make of the great works of art and wisdom inspired by this God? They were certainly created by people in commune with a sense of the beyond, a mysterious compulsion that they named God. This God was perhaps a convenient explanation of their super-human powers, as if they were embarrassed to admit themselves capable of the staggering fertility of their imaginations, the towering intellect and insight whose flashes they could transcribe into music and art. So God is perhaps best described as an alibi; a colossal self-denial. We had the divine in us, were ashamed, and assigned it elsewhere. We excised perfection from humanity and called that perfection the divine. The divine is the fearful perceived impossibility of authentic perfection: the non-human, the meta-human, the über-human. Yet there is only human.

God is a human concept. Everything we assign to it signifies some human depth. The inspiration from God comes only from within. The messages and morals come from inside humans. Like the Greek Myths, all religious stories are necessarily and in every way about us. Every tale that resonates with us is one in which we see ourselves reflected, as in a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13). Freud found in the Oedipus myth a cipher of human desires. Camus saw in the myth of Sisyphus a manifestation of our own sense of endless futility. Whether or not done consciously, these ancient stories strive towards self-understanding. The same can be said of Shakespeare: we needn't attempt to unravel Hamlet's actions to know that somehow he is the everyman; his struggle his not explicable, but is utterly and terrifyingly knowable. Something, in the words of Beethoven, "which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend."

Is it not time to decipher ourselves through the prism the greatest story ever told: The Bible? To reinvent parable as myth?

The Bible stumbles on weighed down by a dead God hanging like an albatross from its neck. It should be saved and put in its place not as a devotional text, but as a psychological work of art. The Bible must be rescued, not thrown out with the bathwater of organised religion. Remove God, and we are presented with a solely human work, a work comprised of tales of greed, love, avarice, calumny, sacrifice, wisdom and art probably unparalleled in any other single text. God must be recognised as a placeholder, and re-signified as a mortal intention of the human psyche.

As an example, the story of Abraham and Isaac. In it we learn that God is a manically jealous deity, perhaps a practical-joker. Without God, these parables can become riddles of human psychology, instead of endless ruminations on the vagaries of a fantastical beardied lunatic. Perhaps we see Freud here: the father is jealous of the son and seeks to kill him. It could reflect the inexplicable instinct to destory that which we love , or perhaps our endless intoxification with danger and violence. Is this a challenge which we all face everyday - the effort not to kill those around us? Man is both a proud and yet a wretched thing.

Humans wrote every word in the Bible: unearthed every psychological truth, had every mystic revelation, created every heart-stopping metaphor, grappled with the terrifying and uncompromising truths of existence and constructed a place for mankind in a seemingly chaotic world: it’s time to take sole credit for this achievement: to acknowledge the human divine. I would like to see a Bible stripped completely of its devotional elements, with God on the cutting room floor, and left as a book of human wisdom and human art.

Time to make an atheist’s Bible of pure literature, untainted by the stain of religious association. The aim is not to explain or understand what the writers of the Bible were implying, but just to render them accessible, to allow their words to emerge from under the veil of faith.

Anyone who is interested in joining in, do so: the aspiration is to become open-source.

Downtown New York

2009-10-26T23:38:00.008Z

Without the Twin Towers, Downtown New York is barely recognizable. Its dumpy oblong skyscrapers could be anywhere – Phoenix, Atlanta, Vancouver, Miami, Seattle, even Bogotá. Along with the Empire State Building, they were the defining insignia, the animistic totem of the tribe of New Yorkers. Now, Downtown could be anywhere, anyone’s.

Which is which?

Which is which? Answers at the bottom of this post.

The city’s identity is saved by the Empire State Building in Midtown, and the monumentally over-sized bridges of the East River. These symbols retain the distinctive arrogance of the new imperialism, as the palaces of London, Paris and Vienna manifest the contempt of the wealthy imperialist for his pillaged colonies.

Architecturally, in New York’s loss, we can see the indispensability of enduring landmark buildings in the definition of location. It is these iconic buildings which should reflect the people for whom they become a landscape, a permanent backdrop, and in reflecting them, also represent them symbolically, become their identity. Egypt and the Pyramids, Paris and La Tour Eiffel and Notre Dame, London has many defining landmarks – Tower Bridge, The Palace of Westminster perhaps above all. Thus architects have a responsibility to those in whose backyards they build – a responsibility of psychological affiliation. They must not construct their own personal visions, but use their vision to sum up the enduring and possibly concealed identity of the citizens and inhabitants of those places. These icons must be built to last, as a civilization’s identity lasts longer than the lifetime of one of its inhabitants. My identity as a Londoner comes in great part from absorbing a sense of myself through my surroundings: the River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster, the BT Tower, Canary Wharf, views from Hampstead Heath and Kenwood House, Tower Bridge, the Eye, Westway, St Pancras; equally the future “identity”, inasmuch as such a thing exists, of future Londoners will continue to be fashioned by these same influences.

This necessity, for endurance and quality, must be in the forefront of an architect’s mind: will it last? is it a gift to the future of its setting? will it become part of the identity of its place? can it become its location? The swagger of riches, the two-fingered salute to socialism that the Twin Towers were, could only exist in New York, and so naturally came to be an allegory for the city.

Equally Tower Bridge, the Victorian re-invention of an idealised faux-Gothic memory, could only represent London: the centre of a country, perhaps more than any other, which is both proud of its past and hostage to it.

The Twin Towers were a timely emblem for New York and for New Yorkers. They perfectly pre-empted and went on to represent the phenomenal financial success of the 80s, they were a temple to the values of the modern capitalist paradigm. Like a symbol such as St Peter’s in Rome, they could be seen all over the city – a moral certainty, a harbinger of the new meritocracy, a reflection of what the city stood for, evidence that bigger was better. They were also what New York was to the world – confident, wealthy, brash, fearful, oversized, defiant, exhilarating.

Psychologically, psychoanalytically, Downtown Manhattan was castrated on 11/09. In "The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910, p144), Freud states that the child is “in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.” This child wants both to ape his father, but also kill or castrate him. The instinctive urges of the child - of an adolescent civilization - attacked from envy what it both hates and yet aspires to be: a strong and self-determining civilization. This “father” (in this case perhaps an uncle – Uncle Sam) is powerful and vengeful, it can both bestow and withhold, save and destroy, punish and reward. Since 2001, America has reinforced the relationship of an inconsistent father alternately criticising and spoiling an angry juvenile son. Through retributions, wars, invasions and threats it punishes; simultaneously it rewards: cajoling, sweetening, rebuilding and making promises, expecting to raise the rest of the world in its own dysfunctional image, like a parent filling its child with all the faults it had.

Photos are, from top: Seattle, Miami, New York, Vancouver, Bogotá, Atlanta

Williamsburg Bridge NY, the architecture of belittlement

2009-10-25T15:23:00.000Z

The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges

One of the beautiful things about the great bridges over the East River, between Long Island and Manhattan, is their spatial arrogance. So grand are they that they tower not only above the water, but also well over the land on both sides. When the Williamsburg Bridge reaches Manhattan from Brooklyn, the pedestrian walkway is still over 100ft above ground level. It towers above the cars of East River Drive and the football players of East River Park as it had towered over the boats and barges and docks.

Williamsburg Bridge from Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The function of bridges is to cross rivers, not to trivialise them. The Williamsburg Bridge soars eye-to-eye with the symmetrical towerblocks of the East River Housing Corporation, as contemptuous for them as it is for the great waterway it belittles.

It finally lands, walkways, eight lanes of traffic and two trainlines, twenty minutes walk, six blocks, one kilometre, inland.

Despite looking like a veteran of the age of steel, Williamsburg bridge was begun in just 1896. New York had just started realising its strength as it began to rival European nations in its architectural manifestation of imperial arrogance. As the palaces of London, Pairs and Vienna, and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, are intended to leave the onlooker in no doubt as to the holders of power and wealth, so in New York did these colossal building projects aspire to swell New York’s self-image, and its metaphorical height amongst the big boys of the old world. Man, unsurprisingly, has always erected giant buildings as physical evidence of his power. Great civilizations have always commemorated themselves through their architecture – the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Dynastic Empires of the Far East. From the flowering of the gothic in the late middle ages, through the Renaissance and into the era of Empire, all the world’s tallest structures existed in Europe – first the cathedrals of Lincoln, Hamburg, Cologne, Rome and finally La Tour Eiffel in Paris. Europe’s dominion was nearly complete. In 1870 the British Empire (the largest the world has ever seen), controlled 35% of the world’s total GDP, a quarter of the landmass, and a quarter of the population.

Cologne Cathedral - Europe's skyline

The twentieth century saw the collapse of empire and the rise of American power, so that by 1945 the United States controlled 35% of the world’s GDP. This social and financial shift is echoed architecturally: from the construction of the Chrysler in 1930 until 1998, every tallest building in the world was in America. But now, 2009, the New World is soon to join Europe in the Old World: the wheel of time grinds down all things over which it passes, and the sun beginning to set on the endless wealth and pride of Imperial America. The New, New World is China and the Far East – now ten of the twenty tallest buildings in the world are in China alone, ten of the top fifty are in the UAE, and 24 of the top thirty are in UAE, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and North Korea combined. If oil reserves are really about to run out, this new ascendancy might find itself rudely curtailed.

Kuala Lumpur - the New New World

There will be fewer and fewer colossal buildings in the old world (and the now ageing new world). Those that are being built and designed will be increasingly unpopular and unrepresentative. Our societies, now fading and subtle, can no longer make a psychological affiliation with the architecture of bombast. And I see in the paper as I write this…as if on queue…could anything make less sense now, than a new Eiffel Tower for London?

Art obscures truth; art illuminates truth: the case of the Bible

2009-10-21T17:24:00.005+01:00

The Bible, like all works of art, is a manifestation of one of the dichotomies of mankind. We are both literal beings: animals, machines for turning good food into shit, beings of mere phenomenon; and yet also metaphysical: we are artists, sensitives, creators of the transcendental. The Bible is literally just a devotional text, a practical guide for life, and yet also a rarely-paralleled work of literary art. This duality, of practical devotion and non-aligned expressive spirituality, is a dilemma for translators, a dilemma for cultured atheists, and a dilemma for fanatics and the devout.

The Bible is to all mankind a work of art, and to some Christians a work of truth. Is this truth illuminated by its artistry, or obscured by it? Should the Bible be read as a purely devotional text, or as a text in which language is as divine as content?

Modern Christian translations of the Bible assign primacy to intelligibility, in order to facilitate pure devotion without the distraction of obscure complexity. In so doing, they must refashion florid language into the common mundane, clarify opaque and mysterious fables into lucent morality tales. In the process they must strip art from the scriptures, untangle the literary from the liturgical, and leave a text of merely devotional value. The translator is contending that the Bible should not be acclaimed for anything other than its religious significance.

But is it not through encountering art that we can encounter, as humans, uniquely, our experience of the divine? What divinity can be encountered without transcending the merely human, the instructional mundane?

There are many translations which appeal solely to the devout. The devout can have them. I would like to see an atheist’s Bible of pure literature, untainted by the stain of religious association. The Bible stumbles on weighed down by a dead God hanging like an albatross from its neck. It should be saved before it is pulled under. We should not throw out the Bible with the bathwater of organised religion. I would like to see a Bible stripped completely of its devotional elements, with God on the cutting room floor, and left as a book of human wisdom and human art. Humans wrote every word in the Bible: unearthed every psychological truth, had every mystic revelation, created every heart-stopping metaphor, grappled with the terrifying and uncompromising truths of existence and constructed a place for mankind in a seemingly chaotic world: it’s time to take sole credit for this achievement: to acknowledge the human divine.

1611 King James (1611) vs New International Version (1978)

1 Corinthians 13:

For now we see through a glass darkly

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror

Ecclesiastes 1:1

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

Mathew 6:28

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.

Hair: Strength/Power

2009-09-22T21:03:00.020+01:00

So we’ve seen the extent to which the loss or covering over of hair creates different kinds of shocks, punishments and taboos. Naturally the converse is also true: the ownership of great hair is a living allegory for the ownership of great power.

At the risk of seeming obsessed, lets stay with the iconography of the headscarf. We talked above about the taboo of concealing and revealing hair, and how this taboo is born from a strong desire for the thing which is concealed. So a headscarf, by definition, covers something exciting and desirable – this is in fact its stated purpose. I have written elsewhere about Foucault’s essay “We, Other Victorians”, in which he extends Freud in Totem and Taboo to question the motivation of creating such an obvious discourse (a pointer) to something we are pretending to hide. People conceal sexy things: breasts, ankles, and also long, dark, middle-Eastern locks, because they are so attractive they threaten to unshackle our inhibitions and cause civic unrest. For the security of our own society we cover up these sexual icons: they are withheld and rationed. Yet in covering them up we underline their powerful sexuality by emphasising them through the very fact of their proscription. We treat them as special hidden secrets, in a perverted attempt to rob them of their special sexual force. Furthermore, we explicitly grant the tabooed object the characteristic of being a locus of sexual attraction. In reality, the sexual attraction of a person is to be found in them as a whole; but by isolating and censoring one element – their breasts, or their hair – we are annexing that overall power into one place, which is then prohibited and tabooed. All physical censorship is synecdoche, in which the tabooed body-part stands for the sexuality of the whole person.

So the link to power? Well, having focused sexual power in one place, for example, in a Muslim woman’s hair, who then holds the key to all this power? Who can withhold or grant access to this illicit store of sexual energy? It is the woman herself who wears the headscarf. So in being the keeper of this strong desire, those women who wear headscarves hold under wraps a great deal of sexual power: the suggestive sexual power of the unseen, the withheld, the imagined, the unobtainable. In revealing her hair, that woman unleashes a sexual potency so strong it had needed to be contained. This fact is also seen through its converse: it is well known that wearing revealing clothes often has the opposite effect to the one intended: revealing too much is less sexy than leaving something to the imagination. Hence the tease is sexier than the strip. Anyone who has been given the privilege of seeing the hair of a woman who normally always wears a headscarf will have experienced first-hand the extraordinary power held by the unveiling of acres of wavy, shiny, black hair. In most respects these Islamic woman are by Western standards oppressed, or even brainwashed, but in this limited but important context they hold all the cards. Their enforced modesty (not just in hair, but in manners, abstention, shyness and so on) gives them a great power: the power to withhold and release sexual potential at will.

Moving on to more conventional and well-proven relationships between power and hair, one can look at innumerable mythical stories: Samson, whose trim by Delilah betrayed him and stripped him of his power;

Peter Paul Rubens - Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London

Medusa, favourite of psychoanalysts, whose ophidian locks themselves turn people to stone;

Caravaggio - Medusa, Ufizzi, Florence

Nisos, protected by a magic lock of purple hair; Pterelaos, whose immortality, dependent on a gift of hair from Poseidon, is reminiscent of the cult of the reliquary (discussed in the next post, on hair, magic and superstition); and Apollo (also called chrysokomon – meaning with golden hair):

God of the golden bow,
     And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
     And of the golden fire,

Keats, Hymn to Apollo, 1815

Naming just a few is sufficient to see that ancient man saw in hair the same iconography as it has today.

In our own more recent and extant culture, a slightly comic example of this relationship is the visual link from big power to big wigs: literally, the Restoration wig, which persist today in the court-room.

The more powerful and senior you are, the bigger your wig, culminating in the huge wigs of high-court judges. In a 1992 consultation it was decided to retain the wig, as “it imbues in laypersons a sense of the solemnity and dignity of the law.” Big, fake hair then is the necessary bastion of authority, a placeholder of dignity, in the British legal system.

Politically, Berlusconi and his hair transplant may look like a typically buffoonish act,

but anyone who has been in ex-Soviet or east European nations during election-time cannot help but be in awe of the sheer hirsuteness of the candidates, their great Nietzschean moustaches signs of wisdom and reliability.

It may be very true that Berlusconi would not have been repeatedly re-elected had he allowed himself to go bald. If so, this could be seen as an embarrassing example of Italian voter ignorance, but also a soaring affirmation of the continuing power of big hair.

In psychoanalytic terms, men compete, in all walks of life, at all times, over the size of their phalluses. Men show off their phalluses in many ways, and many show it off on their heads too. It is both amusing and hard to avoid this equivalence when we look at people like Berlusconi, Peter Stringfellow, Fabio. Hair is a symbol of virility, sexual potency, youth. Their hair is a shiny, well-groomed and shoulder-length phallus.

Stringfellow: well-groomed, shoulder-length phallus

There is also a peculiar inverse of this: the skinhead, who seems to be boasting of his strength, in spite of having shorn himself. The skinhead is so strong in himself that he can rebel against the supremacy of the power of hair, drawing instead from his raw physicality. He shows his power by transcending the location of power in the hair. He, qua his body, is stronger than his hair. Perhaps we can say he has shaved off the phallus which hair represents, revealing that the phallus is his head itself.

In a very literal sense, knowledge is power, and notoriously to the criminal classes, all you need to know about someone can be found in a single strand of hair. While our complete DNA is to be found in almost every human cell, practically and forensically speaking, it is a person’s hair which most often is used to fix his identity. We could say that while our superficial fingerprints are on out fingertips, our real genetic fingerprint is most commonly accessed through our hair.

Tresses and Taboos 2: Depilation = depletion

2009-09-21T12:08:00.021+01:00

Baldness is not necessarily a taboo in itself when it occurs naturally, as in most men, or voluntarily: the monks’ tonsure and the barber’s blade. Enforced baldness, however, remains an enduring social taboo. Let's look at each in turn.

Men go bald naturally, on the whole. In the case of male baldness, most men are ambivalent – they’d prefer to have rich, velvety locks as a sign of youth and fertility, but most will eventually, albeit reluctantly, embrace their glabreity. Big hair for men is like big breasts for women: they’d rather have it, until they’re reassured they don’t need it. For personal peace of mind in both cases, attractiveness must be acknowledged not to exist exclusively in that body part, as the subject often mistakenly believes.

If the French woman’s femininity is to be found in her hair, can masculinity to be found in a man’s hair? Is the femininely-coiffured man (who will be examined in the next post on hair and power) a paradigm of masculinity, or a hijacker of femininity?

It seems hard to agree to either claim. Biologically speaking, it is now known that contrary to the folk-belief that power and virility are found in hair, hair loss in men signals an abundance of testosterone. So masculinity, naturally more elusive then femininity (as it is owned by those who coin the terms ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’: men: perhaps male intellectuals find their masculinity in their tablette de chocolat), seems to fall somewhere between the stools of glabrous and hirsute, being found both in the big-balled baldy, and the eroticism of male vanity.

Baldness in men is hardly a taboo, partly because it is so common, and partly because it happens naturally. Voluntary baldness is also not necessarily seen as taboo. In some cases it is a question of power, as with the skinhead, which will be looked at in the next post. I mentioned female tonsure in the previous post with some examples that do not invoke a national backlash, as does female hair covering. But for fashion things are different: a woman shaving her head for fashion is still newsworthy, if not shocking.

My (female, Japanese) hairdresser shaved all her hair off when she was 24 (more than 10 years ago). She told me her father was furious. Perhaps it is shocking to people that a woman might claim power and full ownership over her own hair. If this is true, perhaps the French state claims some kind of ownership of women’s hair in the same way the state ‘owns’ your passport. If you are male, think how you would feel if your sister/daughter/mother/girlfriend shaved her hair off. Would the shock come from the loss of femininity? If you are female, why might you do it? I shaved my head once, I just looked like a bollock. But with my male-pattern baldness spreading like twilight, its time will come again.

Hair acts simultaneously as a teacosy and a carrycase for our pate. Those who have shaved their head down to the bone must have experienced the disarming sense of exposed nakedness and unprotectedness that it causes. Our most important organ, our most human organ, the brain, is located balanced on top of our bodies, like a coconut waiting to be knocked of its shy. It is cased within just a centimetre of bone, and cushioned in water. Hair is not armour: its thin covering offers no additional protection to the skull. It offers only token defense, it is an impersonation of resistance. Its contribution is psychological: it serves to disguise the vulnerability of our crania. Baldness does not increase the skull’s fragility, it is fragile in any case. Instead baldness is the unmasking of poor design, it is a smokescreen to the trade-off between brain size and birth canal. The skull is exposed to be our Achilles heel.

Involuntarily imposed baldness, on the other hand, retains all the power and strength of the taboos of primitive man. One of the continuing taboos of illness is the loss of hair. This may be from the illness itself, or from a major invasive treatment like chemotherapy. Cancer is by far the biggest killer in the West, and yet the side-effects of its most effective treatment is strong enough to make a pariah of the patient. Would a French intellectual openly demand that a cancer-suffering French woman must wear a wig, because otherwise she lacked femininity, and was therefore un-French, un-Western?

Perhaps the French intellectuals (when they spoke out against the lack of visible hair of the Muslims) were familiar with an example of another shaving taboo: the ritual head-shaving of women imparted by the French resistance on collaborators. Certainly performed as an act of humiliation, the shame can be ascribed to the belief held by both perpetrator and victim that her femininity, and hence her identity, was found in her hair. Perhaps the act would not have been so damning had hair not had the powerful symbolic status it did.

Another well known ritual of shaving is entry into the army. At the end of the process, all the soldiers, until they become familiar with their new selves, look exactly the same: their identity has been shorn, along with their hair, instilling them into their new life as tiny meaningless cogs in a giant allegorical weapon. The army may claim that the shearing of locks is solely hygienic, but of course there is no such simplistic teleology. Ritual marine shaving, making man into monkey, is a purely symbolic act of self-negation. It is the equivalent of entering prison for the first time, handing over all your belongings, clothes, identification, and taking in return standard issue clothing: a person becoming a convict, as the soldiers walk into the barber’s hall civilians, and walk out tools. The removal of hair is the removal of self, an exchange of "I" for "Us". I remember hearing Germaine Greer once say that rapists should have their heads shaved and painted red. As well as ensuring they would look like giant walking cocks, they would also enter the shaven social subset – the non-civilian, the marked-out, the nonperson.

The loss of hair that is the only determining and sufficient characteristic of loss in all these cases, underlining just how strong a symbol of identity, selfhood and uniqueness it is. Loss of hair symbolises the loss of femininity, ejection from the social norm, the loss of (French) Western-ness, the loss of virility, the loss of social acceptability, the loss of individuality, the loss of health, the loss of sexuality.

Since depilation has such strong connotations of depletion, it is no wonder that hair ownership has such strong associations with power.

Tresses and Taboos 1: Femininity/Sexuality

2009-09-15T22:29:00.012+01:00

A few years ago the French government, to keep true to their admirable secularity, banned “ostensible” religious dress in schools, effecting above all the headscarf. Sarkozy recently said that burqas (full body coverings) were “not welcome” in France, depriving women of an identity. The mood of the nation, as measured by my own anecdotal evidence and limited knowledge of the intellectual debate, is that headscarves are un-French, un-developed, un-Western. In hair, in women’s hair, femininity is located, say many French women and some French intellectuals. So to cover her hair is for a woman to negate her femininity. In denying her identity, her identity as an elegant Gaul, in some sense she is challenging the national gender stereotype and so threatening the alleged homogeneity of French women and the first woman, Liberté herself. The concealment of hair is implicitly compared to treason. To cover the hair in France is as taboo as to uncover the hair is in Islam.

Hair is a taboo because like all things that are taboo, it is desirable. The existence of a taboo is only required when there exists a desire that needs to be suppressed. Freud wrote on this topic with unapproachable insight in the essay Totem and Taboo, to which I direct the reader rather than attempt to paraphrase.

Hair is a locus of sexuality, which like all taboos is both sacred and forbidden. It is the taboo of women’s hair in Islamic society which reveals hair’s sexual potency. One doesn’t need to read Freud (so integrated into our worldview are his discoveries) to recognise that modesty must be enforced, in many cultures through hair-concealment, to ward off sexual desires, promiscuity, and the threat to family and the social status quo. While in Islamic countries hair, as the locus of sexual potency, is concealed to subjugate promiscuity, in France a different quality is located in the hair, and its concealment enacts a different taboo – the taboo of unfemininity.

The desire suppressed by one taboo in one culture may not be the same desire the same taboo suppresses in another culture. The two desires being tabooed by covering the hair: that of sexual promiscuity in Islam, and the need for femininity in France, show that the femininity of French women is then placed, through this taboo, alongside sexual promiscuity, as both must be located in the same place. This result would not have pleased the generations of feminists who fought to unshackle the second sex, and is perhaps a sign which reveals the continued chauvinism of the French intellectual aristocracy.

Now we come full circle. Sexuality and/or femininity are being ‘protected’ by making the wearing of a headscarf into an anti-French taboo. A taboo exists because what it taboos is in fact deeply desired – if it wasn’t desired, a taboo would not be required. So the taboo of hair coverage in France reveals a desire to have femininity denied. Does this desire just come from the oppressive husbands of Muslim women, or from the barbaric Koran? No, it comes from the top, from Liberté herself. Why? Precisely because this femininity has been aligned with sexual promiscuity. And what is “femininity” if it is not a convenient label for men’s desires: the sexuality with which men burden women. Finally Liberté wants, deep down, to burn her bra, to neglect her hair, as she once did, to break the tradition of female objectification, to unclasp the link from hair to sex, and in so doing crack open the synecdoche of hair as a physical locus of the notions of femininity.

And it is her terrified husbands and fathers - Sarkozy, the left bank intellectuals, the Law – looking on aghast, who are tabooing this break up, who are ostracising those who coincidentally manifest their fears. The Islamic woman does not aspire to emasculate La France, but she represents this potential defrocking. And why the Muslims? No-one seems to bother the tonsured Orthodox Jewish women, Buddhists, Krishnas, and the various other religious sects who shave their heads, qua being un-feminine, being un-French. Man fires taboos from the watchtowers at those who seek to escape the enforced prison of the manufactured woman, the manufactured France, and leave behind her “femininity”: sexuality, vanity, and judgementalism.

On the symbolism of hair: an introduction

2009-09-14T01:01:00.005+01:00

No other part of the body seems to hold such a variety of symbolic power as the hair. It is both part of our body, and therefore part of our individual identity, and yet at the same time it is changeable and detachable: it emerges and falls out, it can be altered according to taste and fashion, it can be covered or revealed, given or revered. Growing quicker than any other part of our body, it is our most visibly living organ and in this sense is a manifestation of living. At the same time, hair is composed entirely of dead cells: it is where cells go to die - it is the body’s living graveyard.

Upcoming are several analyses of the symbolism contained within hair. One or two will examine hair and taboo: hair lost or hair concealed, with reference to the anti-headscarf sentiment in mainstream French society. Another looks through psychoanalytic glasses at both famous and less famous examples of hair as power. Another post will concern hair as an object of superstition and a bearer of magic. I don’t know yet which order they will emerge.

The Tomb of Shelley

2009-08-29T11:03:00.010+01:00

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

2009-08-25T01:31:00.015+01:00

“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

2009-08-24T22:26:00.019+01:00

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

2009-08-18T21:47:00.019+01:00

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

2009-08-16T00:55:00.007+01:00

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

2009-08-14T01:11:00.009+01:00

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

2009-08-11T23:35:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-03T19:54:00.019+01:00

On the left, a 2nd century BC bronze Hercules in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, reassuringly asymmetrical and swinging free. 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 sheathes 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. Also of course 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, and 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 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

2009-08-01T22:14:00.020+01:00

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.

Oaxaca Cemetery, Memento Mori

2009-07-30T02:51:00.036+01:00

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

2009-07-30T01:39:00.012+01:00

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

2009-07-27T22:28:00.020+01:00

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?

2009-07-20T18:26:00.020+01:00

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

2009-07-13T01:15:00.008+01:00

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

2009-07-07T00:25:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-06T00:44:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-02T18:40:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-01T22:24:00.006+01:00

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

2009-07-01T22:19:00.004+01:00

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.

Artist and Artisan

2009-06-25T22:24:00.001+01:00

The notion of artisan is not at all clear in this age, and in fact very few people are artisans in the traditional sense. Artisan in the arts and crafts definition refers to a nostaligia for the pre-industrial age, the continuity between creator and product. Here I mean artisan as a worker who uses an art form as a tool in the service of creating another product; using an artform as a means to an end, as opposed to an artist, for whom the art form is an end in itself. In visual arts, the artisan now is the graphic designer, logo creator, brander; in music, the jingle and ringtone composer; in writing, the marketer and writer of guff.

Such an artisan cannot have a fully developed artistic sensibility. The graphic designer is using art, the artform, as a product, a tool; to do so would be impossible with a full understanding and appreciation of the achievement of art. Equally the jingle and ringtone writer is a musician only out of pure trade, not out of love or necessity. They cannot be both a producer of a product, and an appreciator of art. The artist produces out of necessity the fruits of the relentless pressure of his mind and heart on some divine flow; the artisan on the other hand rejects the lofty in favour of the mundane, the creation in favour of the product. How could a person do this and claim to really respect exactly what they forsake? Instead, the artisan has a necessarily dulled artistic sense. They are incising from art that which makes it special, using higher forms who have their home and origin in nature in the Oneness, into parcels, units, pieces, packages, products. The sacred is harnessed to glorify the profane. Art comes from above and beyond us, if the artisan saw what contempt for inspiration he used, he would be ashamed of how he debases the divine. Instead, the artisan is deadened to art, dulled to its wonder. Otherwise, how could they go on? Every person who hijacks art in the service of vapidity is an enemy of art, and stands against the evolution of man to a higher plane of consciousness. They are obscuring the light in the darkness of existence.

An exaggerated parody of this occurs in This is Spinal Tap. Nigel Tufnel is playing a melancholy song on the piano, and is asked about it, diverging as it does from the heavy metal they normally play. Influenced by Mozart and Bach (“Mach, kind of”), he says it’s “in D minor, which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don't know why.” In fact, he is right – Mozart almost exclusively used D minor when writing in a minor key, Bach’s Art of Fugue, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and many of the most tragic works are in this key – the solitary flat, punctuating the long open scale seems to give this key a particular sparseness, evoked emptiness. When asked what the name of the piece is, Tufnel replies “Lick my love pump.”
How far from this is the graphic designer who studies the sketches of Michaelangelo to inform logo design? Can one really be in touch with the mystery and otherworldiness of what Michaelangelo creates, and also use that in logos or to advertise any product? It’s an insult to him, as Tufnel is a (comic) insult to those who use music to take humans beyond their mortal prisons. Equally, the person who writes things like “Flip-flops this summer - To be or not to be?” cannot love Shakespeare and by extension does not ‘get’ literature as a form of art. They show that at worst the artisan is intellectually and artistically lacking: in this case they cannot fathom intellectually that this is a question of suicide (what Wittgenstein described as the only important question) and that artistically they cannot grasp the anguish of Hamlet’s knowing self-destruction. At best they are just cynical, parasites on one of the few things which make us special, devaluing that which gives our great living tragedy any worth.