For whom the cemetery?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on fate: choice

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

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

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

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

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

Existential Therapy and Zen

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

Subterranean Homesick Blues

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

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

The Wheel of Fortune

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

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

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

The Pantheon

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

The occulus eyeing idlers in 1911.

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

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

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

The Tower and personal growth

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

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

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