Forever 63 no.

In the early 90s I would open the batting for the 2nd XI of our age group at school. At 12 I set a high score of 52, and that year averaged about 26; a very respectable score for a young team of sloggers would often make under 100 in a whole innings. That year, 1993, was by far the high water-mark of my cricketing career.

Our practice nets were a row of 10 outdoor netted corridors, half astro-turfed, with an all-weather mat at the bowlers’ end, one at the batsmens’ end, and a patch of overgrown grass in between. During a routine practice session our opening bowler Sanjay Dindyal decided to emulate our heroes in the West Indian team, and bang one in short. The ball caught the far lip of the batsmens’ astro-turf where it was sunk into the soil, and spinning forward, the ball looped high up in front of me, and suddenly dipped down. I attempted something between an ambitious pull shot and an automatic facial self-defence. The result was closer to a 19^th century circus act as I instead opted to catch the ball with my teeth. That’s something you just can’t teach, you either have it or you don’t. I didn’t, and I remember to this day, 20 years later, the slow motion image of my tooth arcing out of my mouth as I span anticlockwise on my back foot and the little white missile floated serenely forwards, landing about 15 feet up the pitch. James Stern, batting in the next net, first in surprise and then laughing said “give us a smile Rob”, and I did, a big bloody toothless grin. I don’t remember it hurting at all. We were kids, up to high-jinx, and the whole thing was quite a laugh. I knew I would have a good story for life.

The damage was this: both front teeth were severed from my jaw. Pushing the defenestrated tooth back into the shrunken, in-pressing gum hole was at that time the most painful thing I had experienced. Both front teeth had deep root canal surgery and are now drilled into my jaw. Being dead, they gradually blacken and periodically they have to be dyed from the inside out. For many years I was extremely self conscious of my smile, as my front teeth will always be a slightly further off-shade than my already very off-beige English drinkers’ ivories. The much worse damage was that the school introduced the compulsory wearing of helmets for child-batsmen. I asked them not to, and instead to simply astro-turf over the whole length of the nets. We don’t play cricket on a pitch with two inch-deep ridges running cross-wise, so why were we made to practice on ones? A schoolboy does not, until they have developed physically, have the speed or power to fire down a proper bouncer, not without the aid of a ridged pitch. The school could see that rather than upgrading to inherently safer and more accurate facilities they could pass the expense onto the parents by adding equipment to little Timmy’s kitbag.

I played on for a few more years, never with a helmet as it felt cumbersome, uncomfortable, and above all unsportsmanlinke, and perhaps because of this I stopped at about 17 when the bowlers had become men, 6ft tall with furry faces and broad palms. They chucked down the ball too fast for me. Against full-size butch sportsmen I simply didn’t have the reaction time, let alone the physical or mental toughness, for cricket.

That’s not even the only cricketing accident we had. During a school match at 15 I remember seeing David Bloom, also playing for the under 16 2^nd XI, knocked unconscious in the field at short leg, when a misthrown ball from the outfield landed on the top of his head, rather than in the keeper’s gloves. He was felled for about a minute. It happened quickly and I don’t think it ever got mentioned again. Had the accident, god forbidden, been fatal, would we have introduced helmets for fielders? Now that an umpire in an amateur match in Israel has died after being struck by the ball in a freak ricochet accident, is umpire's safety to be regulated too?

Now when I see little batsmen of 10, keen, proud, lively, playing cricket wearing preposterously vast protective gear, helmets making them look like a team of sporty Frank Sidebottoms, I feel guilty. It would have happened anyway but at that moment it was my bad batting, poor technique and naturally slow reflexes that led to, in our little corner of London, the sudden advent of pampering over hardiness.

Cricket is a tough sport. The first thing you notice when you handle a cricket ball is how hard it is, like lightweight concrete. Mentally the game is tougher: even at the schoolboy level a game goes on all day. It is inevitable that someone will lose concentration at some point over the 7 hours. We play sports for health, but also for risk. A sport is a choice that each one of us makes to play. It’s fun, exciting, alive, to take risks, grow, strengthen, discover, and there must be setbacks and injuries as part of this process.

If Philip Hughes, and perhaps eventually Sean Abott, had known that their aggressive and exciting let alone normal style of play would cause future players to be made to play in riot gear, in an attempt to snuff out all physical risk, they would I hope be disappointed. They played because they liked the drama and excitement, and they were and are extremely tough men. Broken fingers are pretty regular in cricket. Taking it on the bonce, the chin, in the ribs, they don't like it up 'em. Out in the middle for hours on end. Sledging, taunts from around the bat. Heat, sweat, fear. I was neither tough nor particularly liked the risk, so I stopped playing. As a university student in Scotland, cricket didn’t really figure on the agenda and I took up golf, an excuse to get away from women for a stroll in the countryside with a side-issue of competition.

Parents hate their children sitting indoors playing computer games all day, but a boy playing cricket in an environment without risk is an open-air computer game. We have helicopter parents who endlessly protect their children from all forms of living risk, in a guilty bid to induce unbreakable dependence. I hope that cricket’s rulemakers don’t lose their heads and render this sport of tough bastards into, as Vic Marks put it, rugby without the tackling.

At the Musée Rodin, Cariatade tombée

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

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

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

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 in Britain into a discrete 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, peopled with knot-tops and punks with mongrel dogs on string, created such a sense of quasi-reality that he felt himself to be walking not through a Roman street but through an actual cartoon, as if pulled out of 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.