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.

The Tomb of Shelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decoding "Should": Self Denial and the False Subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Piranesi drawing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius

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

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


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


A grave reading only: "Mother"

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

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

Remains being exhumed

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tomb of Keats

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

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

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

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

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