“Now, let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not
a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich
past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all
previous phases of development exist beside the most recent.”
^Roman Rorschach 01
Rome is an artificial intelligence of the highest order, an
ancient mind so vast no one writer or researcher has been able to comprehend
any but the tiniest manifestation of its intelligence, anything but the most
circumscribed, delimited moment in the awe inspiring depths of its oceanic
memory.
It is a fathomless and traumatised intellect that has suffered
at various moments in its life haemorrhage, stroke, dementia, concussion, it
has had the most brutal and retrograde forms of surgery enacted upon it, trepanning
and lobotomy, electro-shock and torture, but it has always recovered, rebuilt
itself, re-connected whatever dots were left to hold on to a sense of self,
radically altered as that may have been, again, and again, and again.
^Roman Rotate 01
Rome suffers the terrifying fate of the immortal who is
destined to repeatedly outlive every individual and every era that he loves,
who is doomed to remember even if only partially things he is desperate to
forget, a consciousness fated to forever exist in a present that is only half
as real as moments that burned themselves into its mind a thousand years ago.
It has seen, understood, experienced, lost, achieved and
attempted so much that there isn’t the slightest trace of cynicism in its gaze.
Everything is equal and not good nor bad, it all just is. Rome is tender towards
the frivolous, fleeting, involved passions it is always encompassing. It can no
longer judge anything or anyone, after having seen the failure and the success,
the condemnation and celebration of each and every kind of whim imaginable. One
moment an idea is lauded, the next it is deplored.
But the mind in its own way is also forever young. It cleans
itself out occasionally. It sometimes forgets, briefly. It looks in envy at
those whom it encloses with their beautiful illusions, their lightness, beliefs
and certainties. There are moments at any age when each of us is swept up in
some excitement and looks again to be in the full blush of youth.
^Roman Rotate 02
Rome is sometimes as delighted by new things as a child. It
is sometimes as taken with new notions as a teenager who has been swept up in a
holiday romance, falling in love like it has never happened before with
temples, tombs, forums, basilicas, catacombs, monasteries, pilgrims, churches,
villas, axes, factories, trains, ministries and parliaments, monuments,
motorways, museums, tourists, subways, suburbs, airports, shopping centres, office
parks…
It has a deep memory, yes, but its extraordinary capacity for
reordering itself, for learning, for comprehending, digesting and even
constructing the present is directly proportional to the depth of its past.
Rome’s physical memory is also its processing power.
St Peter’s, the Vittoriano, Termini, the Basilica of
Maxentius, the Aurelian walls, EUR, the villa Albani, these are all not only
vast databanks of information-storage in stone and steel, they are also macro-processors,
huge, unwieldy, but incomparably reliable machines that turn the past into pure
computing power with which to manage the present. Rome brings to bear the
entire vigour of its singular history, with all its accumulated knowledge and
sensibilities, on every contemporary situation it faces. The past here is the
antithesis of heritage; it is the very substance, the very means, the base material and
energy of change itself.
"It is clearly pointless to spin out this fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd. If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things. Our attempt to do otherwise seems like an idle game"
Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents”
Freud’s supposedly absurd metaphor was more apt than anyone might have ever imagined.
^Roman Rorschach 02
“Having overcome the error of thinking that our frequent
forgetfulness amounts to the destruction of the trace left by memory and
therefore to an act of annihilation, we now tend towards the opposite
presumption -- that, in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be
lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right
circumstances -- for instance, through a sufficiently long regression. Let us
try to understand, with the help of an analogy from another field, what this presumption
implies. As an example let us take the development of the Eternal City.
Historians tell us that in the earliest times Rome was Roma quadrata, an
enclosed settlement on the Palatine Hill. The next phase was the Septimontium,
a union of the settlements on the separate hills. After this it was the city
bounded by the Servian Wall, and still later, after all the vicissitudes of the
republican and the early imperial age, the city that the emperor Aurelian
enclosed within his walls. We will not pursue the further transformations
undergone by the city, but we cannot help wondering what traces of these early
stages can still be found by a modern visitor to Rome -- whom we will credit
with the best historical and topographical knowledge. He will see Aurelian's
wall virtually unchanged, save for a few gaps. Here and there he will find
stretches of the Servian wall that have been revealed by excavations. Because
he commands enough knowledge -- more than today's archaeologists -- to be able
to trace the whole course of this wall and enter the outlines of Roma quadrata
in a modern city plan . Of the buildings that once occupied this ancient
framework he will find nothing, or only scant remains, for they no longer
exist. An extensive knowledge of the Roman republic might at most enable him to
say where the temples and public buildings of that period once stood. Their
sites are now occupied by ruins -- not of the original buildings, but of
various buildings that replaced them after they burnt down or were destroyed.
One need hardly add that all these remnants of ancient Rome appear as scattered
fragments in the jumble of the great city that has grown up in recent
centuries, since the Renaissance. True, much of the old is still there, but
buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives in historic places
like Rome.
Now, let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a
place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich
past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all
previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome this
would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the Septizonium
of Septimius Severus still rose to their original height, that the castle of San
Angelo still bore on its battlements the fine statues that adorned it until the
Gothic siege. Moreover, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus would once more stand
on the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli, without there being any need to
dismantle the latter structure, and indeed the temple would be seen not only in
its later form, which it assumed during the imperial age, but also in its
earliest, when it still had Etruscan elements and was decorated with terracotta
antefixes. And where the Coliseo now stands we could admire the vanished Domus
Aurea of Nero; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the
present Pantheon, bequeathed by Hadrian, but the original structure of M.
Agrippa; indeed, occupying the same ground would be the church of Maria sopra
Minerva and the ancient temple over which it is built. And the observer would
perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or
the other.”
Extract from Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its
Discontents”
...........................................................................................
References:
Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, Kindle Edition
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