Memory Theater (7 page)

The hallucinations disappeared back then too. I miss them. Their company. The strangest thing was that after the events of June 13, when I woke up exhausted on the floor of the theater late that evening covered in sweat, I became instantly consumed by a
fear of death, a total, grinding night-panicked terror.
Timor mortis conturbat me
. It never leaves me. It never ends. Never.

My fantasy was doubtless that I could coincide with my fate, rise up to meet it, unify freedom and necessity and extinguish myself from existence like a glorious firefly. Contingency would be abolished. It was the dream of the perfect death, the Socratic death, the philosophical death: absolute self-coincidence at the point of disappearance. Autarchy. Autonomy. Authenticity. Autism. It was a delusion of control. Death as some erection without procreation. An obsessional’s garden of delights. As you can see, I am still quite the thinker at times.

Things didn’t exactly work out. Maybe none of the memory maps were true. Maybe Michel just had a death wish and so did I. But it’s not death that terrifies me, but life’s continuation, its stretching into the a distance that recedes as we try to approach. No purpose, aim, or goal. That is the most difficult thing to endure. Not death, but dying. Death will happen. Yes. It is certain. Yes. But not now, and life cannot be consumed in the now. The now of nows. It is forever not now. Even if I hanged myself I would not experience a nihilating leap into the abyss, but just the rope
tying me tight, ever tighter, to the existence I wanted to leave.

I didn’t want total recall. I wanted to kill my memory by controlling it. Now, my memory lives and it kills me. Each man counts his rats.

I dreamed of the void, of the controlled leap into oblivion. But now everything is packed and swarming. The void has destroyed itself. Creation is its wound. We are its drops of blood. The world is the grave in which it rots.

There is a persistent light drizzle over the Brabant heath. I see the dunes in the distance and think of rivers swelling and debouching into the vast gray North Sea.

Some time passed
. Years. I decided to write things down. The grotesque scale of the error I had made gradually became clearer to me. What I had built in my Dutch backyard was a flat literalization of the idea of the memory theater. It was a sort of static, inert, dead rendering of an entity that had to be multidimensional, mobile, and somehow alive. Not literal, but metaphorical. Like those guys I saw at Venizelos Airport in Athens with
metaphora
written across their backs. Memory had to be transportation. Motion. I had misunderstood history as some kind of cocktail of personal whining and the history of philosophy. This was finally dull and sad. Any life is dull when looked at in the certain light. That’s why a true memory theater has to be something else.

I went back to Yates’s
Art of Memory
and reread it intensely, marking passages boldly in different
colored inks (yellow and green highlighters, red and black Uni-Ball Vision pens). I also found a photocopy of Michel’s essay on Hegel in the bag of stuff that I’d brought from New York. The brilliance of Hegel’s insight was not to reduce memory to a kind of dull recitation of the past, but to create something permanently moving. A wheel that turns, returns, and turns again. Hegel’s memory theater was a kind of
perpetuum mobile
, a permanently moving loop. Knowledge of the Absolute, achieved through recollection, was a vast living organism, a totality endlessly creating novelty out of itself.

Everything that I had done—and Michel too with his damned memory maps—was too two-dimensional. Too flat. Like this fucking landscape. Memory is repetition. Sure. But it is repetition with a difference. It is not recitation. It is repetition that creates a felt variation in the way things appear. Repetition is what makes possible novelty. This is what Mark E. Smith meant. Memory needs to be imagination. Transfiguration. Now, I saw it. The whole thing. An endlessly re-creating, reenacting memory mechanism. A rotating eternity. Self-generating and self-altering.

We do not make ourselves. We cannot remake ourselves through memory. Such was the fallacy driving my memory theater. We are not self-constituting beings. We are constituted through the vast movement of history, of which we are the largely quiescent effects. Sundry epiphenomena. Symptoms of a millennia-long malaise whose cause escapes us. Memory theater cannot be reduced to my memory, but has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past. The dead who still fill the air with their cries. The memory theater would have to immerse itself in the monumentally forgotten. Like a dredging machine descending down through the lethic waters of the contemporary world into the sand, silt, and sludge of the sedimented past. I had seen a machine like that once on the Essex coast. I watched it for hours. Dredging mud. The clanging noise it made. Water slipping through its metal teeth.

The problem with my memory theater was that it was a theater of death and it would die with me. What was the point of that? The new machine would continue forever. Forever repeating. Forever innovating. Not just the same. It would be an artifice, sure, a simulacrum, undoubtedly, but infinite and autonomous.
Its autonomy, not mine. Not the same mistake again. It would be the perfect work of art. It would continue without me, in perpetuity. Endlessly. Eventually, it would be indistinguishable from life. It would become life itself.

I had to begin again
.

Somewhere else
. Somewhere remote. This place was no good. Isolation. An island, perhaps. But which one? There are so many (wasn’t I from an island?). At the very least I would need a contained environment. Somewhere small. It would involve a huge amount of work. This would not be another static memory theater, but a living machine whose power would be generated by the constant ebb and flow of tides. Moon powered. I began to make little drawings in crayon for a kind of cinematic projection system. I needed to find visual, moving analogues to the entirety of world history that could be projected onto a specially prepared landscape. This would be a kind of garden, but with all the trees stripped down to expose their roots and a specially prepared black grass on a series of
narrow terraces that would progressively soak up the projected images. And then project them back. Paradise. But in reverse. An Eden containing all that falls. Long after my death, all the elements of world history would combine with this garden and form an artificial but living organism. I could see it very clearly. A machine that would use history to generate nature. It would be like a second fictional sun in the universe. Finally, it would become the true sun.

It was dawn. Light rain. Dull. I rode my bicycle into Den Bosch and waited for the local library to open. 5:00 a.m. Four hours to wait. I needed to consult tidal charts.

a partial glossary of potential obscurities

A1124

An “A” category, single carriageway road that connects the towns of Colchester and Halstead, both in Essex, England.

JEAN BEAUFRET
(1907–1982)

French philosopher, notable for his prominent role in the French reception of Heidegger’s thought.

JAMES BROWN
(1680–1748)

Citizen of Earls Colne, Essex, England.

GIULIO DELMINIO CAMILLO
(1480–1544)

Italian philosopher, known widely for his memory theater, which was described in the posthumously published
l’Idea del Theatro
.

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA
(1568–1639)

Important Italian philosopher best known for his utopian treatise
The City of the Sun
.

THOMAS CARLYLE
(1795–1881)

Hugely influential Scottish philosopher.
Sartor Resartus
(1836) is a scathing and immensely funny satire on German idealism and a fascinating philosophy of clothes.

CARNEADES
(214–129/8
BCE
)

Skeptical philosopher and head of Plato’s Academy. He was known for his very loud voice.

CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING
(1150–1224)

Christina Mirabilis from Sint-Truiden (now in Belgium), who was miraculously revived at her funeral and continued to perform wonders, such as levitating, surviving fire, and surviving drowning. She lived for nine weeks by drinking only the milk from her own breasts.

C.H.Z
.

Continuously Habitable Zones
(2011), an artwork by French artist Philippe Parreno (1964–) that figures subliminally in
Memory Theater
.

JOHN DEE
(1527–1609)

Mathematician, navigator, proponent of English expansionism, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and Hermetic philosopher.

DUNDONIAN

Inhabitant of Dundee, Scotland.

THE FALL
(1976–)

A mighty pop combo from Manchester, England, led by Mark E. Smith (1957–).

MARSILIO FICINO
(1433–1499)

Founder of the Platonic Academy in Florence, translator into Latin of the complete works of Plato and coiner of the expression “Platonic love.”

ROBERT FLUDD
(1574–1637)

Astrologer, mathematician, and cosmologist, whose memory system may find an echo in the architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

FRANCES THE CAT
(1995–2014)

Elegant, beautiful, and fastidiously small, Frances was part Oriental, part mongrel, and her good looks were a result of that fortunate combination. Born in Sydney, she emigrated
to New York and liked the city. She adapted quickly, spending a number of nights on the tiles, but looked no worse for it. She could be tough on her prey, whether large pigeons, frogs, or lizards. Frances had no time for dogs, or indeed other cats. She proved that refinement is compatible with immense affection and warmth. The protagonist fuses Frances with the cat Jeoffry, the dedicatee of Christopher Smart’s poem
Jubilate Agno
, composed during confinement for insanity in London between 1759 and 1763.

FULKE GREVILLE
(1554–1628)

1st Baron Brooke, poet, biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. Stabbed to death by Ralph Heywood, his servant.

GREEN MAN, OR JACK-O’-THE-GREENS

A vegetative deity, a symbol of rebirth, usually depicted as a head peering through foliage. Very often the name given to public houses in England and, by association alone, the name of an excellent brewery in Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.

GREENE KING

Renowned for their Abbot Ale.

GRIOT

West African storyteller and bardic singer.

MICHEL HAAR
(1937–2003)

French philosopher with astrological leanings. Much of what is said about him above is true. Some of it isn’t.

HADEWYCH OF ANTWERP
(?–1248)

Beguine visionary from Brabant, and perhaps the most profound poet of divine love.

MICHEL HENRY
(1922–2002)

An as yet under-recognized French philosopher and novelist, author of a fascinating two-volume study of Marx, a genealogy of psychoanalysis, and a philosophy of Christianity. Henry was a philosopher of life conceived in terms of radical immanence and interiority.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

Hermes the Thrice-Great, who was believed to be an Egyptian priest, a contemporary of Moses, and author of the
Corpus Hermeticum
. In the early seventeenth century, these texts were dated to no earlier than the second or third century of the Common Era, although the identity of their author remains unclear.

’S-HERTOGENBOSCH OR DEN BOSCH

“The Duke’s Forest,” a once enormously powerful trading center from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and home to the artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516). The city’s fortunes collapsed during and after the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). It remains a beautiful and rather haunting place.

DOMINIQUE JANICAUD
(1937–2002)

A French philosopher of great importance, whose work is yet to be allotted its true importance. Janicaud wrote books on Félix Ravaisson, Hegel, and Heidegger as well as developing an entirely novel approach to rationality and a philosophy of time. The final work completed in his lifetime was an introduction to philosophy written for his daughter, Sophie. He was a man of great patience, good humor, and refinement. He was the protagonist’s
maître
and the person through whom he met Michel Haar.

“JEDER ENGLANDER IST EIN INSEL”

“Every Englishman is an island,” a saying of the German romantic poet and mining specialist Novalis (1772–1801).

JILTED JOHN

The name of the first alter ego of Graham Fellows (1959–), an entertainer from the north of England. “Going Steady/
Jilted John” was released in July 1978 and reached number four in the UK charts. Other alter egos followed, notably John Shuttleworth, composer of the unforgettable “Pigeons in Flight.”

H. D. F. KITTO
(1897–1982)