Memory Theater

by Simon Critchley

  After three operations and as many weeks in hospital, I was told by the specialist that my hand wouldn’t have to be amputated. Here it is in front of me right now, arthritic and disfigured with a huge skin graft scar, but still capable of slow two-finger typing. Tap, tap. A registered disability, no less. It’s like that bloody short story by Maupassant. I kept my hand, more or less, but lost large fields of my memory. This was the effect of the trauma, doctors told me. How reassuring. I would get flashbacks, for sure, but they were often vague and they didn’t necessarily feel like my memories. My self felt like a theater with no memory. All the seats were empty. Nothing was happening onstage. I sat back in my office chair and closed my eyes.

  Reg Varney, one of the university security guards whom I’d known since I was an undergraduate at Essex, woke me. It was getting really late and I had a longish drive back to the perfectly anonymous village I used to stay at on the Suffolk border. I decided to leave the last box for tomorrow, marked Pisces. My star sign.

  I got back to the little house I rented, Churchgate Cottage, next to a medieval graveyard that surrounded an undistinguished fifteenth-century parish church. The nearest grave belonged to one James Brown, deceased in 1748. Where be your funk now? I drew a very hot bath and lay there, turning things over in my mind and listening to the shipping forecast on the BBC. A repeat-loop surrealist poem:

  Dogger, Humber, German Bight. Southeast veering southwest four or five, occasionally six later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

  Forties, Viking. Northeast three or four. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.

  Rockall, Malin, Hebrides. Southwest gale eight to storm ten, veering west, severe gale nine to violent storm eleven. Rain, then squally showers. Poor, becoming moderate.

  Moderate or good, occasionally poor. Poor, becoming moderate. I lay in the steaming water and mouthed the other regions of the sea: South Iceland, Biscay, Fitzroy, Trafalgar. Bliss. It was an incantatory memory poem. Recall the sea and retain the land. Jede Englander ist ein Insel. Appropriately enough, the late-night forecast was always followed by the national anthem. The islands were safe. We could all rest.

  I went to bed. With the sound of automated bells in the church tower outside and the discreet aid of Ambien, I fell into a profound sleep. I immediately began to dream floridly. I was floating, small, angelic or bug-like, inside a vast Gothic cathedral. It looked like the capacious nave of Lincoln Cathedral, but it was truly some kind of compound image of Canterbury, Norwich, Beverley Minster, Peterborough, Ely, and York. I floated up to the ceiling and hovered beneath the roof bosses. I gazed from one end of the cathedral to the other. Each roof boss depicted a stage in the history of the world from Creation onwards through the Fall and expulsion east of Eden, the figural precursors of Christ in the Kings of Israel, onwards into the Nativity, the young Jesus’ lecture in the blinded synagogue, the miracles, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and, finally, Christ triumphant, in majesty framed by a vast, vagina-like mandala. His beginning is his end.

  I gazed at the huge, rose-shaped eastern window, soaking in the hues of ruby red glass and lapis lazuli. Then I descended abruptly into the choir, circling around the lectern in the form of an eagle—St. John—and beneath the stalls. I looked intently at a long series of mercy seats, or misericords, each with elaborate wood carving beneath it. There was an elephant with horse’s feet, a gaping-mouthed fool with his tongue stuck out, a bear being hanged by geese, a series of Jack-o’-the-Greens or Green Men peering out all phallic and menacing, a fox lecturing an audience of ducks, a blacksmith trying to put horseshoes on a dog, endless images of wrestlers, a devil conducting dentistry on a poor open-mouthed soul, and finally the image of a mild-faced mother and child dancing together.

  Out I floated into the chapter house, with stone carvings of three-headed kings, veiled women, fighting lions, and tumblers, directly over the dean’s throne. There were many, many monkeys and the carving of a vast serpent eating a cat. The angle of a vault entered the cranium of the Green Man and went out through his mouth. There were mouths everywhere. Fiercely oral architecture. Eucharistic gluttony. Eat the bready body of God and wash it down with his sweet blood—like Leopold Bloom with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. Transubstantiation. I thought of seedcake. Back I flew into the body of the cathedral and floated there gazing at its cruciform shape, the simple vaulted ceiling and the light pouring in through the clerestory, down through the triforium into the bays beneath. I felt majestic. Then I was suddenly sucked out of the cathedral roof through an octagonal wooden lantern; my head burst through the glass and I was being pulled up into the air faster and faster. I could see the cathedral’s twin towers receding below me and the vivid green flatness of the English landscape. The sky was getting deeper and deeper blue and I couldn’t breath. The skin on my face was beginning to smolder with the intense heat. I could smell myself burning. Father can’t you see?

  It was still dark when I woke up. Breathless and rigid with anxiety. Mouth aching from clenched teeth. I lay there waiting for light to come, listening to the BBC World Service. A show about Malian griots. I couldn’t think of anything apart from death and the vague prospect of breakfast cereal.

  I drove back to the university the next morning and thought about my dream of the Gothic cathedral as a vast memory theater. The medieval love of the figural, the dramatic, and the grotesque was not, then, evidence of either some tortured sexual repression or the liberation from such repression, as we moderns arrogantly assume, but is simply a powerful and vivid aid to recollection. Before the Reformation and the rise of literacy, image rather than print was the privileged means of religious instruction. The seemingly wild imaginings of the Gothic cathedral were simply concrete ways of shaping the entirety of time, from Creation to Redemption, as an aid to recollection and reflection. In a cathedral, time became space, fixed in location, embodied in stone. It was a vast time capsule. Decline from Gutenberg onwards. Fuck the Reformation.

  But wasn’t this also true of everything, even the shipping forecast? Might not the space of a town or city be seen as a memory theater? One walks or moves in a city, most Bloom-like, and somehow the entirety of the past is silently whispering through locations—ghostly and sepulchral. Like a huge question mark. And implicitly that story becomes one about the future as well. The city is a spatial network of memory traces, but also a vast predictive machine.

  I looked out of the car window at the slow windings of the A1124 as it wended through the subtle hills of the Colne Valley and thought of the old Roman road between Colchester and Cambridge. Traders carrying oysters wrapped in damp sacks from Mersea Island. Might not a landscape itself be seen as a memory theater? Might not the whole globe be viewed as a set of memory traces for life, organic and inorganic, past and future? When we look at the night sky, all we see is the past; the further we look, the further back we see. To see the future, we must turn inward.

  Maybe the Hegelian memory theater is not just a map of the past, but a plan of the future, a predictive memory theater. Everyone could have their own memory theater. Everyone was their own memory theater. If I had no memory, had I ceased to really exist at the moment of the accident? Was this a kind of death in life where I was experiencing a kind of reverse dementia?

  As I reached the office, the thought hit me: Did Michel have plans for building a memory theater? Or did he perhaps even build one?

  I opened the Pisces box. There were a compendious number of obscene epitaphs written in Latin denouncing various of Michel’s academic enemies, of which one has many in France, bien sûr. There were also a number of translations from Martial’s epigrams where Michel had crudely cut out a page of the Latin text and handwritten beside it, often illegibly, a French translation. They were awfully rude. My favorites were: “Lesbia claims she’s never laid, without good money being paid” and “If from the baths you hear a round of applause, Maron’s prick is bound to be the cause.” Michel translated “mentula”
as “queue.” “Prick” worked quite well, I thought.

  I dug deeper, through piles of notes and drafts for lectures and seminars from the final years. Among some frankly uninspiring material, I found a fascinating little presentation of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and the beginnings of a comparison with Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Artwork.” It looked like it was dated 1997, with the word “Perouse” in uppercase at the top of the title page, the French name for Perugia in Umbria, where we met every summer for many years. There were stacks of yellowing papers which I glanced at quickly and several large Rhodia notepads with squared graph paper, as is the French custom, covered with Michel’s sloping scrawl. I used to collect those notebooks and fill them with awful stretches of sub–T. S. Eliot lyric poetry and then type them up. Thank God I stopped writing poetry.

  Then, at the bottom of the box, I discovered a stack of what initially looked like unframed lithographic prints on large pieces of stiff card. On closer inspection, however, they were a series of circular charts covered with numbers, dates, and masses of cramped handwriting. Each chart was arranged in concentric circles. Each circle was intersected by irregularly divided lines radiating out from the center, which was left empty apart from some writing. Knowing Michel’s predilection for astrology, I assumed they were star charts.

  I felt a chill, as if someone had walked over my grave. I knew I’d stumbled onto something interesting. But the charts were impossible to read. I bundled them up with some string from my desk and decided to continue work in the university library. I needed dictionaries, reference books, and magnifying devices. The librarian, Robert Butler, was an old drinking companion of mine and would be able to help.

  I settled into the special collections room in the basement of the library. As the academic year had just finished, all was quiet and I was alone. It was perfect. Surrounded by hundreds of rare books on wooden shelves with a carpeted floor, all I could hear was the persistent, high-pitched ringing of my tinnitus, my constant, clandestine companion since the breakdown in Nice in 1986. I began to do random Internet searches on astrological charts, but my initial hunch was not confirmed. Frustrated, I called Robert to come down and tell me what he thought the diagrams were. Laconic Dundonian. He took his time with a large magnifying glass before concluding, “They resemble astrological charts, drawn carefully by hand with a compass and protractor, with their concentric circles and division into what look like zodiacal houses. But they are full of words instead of the numbers, degrees, planes, and lines that one would expect.” He began to peer through the glass and mouth what he saw: “Platon, 428/427-348/347 av. J.-C … ne fait d’ailleurs référence à lui-même qu’à deux reprises dans ses deux douzaines de dialogues … Platon avait trente et un ans à la mort de Socrate … D’après Cicéron, Platon se serait éteint en train d’écrire …

  “It appears to be a biography of Plato,” Robert said. “It recounts the few biographical facts and anecdotes associated with the broad-shouldered one, which is the meaning of Plato’s name from the Attic platys, broad, as platanos, the broad-leaved plane tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus sit. You know, the Phaedrus takes place in the shade of the Plato-Tree.” God, Robert could be a pedant, particularly when he was right. Plato had apparently died writing. I wish I knew how he felt.

  Michel had basically assembled all of the real or apocryphal data available about Plato, from Cicero, Hermippus, Diogenes Laërtius, and even Ficino, who claimed that Plato died on his birthday. (Many happy returns! There will be no returns.) He had written the data on a chart, complete with the titles of extant dialogues and several apocryphal texts for which we have only the titles, the names of purported family members (for example, Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who appear as Socrates’ interlocutors in the Republic), and some significant dates. The phone rang and Robert had to go back upstairs to resume his duties.

  There was a sequence of a further ten such charts, each one devoted to a philosopher or thinker with whom Michel clearly felt a strong affinity: Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Plotinus, John Scottus Eriugena, Montaigne, Campanella, Pascal, Spinoza, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In short, these were Michel’s favorites. The oddities on the list were Zhuangzi, whom Michel had never mentioned to me, but whose Inner Chapters I had read and become captivated by; and Spinoza, who initially didn’t seem to fit in his canon. As with the Plato chart, the data was organized in a series of circles. In the outer circles, there was all the biographical data, information on family background, parents’ occupations, education, teachers, number of children, affairs, marriages, scandals, political intrigues, etc. etc. In the inner circle, there was a chronological listing of works, complete with one or two annotations or quotations. On the Nietzsche chart, Michel cited the final words of his final book, Ecce Homo, “M’a-t-on compris? Dionysos contre le Crucifié.” It was unclear to me whether Michel, the avowed Nietzschean, perhaps finally identified more with the Crucified Christ than with the ever-playful Bacchus. Has Michel been understood? Have I?

  In the bull’s-eye center of the circle, the date of death was marked, sometimes together with the cause and location and occasionally a short comment. In Heidegger’s chart, Michel wrote, “Le 26 mai 1976, après une nuit d’un sommeil réparateur, Heidegger s’endormit à nouveau et ne se réveilla jamais!” Clearly, Michel envied Martin his final night of refreshing sleep and his peaceful demise.

  Michel had obviously discovered some weirdly idiosyncratic technique for plotting and recalling the lives and works of the philosophers. But then my mind cast back to Michel’s essay on Hegel and to Yates’s The Art of Memory. These were not standard astrological projections at all. They were memory maps, spatially organized devices like the memory theaters Michel had discovered in Francis Yates’s book. They weren’t so much birth charts as death charts, necronautical rather than genethlialogical. Their purpose was to plot the major events in a philosopher’s life and then to use those events to explain his demise. Much of the script was simply illegible or had faded and many of the charts had odd, vaguely occult-like geometrical designs that resembled crayon drawings I had seen by schizophrenics when I was visiting my friend Samson in hospital after his suicide attempt (crayons were dispensed rather than pens and pencils in order to avoid suicide attempts or attacks on staff). I had no idea what the designs meant.

  Beneath the initial eleven memory maps, I came across another, very dog-eared chart that was clearly written in a different hand. I peered hard through the magnifying glass. The chart was signed with a flourish with the name printed underneath in uppercase in the traditional French fashion. It read “Henri MONGIN” and it was dated 1985. I knew that name. I wracked my brains and recalled a conversation I’d had with Elizabeth on one of our drizzly Welsh walks. I’d asked her where Michel’s interest in astrology and the occult had begun and she said that he’d learned it at the hands of one of his philosophy teachers, also an early follower of Heidegger, Henri Mongin. Clearly, Mongin had projected Michel’s memory map and Michel was the inheritor of a technique that Mongin had either discovered or also inherited from a teacher. Who knew how far back this occult tradition might extend? If I could produce an heir, then maybe it would continue.

  Looking more closely at the map, all the events in Michel’s life were carefully recorded: his family background in the Alsace, the occupation of his father, who was also a philosophy teacher in a lycée in Strasbourg, the birth of his younger brother, Roger, his marriage with Elizabeth in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1970, and so on. But the strangest thing was that the map also predicted the events of Michel’s life after the date of its composition. It mentioned his elevation to full professor at Paris XII (Créteil) in 1991 and subsequently at the Sorbonne in 1995. It also listed the titles of the books that Michel would go on to publish: Nietzsche et la métaphysique and Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme, his most impressive published work. After La fracture de l’histoire, from 1994, there fo
llowed an increasingly mediocre series of essay collections that finished with Par-delà le nihilisme from 1999. It was the most productive period of Michel’s life. I remembered him excitedly saying to me in his apartment in around 1996, “J’ai trois livres en chantier!” He had three books in production. No children were named on the map.

  Michel knew that he was doomed. Did Elizabeth know too? Is that why she left him? She saw from the map that he would have no children. Michel could see the date, time, cause, and location of his death: “0421 h, le 18 août 2003, La Verrière (Yvelines), crise cardiaque.” I checked the precise details with my friend Beatrice in Reims, who had been a student and close friend of Michel. La Verrière was the little town to the southwest of Paris where Michel had spent his final years in a sanatorium. Knowing his fate, he had simply lost the will to live. He arrived dead just on time.

  I moved more rapidly through the stack of charts with a growing sense of unease. All of the remaining maps were devoted to philosophers who had been either superiors or contemporaries of Michel or whom he had met and become curious about, such as his predecessor Sarah Kofman, Reiner Schürmann (whose name was on my office door when I arrived in New York and remained. It felt like a tomb), Emmanuel Levinas, André Schuwer, Gilles Deleuze, Dominique Janicaud, Michel Henry, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I thought this was clearly some eccentric mark of affection. Michel had secretly designed memory maps for the philosophers he admired and had met. But that hypothesis fell to pieces with the next discoveries.

  Digging deeper, I found maps for philosophers who had died or were to die after Michel’s death. What was so terrifying was that all the predictions proved to be true, although Michel couldn’t possibly have known that. There was a chart for his longtime acquaintance Jacques Derrida, who would die from the effects of pancreatic cancer in October 2004, four months after I first discovered his map, at the same age as his father, who had died of the same disease. Richard Rorty, whom Michel had met and befriended during his frequent visits to Paris in the early 1990s, would die from the same disease as Derrida on June 8, 2007. Michel’s maps seemed deadly accurate.