Memory Theater

by Simon Critchley

  Row seven was devoted to languages. French and German grammar did not present insuperable difficulties, but it was extremely hard to symbolize the complex grid pattern of Attic Greek verb forms in all three voices (active, passive, and middle). By the time I had listed the relative pronouns and adjectival forms, I had almost run out of statues. I daubed the last statue with random fragments from Sophocles: ἄνθρωπος ἔστι πνευˆμα ϰαι σϰιά μόνoν and ἀλλ᾽ οὐδἐν ἔρπει ψευˆδος ε’ις γηˆρας χρόνου. But it didn’t really matter, as I was quite delusional by this time.

  By early in 2010, work on the statues had finished and the theater was complete. I installed the statues in the theater and waited quietly for the day of my death to come: June 13. Lucky for some. Utterly unkempt, I had no friends and kept to myself. Aside from my duties in the theater, I spent the days in long bike rides through the dunes and developed the habit of visiting a local Trappist abbey where they brewed very strong beer (Blond, Dubel, Tripel, Quadrupel; 1, 2, 3, 4—I would periodically change the number sequence by which I imbibed. 1432 was a favorite. I don’t know why). I would get drunk in the afternoon and then cycle home. It guaranteed a couple of hours’ sleep. To the outside eye I was a lunatic. People wouldn’t return my gaze (the Dutch like to keep to themselves). But within I felt completely calm.

  I’d asked Bert to design small wooden drawers to be placed under the statues, into which I put files, papers, records, photographs, and often copies of books. Although the contents of the drawers were invisible to the viewing eye and had been reduced to symbols and notation on the statues, I took solace in knowing that the objects were present. Latent content beneath the manifest. The theater is my unconscious. Fuck off.

  Like crazy Crusoe in his island cave out of his mind for fear of cannibals, I would sit onstage and inspect my artificial kingdom, my realm, my shrunken reál. I sat there for hours running through the loci and rehearsing the meanings of the various statues until I recalled everything lucidly. Time had become space. History was geography. Everything was a map and I’d mapped everything. I’d built a vast, living, personal encyclopedia, or living intelligence system, where, through mnemotechnics, I would be given a conspectus of the whole. This was the way I would finally overcome my amnesia. Total recall. Lights out.

  My time of death was 3:51 in the afternoon. Every day for months prior to my demise, I would enter the theater and begin the process of remembering. I would sit onstage with a torch and a stock of spare Duracell batteries and begin to recollect, to inwardize the outward, er-innern. Sometimes I would begin at row seven, sometimes with row one, sometimes entirely randomly. I would shine the torch at a statue, then close my eyes and try to make manifest its meaning. I read medieval texts on the craft of memory like The Guidonian Hand and Hugh of St. Victor’s little book on building Noah’s ark, De arca Noe mystica. The ark was within, not without. I prepared for the deluge.

  My first attempts at recollection were poor. I kept forgetting and would have to look into the drawers for reminders. It sometimes took four or five hours to complete the whole sequence. It was exhausting. I began to panic. The clock was ticking. I developed a weird rash on my chest and the palms of my hands.

  After a month or so of sustained effort, my technique improved and I could recall the entirety of the theater in two hours. This was the plan: to enter the theater at around 1:40 p.m. on June 13, make myself comfortable, check my torch, and begin the process. At the instant of my death, I would have recalled the totality of my knowledge. At the moment of termination, I would become God-like, transfigured, radiant, perfectly self-sufficient, alpha and omega.

  The day of my death finally arrived. The hallucinations had continued pretty much unabated since I’d left New York, but became more auditory than visual. They were my only company, the only voices I heard apart from my own. As I sat up in bed at night, they would speak to me, reassure me, embolden me in a low-pitched female voice. Like a public address system in a German airport. I didn’t sleep at all the night of June 12. I took the bike out in the moonlight and looked at the dunes, the only feature in an otherwise completely flat landscape. Immanence. This commercial war and water machine of a country.

  In the morning, I bathed very carefully, cleaning my feet and ears. I shaved off my grizzled beard and carefully flossed my teeth. Then I clipped my nails and tidied up the cuticles. Cuticles. I love that word. Hunger had long left me. I felt as if my body was light and bird-like, as if I were full of air, like a medieval female Flemish mystic. Hadewych of Antwerp or Christina the Astonishing or that other one who dived into an oven and spent three days under the water in an icy river. What was she called? She lived near here. I dressed in my one remaining suit. Mortuary clothes. I seemed to need the weight of the clothes in order to prevent myself from levitating. I felt amazing, like the moment in the dream inside the cathedral all those years back. Garment of grace.

  1:51 p.m. I began the process of recollection in reverse. Row seven: French, German, and Greek grammar. My lips moved without effort or sound in a perfect automatism. I was like that puppet in Kleist’s essay: perfection is possible only in a marionette or a god. I was somehow both. 2:30 p.m. Row five. I worked backwards through the history of philosophy. My recall was flawless: Hegel, Fichte, Schiller, Goethe, Bentham, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft. Next statue. Next statue. Next statue. Boethius, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Antony, Origen, Paul. Next statue. Backwards through the Pre-Socratics to Thales. Row two. On time. I moved through the sequence of my works. I seemed to see an arc, an idea of order for the first time, a series of lines of argument converging on a present that ascended into a kind of eternity. The philosophy of disappointment melted away into a vast and radiant immanence, like St. Anthony at the end of Flaubert’s book: be matter. I was matter. Matter was divine. I was God (or Spinoza). 3:26 p.m. Row one. The easiest and fastest. I gave myself the leisure to linger over certain memories and roll the words in my mouth. The first time I held my son after the emergency caesarian (where was he now? What did he do?). Touching my father’s bony hand as he left for the hospice. The constant look of terror in my mother’s eyes. Her hermaphrodite lover. My hand in the machine. Jilted John on the radio. Blood on the floor. Recall complete. Knowledge absolute.

  3:50 p.m. The fire inside me now. My lips stopped moving. I waited. Full of Vicodin, I waited for the pain to sear through my head. I was ready. My face was relaxed. My arms hung limply at my sides. The beating of my heart suddenly became irregular. It was as if I heard that woman’s voice in the theater saying, “So, here it is at last, the distinguished and noble thing.” My eyes were open, surveying my empire and recalling everything. I felt an extraordinary lightness, a kind of beatitude that had nothing to do with happiness. An elation. An ecstasy perhaps. A feeling of absolute sovereignty. The relief at forgoing the counterfeit eternity of existence. Mortality. Now, I thought. Now.

  I waited. Nothing happened. Soon it was 4:00 p.m. The afternoon shower that had beaten against the roof of the theater subsided into the light tapping of drizzle and then nothing. I heard birds singing in the woods. Wood doves. Brusque return to the world. I was not dead. I began to cry. It had all seemed so perfect.

  I am ruined, financially. All my savings paid for the construction of the memory theater. My teaching job is pathetic and humiliating and leaves me a couple of hundred euros a month to live on. I’ve taken to growing my own vegetables and eating processed cheese. A diet that’s easy on the teeth, which are in bad shape. Look like a Beckett character. The theater is still there, though I haven’t been back inside since that day. From the outside there is a vague smell of rotting matter. Paper and papier-mâché, I imagine. Mold too. I bet the local authorities come round soon to ask questions. Very Dutch.

  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 swea
t, 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 ex
pansionism, 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)