Memory Theater

I was dying
. That much was certain. The rest is fiction.

The fear of death
slept for most of the day and then crept up late at night and grabbed me by the throat, making sleep impossible no matter how much alcohol I had drunk that evening. Insomnia had been my clandestine companion for much of my adult life, at least after the accident. But since the discovery of the boxes and the building of the memory theater, it had intensified with the force of an implacable logic: If I was going to die anyway, then why sleep?

Then the bladder game would begin. Teeth brushed and flossed, a confident final piss in the toilet, a few pages of
Ulysses
perused in the exquisite, cloth-bound 1960 Bodley Head edition, sleep would softly descend … only to be interrupted by that vague
Alien-
like pressure in the lower abdomen. Do I need to piss
or don’t I? Up and down, to and fro, throughout the night until the terrors of darkness disappeared with dawn. Suicidal and sometimes homicidal thoughts would slowly subside. Sleep would come, but too late.

The next day I would walk around with a thousand invisible tiny lacerations around the eyes and a painfully acute sensitivity to noise that would make the most humdrum tasks hugely cumbersome. This had gone on for three years, ever since the realization and the ever-widening fear. I was exhausted with exhaustion.

I had moved
from England to New York in January 2004 to see if my necronautical activities met with a kinder reception in the New World than the indifference I had experienced in the Old. On return to the University of Essex in June of that year, in an effort to clear up and leave my old office, sort through my papers, and finally move my books, a peculiar thing happened.

Semi-hidden in my office, I came across an unfamiliar series of boxes, five of them in a stack, sort of midsized brown book boxes. After I spoke to Barbara, the administrator in the Philosophy Department, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes, and remains of a close friend and former philosophy teacher of mine in France, Michel Haar. They had been sent unannounced by his brother from the sanatorium in which Michel died from a heart attack
in the dreadful summer heat wave that swept France in 2003. His death had followed a long bout of neurological, psychological, and indeed hypochondriacal illnesses that had besieged him since taking early retirement from his chair in the Philosophy Department at the Sorbonne and which, indeed, were the cause of his early retirement. Truth to tell, there was always a slightly maniacal death wish in Michel. When he finally received his chair in Paris, the dream of every self-respecting French academic, he incorrectly told everyone he was replacing Sarah Kofman, the great Nietzsche scholar, who had committed suicide on the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. Michel seemed determined to repeat the fate of his supposed predecessor.

I subsequently tried to contact Michel’s brother Roger, whom I’d met once at a dinner in a terrible chain restaurant in Paris (Michel was a cheapskate and didn’t care about food). I had his phone number in Strasbourg, but it no longer worked. I sent a letter that was later returned unopened,
retour à l’envoyeur
stamped across it. Michel was divorced and estranged from his wife, Elizabeth, after refusing to have children. Narcissistic to the end. I knew of no other immediate family members. I was left with the perplexity of
not knowing why these boxes had been sent to me. Michel had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did. He didn’t really have what you would call friends.

I immediately began to go through the boxes, finding everything within them in apparent disorder, although each box was marked with a sign of the zodiac, from Capricorn to Gemini. The Taurus box was missing. Had it been lost in transit or was there some design at work? The zodiacal signs didn’t surprise me, as Michel was possibly the first philosopher since Pico della Mirandola in the late fifteenth century to have a deep commitment to astrology. Like Pico, Michel was a genethlialogist, a maker of horoscopes.

In the box marked
Capricorn
, I found some absolute gems, such as notes from a lecture on ethics and Marxism by Jean-Paul Sartre at the École Normale Supérieure in 1959, when Michel was a student. There was also the transcription of a debate between Sartre and several
normaliens
, including two of my former teachers, Clément Rosset and Dominique Janicaud, and a young, vital, and very Sartrean Alain Badiou. I found
Notes de Cours
from Louis Althusser’s class on Montesquieu and Rousseau and the draft of a long dissertation by Michel on ancient materialism, with
detailed discussions of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.

To my complete astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Jean Beaufret, Jacques Lacan, and Martin Heidegger, which concerned the latter’s visit to Cerisy-la-Salle on the Normandy coast in 1955 to deliver the lecture
“Was ist das—die Philosophie?”
the title of which had always made me laugh. Don’t know why. Most amusingly, some of the correspondence between Lacan and Beaufret dealt with the topic of what Herr und Frau Heidegger might choose to eat for breakfast
chez
Lacan during their passage through Paris. Lacan had made complex plans to obtain specially imported
Schwarzbrot
from the Alsace, together with hard cheeses and ham. Beaufret spends some paragraphs reassuring Lacan that the Heideggers looked forward to nothing better than some croissants, café crème, and perhaps a little
tartine
. Beaufret, a tortured, closeted homosexual who spent most of his days in his pajamas, was in analysis with Lacan for five years, and this was the only time that the great psychoanalyst ever appeared to take any interest in him.

I found a large number of more conventional academic manuscripts in the first box, which kept circling
back to the problem of nihilism and to Michel’s lifelong fascination with Heidegger’s mighty two-volume
Nietzsche
, based on lectures from the late 1930s, but which had appeared in German in 1961, when Michel was in his early twenties. Heidegger himself and many of his apologists saw these lectures as the place where a critique of National Socialist ideology was being articulated after his fateful and hateful brief tenure as rector of Freiburg University when the Nazis came to power in 1933. I thought that such apologetics were bullshit. For Michel, much more interestingly, what was at stake was the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, in particular the disclosive possibilities of nonpropositional forms of language, such as verbalized nouns and tautologies:
die Sprache spricht, die Welt weltet
, and so on, and on. To what extent was Nietzsche’s wildly inventive, poetic, and polemical thinking contained by Heidegger’s increasingly strident philosophical critique, which interpreted Nietzsche as the mere inversion of Plato and, ultimately, as a figure for our entrapment in metaphysical modes of thinking rather than a release from them? On this reading, Nietzsche was not the exit from nihilism, but its highest expression, its fulfillment (there
was a German word for this—there always is—but I’d forgotten it).

Michel kept coming back, in text after text, to the poetic dimension of Nietzsche’s language and style as that which might escape philosophy. This line of argument was continued in a series of extraordinary short handwritten papers I found on various poets: Saint-John Perse (Michel had introduced me to his long poem
Anabase
when I first met him. I still read it with T. S. Eliot’s translation), Francis Ponge (an essay on the descriptive prose poems in
Le parti pris des choses
), Wallace Stevens (on the late poems from “The Rock.” He had discovered Stevens through Elizabeth), and Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy (a commentary on the words “Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable”). On each occasion, Michel showed with exquisite delicacy the fragile force of poetic language as that which pushes back against hard reality and pulls free of flat-footed philosophy.

Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But—Michel insisted—poetry lets us see things as they are anew. Under a new aspect. Transfigured. Subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us, yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are still
our things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality. I instantly thought that many of these texts could have been published, if I could have interested the increasingly flagging and beleaguered French and Anglophone academic presses. But such plans soon seemed irrelevant.

Michel had a small cult following in France and the United States, but lacked the capacity for endless and shameless self-promotion that most often defines philosophical fame. Michel slipped into his pajamas around 10:30 p.m. and slept like the dead, thanks to the chemical kindness of his liberal doctor and an understanding pharmacist. While sometimes spotted with moments of brilliance, his talks in English were usually long, rambling, and incoherent. He also often seemed to lose interest in what he was saying.

In the
Aquarius
box, I found many strange maps. Michel had somehow obtained an annotated cloth print of the
Mappa Mundi
from Hereford Cathedral. This extraordinary object from around 1300 presents the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) with its center in Jerusalem, which looked like a keyhole. I came across a series of almost fantastical antique maps of Australia, or more precisely
New Holland, seemingly drawn by French explorers from the early to mid-1700s. There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial systems of Virginia and North Carolina, combined with exhaustive descriptions of flora and fauna. Most impressive of all was Michel’s own six feet by four map of natural catastrophe, with extensive detail on the paths of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the tornadoes of the American Midwest, maps of volcanic explosions from Vesuvius to Krakatoa and beyond. There was also a detailed prose description of the meteorite the size of Manhattan that allegedly fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out most forms of life on earth, including all dinosaur species.