Memory Theater (6 page)

Some months earlier
, I had received an e-mail from a Dutch university: Tilburg, in North Brabant. They were looking for a chair of ethics and asked me if I’d like to be considered. What did I know about ethics? Was I good? After finding the place on a map, I made a discovery. I told them that I could not teach full-time but would be interested in some sort of really limited, part-time arrangement. They agreed and a contract had already been drafted. The salary was a pittance, but now that didn’t matter.

I knew exactly what I had to do next.

I resigned immediately from my position in New York and refused all efforts to return phone calls and e-mails from the dean’s office and saw none of my colleagues. By July of that year, I left Brooklyn for good, placed my books and few belongings in storage in East New York, near JFK, and left for the Netherlands. I
took the train from Schiphol Airport and ninety minutes later checked into Hotel Central, in ’s-Hertogenbosch, which was the full name of Den Bosch, home of the appropriately eponymous Hieronymus. It was just a ten-minute train ride from the university.

With the money I had made on the dead philosophers book, I bought a small house outside Den Bosch with a plot of land behind it, surrounded by trees. I needed some space. The house was close to an extraordinary series of sand dunes, De Loonse en Drunense Duinen, not far from the village of Vught, which was the location of a concentration camp during the Second World War—Kamp Vught—which was also the patch of heath where the entire Jewish community of Den Bosch had been burnt alive in the thirteenth century. The Germans can always be relied upon for a sense of history.

I started work on the memory theater almost immediately. It took months to organize, as I had no practical skills and spoke no Dutch. I hired a local architect called Bert van Roermund and two carpenters. Designs were drafted from Michel’s maquette. I even got students from the local art school to help me make a large number of papier-mâché figures, of various sizes, from six inches to two feet high, white and
anonymous, looking rather like vulgar gnome-like garden ornaments. They cost a fortune and the students were incompetent, requiring constant supervision. But within three months, despite the persistent drizzle of the Brabant autumn, the exterior work of the theater was finished. I would complete the interior alone.

The theater was enclosed with a roof like the maquette. It stood about eight feet high and sixteen feet across. I had to stoop a little to enter through a small door into a kind of
parodos
, or entrance, to the left and there was the stage, elevated six inches above the ground with a simple dark wooden kitchen chair. Around me, the mini-auditorium was arranged with its seven gangways and seven tiers. The blank, expressionless eyes of forty-nine papier-mâché statues stared back at me.

Then the work of memory really began. It was too cold, cramped, and poorly lit to work in the theater, so I took some of the statues into the house and began my taxonomy. In the front, with the smallest statues, I had arranged all the elements of my life that I could remember together with family attachments and friends, such as they were. The statues were brightly painted with sets of initials, number sequences, and
small diagrams that would call to mind whatever I recalled about my childhood, which wasn’t much, frankly. Having my head ducked in water at nursery school. A broken arm after being thrown off a scooter. Something about brother-sister incest. By cock, she was to blame. That cunt Kevin who bullied me at school. My ancient-history teacher was called Mr. Parker. Assyria and Babylon. The glory that was Greece. H. D. F. Kitto. I lost interest when we started studying medieval systems of plowing. The accident had wiped so much clean and the rest seemed like it belonged to someone else.

On row two, I had reduced my books and papers first to a series of short summaries and from that to a series of notations and symbols, which I memorized. By learning to associate text with image through a process of lengthy training, I could flawlessly reproduce extended stretches of argument and exposition. It was amazing. I also symbolized my various plans for works that I knew I would never finish, such as my series of essays on the superiority of Euripides over the other Greek tragedians, a book called
Sartre’s France
, a pamphlet on the etymologies of the names of fish in diverse languages, a set of embarrassing sub-Pessoaesque prose fragments, and a book on
Hamlet
that would now never get finished. The rest is silence.

Rows three to five were devoted to the history of philosophy. I arranged matters chronologically in a series of obvious clusters: (i) the Pre-Socratics, (ii) Platonists and Aristotelians, (iii) Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans, (iv) Classical Chinese Philosophers, and so on. I found this remarkably easy to symbolize: a solid circle for Parmenides, a torch for Heracleitus, twin scales of justice, one inverted and the other right side up, for Carneades, a line joining God and the world for Aquinas and a line separating them for Siger of Brabant, a butterfly for Zhuangzi, a snake for Plotinus, and so on through the centuries. When I could, as with Copernicus (a series of circles) and Kepler (an ellipse), I made a visual note of parallel developments in physics and later in chemistry and biology. It was oddly pleasing.

And so it went on. Row five finished with visualizations of (i) Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology (arrows pointed towards a head branded with a huge “S”) and his late account of the aleatory materialism of the encounter (rainfall and simple solids), (ii) Deleuze’s plane of immanence as a transcendental field (a simple geometrical plane—I adapted a map of
the Netherlands), and (iii) Derrida’s grammatological theory of signification (a series of Chinese ideograms borrowed from Ezra Pound’s
Cantos
). Row six was devoted to various personal miscellany: a series of symbolic maps registering land borders at the outbreak and end of the First and Second World Wars; the playing and coaching staff of the great Liverpool Football Club teams of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s reduced to a series of initials (RH, RY, IS-J, IC, KD—YNWA); snatches of lyrics of my fifty favorite albums: from
Here Come the Warm Jets
, through
Strangeways, Here We Come
, to
Fear of a Black Planet
.

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.