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.