~ ~ ~
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 sweat, 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.