I gazed at the huge, rose-shaped eastern window, soaking in the hues of ruby red glass and lapis lazuli. Then I descended abruptly into the choir, circling around the lectern in the form of an eagle — St. John — and beneath the stalls. I looked intently at a long series of mercy seats, or misericords, each with elaborate wood carving beneath it. There was an elephant with horse’s feet, a gaping-mouthed fool with his tongue stuck out, a bear being hanged by geese, a series of Jack-o’-the-Greens or Green Men peering out all phallic and menacing, a fox lecturing an audience of ducks, a blacksmith trying to put horseshoes on a dog, endless images of wrestlers, a devil conducting dentistry on a poor open-mouthed soul, and finally the image of a mild-faced mother and child dancing together.
Out I floated into the chapter house, with stone carvings of three-headed kings, veiled women, fighting lions, and tumblers, directly over the dean’s throne. There were many, many monkeys and the carving of a vast serpent eating a cat. The angle of a vault entered the cranium of the Green Man and went out through his mouth. There were mouths everywhere. Fiercely oral architecture. Eucharistic gluttony. Eat the bready body of God and wash it down with his sweet blood — like Leopold Bloom with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. Transubstantiation. I thought of seedcake. Back I flew into the body of the cathedral and floated there gazing at its cruciform shape, the simple vaulted ceiling and the light pouring in through the clerestory, down through the triforium into the bays beneath. I felt majestic. Then I was suddenly sucked out of the cathedral roof through an octagonal wooden lantern; my head burst through the glass and I was being pulled up into the air faster and faster. I could see the cathedral’s twin towers receding below me and the vivid green flatness of the English landscape. The sky was getting deeper and deeper blue and I couldn’t breath. The skin on my face was beginning to smolder with the intense heat. I could smell myself burning. Father can’t you see?
~ ~ ~
It was still dark when I woke up. Breathless and rigid with anxiety. Mouth aching from clenched teeth. I lay there waiting for light to come, listening to the BBC World Service. A show about Malian griots. I couldn’t think of anything apart from death and the vague prospect of breakfast cereal.
I drove back to the university the next morning and thought about my dream of the Gothic cathedral as a vast memory theater. The medieval love of the figural, the dramatic, and the grotesque was not, then, evidence of either some tortured sexual repression or the liberation from such repression, as we moderns arrogantly assume, but is simply a powerful and vivid aid to recollection. Before the Reformation and the rise of literacy, image rather than print was the privileged means of religious instruction. The seemingly wild imaginings of the Gothic cathedral were simply concrete ways of shaping the entirety of time, from Creation to Redemption, as an aid to recollection and reflection. In a cathedral, time became space, fixed in location, embodied in stone. It was a vast time capsule. Decline from Gutenberg onwards. Fuck the Reformation.
But wasn’t this also true of everything, even the shipping forecast? Might not the space of a town or city be seen as a memory theater? One walks or moves in a city, most Bloom-like, and somehow the entirety of the past is silently whispering through locations — ghostly and sepulchral. Like a huge question mark. And implicitly that story becomes one about the future as well. The city is a spatial network of memory traces, but also a vast predictive machine.
I looked out of the car window at the slow windings of the A1124 as it wended through the subtle hills of the Colne Valley and thought of the old Roman road between Colchester and Cambridge. Traders carrying oysters wrapped in damp sacks from Mersea Island. Might not a landscape itself be seen as a memory theater? Might not the whole globe be viewed as a set of memory traces for life, organic and inorganic, past and future? When we look at the night sky, all we see is the past; the further we look, the further back we see. To see the future, we must turn inward.
Maybe the Hegelian memory theater is not just a map of the past, but a plan of the future, a predictive memory theater. Everyone could have their own memory theater. Everyone was their own memory theater. If I had no memory, had I ceased to really exist at the moment of the accident? Was this a kind of death in life where I was experiencing a kind of reverse dementia?
As I reached the office, the thought hit me: Did Michel have plans for building a memory theater? Or did he perhaps even build one?
~ ~ ~
I opened the Pisces box. There were a compendious number of obscene epitaphs written in Latin denouncing various of Michel’s academic enemies, of which one has many in France, bien sûr. There were also a number of translations from Martial’s epigrams where Michel had crudely cut out a page of the Latin text and handwritten beside it, often illegibly, a French translation. They were awfully rude. My favorites were: “Lesbia claims she’s never laid, without good money being paid” and “If from the baths you hear a round of applause, Maron’s prick is bound to be the cause.” Michel translated “mentula” as “queue.” “Prick” worked quite well, I thought.
I dug deeper, through piles of notes and drafts for lectures and seminars from the final years. Among some frankly uninspiring material, I found a fascinating little presentation of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and the beginnings of a comparison with Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Artwork.” It looked like it was dated 1997, with the word “Perouse” in uppercase at the top of the title page, the French name for Perugia in Umbria, where we met every summer for many years. There were stacks of yellowing papers which I glanced at quickly and several large Rhodia notepads with squared graph paper, as is the French custom, covered with Michel’s sloping scrawl. I used to collect those notebooks and fill them with awful stretches of sub — T. S. Eliot lyric poetry and then type them up. Thank God I stopped writing poetry.
Then, at the bottom of the box, I discovered a stack of what initially looked like unframed lithographic prints on large pieces of stiff card. On closer inspection, however, they were a series of circular charts covered with numbers, dates, and masses of cramped handwriting. Each chart was arranged in concentric circles. Each circle was intersected by irregularly divided lines radiating out from the center, which was left empty apart from some writing. Knowing Michel’s predilection for astrology, I assumed they were star charts.
I felt a chill, as if someone had walked over my grave. I knew I’d stumbled onto something interesting. But the charts were impossible to read. I bundled them up with some string from my desk and decided to continue work in the university library. I needed dictionaries, reference books, and magnifying devices. The librarian, Robert Butler, was an old drinking companion of mine and would be able to help.
I settled into the special collections room in the basement of the library. As the academic year had just finished, all was quiet and I was alone. It was perfect. Surrounded by hundreds of rare books on wooden shelves with a carpeted floor, all I could hear was the persistent, high-pitched ringing of my tinnitus, my constant, clandestine companion since the breakdown in Nice in 1986. I began to do random Internet searches on astrological charts, but my initial hunch was not confirmed. Frustrated, I called Robert to come down and tell me what he thought the diagrams were. Laconic Dundonian. He took his time with a large magnifying glass before concluding, “They resemble astrological charts, drawn carefully by hand with a compass and protractor, with their concentric circles and division into what look like zodiacal houses. But they are full of words instead of the numbers, degrees, planes, and lines that one would expect.” He began to peer through the glass and mouth what he saw: “Platon, 428/427-348/347 av. J.-C … ne fait d’ailleurs référence à lui-même qu’à deux reprises dans ses deux douzaines de dialogues … Platon avait trente et un ans à la mort de Socrate … D’après Cicéron, Platon se serait éteint en train d’écrire …