“It appears to be a biography of Plato,” Robert said. “It recounts the few biographical facts and anecdotes associated with the broad-shouldered one, which is the meaning of Plato’s name from the Attic platys, broad, as platanos, the broad-leaved plane tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus sit. You know, the Phaedrus takes place in the shade of the Plato-Tree.” God, Robert could be a pedant, particularly when he was right. Plato had apparently died writing. I wish I knew how he felt.
Michel had basically assembled all of the real or apocryphal data available about Plato, from Cicero, Hermippus, Diogenes Laërtius, and even Ficino, who claimed that Plato died on his birthday. (Many happy returns! There will be no returns.) He had written the data on a chart, complete with the titles of extant dialogues and several apocryphal texts for which we have only the titles, the names of purported family members (for example, Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who appear as Socrates’ interlocutors in the Republic), and some significant dates. The phone rang and Robert had to go back upstairs to resume his duties.
There was a sequence of a further ten such charts, each one devoted to a philosopher or thinker with whom Michel clearly felt a strong affinity: Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Plotinus, John Scottus Eriugena, Montaigne, Campanella, Pascal, Spinoza, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In short, these were Michel’s favorites. The oddities on the list were Zhuangzi, whom Michel had never mentioned to me, but whose Inner Chapters I had read and become captivated by; and Spinoza, who initially didn’t seem to fit in his canon. As with the Plato chart, the data was organized in a series of circles. In the outer circles, there was all the biographical data, information on family background, parents’ occupations, education, teachers, number of children, affairs, marriages, scandals, political intrigues, etc. etc. In the inner circle, there was a chronological listing of works, complete with one or two annotations or quotations. On the Nietzsche chart, Michel cited the final words of his final book, Ecce Homo, “M’a-t-on compris? Dionysos contre le Crucifié.” It was unclear to me whether Michel, the avowed Nietzschean, perhaps finally identified more with the Crucified Christ than with the ever-playful Bacchus. Has Michel been understood? Have I?
In the bull’s-eye center of the circle, the date of death was marked, sometimes together with the cause and location and occasionally a short comment. In Heidegger’s chart, Michel wrote, “Le 26 mai 1976, après une nuit d’un sommeil réparateur, Heidegger s’endormit à nouveau et ne se réveilla jamais!” Clearly, Michel envied Martin his final night of refreshing sleep and his peaceful demise.
Michel had obviously discovered some weirdly idiosyncratic technique for plotting and recalling the lives and works of the philosophers. But then my mind cast back to Michel’s essay on Hegel and to Yates’s The Art of Memory. These were not standard astrological projections at all. They were memory maps, spatially organized devices like the memory theaters Michel had discovered in Francis Yates’s book. They weren’t so much birth charts as death charts, necronautical rather than genethlialogical. Their purpose was to plot the major events in a philosopher’s life and then to use those events to explain his demise. Much of the script was simply illegible or had faded and many of the charts had odd, vaguely occult-like geometrical designs that resembled crayon drawings I had seen by schizophrenics when I was visiting my friend Samson in hospital after his suicide attempt (crayons were dispensed rather than pens and pencils in order to avoid suicide attempts or attacks on staff). I had no idea what the designs meant.
Beneath the initial eleven memory maps, I came across another, very dog-eared chart that was clearly written in a different hand. I peered hard through the magnifying glass. The chart was signed with a flourish with the name printed underneath in uppercase in the traditional French fashion. It read “Henri MONGIN” and it was dated 1985. I knew that name. I wracked my brains and recalled a conversation I’d had with Elizabeth on one of our drizzly Welsh walks. I’d asked her where Michel’s interest in astrology and the occult had begun and she said that he’d learned it at the hands of one of his philosophy teachers, also an early follower of Heidegger, Henri Mongin. Clearly, Mongin had projected Michel’s memory map and Michel was the inheritor of a technique that Mongin had either discovered or also inherited from a teacher. Who knew how far back this occult tradition might extend? If I could produce an heir, then maybe it would continue.
Looking more closely at the map, all the events in Michel’s life were carefully recorded: his family background in the Alsace, the occupation of his father, who was also a philosophy teacher in a lycée in Strasbourg, the birth of his younger brother, Roger, his marriage with Elizabeth in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1970, and so on. But the strangest thing was that the map also predicted the events of Michel’s life after the date of its composition. It mentioned his elevation to full professor at Paris XII (Créteil) in 1991 and subsequently at the Sorbonne in 1995. It also listed the titles of the books that Michel would go on to publish: Nietzsche et la métaphysique and Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme, his most impressive published work. After La fracture de l’histoire, from 1994, there followed an increasingly mediocre series of essay collections that finished with Par-delà le nihilisme from 1999. It was the most productive period of Michel’s life. I remembered him excitedly saying to me in his apartment in around 1996, “J’ai trois livres en chantier!” He had three books in production. No children were named on the map.
Michel knew that he was doomed. Did Elizabeth know too? Is that why she left him? She saw from the map that he would have no children. Michel could see the date, time, cause, and location of his death: “0421 h, le 18 août 2003, La Verrière (Yvelines), crise cardiaque.” I checked the precise details with my friend Beatrice in Reims, who had been a student and close friend of Michel. La Verrière was the little town to the southwest of Paris where Michel had spent his final years in a sanatorium. Knowing his fate, he had simply lost the will to live. He arrived dead just on time.
~ ~ ~
I moved more rapidly through the stack of charts with a growing sense of unease. All of the remaining maps were devoted to philosophers who had been either superiors or contemporaries of Michel or whom he had met and become curious about, such as his predecessor Sarah Kofman, Reiner Schürmann (whose name was on my office door when I arrived in New York and remained. It felt like a tomb), Emmanuel Levinas, André Schuwer, Gilles Deleuze, Dominique Janicaud, Michel Henry, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I thought this was clearly some eccentric mark of affection. Michel had secretly designed memory maps for the philosophers he admired and had met. But that hypothesis fell to pieces with the next discoveries.