Memory Theater (3 page)

Bruno was the Simon Magus figure of a Hermetic tradition of the arts of memory. In Frances Yates’s words, its central doctrine is, “All is in all in nature. So in the intellect all is in all. And memory can memorize all in all.” Through techniques of memory, the human being can achieve absolute knowledge and become divine. For Bruno, to understand is to speculate with images, where the human mind is the mirror of the cosmos which functions through powerful, proto-Jungian archetypes. Through the divine power of the imagination, the intellect can seize hold of the whole.

Bruno’s art of memory is enshrined in texts like
Torch of the Thirty Statues
from 1588, where towering mythological statues embody a Michelangelesque memory: Apollo, naked in his chariot, his head nimbed with solar rays, is the Monad or One; Saturn, brandishing his sickle, is the Beginning or Time;
Minerva is the divine in man reflecting the divine universe; the infigurable Orcus or Abyss signifies the thirst for divine infinity.

Bruno was an occupant of the French embassy in London between 1583 and 1586, the key years for the inception of the English poetic renaissance, ushered in by Fulke Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, and his group. These people were close to Bruno during his London years and he also met with John Dee, the Hermetic philosopher and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, who was the teacher of Sidney and Greville. Indeed, some believe that Greville was the author of plays attributed to Shakespeare, some of which were lost. Although such speculations are dubious, there is documentary evidence connecting Greville to Shakespeare and indeed mentioning that the former was the latter’s “master” (they both hailed from Warwickshire). Maybe the young Will found admittance into the circles of the Hermetic art of memory.

Such speculations find some anchor in history if we consider the writings of another Hermetic philosopher of the period, Robert Fludd. One of Yates’s most far-reaching contentions in
The Art of Memory
is that the memory space described in Fludd’s obscure treatises on the two worlds (the
Utriusque Cosmi
), and
which he describes as “public theaters,” may reflect or even anticipate the circular architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Is it not at least plausible to speculate that the Globe Theatre, with its heavens over part of the stage, complete with zodiacal symbols, was not some adapted bear pit or inn yard, as is commonly thought, but an elaborate and geometrically exacting theater of memory, a kind of machine for recalling the whole, a mortal portal for touching the divine, a microcosm for the cosmic macrocosm. Shakespearean theater might thus be the continuation of ancient and Renaissance traditions of the art of memory, a concrete building that embodied the operations of occult memory. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the theater is the stage of the world itself: its mirror and key.

The wilder excesses
of Yates’s book fascinated me in the mid-1980s, as they had attracted Michel in the late 1960s. For example, the idea that there might be a connection between the “Giordanisti” (the followers of Bruno) and the Rosicrucians, the mysterious brotherhood of the Rosy Cross announced by manifestos published in Germany in the early 1600s and who might never have existed, and with the Freemasons, who first surface in 1646 in England. Indeed, the speculative masonry of this cult, with its emphasis on architecture and building, is also a tributary of the art of memory.

Yates ends her book by claiming that the art of memory does not disappear with Elizabethan theater, but reappears in a more secular and respectable guise in the various seventeenth-century projects for an encyclopedia of knowledge that would reflect the
world and make it available to memory. We find such projects in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz—indeed, Leibniz took over from Bruno the concept of the “monad,” the simplest substance or unit of existence out of which the entire universe was constructed.

The seventeenth-century fascination with the idea of a universal language, stimulated by Bacon’s demand for “real characters” for expressing notions, comes straight out of the tradition of the art of memory and is a rationalization of the occult and magical memory images of Bruno. This led to Leibniz’s plans for a “characteristica”: a system of universal signs based on the invention of infinitesimal calculus, a kind of modern hieroglyphics, an attempted recovery of the language of Adam against the Babel of the world. These signs would be placed onto a vast combinatorial machine, a proto-computer, the calculations of which would provide all possible permutations of the knowable.

As with Camillo’s stupendous memory theater, Leibniz never completed his plan for the universal characteristic and ended his life in failure, an unwanted and ignored courtier abandoned by his patron, Duke Georg Ludwig, who went off to become King George I of England in 1714, leaving Leibniz in Hannover. But their
hybris
lives on in the idea of a
universal key, a
clavis universalis
, that will unlock the secrets of nature, an arcane encyclopedia that would arrive at universal knowledge through the right combination of the constituent, abstracted features of reality. And what subtends this desire for an encyclopedia, Yates contends, is an ecumenical drive for an ethic of universal love and charity that would overcome all the religious differences that lead to intolerance and war, a kind of Rosicrucian effort at a universal reformation of man, the occult humanist strand at the heart of the Northern European Enlightenment.

Michel’s
simple but brilliant idea was to read Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
as a memory theater, namely as a continuation of Yates’s tradition of the art of memory. The main protagonist in Hegel’s book—the book that nearly ruined my life when I first read it when I was twenty-three (I thought it was too incontestably true and it ruined everything else I read)—is a personage called
Geist
or Spirit. By Spirit, Hegel means no less than the entire cultural development of the world. His basic thought is that Spirit requires a series of appearances or phenomena in arresting, dramatic, and memorable images. These images, or what Hegel calls “shapes,” by which world history is traced as if in silhouette, have to be seized by the self and made our own. The stated goal of Hegel’s philosophy is that substance becomes subject: namely, that the knowledge of the whole which exists externally in its historical
movement has to be grasped internally by the self. This is the process of
education
whereby a self ascends to an experience of self-determination.

This grasping of the whole is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge,” and he insists that this is possible only as recollection. This is why Hegel fills his book with vivid and indeed bloody images, such as the life-and-death struggle between master and slave, the unhappy consciousness, the vapidly legislating Stoic, the beautiful soul made mad by the world, and the terroristic reign of virtue in the French Revolution, where death had no more meaning than cutting the head off a cabbage or swallowing a gulp of water. Hegel’s pages are full of exaggerated and powerfully visual images, aids to recollection, like Bruno’s statues or the icons in the seats of Camillo’s theater. The
Phenomenology of Spirit
is a memory theater where the long path of the world’s historical development can be held in the storehouse of memory and obsessively replayed. Hegel insists that the movement of Spirit is the circle that returns into itself, a circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end. The theater of Spirit is a globe.

Hegel’s philosophy is a mnemotechnic system in the ancient and Renaissance tradition. The difference
is that what Hegel adds to his memory theater is
time
, that is, the experience of becoming. Rather than the static ensemble of Camillo, Hegel’s is a moving theater, a kind of proto-cinema. In the final paragraph of the
Phenomenology
, Hegel talks of becoming as a slow-moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which is endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moving slowly so that the self can penetrate and digest the entire wealth of its substance. This is why the
Phenomenology
can only be read in reverse. It’s like driving a car while constantly looking in the rearview mirror.

The German
Erinnerung
denotes both recollection and the active experience of making inward. As such, it can be opposed to forms of external, mechanical, technologized, or even neurophysiological memory, captured in the word
Gedächtnis
. The Hegelian art of memory is the
inwardizing
of all the shapes of Spirit. In memory, the whole world of history is emptied into subjectivity, filling up the void of the self. This fulfillment is what is meant by absolute knowledge: the unity of the divine and the human, what Hegel calls in the final words of the book “the Calvary of absolute Spirit.”

Absolute knowledge is the final shape of Spirit, the end that returns to the beginning where the movie
show begins again, and again, and again. Repetition, repetition, repetition—I thought of Mark E. Smith of the mighty Fall. Perhaps the task of each subsequent generation would be the construction of its own living memory theater, its own construction of the past in thought and image. The difference from Camillo’s theater, which has the subject onstage and the items to be remembered filling the auditorium, is that in Hegel’s theater the subject sits in an auditorium alone and views the shapes of spirit passing onstage in succession on a vast reel, trying to recall them all. For Hegel, what is being recalled is the history of Spirit, namely the very history that implicitly constitutes the viewing subject. What happens onstage is the entire spiritual drama of subjectivity, our drama. Through the art of memory, we learn to see ourselves from the perspective of the whole, from the standpoint of totality. In so doing, we become infinite, divinely human.

Michel’s essay
was astonishing, far and away the best thing I’d ever read by him. I had no idea why he didn’t publish it. It was admittedly the sketch of a larger argument. Maybe he moved on or just lost interest. Typical of him. However, I found the idea of a memory theater, even the Hegelian version, slightly droll, as I had lost much of my memory after the accident. All I remembered from that morning in the pharmaceutical factory was Jilted John playing on the radio—“Gordon is a moron”—and blood all over the floor. I loved that song. It was even more stripped down than conventional punk: two chords instead of three. Then my hand got trapped in the machine by inch-thick steel paddles. Steel slicing flesh. After I pulled out my hand, horribly mangled and hanging by what looked like bloody tendons, threads, and shards of bone, I collapsed.

I remember being blissfully out of my brain on pethidine in a hospital bed and trying to put my hand up a nurse’s skirt. Then I blacked out. Then I remember going into the operating theater. I blacked out again. My dad was by my bedside as I came around, my hand suspended above me and wrapped in vast bandages. It was dark and I told him that it wasn’t my fault this time. Then I lost consciousness again.

After three operations and as many weeks in hospital, I was told by the specialist that my hand wouldn’t have to be amputated. Here it is in front of me right now, arthritic and disfigured with a huge skin graft scar, but still capable of slow two-finger typing. Tap, tap. A registered disability, no less. It’s like that bloody short story by Maupassant. I kept my hand, more or less, but lost large fields of my memory. This was the effect of the trauma, doctors told me. How reassuring. I would get flashbacks, for sure, but they were often vague and they didn’t necessarily feel like
my
memories. My self felt like a theater with no memory. All the seats were empty. Nothing was happening onstage. I sat back in my office chair and closed my eyes.

Reg Varney
, one of the university security guards whom I’d known since I was an undergraduate at Essex, woke me. It was getting really late and I had a longish drive back to the perfectly anonymous village I used to stay at on the Suffolk border. I decided to leave the last box for tomorrow, marked
Pisces
. My star sign.

I got back to the little house I rented, Churchgate Cottage, next to a medieval graveyard that surrounded an undistinguished fifteenth-century parish church. The nearest grave belonged to one James Brown, deceased in 1748. Where be your funk now? I drew a very hot bath and lay there, turning things over in my mind and listening to the shipping forecast on the BBC. A repeat-loop surrealist poem:

Moderate or good, occasionally poor. Poor, becoming moderate. I lay in the steaming water and mouthed the other regions of the sea: South Iceland, Biscay, Fitzroy, Trafalgar. Bliss. It was an incantatory memory poem. Recall the sea and retain the land.
Jede Englander ist ein Insel
. Appropriately enough, the late-night forecast was always followed by the national anthem. The islands were safe. We could all rest.

I went to bed. With the sound of automated bells in the church tower outside and the discreet aid of Ambien, I fell into a profound sleep. I immediately began to dream floridly. I was floating, small, angelic or bug-like, inside a vast Gothic cathedral. It looked like the capacious nave of Lincoln Cathedral, but it was truly some kind of compound image of Canterbury, Norwich, Beverley Minster, Peterborough, Ely, and
York. I floated up to the ceiling and hovered beneath the roof bosses. I gazed from one end of the cathedral to the other. Each roof boss depicted a stage in the history of the world from Creation onwards through the Fall and expulsion east of Eden, the figural precursors of Christ in the Kings of Israel, onwards into the Nativity, the young Jesus’ lecture in the blinded synagogue, the miracles, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and, finally, Christ triumphant, in majesty framed by a vast, vagina-like mandala. His beginning is his end.