It was still dark when I woke up. Breathless and rigid with anxiety. Mouth aching from clenched teeth. A show about Malian griots. 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. 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 A 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.
