Loving Memory

Abstract

Possible relations between libraries and death, books and gravestones, are manifold. One may think, for example, of relations between the spirit and the letter (soul and body, the material and the immaterial), not least with the ‘care of self’ in associating philosophical reading with contemplative preparation for death. In the relation between the metaphorical and the literal, what is offered to reflection in both cemetery and library (through a reading of names and a concern for memory) is an appeal to and for loving memory. Furthermore, alongside these manifold senses of literacy, relations between libraries and death involve practices intended to ‘show respect’—for example, by keeping quiet and not causing a ‘disturbance’. How does the ephemerality of these situations correlate with the enduring pathos of writing in stone, evoking the books of life and death as distinct, say, from the legibility of fossils? Faced with the necro-politics of capitalism, who would we be if inscriptions on gravestones became, indeed, illegible—not because they had been effaced in time (their outline erased by the weather), but because we no longer understood ourselves to be addressed by them—or even, if we perhaps no longer cared?

Notes

1 In the essay-film of which this text is a complement (as if researching ‘in theory’ a work ‘in practice’), Bernard Stiegler discusses precisely an organology of memory, in a juxtaposition with images of gravestones rendered as books – evoking (in their very appeal to it) ‘loving memory’. This mode of attention, as a historical form of an art of individuation, is the practice that animates the analogy between bodies and books that is figured in the film’s visiting a cemetery. The sonorities of the transcriptions of Bach by György Kurtág, which alternate with those of Stiegler’s own voice, echo – in concert music rather than church music – a tradition of ‘psychopannychism’ (a Protestant understanding of the dead being at rest before the Day of Judgment, their souls asleep rather than prey to the commerce of the Catholic church’s indulgences (Laqueur 2015: 59)). In the relation between performance and recording (as, precisely, between its anamnesis and hypomnesis), there is a sense of lullaby that is audible (I feel) in the duet playing of the composer and his wife, with an aura of loving memory suggestive of care rather than a religiose sentimentality. The film is available to view on Vimeo in English (Twitchin 2014a) and in a slightly different, French version (Twitchin 2014b).

2 This essay is dedicated, in loving memory, to my mother, my maternal grandparents and great uncle, who are all buried at Mill Hill Cemetery (although none of them beneath books), where the photographs were taken.