At Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Table
This episode opens a series of twenty-two imaginary encounters between the living and the dead, the real and the invented.
They are conversations born of a desire to understand how ideas reincarnate themselves—century after century—within our voices and our bodies.
Each chapter gathers a small group of “spirits”: thinkers, artists, mystics who discuss what escapes the boundaries of any single discipline—consciousness, faith, matter, desire.
The names that appear here will return, changed and resonant, in the following episodes. It is an experiment in narrative theology—or perhaps simply a way of saying that thought never truly dies.
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Florence, late afternoon. The sun melts across the warm stones of the Museo degli Innocenti, while the sky fades into a washed-out fresco of violets against a golden ground.
I return here after a long year of exile from my homeland, to the place where I once attended nursery school, together with my friend Adnane—a gentle voice of Muslim-Christian dialogue and a traveler along spiritual frontiers.
Our plan had been to visit the exhibition on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and dream for a while of the creative opulence of fin-de-siècle Paris; but once the visit was over, we lingered at the Caffè del Verone, admiring from its terrace the Florentine skyline of domes and red-tiled roofs.
As soon as we sit down, a waiter with an old-fashioned smile insists on serving us two glasses of absinthe, à la Montmartre.
And then—swaggering, sunlit, unmistakable—Rupert Sheldrake walks into the café: the “heretic” biologist who theorized morphic fields, dressed in a light-linen jacket, with the distracted air of a naturalist on holiday. He recognizes us, waves with delight, and joins our table.
Moments later, without anyone understanding how, other guests begin to appear.
First comes Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec himself, cane gleaming, half-smoked cigar in hand. A step behind him follows Fazlur Rahman, one of the great Muslim theologians of the twentieth century, serene as only those who have made peace with both faith and reason can be.
To the right of our table stands the profile of Julian Jaynes, the Princeton psychologist who hypothesized the bicameral mind and the divine voices as remnants of a brain once divided;
to the left, the spectral duo of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the French philosophers of desire-as-machine, inseparable as the Dioscuri;
and finally, a few steps back, I glimpse Gananath Obeyesekere, the Sri Lankan anthropologist who studied the religious mind and the myth of Western rationality.
The café is no longer a café. It has become a threshold between worlds, suspended between the visible and the imagined.
And of course it is Lautrec who taps his glass against the table, as if to open a convivial rite:
“So then, my friends,” he says with a half-smile, “when we see too much, is it the mind that overflows—or the world that invades us?”
Rahman opens his mouth to reply, but Sheldrake—driven by the gentle zeal of the curious man, and by the well-known forwardness of the English researcher—gets there first. Rahman gestures to him graciously, as if to say, please, go ahead.
Sheldrake places his cup back on its saucer with that deliberate movement of someone who’s about to say something that matters to him. His eyes are bright and restless, darting from one interlocutor to another, searching for the right way to enter a conversation that has been going on for centuries.
“I’d say both perspectives are true,” he begins, in the unmistakable accent of the English expatriate in Florence. “That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to express for years with my idea of morphic fields. The individual mind doesn’t create the message—it tunes in to it. It’s like a tuning fork resonating to the frequency of a wider field. The trouble is that we moderns have cut the cord, convincing ourselves that we are nothing but brain, nothing but synapses.”
He pauses, smiles, then adds:
“But if God speaks filtered through the human mind—as dear Fazlur suggests regarding the Prophet Muhammad—then every mind is an antenna. Cleaner or dirtier, depending on its fears, its language, its body. I would call it a phenomenon of morphic resonance: the divine doesn’t speak in words, but as an echo vibrating through living forms.”
He leans back; his tone softens.
“And that, I think, is the real challenge: knowing when the echo of a divine voice is genuine, and when it’s merely the return of our inner noise.”
Then, with an ironic grin, he looks at his glass of wine.
“This helps too, sometimes. Not to silence the mind, but to tune it.”
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Sheldrake’s words dissolve into the café’s smoke and the crimson reflections of wine in the glass.
A brief silence falls over the table—then a clear, ringing laugh cuts through the air.
We all turn: Lou von Salomé has appeared at the café’s entrance, wrapped in a mauve coat, her face lit by an irony that asks for no one’s permission.
Daughter of Tsarist Russia, philosopher, writer, and muse to Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou carries the restless energy of one who learned to think with the body and to desire with the mind. She is the liveliest ghost the Innocenti could have conjured: her step a flash of lightning, her voice a gentle heresy.
“Ah, you men!” she begins.
“You’re always talking about the divine as if it were some abstract force—something the body can only corrupt!” she exclaims, setting her handbag decisively on an empty chair. “I say the real problem is that you think too much and feel too little. God manifests in every body that empties itself well and laughs wholeheartedly. Forget transcendence.”
She looks at us one by one, then fixes me with a conspiratorial half-smile.
“Margherita, I believe you already know this… When you’re at peace with your body, your bowels move better and your anxiety eases. The body doesn’t lie. The body is the first prophet—the one Moses and Freud forgot to take down the mountain.”
Sheldrake blushes slightly; Adnane stifles a laugh. Lou continues—merciless and tender at once:
“To think of oneself as an ape is far more accurate than to think of oneself as free. But the two are not opposed, oh no. One can be both ape and free—so long as one stops believing that freedom means denying one’s own animality. The bonobos know this better than we do, with their gift for turning tension into pleasure, hierarchy into play, fear into touch.”
She pours a little wine into Sheldrake’s glass without asking.
“Caparezza was right in singing Bonobo power. The divine is there, in the short-circuit between instinct and intelligence. Not in sterile mysticism, nor in biological reductionism. It appears when the body learns to laugh at itself, and the soul stops pretending it has no orifices.”
Then she sits beside me, crossing her legs.
“So, my dear prophets and philosophers, if you want to speak with God, start from the lower belly. That’s where the ascent begins.”
Lou has barely finished speaking—and it’s unclear whether her words are meant as aphorism or provocation—when Adnane clears his throat.
“I… I think I’ll need a little time to digest this idea of thinking apes,” he says with a friendly smile. “Margherita, I’ll see you around – but I’ll think about it, I promise I will.”
Rahman rises as well, with the quiet grace of one unsure whether he’s leaving a conversation or an era.
“Sometimes,” he murmurs, “theology begins with an animal gesture. It’s a good evening for meditation.”
Their two silhouettes move away together down the steps, absorbed into the liquid gold of the sunset.
Lou follows them with her eyes, then turns toward me and Sheldrake.
“Serious men,” she says softly, “always run away after a woman has spoken too clearly about the body.”
She lights a cigarette—or perhaps only imagines it, since the smoke leaves no trace—and adds:
“But don’t worry. They always come back, once they realize it was life itself doing philosophy, not us.”
Sheldrake chuckles quietly, a laboratory laugh surrendering, for a moment, to poetry.
The terrace slowly empties; voices fade like candles in the wind.
I remain alone with Lou and Sheldrake—but they too seem already elsewhere: she in a past that refuses to stop speaking, he in a future trying to translate her into data.
“It’s truly a good evening for meditation,” Rahman had said.
And so it is.
Later, I have an invitation to attend an event with a mysterious title—The Universal Gnosis.
They say it will be about Saint Francis of Assisi, but I already know that, in these times of thresholds and apparitions, no saint ever stays entirely in his own century.
So I gather my notebook, bid farewell to the spirits—or perhaps I’m the one left waiting—and step into the night, ready to see who will come to speak with me this time,
while in the dark a distorted voice keeps singing: