Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

(Doniger, The Woman )

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Scottie: What was there inside that told you to jump?

Madeleine: Please!

Scottie: What?

Madeleine: Please don’t ask me please don’t ask me.

(01:01:24)

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A reminder: the word “person” comes to us from the word “persona,” a Latin translation of the Greek “prosopon,” the mask actors wore in Greek theater. Per (that through which) sona (the sound [of the actor’s voice] comes).

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Scottie: Where are you now?

Madeleine: Here, with you.

Scottie: Where?

(01:00:47)

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We are never ourselves merely to ourselves but always in relation to others, even if only imagined others. Like Bishop Berkeley’s tree in the quad, we exist only when someone sees us. We become the person we see mirrored in the eyes of others, ideally someone we love or someone who loves us.

(Doniger, The Woman )

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If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Recollections of Wittgenstein )

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Deception often leads to being deceived; the trickster is duped because his own reflection blurs: “I had a mask that hid my face and I no longer know who I was when I looked at myself in the mirror.”

(Pierre Marivaux)

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Each of us is already a lot of people. And so when, failing to be the other person we hoped to change into, we fall back to our default position, we find a different form of ourselves awaiting us, a different one of our many selves.

(Doniger, The Woman )

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Kim Novak: “Sometimes I feel like I’m two different people. One is an ambitious young actress struggling to acquire an armor of sophistication. But not far beneath the surface is a girl who believes herself unattractive and odd — a misfit who is often lonely and introspective.”

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Thinking about the Maltese Falcon, the actual statuette, I found myself thinking also about the first chess automata.

These automata were cabinets with mannequins inside, mannequins put together and articulated so as to be capable of playing chess with human opponents. Though it was not widely known at the time of their popularity, these automata weren’t automatic at all. Instead, human chess masters — famous players — hid in recesses in the cabinets and directed the automata’s moves. The automata were nothing more than masks or gloves for these human masters. (The masters were paid for their discomfort — the recesses in the cabinets were usually quite small — though, given the rumored turnover in operators, the discomfort must have been greater than the pay.)

What we have, then, in the chess automaton, is a human pretending to be an automaton pretending to play chess, i.e., pretending to human intelligence, i.e., pretending to be human (since cogito ergo sum ). (What really is the difference between these masters pulling levers in a cabinet and modern-day programmers writing software? And yet when we play a game of computer chess, we would never dream of saying that we’ve just played a human being.) That the automaton’s challengers did not suspect they were playing another human being is beside the point. Why do we find things disguised as other things (even when those disguises actually expose their wearers) more appealing than things left undisguised? Is this attraction to artificiality the true legacy of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? The Maltese Falcon was worth at least two lives — would a gold falcon statue, uncovered by lead, really be worth as much? Once the lacquer has been scraped away or the automaton revealed, it’s worthless. But in their disguises, they’re both worth fortunes.

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Impostors. teach us, by positive precept and negative example, how to believe in ourselves as something other than impostors.

(Schwartz, Culture )

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The local video store has a sign in its window: WE CAN PUT YOUR MEMORIES ON VIDEOTAPE. But memory isn’t memory until it is past tense. It is subjective, filled with internal voice. They might capture the event — but not the memory. To do that, I would have to hold the camera, select the angle of vision. And to hold the camera is to efface the self. To become an impersonal eye. A cold and singular lens.

(Judith Kitchen, “Transitional”)

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Robert Musil wrote in his journal, “It is not the case that we reflect on things. Rather things think themselves out within us.” And we think things out within things, it seems.

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At the security checkpoint at SFO, I explained that I had lost my wallet but that my flight was leaving in an hour. A TSA agent led me through a passage made out of temporary walls, the kind office cubicles are made out of, and put me in a very small room with a desk but no chair. He pulled out a cell phone, typed some numbers into it, and handed me the phone. I waited for a moment. I was asked by a recorded voice to type in my social security number. I did so. A moment later, there was a woman on the other end of the line, asking me what my father’s mother’s maiden name was. I told her. She asked me what hospital I was born in. I told her. She asked me when my wife was born. I told her. She gave me a list of courses and asked which one I had not taken my sophomore year of college. After thinking for a while, I came up with what I think was the right answer. She asked me which way one would turn out of the driveway of the apartment complex I lived in in order to go downtown. I thought: “It depends on whether you want to take an unprotected left turn,” but I gave her the geographically correct answer. She gave me a list of names and asked me which was not a name of one of my first cousins. Again, I thought for a while and came up with the right answer. She asked me what color my eyes were, how tall I was, if I had any fillings. I answered everything. But if she had asked me how she could have known whether my answers were correct, I could not have answered. I was profoundly disturbed by the whole experience. Eventually, she asked me to turn the phone over to the TSA agent. I did. He handed my ticket back to me and escorted me back to the steel benches where people were putting their shoes back on. He warned me that if I exited the secured areas anywhere along my itinerary, I would have to go through the same process again, and the questions asked were never repeated. I could barely speak to say, “Thank you.” There was no feeling behind it anyway. It would have been a formality — I really wanted to ask him who it was he had called, how this could be real life. I still wonder what his answer would have been.

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A British Royal Commission in 1904 warned that “Evidence as to identity based upon personal impressions is, unless supported by other facts, an unsafe basis for the verdict of a jury.”

(Schwartz, Culture )

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The more real-life echoes a crime story had for Hitchcock, the bigger his pool of references, the greater his enthusiasm.

(Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light )

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[D]ifference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra.

(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition )

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A man known all over the world who had delusions that strangers were staring at him — how in this case could reality be sorted out from fantasy? What was the frame of reference which would distinguish them one from the other?