Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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Falling is an “orientational metaphor,” signifying a lack of control. Thus, to “fall down on the job” means to fail to do something one ought to have done. “Fail” and “fall” share a common origin, the Sanskrit phálati , which means “it bursts.” “It bursts”?

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Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge “There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.” On one level, when you “step out of yourself” and see yourself as “just another human being,” it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life. When you try to imagine your own nonexistence, you have to try to jump out of yourself, by mapping yourself onto someone else. You fool yourself into believing that you can import an outsider’s view of yourself into you [and] though you may imagine that you have jumped out of yourself, you never can actually do so.

(Doug Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach )

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To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.

(Edouard Levé, Suicide )

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“The reality is that we seldom define things by essence; more often, we give lists of properties. And this is why all the lists that define something through a nonfinite series of properties, even though apparently vertiginous, seem to be closer to the way in which, in everyday life. we define and recognize things. A representation by accumulation or series of properties presupposes not a dictionary, but a kind of encyclopedia — one which is never finished, and which the members of a given culture know and master, according to their competence, only in part.” That is what Umberto Eco says, in his Confessions of a Young Novelist .

In Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett: The Stoic Comedians , Hugh Kenner writes that the Encyclopedia is an invention that “takes all that we know apart into little pieces, and then arranges those pieces so that they can be found one at a time. It is produced by a feat of organizing, not a feat of understanding.” Thus Eco’s “representation by accumulation” is a “feat of organizing, not a feat of understanding,” which would seem a kind of diminution. Kenner makes his claim in the context of describing Flaubert’s achievements as a novelist: Flaubert recognized in the novel a closed system and perfected it by considering every bit in light of all of the others. Both the novel and the Encyclopedia are, after all, artifacts; they are controllable, artificial, and finite.

Kenner’s capitalized Encyclopedia is historical — compiled by Denis Diderot, it existed at a particular point in time, was printed and had boundaries (endpapers, boards, a binding). The process that he describes, however, is ongoing and unfinished. The production of an encyclopedia understood as an atomization of knowledge is a potentially infinite process; considered point by point, the acquiring of knowledge is simply a variation on one of Zeno’s paradoxes — each concept is really a collection of concepts, each of which can be explained as a collection of concepts, each of which can be explained as yet another collection of concepts, and so on. A book is an organization, finite; the process of composing a book is an attempt at understanding, infinite.

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Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Self evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

(David Markson, This Is Not a Novel )

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Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo — fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being )

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It is a cliché: “My whole life flashed in front of my eyes,” we say. The dead will never be able to tell us what happened in the moment of death, so we, the living, can speak only of the near-death experience. Still, the cliché seems questionable: What “eyes”? If it is just a “flash,” how does it register, and how much of it registers? Whether we register it or not, how much of our lives can pass in a “flash”? Is the flash actually the experience of relief, like the feeling of first scratching an itch, relief that we have reached the point where we can finally describe our life as whole, complete, finished?

Our experience of time is plastic, that much we do know. We have all felt it change: a few seconds seem to take hours to pass; hours pass in what feels like seconds. That, too, is a cliché. The cliché of the moment of death or near-death has its complement in this strange, subjective pliability of time. Scottie’s fall from the rooftop may have taken just a little over two hours, the movie’s running time, that instant for him (and for us) like entering a wormhole somehow, and at the end, at the bottom, just before the moment of impact, we have a view from a great height, looking down but not seeing. Why not? Can anyone really anticipate what the journey will be like or how long it may seem to take? A fall of seven or eight stories may as well seem like two hours, two years. It therefore seems just possible — doesn’t it? — that we are all already in that moment of passing, that our lives flash before our eyes because the lives we are living only seem to pass at the speed we have accustomed ourselves to, that we are all living in a kind of freefall, that our experience of life is really only an experience of the moment of death, that we are all already on the point of dying, and that this is why we pass out of existence in an instant. One moment alive, the next, not. A thread is cut. It is not only Scottie hanging from that gutter. We are there, too.

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Although, properly speaking, we open the film with a stranger, a woman who will never again appear in it, neither Midge nor Madeleine nor Judy, a woman who is not credited (though appearing underneath the credits) and who seems to have nothing to do with what follows.

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Saul Bass, on the (beginning of the) title sequence: “Here’s a woman made into what a man wants her to be. She is put together piece by piece and I tried to suggest something of this as the fragmentation of the mind of Judy.”

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The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss but the abyss of the death of another person. It’s what philosophers describe as the “night of the world.” Like when you see another person, into his or her eyes, you see the abyss. That’s the true spiral which is drawing us inward.

(Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (film))

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Bass’s shot of the eye from which the spiral ascends during the title sequence mirrors or mimics a shot (or, really (appropriately), two shots) in Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon,” of a woman’s eye at an identical distance from the camera. Given that “Meshes” was filmed in 1943 ( Vertigo was released in 1958), there is no reason not to think that Bass knew of and was perhaps even quoting from Deren’s film, in which a woman is first doubled, then trebled, and, by the end, either commits suicide or is murdered by the man she lives with.

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