Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

When I’m home, alone, writing or not writing, I can hear my neighbors in their apartment. Our walls are thin. They interrupt my concentration every now and again. I’ve learned to live with them and they’ve learned to live with me, but I’ll hear them walking to their door, their noisy, creaky door, and I’ll wait for them to open it, maybe without even realizing I’m waiting for it, and they won’t open it. I lose my focus. Open the door! Their dog will bark and then suddenly fall silent mid-bark, and somewhere in my mind, I’ll wonder what happened and I’ll lose the sentence I was working on. There is a laugh, louder than normal, more hysterical, and something on the page eludes me. When did any of it happen? I don’t remember. I don’t even remember that any of it happened — I’ve made it all up. I forgot it almost at the same moment it happened. Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. My memory, intent on preserving the things I am focused on, the things I’ve told myself are significant — the book — chooses not to recall everything else.

In a near-death experience, everything is significant. And, as one’s memory records everything, and everything, seeming significant, calls up a memory that, the brain thinks, might help to prevent or at least put off death, one’s life flashes before one’s eyes, or at least as much of one’s life as has any potential bearing on one’s present circumstances. It is not an elegy or a lamentation or even a memoir, it is an escape plan, a plot the brain hatches or anyway attempts to hatch. Somewhere in Scottie’s reflections on Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton is the key to saving his life.

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In life you, the reader may suddenly hear a cry for help; you see only the window; you then look out and at first see nothing but moving traffic. But you do not hear the sound natural to these cars and buses ; instead you hear still only the cry that first startled you. At least you find with your eyes the point from which the sound came; there is a crowd, and someone is now lifting the injured man, who is now quiet . But, now watching the man, you become aware of the din of traffic passing, and in the midst of its noise there gradually grows the piercing signal of the ambulance. At this your attention is caught by the clothes of the injured man: his suit is like that of your brother, who, you now recall, was due to visit you at two o’clock.

(V. I. Pudovkin, “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film”)

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The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present; this is what keeps the genre from congealing. The novelist is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed.

(Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination )

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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”)

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[EXT. A Cemetery South of San Francisco (DAY)]

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I. am not the visual reality that my eyes encompass, for if I were, darkness would kill me and nothing would remain in me to desire the spectacle of the world, or even to forget it.

(Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality”)

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I hated the thought of following my wife. We’d been together seven years. We trusted each other. I pretended to myself that I wasn’t following her. I followed her to work, but really I was just running errands early, trying to beat the crowds.

Twice, I saw her on my way home from following her to work. The first time, I saw her in the passenger seat of a car on the other side of the road (she was going in the same direction she had already gone, again). The second time, I saw her through the window of the MAX. Though I told myself over and over that these women could not have been her, I had seen what I had seen. Everything had seemed fine not too long ago, but how could I go on pretending that everything was still fine? I was following her.

In the car, she’d been wearing the jacket she’d stopped wearing after I said she looked beautiful in it. I decided to look through her closet. It wasn’t there. When I asked her to wear it to dinner, she told me we couldn’t afford to go out, and, besides, she’d donated that jacket to Goodwill. On the MAX, she’d been wearing a dress I had seen her spill red wine on. I looked through her closet. Nothing.

Then she spoke to me, finally, after too long, and it was the worst thing that could have happened. She said she was pregnant. She looked angry. I was on the verge of tears, I think. Even now, I can’t be sure what I was feeling. I asked if she was sure. Really, I wanted to stop time, make it so that I didn’t have to live this moment. Yes, she was sure. It was a stupid question. We aren’t ready, I was thinking. I was thinking: this is the worst possible time for this to happen. What are you thinking? she asked. What she meant was, Should I have an abortion? I’m not just saying that, now, to make myself feel better about what I said then — that’s what she meant. I said that it was going to be her decision. Had she been to the doctor? Was she really sure? She looked so disgusted with me. I felt disgusted with me. I thought: When had we even had sex last? It would have been the wrong moment to ask questions about where she was going during the day.

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Such an entity could have been utterly abolished only by the power of nothingness. Only the absolute void could have imposed on him this particular manner of vertigo.

(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve )

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It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d’Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.

(W. G. Sebald, Vertigo )

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[Mme. Gherardi], who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle’s later work, is a mysterious, not to say unearthly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher. and that Mme. Gherardi, whose life could furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence, and was merely a phantom, albeit one to whom Beyle remained true for decades.

(Sebald, Vertigo )

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MADELEINE

WIFE OF

GAVIN ELSTER

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No mention of Madeleine as anything more than the role she has played. An empty gravestone, if not an empty grave.

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Did Madeleine’s gravestone stay up as long as Carlotta’s? It seems unlikely; there are no reports of tourists visiting it. The production took Madeleine’s gravestone with them and left Carlotta’s.

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[I see] breakdowns as a philosophical experience that is about the confinement, or even death, of the self.

(Zambreno, Heroines )

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Speaking of the panoramas (huge, often wraparound photographic or painted images, like Atlanta’s Cyclorama) popular in the late 19 thcentury, Rebecca Solnit writes, “The passage of a whole day was reduced to fifteen minutes, and those who might not care to watch the changing skies loved to see their imitation, just as they flocked to see the Diorama imitating a nearby church they could have visited in actuality for free. This is one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original. Perhaps it is the skill, the medium, the technique, the promise of resolution, or perhaps it is merely that someone has already decided to pay attention to a subject, and the representation invites you to commune with this attention as well as its subject.”