Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

…

Above a phone on the Golden Gate, the words: “THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.”

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A child’s desire for a doll to come to life may become, in adulthood, a fear.

(Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve )

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The more images I gathered from the past

the more unlikely it seemed that the past had actually happened

in this way or that, but rather one had pulled back from the edge

and for that moment it all came rushing in.

(Ronk, Vertigo )

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If I see the body I was looking for it is almost always mine.

(Ronk, Vertigo )

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It was thus without planning it or even willing it that my wife and I came to be at San Juan Bautista on a day that was sunny but not particularly warm, looking at each other as though something neither one of us could name had stirred up an old enmity that had arisen from yet another mystery. She pulled me along as though I was resisting, but I was not resisting, or else I felt I was not resisting. I had no reason to, although I was conscious of not wanting to reopen old wounds. But that had never been within my power, had it? Perhaps it was that that I was afraid of — that I had no control over what I could see coming.

…

In Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s novel, Tomorrow’s Eve , Lord Celian Ewald, distraught at finding himself in love with Miss Alicia Clary, a woman he despises (Villiers’s characters are, it needs to be said, extraordinarily misogynistic), tells his friend, the American inventor Thomas Edison, that he is going to commit suicide. Edison, to save his friend’s life, proposes to replace his friend’s lover with an android named Hadaly, an android that will have all of Lord Ewald’s lover’s physical qualities as well as “a sublime spiritual presence” (as opposed to the coarse “spiritual presence” Lord Ewald describes as belonging to his lover). Edison proceeds to show off to Lord Ewald his invention, going so far as to perform an “autopsy” on it in his friend’s presence—”If you’re already familiar with the charm of the Android when she’s fully completed,” Edison explains, “no explanation can keep you from feeling that charm — any more than seeing the flayed skin of your living beauty would prevent you from loving her still, if afterwards she appeared before your eyes as she is today .”

Hadaly’s movements and her finer gestures are made possible through a mechanism Edison describes as “the exact analogy of those so-called barrel organs, on the cylinders of which are encrusted, as there are on this, a thousand little metallic points. Each of these points,” Edison tells Lord Ewald, “plucks a particular tone at a particular time and thus the cylinder plays exactly all the notes of a dozen different dance airs or operative operas. So here; the cylinder, operating on a complex of electrical contacts leading to the central inductors of the Android, plays

. all the gestures, the bearing, the facial expressions, and the attitudes of the woman that one incarnates in the Android .” The android’s palate is thus limited in its scope, as are its exclamations: Hadaly’s speech, Edison explains, is phonographically recorded sound.

Lord Ewald objects. “To hear exactly the same words for ever and ever? To see them always accompanied by the same expression, even though it’s an admirable one?” To which Edison rebuts, “The man who loves, doesn’t he repeat at every instant to his beloved the three little words, so exquisite and so holy, that he has already said a thousand times over? And what does he ask for, if not the repetition of those three words, or some moment of grave and joyous silence?. It’s apparent that the best thing is to re-hear the only words that can raise us to ecstasy, precisely because they have raised us to ecstasy before. When one of these absolutely perfect moments brushes us with its wind, we are so constructed that we want no others , and we will spend the rest of our lives trying, in vain, to call this one back — as if the prey of the Past could ever be snatched from its jaws.”

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But just think how many little nothings like this, added one to the other, produce sometimes an irresistible impression! Think of all the nothings on which Love itself depends!

(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve )

…

At the moment that Hadaly, in her new guise as Miss Alicia Clary, is revealed to Lord Ewald, Villiers writes, “He had just experienced, all of a sudden, the sensation that comes over a traveler when he is lost on a mountain pathway, hears his guide say in an undertone, ‘Don’t look to your left,’ then carelessly does so — and suddenly sees, right beside his foot, one of those perpendicular drops so deep and steep that its bottom is hidden from him in the mists, but which, as it returns his horrified look, seems to be inviting him over the precipice.”

…

Without this stupefying machine for manufacturing the Ideal, he might never have known such joy. The words proffered by Hadaly had been spoken by the real actress, who never experienced them, never understood them. She had thought she was “playing a part,” and here now the character had taken her place within the invisible scene, had not only “assumed” but become the role. The false Alicia thus seemed far more natural than the true one.

(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve )

…

It seems so unlikely to me that the tower would be open to the public, even a year later, after Madeleine Elster had “committed suicide” there. Why wouldn’t the mission close it off, at least to visitors? Is this just a doubt I have because of the times I live in, a symptom of the security-obsessed (really, indemnification-obsessed) culture of America in the early 21 stcentury? Or is it as unlikely as I think it is? And this is the same man who has already been questioned about Madeleine’s death, who was present at that “suicide” a year prior. How could he go unnoticed at the Mission?

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Then again, authorities have resisted putting up barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge for decades, because to do so would be to mar the bridge’s beauty.

…

Madeleine E.

This is a book about a man writing a book about Vertigo . In his book, he thinks, he will trace his thoughts about the film as they relate to the guilt he has about how he has lived his life, about the lives he hasn’t led, and about the lives of others he believes he has ruined. “The past is the only inaccessible part of our present, the one thing we can’t change about how we are now,” he writes. This is the first line of the book.

He writes every day. He writes quickly and confidently. He writes about his troubled relationship with a woman, how they met, how quickly things moved in the relationship, how she became pregnant and how he fears he may have manipulated her into getting an abortion. He writes about Vertigo and the things he finds most interesting about it. He intends to draw parallels between his actions and those of Scottie, but he realizes he can’t quite understand Scottie as a character or as a person. He can’t enter into that mindset. Still, he tries. As he is writing the scene at Planned Parenthood, he realizes he feels more at home with Elster. This, for him, is a disturbing realization.

Now, he has a great deal of trouble writing. He has never had trouble before, but now he cannot write — not the book, not anything. We understand it is a difficult process for him, not only the process of producing a work of art, but the process of reckoning, of understanding what he has done as others understand it. He struggles with the best way of writing his story — should it be plain or baroque? fractured or carefully constructed? — but then he thinks, Aren’t I trivializing things by wondering about the best way to represent them? Isn’t there something evil about struggling with aesthetics in the face of one’s past bad actions? In a weak moment, he wonders whether the two things — the expression of one’s past actions and those actions — can truly be separated.