(Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design)
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I renewed my driver’s license just before my thirty-fifth birthday. I had originally received the license seven years earlier, when I moved to Oregon. I was in considerably better shape then, and clean-shaven. The person taking my picture had allowed me to keep my glasses on. Now, with a beard and a face showing the extra pounds of seven years of bad habits, I was asked to remove my glasses. The man behind the digital camera took my picture, and, just as I was about to leave, he asked me to please sit back down so that he could take another. I did so. He still looked concerned. Joking, I asked him, “What’s the matter? Am I blurry today?” He said no, but the computer, comparing this new picture of me to the one taken seven years earlier, did not believe that I was me. My identity could not be confirmed. It would need further corroboration. He called for a supervisor. Who was I? What name should go on the license, if I was not me anymore? Could it still be considered a “renewal,” if they determined that I was some other me?
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Wallace Shawn, in My Dinner with Andre, says, “Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full you’d be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as part of your own experience.”
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The same day I watched the documentary The Bridge for a second time, this message showed up in several places on Facebook:
PLEASE BE CAREFUL!. [sic]
Some hackers have found something new. They take your profile picture and your name and create a new FB account. Then they ask your friends to add them. Your friends think it is you, so they accept. From that moment on they can say and post whatever they want under your name.
Please DON’T ACCEPT a second friendship request from me, I have only ONE ACCOUNT.
I was watching The Bridge again because I had forgotten I had ever watched it to begin with. The Bridge is a documentary filmed over the span of a single year, about several people who committed or attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge; from the moment (0:03:07) when the white-haired man in the red cap climbs over the railing and the camera loses him halfway down, I couldn’t help but watch, even after realizing I was rewatching it. It reminded me of the footage of September 11th, of men and women falling from the towers, of the dread I felt that morning, watching it. News outlets were later shamed, persuaded that to show such a thing was in bad taste. It was erased from their histories, left out of their retrospectives and their memorial programs. But it is what I remembered best about that morning. I remembered that I had actually had to sit down when I first saw people falling. I was standing in front of the television after listening to the message on my answering machine telling me to turn on the television. On the screen, between news crawls telling me what I was seeing, there was smoke pouring out of one of the towers and the ash of a human being flitting through the air. I could not stand to see what I was seeing, so I sat.
I believe now that the dread I felt watching the news that morning, or, later, The Bridge, came from imagining myself in the place of the people I watched. I have a fear of heights, but this was much more than that — what I felt wasn’t, after all, mere fear, but dread, the feeling people describe as a “sinking” feeling, an experience, at least in the word’s archaic form, of awe or reverence. Not a matter of fight or flight, but of being completely and utterly helpless, unable to so much as move, as though one has lost all will.
What distinguished these experiences from fear, I think, had to do with a question they raised for me: What goes through one’s head on the way down? If I search my memory for anything approaching the feeling of falling, I can think of two or three jumps or falls from very modest heights. In these memories, I recall a complete erasure of myself from the world until well after the moment of impact, when my self seems to return, from where I do not know. Does one lose consciousness the moment one steps off into air? I’ve only ever jumped from a single story, maybe two, maybe just slightly higher than two. Most recently, on the island of Kauai, from the top of Kipu Falls, perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet above the pool below. What if the fall were longer? What if there was not only the moment of erasure I had felt but also a moment of impact, of being brought back to oneself, before the final, physical impact, a realization in midair that one has entered a situation from which one cannot hope to escape, that everything that follows has been entirely removed from consciousness because no conscious thought can alter it? What does one think about then? Isn’t that awe? I am reminded of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the ark is opened — the opening sequence of the movie was filmed at Kipu Falls. Indiana Jones’s rival, Dr. René Belloq, and the Nazis for whom he has acquired the ark look down into the opening. Something there catches one of the Nazis’ eyes. The look on his face just before the skin melts off is the look I associate with awe: expectant, terrified, mindless. The only way to save oneself, as Jones somehow knows, is to close one’s eyes to this awe-ful force, to obliterate oneself before it.
Trying to find the exact height of the falls for this book, I learned that, over a five-year period (including the year that I was there), five people had died making the same jump I had, and, as a result of those deaths, access to the falls has now been closed off. I can remember nothing about my own jump now, just the rush of water up my swimsuit and my nostrils as I sank, unbelievably fast, into the pool. I thought that I would never stop sinking, that I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the surface before I needed a breath.
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People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.
(Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy)
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Rock-climber Mike Pont, interviewed by Garrett Soden for Soden’s book Falling: “When you take a big fall. everything gets really quiet, and very crisp and clear in your mind. You’re falling at whatever rate a human body falls, but it feels a lot slower. I can picture it precisely, what it feels like.” But he does not say what he pictures, what it feels like.
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The critic Robin Wood writes: “We do not see, and are never told, how [Stewart] got down from the gutter: there seems no possible way he could have got down. The effect is of having him, throughout the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss.” Perhaps. But who is Madeleine Elster, a mystery even in Stewart’s fantasy (which, in Wood’s metaphorical formulation, is the rest of the film), to this man, Scottie Ferguson, on the verge of death? Will I, too, dream of a complete stranger when I pass, forgetting my life and all the people in it in order to construct a final escape out of the search for a figment of the imagination?