(Schwartz, Culture)
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Nicholas of Cusa, in “On Informed Ignorance,” writes: “The finite mind can therefore not attain to the full truth about things through similarity. For the truth is neither more nor less, but rather indivisible. What is itself not true can no more measure the truth than what is not a circle can measure a circle, whose being is indivisible. Hence reason, which is not the truth, can never grasp the truth so exactly that it could not be grasped infinitely more accurately. Reason stands in the same relation to the truth as the polygon to the circle; the more vertices the polygon has, the more it resembles a circle, yet even when the number of vertices grows infinite, the polygon never becomes equal to a circle, unless it becomes a circle in its true nature. The real nature of what exists, which constitutes its truth, is therefore never entirely attainable.”
Lawrence Weschler, in his book of interviews with artist Robert Irwin Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, translates Nicholas slightly differently, writing, “Logic, [Nicholas] suggests, knowing, is like an n-sided polygon nested inside a circle. The more sides you add, the more complexities you introduce, the more the polygon approaches the circle which surrounds it. And yet, the farther away it gets as well. For the circle is but a single, seamless line, whereas your polygon seems to be breeding more and more lines, more and more angles, becoming less and less seamless.” It is significant that Weschler puts the opposition in terms of logic and faith, rather than reason and truth. We may ask ourselves, what is the nature of Scottie’s faith in Madeleine? What is the status of her truth? We may find, along with Scottie and Nicholas, that reason and logic simply don’t apply. We may find instead that we have attempted to measure something using a tool not suited to the task.
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Pop Liebel remembers the name Carlotta Valdes — and her tragic end — but not the name of the “rich powerful man”?
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Whether a daring inventor or a living anachronism, the forger is a master of the déjà vu, producing what the archaeologist or historian is already looking for, artifacts or documents quite familiar and a little strange. The familiarity makes the work meaningful, the strangeness makes it valuable.
(Schwartz, Culture)
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If it is as Pop Liebel says it is, Elster’s story has what looks like a large hole in it: a powerful, rich man — never given a name — has a child with Carlotta Valdes; being childless, he and his wife take the child as their own. So far so good. We are not told what sex the child is or any other details about it, but we know it will become Madeleine’s grandparent. The rich, powerful man who is the child’s father is thus Madeleine’s great-grandfather, and so his identity should be easy enough to find, though the movie makes no effort to find him. The script even goes to the extent of having Liebel not remember his name so that Elster can, in a subsequent scene, be the one to reveal that Madeleine is related to Valdes. This delay is in fact unnecessary, as we never learn Madeleine’s maiden name and have no reason to suspect that Scottie knows it at this point in the movie or would recognize it if Liebel were to remember it.
Now, unless that rich, powerful man has made a point of informing his child or those close to him that the child, while his, is not his wife’s, that child would have no reason to suspect that the woman raising it (the wife of the rich, powerful man, in other words, not its mother) was not its mother. Given all the rich, powerful man has already done to Carlotta, and given the results of all of those actions — Carlotta’s suicide — one would be excused if one were to assume that the rich, powerful man would likely have wanted to keep the child’s true parentage a secret from everyone, except perhaps his wife, who would be embarrassed if the truth were to come out and so would be likely to have her own reasons for sharing — and keeping — his secret. And if all of that is so, where and when would Madeleine’s mother, two generations removed from those events and thus protected by two layers of secrets and fictional history, where would she have learned about Carlotta and her connection to the Valdeses? Who still alive would have known enough to tell her?
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We can apprehend the sadness in so many works by male copy artists, who battle to make the copier an instrument of total salvation and arrive so often at absence. the works seem exhausted by their bodiliness, the artists less proud of the resultant image than of their struggle with the machine to realize it.
(Schwartz, Culture)
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In Boileau and Narcejac’s D’Entre les Morts, the Elster character tells the Scottie character about the family connections at once, in the novel’s equivalent to the office scene. And the ancestor driven mad has not had to give up her child, so the wife of the Elster analogue in the novel has the madwoman’s name as her maiden name. Why did Hitchcock and his screenwriters want to make this situation so much more complicated?
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The self, as viewed not only by the self but by the person for whom the self is the object of love, begins at one remove from the ideal partner, the “right” one, and approaches that sense of rightness only when a substitute is found for the substitute.
(Doniger, The Woman)
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After many years of living in cities, I don’t look into people’s faces when I pass them on the street. Maybe it’s wariness, or some attempt at self-preservation. Later, in my memory, they’ve been erased. In my mind’s eye, the people I passed minutes before are a blur, but the buildings and the streets are there. Does the brain work the way the first cameras did, with an exposure time so long that, unless its subjects remain perfectly still, they turn into smears? How else could you live so close to so many other people?
I can’t remember a single other person from that day now, and I’m sure if you’d asked me an hour after it happened, I would have said the same. This man, the man with my face, would have been just another blur if it weren’t for the suit he was wearing; I’m sure of it. The suit looked familiar, which is what first caught my eye — he was across the square when I spotted him — but I don’t know why it would have seemed familiar, since I couldn’t recall ever seeing it before. This man had gray hair — mine could only be said to be graying — and he was thinner than I am, and because he was thinner he also seemed taller, but in all other ways he looked like me. I was terrified.
The moment I saw him, I felt as though someone had caught me committing some crime. I tried to hide that I had seen him. I tried to keep walking in the direction I had been walking, in the manner I had been walking before, but I was conscious of the effort of seeming normal, and the people around me couldn’t possibly have failed to notice it, too. He noticed it. As we passed shoulder to shoulder, he looked me full in the face, and, without changing his expression, swung around and started to follow me. I saw his reflection in the windows of the Union Square Macy’s. I could trace his shadow up Stockton. Above all else, I did not want to meet him. I did not want to be confronted with him. Does it seem strange that I was frightened of him?
I ran up the street and then further up the hill, until I was crossing over the Stockton Tunnel, thinking I could duck back down the stairs into the Tunnel and give him the slip. But he was already down on Stockton when I got there, looking up at me. The stairs on both sides of the tunnel were closed, with fencing up around the entrances. I looked down at him, trying to think of what to say. “Well? What is it?” I asked. He said nothing.