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“I hope we will too.”
“What?”
“Meet again sometime.”
“We have.”
(00:56:38)
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Is this film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ostensibly the story of a woman who dies three times, actually the story of a man who dies just once?
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According to the clambering hypothesis, primates developed consciousness as a reaction to their weight relative to their environment. For a bonobo or a proboscis monkey, it doesn’t much matter how sturdy the branch is it is hanging from or reaching towards — the monkey is so light, most branches will support it, and so no calculation needs to be made. But for the larger primates, like orangutans, that same action, hanging from a branch or swinging to another branch, is greatly complicated by their body weight. Each move in the canopy is accompanied by a complex internal set of calculations. “Does it look like it will hold?” is a meaningless question because it does not include one crucial element: “me.” “Does it look like it will hold me?” Falling out of a tree to one’s death is a high price to pay for being ignorant of one’s self. But if we do not know ourselves, we cannot know the consequences of our actions, cannot even have consequences or actions that are ours.
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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.