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A Letter to My Dead Friend Gilbert
Adair about Blindness
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When after your death I am in your
flat and look for a book that I may like to keep, I come across a white oblong
envelope on which you have scribbled a few notes. One note reads: ‘to foresee
one’s own blindness’.
Is this a phrase that can only be
written after the fact, once one has understood that it is too late, even
though you may have formulated it when you were still ignorant of what would
happen to you? Or does the note demonstrate that you were actually able to
foresee your fate, the fact of going blind, at least partially, and of being
unable to see with the other’s eyes? If you could foresee anything at all, what
else could it have been if not your own blindness? By foreseeing your own
blindness, you did not prevent its destructive future effects, you did not
avoid your fate, the only fate that must always be one’s fate. Did you seek to
let it happen instead of remaining blindly exposed to it? Maybe you left the note
on purpose so that even your death would be pregnant with slippery meaning. Was
this the writer’s last prank? Maybe you wanted the note to appear significant
by making it appear casual, a note jotted down between unreadable und unrelated
scrawls, fragments such as ‘your life tell me’, memos like ‘categories of
fashion: the modish and the outmoded’, and a silly aphorism that I manage to
decipher: ‘I’d rather have my prick fingered than my anger pricked.’ Is it a
coincidence that the note is almost invisible because you wrote it on the
inside of the envelope after ripping it up, turning it into a page with two
surfaces, recto and verso, and then folding it back into its original form?
In the end of your novel Love And Death On Long Island, the
ageing writer foresees the way in which a letter he has just sent will affect
the young actor on whom he has had a perplexing crush. This is how he figures
the spell that the letter, a confession, will cast upon the boy in the years to
come: ‘And because he would not destroy it, it would end by utterly destroying
him.’ The novel’s last sentence confronts the reader with an impossible
decision. Only he, the reader, can make this decision. And it is only in the
course of his as yet unlived life that he will perhaps recognise how blind or
how clear-headed he was at the time he read the last sentence of Love And Death On Long Island. Has
infatuation made the writer go utterly mad or has it allowed him to be more
lucid than ever before? Your note puts me, and whoever cares about you, in the
young actor’s position as imagined by the old man: ‘He would return to it
often, read it again and again over the years, then no longer have to read what
he would have come to know by heart but cherish it against the insentient world
as a source of pride both possessive and possessed.’
Your friends want you to have
foreseen your own blindness for they want you to have had a coherent and
meaningful life. Is this what makes them your friends, what proves their
friendship beyond your death? Since they had to contact your brothers after
your first stroke, a family reunion is planned. It does not take place because
you die. But in the months that preceded your second and fatal stroke, they
convinced you that you should make up with the brothers you had not wished to
see for twenty or thirty years. It seems that your brothers are impressed with
your achievements of which they knew very little. When a celebration of your
life, as they call it, is organised and your friends gather in a cinema, one of
the brothers is the first person to speak. He wonders how your voice acquired
the posh accent that dissimulates your origins. The audience laughs. He means
well. I ask myself why it is so difficult for your friends to understand that
you had broken with your family so that you could become, or be, Gilbert Adair.
Perhaps because some of them formed another family into which you were admitted
and of which you were fond.
The format your friends choose for
the celebration reminds me of the television show This Is Your Life, only that in your case you are dead when the
programme devoted to you is produced. There is a host, a fine radio speaker who
reads the script fluently, there are special guests, and there are clips from
films and interviews arranged in chronological order. In the end there is even
a series of short home movies I have never seen and extracts from a portrait
made by German television. They filmed you as you were coming out of your house
in your long white mackintosh (Maurice Chevalier in your beloved Gigi), walking along
It is past midday when the Famous
Director is wheeled in to address the audience. I don’t think that he has
prepared what he says but some of your friends cannot resist getting their
phones out and record his words with the small built-in camera. He resorts to
kitchen psychology and suggests in passing that it was your fear of going blind
which made you go blind eventually, as if a strange desire had been fulfilled.
I think of a passage in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle about the idea that we always die a death of our own
because we do not die unless we want to do so. Freud takes this idea seriously
and rejects it. Did you die because you allowed yourself to be afraid of
something? I conclude that this is another way of transforming your life into a
coherent and meaningful whole, though in this case the meaning is a more
perverse one.
A group of fogs, as your friends
call themselves with a sense of humour that is not unworthy of you, for they
all concur that you spent your life compartmentalising them, comes up with yet
another way of providing you with a coherent and meaningful life. These friends
emphasise that in the last months an eager, ambitious, intelligent young man
with good manners and a pleasing face came into your life and let you fall in
love with him as you taught him how to do the things you did best. The
unexpectedness of a late passion was the reward for enduring death and the pain
of a life diminished by blindness.
I do not forget that you yourself
indulged the idea of life as a coherent and meaningful whole. Each time you
threatened with committing suicide you pointed out that it would have been much
better for you if you had died after your first stroke. Had you not been dead
already for a minute or two when the men from the emergency medical service
found you in your flat? Not to be brought back to life would have been
preferable because you felt that at that
point your life would have had a certain coherence to it, and that
continuing to live with impaired sight did not make any sense. You had done
what you had wanted to do. Now you could no longer do anything meaningful.
Some of your friends do not want
you to say such things. For them it is during the months that follow your first
stroke that you cease to be the difficult man you were and become a much kinder
person. This is because you recognise the kindness in others, especially in the
nurses and therapists who attend to your mind and body in the different
hospitals where you are treated. Did you not state repeatedly that, in order to
express your gratitude, you wished to write a book about your experiences as a
patient? From this perspective, the months before your second death are crucial
for your life to prove coherent and meaningful. Discount the end and it all
collapses.
I am uncertain whether you are the
Gilbert I knew. This is why I ask you whether you feel that you are the same
person you were in the past. You answer that this is the very question you
address to yourself every day. I have three other friends who have a serious
condition, one in France, one in
Switzerland
and one in
Germany,
and I propose to do a book consisting of conversations with each one of you. It
would be called Four Sick Friends. My
starting point would be an observation. While you are all much closer to life
than the so-called healthy people because you are much more dependent on help
and support from others, you are also much more removed from life and look at
it from a distance that keeps me at bay. You are not sure about the title and
its ambiguity but you like the idea and say that you will do it. When will we
start? I have second thoughts. Now you seem to tolerate anyone willing to pay
attention to you. There are those who feel just as lonely as you do and find
comfort in being solicitous. It is true, I am not always as good a friend as
they are. I am impatient and intolerant.
Who is having the real Gilbert? In
Raúl Ruiz’s film The Territory, for
which you co-wrote the script, the characters eat the flesh of someone called
Gilbert. As they keep chewing, they compare notes. Each one claims to be the
one who has sunken his teeth into the man himself. It took you thirty years to
become Gilbert Adair. But despite your efforts and your fears you did not
foresee your blindness. The world, precisely because it is ‘insentient’, is a
closed book. It moved on more quickly and overtook you before you noticed. What
had required so much time to be achieved, vanished in no time. Suddenly you
were told that you would no longer get an advance for a novel you had devised
in your mind. Who wants to read a demanding, uncompromising novel like the last
one you wrote? You realised that newspapers were no longer willing, or able, to
pay a fee that would have allowed you to keep on going for part of the month.
Who looks for a serious and idiosyncratic piece about a film or a book in a
newspaper? You had to admit to yourself that selling a film script is a task
that could not be accomplished within the delays you had been forced to set for
yourself. Saying that this was Gilbert Adair calling was not enough for the
world to recall. Maybe we have never been the contemporaries of the world we
inhabit but today this is even more true than in the past and when it is not
silence or death, the price we pay for such asynchronicity is barbarism, the
blindness of the ones who let themselves be carried away by the world. Could
you not foresee your own blindness because it was shot through with the
blindness of others, my own included?
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from Issue 2: Devils |
© Alexander García Düttmann May 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |