Mallory's Camera

Okay! So the cousins are now in the parlor snapping at one another, and Nell is reading a book entitled Re-Incarnation: A Study of Forgotten Truth, and it’s a million degrees out, and despite the Hollywood treatment, I can’t imagine what comes next.

Two solutions suggest themselves:

(1) Do what Phil K. Dick did and use the I Ching!

“I say, Alice,” Nell observed. “Fire rises hot and bright from the Wood beneath the sacrificial caldron, and thus, the Superior Person positions correctly within the flow of Cosmic forces!”

(2) Do what the National Lampoon – alas! long defunct – used to suggest: And then Nell and Alice were run over by a truck.

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It continues to be very, very cold, but I think I’ve habituated: When it hit 20° Fahrenheit yesterday, I opened my coat and threw off my gloves because I felt hot.

I shoveled a lot of snow.

I made my end-of-the-year Guilty White Liberal contributions to Good Causes. This year, there seemed to be a significant lack of Good Causes. The beneficiaries of my largesse included Planned Parenthood, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Comparte por una Vida (a group lifeinroseland turned me on to) because you think you have problems? You don’t. People living in Venezuela have problems.

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In the evening, I watched 12 Monkeys (the Terry Gilliam film), which is a kind of companion piece to Vertigo in my mind.

The movie never changes – it can't change – but every time you see it, it seems to be different because you're different – you notice different things, as Cole remarks to Railly.

They’re watching Vertigo. That very spooky scene in front of the cross-section of the giant sequoia with the pins on the tree circles.

There was a similar cross-section of a giant sequoia in the American Museum of Natural History when I was growing up.

I lived just around the corner, and since, from the age of seven or so, I ran around the city all by my little-girlish self, I visited that giant sequoia cross-section at least once a month. It had exactly the same pins demarcating the tree circles as in Vertigo! 1066: Battle of Hastings; 1776: Declaration of Independence signed.

You could touch them!

No, I didn’t stand in front of the cross-section sepulchrously intoning, Here, I was born and there, I died.

I don’t think it had yet occurred to me that people do die.

At that age, I was just absolutely fascinated by the possibility that things happened in the world before I was around to observe them.

I mean, Yes! I understood the world was a complex place. But I figured the complexities were like conditions in a mathematical equation and that they’d all been imposed approximately one millisecond before I was born. It never occurred to me they were the result of a process.