Transcendence
Monday, November 17, 2008
Two nights ago Bill and I watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the extraordinary Julian Schnabel film based on the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of French Elle who suffered a massive stroke in his early 40s. Condemned to live with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby nonetheless authored a memoir that tantalizes, that lives. Schnabel's film is painterly, as one would expect—deeply layered, surprising, reeling off into high color and fantasy. It is a wonder, a feat of the heart.
Films are free to do so many things that books cannot, and yet, "Diving Bell," the film, is a writerly provocation, reaffirming the power of tangents and the fantastical, of flashbacks and dream forwards, within the shell of a story that is ultimately chronological. I am interested in the seams between things, in understanding just how memory and imagination sit inside the frame of narrative. In how memory and imagination become, to some degree, narrative.
I am interested in how one thing sits beside another in a story. In placements. In transcendence. And I am awed, in the end, by this man named Bauby, who found hope and love and power and a way to speak the mind that was still his.
