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A Letter to My Dead Friend Gilbert Adair about Blindness    

 
Alexander García Düttmann
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 Portobello Road and looking, as if for the sake of doing so, at the window of
a well known bookstore that has since closed down. When we see you, a much younger
Gilbert with curly blond hair, in the private environments of a townhouse and a cottage,
we listen to Charles Trenet singing ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours?’ It works and people
have tears in their eyes. You have morphed into a holy innocent. Is this another way of
turning your life into a coherent and meaningful whole with a beginning and an ending?
Afterwards everybody agrees that this was wonderful and moving. And that you would
have liked it very much. I think they are right. Your friends have been allowed to use the
cinema for two hours only, so each time one of the guests who comes onto the stage and
talks about you, or reads something you wrote, goes on for too long, someone in the back
flashes a light. Time to move on.
 
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?

from Issue 2: Devils    

© Alexander García Düttmann May 2012.

Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.

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