:17:03
He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory
insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
:17:12
In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering
a field ever wider as it moved away,
:17:17
a cyclone whose present moment contains,
motionless, the eye.
:17:24
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage
to all the film's locations:
:17:26
the florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak;
:17:32
he the hunter, she the prey.
:17:34
Or was it the other way around?
The tiles hadn't changed.
:17:38
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco
where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline.
:17:50
It seems to be a question of trailing,
of enigma, of murder,
:17:53
but in truth it's a question of power and freedom,
of melancholy and dazzlement,
:17:57
so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it,
:18:02
and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
:18:10
He had followed all the trails,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,
:18:12
where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,
whom she should not have known.
:18:18
He followed Madelineas Scotty had doneto the Museum at the Legion of Honor,
before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known.
:18:26
And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,
the spiral of time.
:18:40
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared
had disappeared itself;
:18:43
concrete had replaced it,
at the corner of Eddy and Gough.
:18:47
On the other hand, the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.
:18:51
On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree and said,
:18:58
"Here I was born... and here I died."