Vertigo

by Ronk, Martha Clare

• ISBN13: 9781566892056
• ISBN10: 1566892058
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-01
• Publisher: Coffee House Pr

Summary

A melancholy, visionary meditation on the mysteries and uncertainties of memory.

Author Biography

Martha Ronk is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

I cannot remember anything about this journey other than this	p. 13
So they say : 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened	p. 14
The grayness of the early hours lasted almost until noon	p. 15
It is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves attached to it again	p. 16
I keep looking in the windows when I walk by	p. 17
This sense of numbness soon came over me	p. 18
The sounds in and of themselves were less like the sounds of anyone	p. 19
I've often felt that I have no place in reality	p. 20
I managed nonetheless to find my way rather blindly	p. 21
Self-regard played across the walls of the room like shadows	p. 22
We hit an impasse on the trail going up	p. 23
It seemed similar to choice, although in an adjacent register	p. 24
The headache alone forced me sometimes to the limit of consciousness	p. 25
Often, probably because I was so tired, the rain seemed more than rain	p. 26
One wrong move is all it takes	p. 27
Twisting and turning like the ebbing tides	p. 28
The shadows of clouds scudded across the steep slopes and through the ravines	p. 29
With interstitial vacuities, a network of light	p. 33
The otherworldly	p. 34
It is no more a world to us	p. 35
The infinite number of conditions	p. 36
Chants	p. 37
Sky's	p. 38
Any memory of	p. 39
A domestic geography	p. 40
If the glazes were iridescent	p. 41
In the upper reaches	p. 42
They keep staring at the sky	p. 43
Remoter worlds	p. 44
In the space of	p. 45
The door opens	p. 46
Below the moon, above the sun	p. 47
I sat at the window and watched it cover everything by nightfall	p. 53
It was quite as if, she explained, the voices were unreal	p. 54
So on the landing to the first floor, I was, as it were, on the borderline of what was permissible	p. 55
You know how I am, he said, when it is getting late	p. 56
I was astonished at the mysterious slow motion quality of the sound	p. 57
Whenever she speaks to him in that voice, an infrequent enough occurrence	p. 58
Cameras, he explained, came then to replace descriptive paragraphs	p. 59
Also the photographs were out of focus, perhaps one had to conclude	p. 60
The dead speak in pictures, some 19th-century figure keeps saying	p. 61
It was a photograph of a house quite unlike any other I had inhabited	p. 62
One night near Versailles, he turned as he took his leave	p. 63
The photograph that reminds you how it is to be near the sea	p. 64
Improbable as it may have seemed at the time	p. 65
It seemed to all of us as remarkably like suspension in time	p. 66
All that remains in the left half of the painting is	p. 67
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