What was Orpheus dying to tell his wife, Eurydice? What was
Judy dying to tell her beloved, Scottie, in Hitchcock's Vertigo?
What were the previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr dying
to tell Shahrazâd? What was the Christian God "dying" to tell
us? What were the faces of the candidates in the 2000
parliamentary election in Lebanon "dying" to tell voters and
nonvoters alike? While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay
on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or Love Dies,
I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers
and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead
stop and reveals the occasional natural motionlessness
of the living as merely a variety of movement; and an unreality
that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (for example, lapses
in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality),
inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"; as well as
a significant number of other anomalies. This new book contains
two or three additional things I am dying to tell its readers
as well as the poet Lyn Hejinian and myself.
