The Diving Bell and the Butterflyed Shrimp

Lately, I have been thinking about memories, rectitude, and gastronomy.

Shall I call it, "Gastronomy in the time of Cholera?" Or, "What moral right do I have to discuss food as art amidst the woes people have suffered in the banking crisis, the  housing crisis, and the international food crisis? 

That is the question I have wrestled with of late. 

To put too fine a point on it, “Where is my moral compass in discussing, for example, the relative merits of one technique over another in the matter of cooking prime meats, when large parts of the world can’t even get the rice or corn they need to survive?”  I have a case of “locked-in” writer’s block.

Last night, Julian Schnabel pointed me in the direction of an answer which I would like to explore with you.  His film, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has rightfully been proclaimed a masterwork.  It brings to the screen the by now well-known true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the brilliant and vivacious editor-in-chief of French “Elle” magazine, who at age 43 suffered a catastrophic stroke.

pictures, at left:

--The DVD case

--Mathieu Almaric as Jean Dominique Bauby, with actress Emmanuelle Seigner

--Almaric with actress Marie-Josee Croze

--The real Jean-Dominique Bauby

Bauby was left entirely paralyzed with the exception of his left eyelid. He awakens some twenty days later from a coma. All of his mental faculties are intact, but he has no way to communicate. 

As the film opens, we discover that Schnabel has cleverly chosen to use the camera in the first person. We are literally looking out at a hospital room through the two eyes of Bauby--until later, in an horrifying scene, we watch as the right eye is sewn shut to protect its cornea, because the paralysis has extended even to the tear duct of that eye. A sardonic moment of life imitating the art of Buñuel and Dali’s “Le Chien Andalou”.

Yet, what might have been merely a journey through despair and deprivation becomes a heroic discovery and a triumphant achievement of what it means to be human.   

After many weeks of Jean-Do’s abject frustration, a physical therapist discovers a way for Bauby to “talk” by blinking.  She recites a French Frequency Alphabet and asks him to blink when he hears the letter he has chosen. 

His first words are, “I want to die”. 

The turning point comes when he is visited by a friend about whom he feels  massive guilt. This man had asked Bauby for his seat on a flight to Beirut, explaining that he had pressing business there. Bauby agreed, and took a later flight.

But the original flight was hijacked and the man was taken hostage. He spent four-and-a-half years in near-total isolation. 

In themovie, the friend explains that he held on to his humanity through memory, repeatedly reciting to himself, among other things, the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855. This idea germinates in Bauby’s consciousness until he makes his own breakthrough.

Bauby decides to write a book, a memoir of his life and of his bizarre experience as a victim of “Locked-in” Syndrome. Communicating to a nurse in the hospital by a system of eye blinks designating different letters of the alphabet, he dictates a fascinating and tough-minded memoir sprinkled with moments of child-like wonder at the beauty of life. 

Dictating the book--the film is largely based on that book--took Bauby nearly a quarter of a million eye blinks, each word took at least two minutes to spell. 

Ten days after the book was published, Bauby died of pneumonia. The book (and the movie Schnabel made from the book proves his realization that, “All that is essential for one’s humanity is imagination and memories.” 

This film has haunted me since I saw it. Next week I will reflect upon my own imagination and memories in my essential realm, food. 

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