The Fallen Hero of St. John's-by-the-Campus

Yesterday for Memorial Day I wore a red-white-and-blue t-shirt I bought a couple years back in Iowa with the state flag on it. I announced that it wasn't for me but for Sgt. Steve Rushing, US Army, who died fifty years ago this summer, age 20 in Binh Dinh.

As I write this, Steve is, to my awareness, the only person I have ever known personally in my life who died in a war. The fact that he remains this after fifty years is remarkable testament to the type of age we have lived in during my life.

Sadly I have no direct recollection of Steve--although I have many memories from that time, and of the basement of our church, St. John's-by-the-Campus, where he lived while going to college at Iowa State, a fact I just learned from that article linked above. I also remember when he died, and how upset my father was, as he was a friend of my father.  Steve had struggled about whether to enlist and go to Vietnam. Like my father,  Steve was politically liberal and opposed the war, but he came from a background that gave him a sense of duty to country (in the late 1950s my father had tried to join the Army but was rejected because he was born almost blind in one eye).

In the end Steve joined the Army and he was killed in action. My father felt deep sorrow about that for years, although he never spoke about it much unless I brought it up.

After my father died, I brought this up with my mother.

"Steve was always going to do what he was going to do," said my mother, almost dismissing the whole thing. "Your dad had nothing to do with his decision."

That lifted a burden off me, for some reason.

I have many memories of his parents, Buck and Betty Rushing. They left St. John's-by-the-Campus when my parents did to help found a small family-centered mission church of the parish on the north end of Ames, called St. David's. For years I saw them nearly every Sunday we went to church. I remember the Rushings as kind people. Buck was large, warm and friendly, with a Santa beard. His wife Betty was thin and affable. They were always in the pews of the small church. Betty was a mainstay helping with church functions. I even remember their house, I think, and could probably find it if I had to.

We left Ames at the end of the 1970s and being still young, I ceased thinking much about the people at  our church back there. The Episcopal Church sort of blew up and disintegrated anyway, and ceased being much of a cultural force in America. St. David's was eventually closed and folded back into the main parish church. The build was sold and redeveloped into a retirement home, such the whole area is no longer recognizable. My dad would have known what became of the Rushings. He kept up with people that way, at least knowing about them, long after we left Iowa--and of course especially about Steve's family.

As a child, the past recedes quickly. In 1981, only a few years after we left, I was cast in a high school dramatic production about a young man who, during the course, of the play, goes off to Vietnam and is killed.  In the play, the young man is drafted. I played the young man's father, who wants his son to do his duty, and not to avoid the draft. I remember our high school drama teacher, who directed the play, trying to coach me to understand the character.  She asked me to draw on experiences I might have, the way one does with, say, Method Acting.

Looking back I realize how I utterly failed to connect that character with Buck Rushing. Only now do I come to understand what sorrow they must have carried after Steve's death.

I forgive myself for that failure, however, as young people usually can't understand about these things. Also the 1970s and the Vietnam War seemed like a different era already by 1981.  History moved so quickly back then. The last few decades it has tended to linger around more than it did then.

Quack: Truth

The purpose is not to settle scientific truth about Rife and his work. If that were my purpose, I would undertake a research project. The purpose is to tell a story.

Moreover, to definitely prove or disprove if Rife and his collaborators were able to do what they claimed they do would involve actual treatment of malignant cancer, something I have no desire to become involved with, anymore than I have already, or wish anyone to have to deal with. I am happy to leave that ultimate decision to others.

Of course we already have the judgment of history and of medical authorities about Rife. Can we assume this judgment is correct and go on?

As it happens, Rife's own work falls within the fields of optics and electromagnetism, two subjects I know a lot about through scientific training. I am not an expert engineer in those fields, but I feel competent enough to judge scientific arguments within them. Part of the pleasure I will take in telling this story will be to take complex scientific subjects and, as I learn more about them, boil them down through a narrative to make them more understandable. It is the old teacher in me, seeking an outlet perhaps, but doing it in an entertaining fashion.

The medical areas--cell biology, virology, microbiology---are fortunately built entirely on biochemistry and organic chemistry, which are themselves built entirely on quantum mechanics. Drill down within any topic of medicine and you will hit the bedrock of chemistry where it intersects with physics---the quantum energy levels of molecular orbits, and the chemical reactions that flow from them. As a physicist, that is comfortable territory for me. I am at home there.

I was just recollecting a while ago how back in college, as an undergraduate, I took a great course in molecular orbital theory from a chemistry professor. He had advanced MS. He talked with a slur and was confined to a motorized wheel chair with a personal assistant who helped him in and out of his van. His office in the newly built science building on campus was designed to allow him easy access. One of the coolest guys on campus was a senior student of his, and did glassmaking work for him in his lab. I was lucky enough to sign up for two semesters of tutorials with him (he didn't teach regular courses anymore). As a physics major, I barely knew what I was doing taking an upper level chemistry class, one-on-one with a chemistry professor in his office. It felt like a British university type of study. I felt over my head most of the time. One just sat in his office with him alone and went through the text book page and page. It was struggle to understand him, but I did all the homework and got A's in both semesters.

His name was Arthur Payton. It wasn't until I was out walking just now, while recollecting those half-forgotten tutorials, that I realized how lucky I was to know him.

I still have the textbook from one of his courses, Chemical Applications of Group Theory by Cotton. It's upstairs in my science library, which I've finally been able to put entirely on shelves again, after many years in storage.

Desert: The Rabbits

This time of year, if I come out early enough in the morning, when the air is still cool and the shadows on the ground are long and dark, I will see the rabbits as I approach the Grove. They live in a colony there, in the brush along the washes. They hear my approach and most of them begin scampering away as they hear by heavy noisy feet. I usually talk to them as I approach, greeting them with good morning. If I come out later in the day, in the blazing afternoon sun, I will not see them, but I know they are hidden in the coolness of the vegetation that hides them.

There is at least one rabbit that is bolder than the others, and it will sometimes linger as I approach, sitting in place in the dry grass. I call him Ernest---Ernest Bunny. He will stand in place as I talk to him, sitting sideways to me as rabbits do, to stare at me with his big dark eye in the middle of his small furry brown body. His ears are turned to me, in reverse imitation of the antennas that in the old days we called by the name of "rabbit ears." If I stop and greet him, he may continue munching on the yellow grass. All the green shoots of early spring are gone by now, so the yellow stalks are the best remaining. He will stay there as I long as I stand still and talk to him, but when I begin moving, he will run away.

The Desert, I have learned comes alive in the summer. One would think the opposite, but the change from March to April is unmistakable, as if all the animals---mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects alike--- arrive after a long sojourn.

Quack: A Tragedy

Deconstruction is most likely a comedy, but the story of Royal Rife is a tragedy. Everyone can agree on that.

On one level he represented everything that ought to have been noble and great about America in the early Twentieth Century.

He was certainly a genius of the highest caliber. Born among the corn fields of the Midwest, he went out to California during the blossoming of that state in its modern incarnation. He served the U.S. in World War I (in a way that has remained mysterious and open to speculation).  He went on to achieve scientific merit for discoveries and theories in optics and microbiology that remain valid today.

Yet something went very wrong. Seduced, perhaps, by pride, and aided by a group of rogue biologists with their own heterodox theory of micro-organisms, he bent his optical and engineering talents toward promoting his own bizarre ideas and "impossible" contraptions in support of the biologists' theories. This intellectual hubris led him to link up with a group of medical doctors  of varying character and intellectual capacity, and to found a clinic and to begin to "cure cancer" with a series of machines that Rife built himself based on his theories.

He was eventually defeated by the medical and scientific establishment. His optical devices and machines were dismantled, and today they are illegal as cancer treatment devices. He and his collaborators were disgraced and largely forgotten. That is the official version, at least.

Of course Rife has his believers and defenders even today. That is to be expected for anyone making such bold claims. But they remain a small sub-community mostly unknown and ignored, not to be mentioned in polite company of medical authority, where it is considered dangerous even to mention these kinds of things, lest people be led astray.

How did things go so wrong? 

That will be a central question that gets addressed by Quack.

An important subtext will be the question of how scientific and medical truth is determined.  Rife's career spans an important era in history. When he was born, there were virtually no standards as to what constituted the practice of medicine. Almost anyone could claim to be a medical doctor (the shadow of the patent medicine salesman can be said to hang over this story). By the time Rife retired as an active scientific investigator, the standards of determination of medical truth through scientific principles that we know today had been firmly put into place, under the authority of governmental institutions and with the force of law.

The issue of the determination of medical and scientific truth is one that obviously remains important today and has been current in the headlines from the news of the last several months, especially in regard to viruses, the theory of which plays a key role in Quack.

Desert: The Ironwood

The ironwood is old--older than the saguaro, and the much older the palo verde, but also older than the other ironwoods anywhere in this patch of desert. It took me a long time to understand its grandeur, and now that I do, I find poignant pleasure in contemplating it.

The ironwood sits a little further down the wash from the palo verde, separated as I've said by the Sandy Bottom.  One could say it is on the opposite bank (the west side), but really it is half within the bed of the wash, its root structures rising out of the sand in a promontory from the bank.

The ironwood might have been here before the ranch. It saw many years of cattle. Then a road was built. Then development came, and the wash upon which it sits now descends as drainage from a shopping center.

In a way its layers of growth remind one of the stages of maturity one sees in the noble sequoia. Both are noble in their own way. The sequoia is built of the lightest wood, feeling almost like styrofoam, so it can soar to great heights. The ironwood is hard and compact, as durable of wood as exists, so as to conserve its growth in the dryness of the desert.

The distinctive pink and white petals make the ironwoods unmistakable this time of year. It was exquisite to see this tall one outfitted in bloom all the way to its top branches. As of this morning there will still blossoms on the lower branches of the trees, the ones at eye level as one stands in the sandy creek bed.

The ironwood has a secret, one that tells me that I am not the only person to appreciate this tree. Others, anonymous to me as I am to them, have discovered it. This is not the place to tell the secret, but it brings a great peace to know that others are aware of the beauty of this place.

Quack: A Cautionary Tale of Medicine

Since it may be a while before I get to the next act of Deconstruction, I've decided it would be good to take some notes on other projects I've had going in my mind, at lower frequency in attention, but nevertheless nursed along with an internal mental interest of the characters which seem to arise spontaneously from a persistent line of research. If the research touches on history, as almost every research does, then when more fully understood, the research yields vibrant historical personages of varying character, and in our minds it is useful to tell their stories, as one sees them. The motivation is partly to better understand the original subject of research, but more deeply, perhaps it is also about some kind of justice, the definition of which we will accept, as did the ancient and medieval philosophers, as rendering undo someone what is due to them.

That being said, I've had a long interest in the study of cancer, the disease. Partly this was due to my father's illness and death a couple years back, and also from other family members. But mostly it was due to curiosity of an unsolved mystery---namely the nature of the disease, and the treatments and possible cures of it.

In a very roundabout way, this led me to the story of a historical individual whose story I think would make for a great subject of a streaming television series, with at least one full season and possible more. The individual in this case is a guy named Royal Raymond Rife (1888-1971).  The streaming series would cover the formative years of his life, concentrating on the late 1920s to the early 1950s, but departing this time window as needed for back story, in particular at least as back 1913.

Other important historical characters in the story would include Thomas Rivers and Arthur Kendall, and others I will mention later. In telling the story, we would necessarily learn a great deal about the development of microbiology, and especially viruses, during that time period, which was greatly flourishing and established the many of the principles of that field as we know it today.

Fortunately I've already done a lot of that research and had some time to put together many strands of thought. I have a wide variety of literature to use on the subject, but as far as the story here is concerned, my principal sources will be The Cancer Cure That Worked by Barry Lynes and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which I originally bought and read about a year before my father got sick from fatal malignant carcinoma.

Ironically there is a tiny bit of overlap with Deconstruction, in that by pure coincidence, Johns Hopkins appears prominently in both stories.

Desert: The Sandy Bottom

The Sandy Bottom is a feature of the Grove. The Grove itself sits along the bed of dry wash, with the palo verde (and the saguaro) about twenty feet upstream from the ironwood. In between an area of the wash that is fine-grained small pebbles and rocks---the Sandy Bottom.

The Sandy Bottom makes the Grove an appealing place because a sandy open area such as that is valuable in the desert for the simple reason that one can sit or stand there and be relatively free of any kind of critters that would sneak up on your feet, as would be the case with grass and scrub brush.

Flanked by the trees, it feels like a little zen garden. It is perfect for setting up the small tripod camp stool, like one I bought at REI years ago and which traveled the country with me. In the morning, even in summer, I bring it out with me in my backpack and set it up in the sandy to read in the brilliant sunlight. In the winter, it is the best place to sit all day long.

The sand is also a convenient place to get down on my knees, face the early sun coming up over the McDowell Mountains, and give thanks to God Almighty for His great mercy, and to beg Him for forgiveness of my sins and for a means to atone for the wretchedness I have caused in my own life and others.

Desert: The Grove

During the Shutdown, I've been lucky in that I've had means of escape, in particular the ability to roam a patch of undeveloped Sonoran desert right nearby us. Most people don't even pay attention to this land, as much of it exists in a no man's area just outside the freeway loop that encompasses the city, and also where the great power lines cross the Valley on sets of tall pylons, a fact that blissfully suppresses the land value and zoning levels,.

One finds in this area old dirt roads, some still used by utility crews, others mostly grown over, some dating back to the original large ranch here. Some of the barbed wire fence remains, and the animals have made paths through gaps, where people walk as well.

One of my favorite spots is one I call the Grove, a gathering of three plants, which happen to be one's best friends in the desert in the height of summer---the ironwood, the palo verde, and the saguaro.  Each of these by itself is capable of casting a saving shadow in the brightest of hot summer afternoons, when there would otherwise be no relief from the sun. Delightfully, each make a particular type of shade which is useful in various circumstances, and having all three together means a spot is particularly rich.

The palo verde and the saguaro often grow in symbiosis, of course, because they shade each other during their formative development. The palo verde---having mostly green twigs for its leaves", is diffuse and tangled. The saguaro of course is noble and straight, with a thick sharply-defined shadow. The overlapping shadows of each, intermingles with each other, are a delight to experience.

Deconstruction: Interlude before Act Two

That should do it for Deconstruction for the moment. We need to take break before we start Act Two (but not too long a break). In Act Two we will need to learn what is at stake in the conflict we have established in Act One between protagonist (Derrida) and antagonist (Lévi-Strauss)  We need to see why much more is at stake, than a professional show-down between two men, young punk vs old guard, an intellectual game, played at the highest stakes within their discipline, at the height of the 1960s, when all of that revolutionary change had its greatest momentum. We will learn, although we will not great fully grasp perhaps, why the entire course of civilization is at stake, and how, after all was said and done, nothing was ever the same again, and nothing has been the same since, in a very profound way.

To do that, we need that Structuralism is, and how it rose from cream of the intellectual currents of Modernity during the height of rationality in the Twentieth Century, and in the wake of the devastating Apocalypse wars. From that era came a great Peace and Prosperity, and the mind of man flourished, and went out into space, and understood in the Universe on a level of details that previous centuries could not have imagined. It was the last great flourishing of Philosophy in the Western Tradition, perhaps, which was centered in France, the nation that above all others had led the West into Rationality as a guide to understanding all things.

Of course we will also learn more about the love story between Derrida and Marguerite, and more about the Trickster Foucault, whose presence hovers over the story, if you will.

Deconstruction: Locations (Act One)

Oct. 17-18, 1966

Baltimore Friendship Airport,
tarmac of the same
on the outdoor deck on the roof the terminal
stairwell down from the roof

on the plane
at the gate
under the giant board of flights
in the airport concourse
outside the door of the airport diner
inside the airport diner at the counter
the taxi stand outside the airport
various places in Baltimore seen from the cab, including City Hall

Outside guest cottage
Mackey's dining room

Derrida's hotel room

The Johns Hopkins Conference
exterior in the morning
exterior of the Humanities Center
lecture hall of the Humanities Center
hallways of the Humanities Center
courtyard seen through window

suburban Baltimore house with car in the driveway

Baltimore harbor,

exterior of a parish Catholic Church

a hospital in Baltimore

late 1950s or early 1960s
Trocadero in Paris,
exterior of Metro
the plaza where one can see the Eiffel Tower
above Paris

early 1960s, later than the scene above
hospital maternity ward in Paris

Undetermined time and place
(voiceover by Foucault)

Deconstruction: Dramatis Personae (Act One)

Jacques DERRIDA, French literary theorist
MARGUERITE, his wife

Richard MACKSEY, Humanities professor at Johns Hopkins
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS, noted French anthropologist and literary theorist
(maybe his wife as well?)

Georges POULET, noted French literary theorist

Paul DE MAN, young Belgian literary theorist, friend of Derria
J. Hillis MILLER, young American literary theorist, another friend of Derrida

A YOUNG WOMAN at the Johns Hopkins Conference

BALTIMORE SUN REPORTER (for now we'll keep this identity)

MICHEL FOUCAULT, noted French literary theorist (in voiceover),

AIR HOSTESSES
BALTIMORE CAB DRIVER
DINER WAITRESS
TWO BALTIMORE POLICE DETECTIVES
young woman who scowls at DERRIDA

tourists around the Eiffel Tower
TOGOLESE FAMILY at the Eiffel Tower

PREGNANT WOMAN
her HUSBAND
ORDERLIES at Hospital
DOCTOR in waiting room at Hospital

Young CATHOLIC PRIEST (we're definitely keep this)

WORKERS hosing down a ship deck in Baltimore Harbor.

People in the stairway of the airport terminal concourse.

STUDENTS asking questions to LEVI-STRAUSS (we'll keep this scene for  now, even though we may unpack it and move it from the conference to airport gate. Also L-S may bring an assistant. Also we may see MACSKEY's wife if he was married, since we are at his home.

On the morning of the conference, maybe we see an establishing shot of JOHNS HOPKINS CAMOUS, with MACKSEY giving a private tour to LEVI-STRAUSS and others (but not DERRIDA) or his colleagues. We will see DERRIDA doing something else in the hotel, but we will not stipulate that for now. I suspect it may involve EDGAR ALLEN POE somehow.

Deconstruction: The Central Metaphor

Before we put Act One to bed for now, let's insert the continuation of Macksey's remarks his opening address to the conference ("Lions and Squares"). We have stipulated that we need to hear Macksey's explicit mentioning of Derrida.

On page 7 we find:

MACSKEY: "...we might conclude and so begin by suggesting some image representative of the metaphoric space which will define our meetings. At such interdisciplinary gatherings we have often invoked hortatory images of walls being razed, windows being thrown open, new corridors or prospects being opened up. .."

"...I am tempted to propose a rather less ambitious or desperate model. The progressive configurations of symposia have often reminded me of the... dynamics of ... board games, games which may provoke ...uncompromising struggle, but which are still governed by an ... set of conventions ..."moves" which ... abstract the conflict. ...

....The comparison...may have been suggested to me by the intriguing title of M. Derrida's paper...but I suppose that these preliminary remarks themselves could be likened to a commonplace ...pawn move in an opening gambit...

Let's suppose we near these three segments as delineated above, the first two of which we can hear in voice over, but the on the third, where we hear Derrida's name, we must go back to the auditorium, in the midst of Macksey's address, and see the reaction of the various principals.  We see LEVI-STRAUSS who does not react at all, as if the name and the point are meaningless to him.  GEORG POULET, next to him, raises an eyebrow, and glances to his side.  J. Hillis Miller (SECOND COLLEAGUE) leans forward and looks down the aisle.

When we will hear this? We could place this between the Eiffel Tower overhead pull-out shot and the FOUCAULT voice over. Or perhaps earlier, interlacing it with Macksey talking to the NEWSPAPER REPORTER. We'll figure this out when we sort out of the fine-grained details of Act One, but for now we have the elements we need, I think.

Deconstruction: The Monstrosity

By having Derrida (and now Lévi-Strauss) arrive at least a day earlier, we have stretched out the storyline a little bit. Given that, we no longer need some of the side material--not directly connected to the main storyline--about Baltimore "waking up" in order to set the pacing and the timbre of the story. We aim to accomplish that in the main story itself.

As far as raw material we've already determined we might use, such as this side material, we are loathe to throw it out. Instead we can probably use all, or almost all. of those vignettes if we determine that we will stretch them over the course of the main story, which is the four days of the conference, plus at least the day before. We are going to tell a lot of back story, as we've seen, and jump around in time (at least going back to late 1950s in Derrida's own life) and place (Paris, at least) in the way stories do these days, and which audiences are used to. But we will frame it all within the duration of the conference and the conflict between the two principals.

One thread of that Baltimore side material that we will certainly want to keep is the woman giving birth in the hospital. All of those scenes---their house, them leaving the house for the hospital, the attending physician in the waiting room, the admitting room door--will be seen. Eventually we will see the birth itself. When we will see that? I think it is obvious. We will see it presumably in Act Three when we see Derrida give the last line in his own conference speech. This is the sentence that begins Here there is a sort of question..., and ends on the word monstrosity, which Prof. Fry at the start of Lecture 11 suggested would make an excellent starting point for a semester project paper.

Deconstruction: Contrast between the Antagonists

So that's where I wanted to end Act One, with that voiceover by Foucault. It only took eight months!

All the principal elements and characters we need for the story are present. We have established the basic story arc, which is the conflict between Derrida and Lévi-Strauss at the Baltimore Conference,

We will add many details later. For the moment, let's stipulate that we are going to go with the idea I expresssed, to have Derrida fly in at latest on Monday night, and not the morning of the conference. That was not realistic, and we found that we need to change it, so it should be good. Perhaps we will even move it earlier, if we need.

But a few clarifications are needed. .

Let's have Lévi-Strauss arriving on the same flight. We need to highlight the difference between the two men. Let's have Macksey at the airport gate, with a graduate assistant or two, waiting for Lévi-Strauss, and then immediately surrounding him and shepherding him off as he arrives. Derrida comes in ignored, amidst the air hostesses. Macksey is attentive to Lévi-Strauss like the Frenchman is a visiting dignitary. Lévi-Strauss is the guest of honor of the conference. Macksey catches sight of Derrida in the midst of the chaos, and tending to L-S, but he is helpless to attract the attention of the other man, with everything else he needs to do.

Now we see Derrida alone in the airport. Let him see De Man (First Colleague) inside the airport diner eating alone, and Derrida is who goes in, and puts his arm around him at the counter, and De Man gets up and they embrace as friends. He points out Miller (Second Colleague) who is on the pay phone, and who comes over to eat with them. Let everything else about the scene be the same, including the "Raw and the Cooked" and the Baltimore cops.

Later we will see Macksey introduces L-S (and perhaps his wife who came with him?) to the guest house where he will be staying during the conference. It's a perfect little garden house with flowers outside. Later in the evening we will see a celebratory dinner given by Macksey and the Johns Hopkins Humanitites Center in honor of L-S. It is in Mackey's house, at a large table, which is crowded with the other French Structuralists who have already arrived. Among them is certainly Georges Poulet, who makes a toast to L-S, and they join in. Later in the conversation, Poulet is holding forth. Macksey has invited one of his graduate students---perhaps the young woman we have mentioned in the photo-shot scene. The graduate student, during a pause in Poulet's monologue, says, "Proust!" as if it comes her mind.

Poulet grins big, looks at her, holding up finger, "Proust! Oui! Exactemment!"


Also, since Derrida is arriving in the evening, we will need to see him in his hotel. I picture lying on his bed, the window opening. I see a paperback copy of a book. He is reading it or it is on the night stand.  For the moment, let's go with The Deer Park by Norman Mailer. He is alone in his room.

Deconstruction: The Voice in Space

As we rise upward from Paris, and the city gets smaller until all of its features are tiny and unrecognizable on the surface Earth, the music fades out completely and we find ourselves in the a featureless blackness that coull be the void of outer space.

We hear a voice in slow lucid French that we will later recognize as MICHEL FOUCAULT.

(subtitles)

"In the beginning, there was God

...and God created Man."

(pause)

"Then there was MAN

...and man created God."

(another pause)

"But I am here to tell you

...that MAN...does not exist."


END OF ACT ONE

Deconstruction: The Eiffel Tower Shot

She pulls him up the steps past the sleek facades of the Beaux Arts building, up towards the plaza with the famous view across the Seine to the magnificent creation of Gustav Eiffel, the iconic symbol of Paris.

But he is having none of it, at first. He is following her but walking up the the last steps at angle to allow himself to look not forward but down the gentle steps, at the other people and groups there, for the purpose of gazing and taking pictures. When he gets to the plaza level. He has turned completely around and is walking backwards slowly gathering in the view diametrically opposed to the direction everyone else is facing until he is up beside Marguerite, who is looking across the Seine.

They are cheek to cheek but facing opposite directions. They can see each other.

He marvels at her looking at the tower for an instant. She turns and looks at him.

 something like:

Marguerite: Tu ne veux pas le regarder? 

You aren't going to look at it?

While she waits for his answer he cranes a little forward and looks right into her eyes.

Derrida: I can see it. It's in your eyes.

She begins a serious of reactions, trying to process what just said, weighing instantaneously on many feminine levels, but before she can react in any solid manner, he interrupts, motions gently towards the people all around them, behind her, saying.

D: In their eyes too. All of you. 

He motions for her to look again the tower.

D: Look again...

She obeys and he studies her eyes again.

I can see exactly what you are looking at. I know exactly what it is.

M: You can see I'm looking at something...

D: I know it's all and far away. By the way you move your eyes up and down, and the way the other people are standing, in a relaxed way, as they would only it were across the river.

M: But you can't tell it's the Eiffel Tower, though?

D: Yes, even that. If I look closely I can see the curve of a gaze. I could tell the contours of the lines of the tower. I could triangulate. I could know there is something interesting that captures you gaze at the top and near the base---the restaurant.

Then he looks away from her back at the people.

D: If I could look at Paris right know, the whole city, and look at everyone who is looking at the tower, from every angle, and see their eyes, perhaps I could know every detail about the tower, even though I had never seen it. I would know exactly what it was.

From above, in the wide view, they are two small people in the plaza of the Trocadero, amidst the others---which include a small tour of a Togolese government official with his family in Paris.  He is now the one facing the tower and she is looking at him, holding his hand. We can see him motion and pull her back down the steps in the direction they came.

As we fly out way over Paris, until we see the river and the tower beyond it, and the entire tableau on the Seine, let's hear some of this (perhaps we heard this in the intro as they come up out of the metro, in which case we'll pick it up again at the end of the scene).