Beach Café under Snow

Midday weather forecast today like something off Fast Show. Everywhere 'Siberio' for the forseeable future.

Imogen Heap, Ellipse and Involuntary Memory

Until recently, Imogen Heap was just another celebrity name that meant little or nothing to me. After all, so many names keep appearing that you just can't keep track. However, her name came up recently while I was browsing Zoe Keating's website. In the Bio section, Zoe said she had worked with Imogen so I thought she must be worth looking up.

A link on the main page of Imogen Heap's website takes you to her YouTube channel, where among other goodies is the fascinating official video of  'First Train Home', the first track on her most recent album, 'Ellipse'. 

It's an elegantly constructed production that starts with Imogen's character trapped in a seemingly endless pillared corridor or loggia peopled by partying out-of-focus city types.

As she runs, looking to escape, the pillared walls morph into a wheel of life, a zoetrope, being turned by a larger version of herself. The whole thing has the absurd but relentless logic of a nightmare.

There's one moment in this visually attractive and inventive film to which I find myself unaccountably drawn. It occurs at two minutes in, when the running Imogen slows and pauses mid-stride, like a winding down automaton, to gaze upwards in astonishment at what we learn will be her larger self. It's a 'whoaa!' moment as she leans back in a perfect expression of awe.

Composite (cropped) screen grabs of consecutive frames

As the moment flashes by, I'm immediately looking at another image in my mind. A picture whose exact character still eludes me. I see it and I sense it, but I haven't yet been able to make it tangible. What is the image this moment irresistibly reminds me of?

What I seem to see in my mind's eye is an illustration. It is a frame perhaps from a bande dessinee – a European comic strip or graphic novel – in which the hero has a moment of revelation. It could be the memory of a drawing by Moebius (Jean Giraud). His characters also inhabit a world full of wonderful contradictions of scale.

Perhaps Imogen's baggy pants are a subliminal reference to Hergé (George Rémi), whose hero Tintin wore similar trousers while dashing about on a variety of urgent missions. Who knows?

Much as I've scoured my books, my brain and the web, the precise memory of the original image still refuses to surface. All I know is that one day I will be likely to see again the image that today eludes me and a tiny circle of past and present experience will have been completed.

"And suddenly the memory revealed itself: The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane."

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust.