Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

While The Figure of Echo takes special delight in clever word games, Hollander knows better than to limit his examination there. Echo may live in metaphors, puns and the suffix—solis ex illo vivit in antris®— but her range extends far beyond those literal walls. For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means "daughter of a voice" which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word "echo." Milton knew it: "God so commanded, and left that Command/ Sole Daughter of his voice."[30] So did Wordsworth: "stern Daughter of the Voice of God." Quoting from Henry Reynold's Mythomystes (1632), Hollander evidences religious appropriation of the ancient myth (page 16):

  This Winde is (as the before-mentioned Iamblicus, by consent of his other fellow- Cabalists sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, the reflection of this divine breath, or spirit upon us; or (as they interpret it) the daughter of the divine voice; which through the beatifying splendor it shedds and diffuses through the Soule, is justly worthy to be reverenced and adored by us. This Ecco descending upon a Narcissus, or such a Soule as (impurely and vitiously affected) slights, and stops his eares to the Divine voice, or shutts his harte from divine Inspirations, through his being enamour'd of not himselfe, but his owne shadow meerely ... he becomes thence ... an earthy, weake, worthlesse thing, and fit sacrifize for only etemall oblivion ...

  Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god's messenger, a female Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.

  In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose dramatically revised this reading. In a series of lectures delivered at Chapel Hill, Rose referred to "God's Grand Utterance" as "The Biggest Bang Of Them All." After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek logos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John, chapter 1, Verse 1—"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: "Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god's echoes and god is Narcissus."56

  Rose's pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation:

  Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, "Be not like me. I am alone."

  And it might be heard.[31]

  There is not time or room to adequately address the complexity inherent in this passage, aside from noting how the voice is returned—or figuratively echoed—not with an actual word but with the mere understanding that it was received, listened to, or as the text explicitly states "heard." What the passage occludes, no doubt on purpose, is how such an understanding might be attained.

  Interestingly enough, for all its marvelous observation, The Figure of Echo contains a startling error, one which performs a poetic modulation on a voice sounded over a century ago. While discussing Wordsworth's poem "The Power of Sound" Hollander quotes on page 19 the following few lines:

  Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and in the sky's blue care reborn —

  [Italics added for emphasis]

  Perhaps it is simply a typographical error committed by the publisher. Or perhaps the publisher was dutifully transcribing an error committed by Hollander himself, not just a scholar but a poet as well, who in that tiny slip where an "r" replaced a "v" and an "s" miraculously vanished reveals his own relation to the meaning of echo. A meaning Wordsworth did not share. Consider the original text:

  Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky's blue caves reborn —[32]

  [Italics added for emphasis]

  While Wordsworth's poetics retain the literal properties and stay within the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander's find something else, not exactly 'religious'—that would be hyperbole—but 'compassionate', which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.

  Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

  Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

  Hollander is wrong when he writes on page 55:

  The apparent echoing of solitary words . . . [reminds] us . . . that acoustical echoing in empty places can be a very common auditory emblem, redolent of gothic novels as it may be, of isolation and often of unwilling solitude. This is no doubt a case of natural echoes conforming to echo's mythographic mocking, rather than affirming, role. In an empty hall that should be comfortably inhabited, echoes of our voices and motions mock our very presence in the hollow space.

  It is not by accident that choirs singing Psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

  When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. In the case of a verbal echo, the

  spoken word acts as the pebble and the subsequent repetition serves as "the plunk." In this way, speaking can result in a form of "seeing."

  For all its merits, Hollander's book only devotes five pages to the actual physics of sound. While this is not the place to dwell on the beautiful and complex properties of reflection, in order to even dimly comprehend the shape of the Navidson house it is still critical to recognize how the laws of physics in tandem with echo's mythic inheritance serve to enhance echo's interpretive strength.

  The descriptive ability of the audible is easily designated with the following formula:

  O Sound + Time = Acoustic Light

  As most people know who are versed in this century's technological effects, exact distances can be determined by timing the duration of a sound's round trip between the deflecting object and its point of origin. This principle serves as the basis for all the radar, sonar and ultrasonics used every day around the world by air traffic controllers, fishermen, and obstetricians. By using sound or electromagnetic waves, visible blips may be produced on a screen, indicating either a 747, a school of salmon, or the barely pumping heart of a fetus.

  Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology. Microchiroptera (bats), Cetacean (porpoises and toothed whales), Delphinis delphis (dolphins) as well as certain mammals (flying foxes) and birds (oilbirds) all use sound to create extremely accurate acoustic images. However, unlike their human counterparts, neither bats nor dolphins require an intermediary screen to interpret the echoes. They simply "see" the shape of sound.

  Bats, for example, create frequency modulated [FM] images by producing constant-frequency signals [0.5 to 100+ ms] and FM signals [0.5 to 10 ms] in their larynx. The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect's velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter.[33]

  As Michael J. Buckingham noted in the mid-80s, imaging performed by the human eye is neither active nor passive. The e
ye does not need to produce a signal to see nor does an object have to produce a signal in order to be seen. An object merely needs to be illuminated. Based on these observations, the already mentioned formula reflects a more accurate understanding of vision with the following refinement:

  O Sound + Time = Acoustic Touch As Gloucester murmured, "I see it feelingly."[34]

  Unfortunately, humans lack the sophisticated neural hardware present in bats and whales. The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of

  a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word—perhaps your word—flung down empty hallways long past midnight.62

  62You don't need me to point out the intensely personal nature of this passage. Frankly I'd of rec'd a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines, especially the last bit "— perhaps your word —" conjuring up, at least for me, one of those deep piercing reactions, the kind that just misses a ventricle, the old man making his way—feeling his way—around the walls of another evening, a slow and tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me completely by surprise, a sudden charge from out of the dullest moment, jaws lunging open, claws protracting, and just so you understand where I'm coming from, I consider "... long past midnight" one claw and "empty hallways" another.

  Don't worry Lude didn't buy it either but at least he bought a couple of rounds.

  Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real coronary like: "Hoss, a claw's made of bone just like a stilt's made of steel."

  "Sure" I said.

  But it was loud there and the crowd kept both of us from hearing correctly. And while I wanted to believe Lude's basics, I couldn't. There was something just so awful in the old man's utterance. I felt a terrible empathy for him then, living in that tiny place, permeated with the odor of age, useless blinks against the darkness. His word—my word, maybe even your word—added to this, and ringing inside me like some awful dream, over and over again, modulating slightly, slowly pitching my own defenses into something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O'Reilly 8 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in the first place, probably right after one burning maze but still years ahead of the Other loss, a horrible violence, before the coming of that great Whale, before the final drift, nod, macking skid, twist and topple—his own burning—years before the long rest, coming along in its own way, its own nightmare, perhaps even in the folds of another unprotected sleep (so I like to imagine), silvering wings fragmenting then scattering like fish scales flung on the jet stream, above the clouds and every epic venture still suggested in those delicate, light-cradled borders—Other Lands—sweeping the world like a whisper, a hand, even if salmon scales still slip through words as easily as palmed prisms of salt will always slip through fingers, shimmering, raining, confused, and no matter how spectacular forever unable to prevent his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even? or never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that mark mean? the opposition of L's? Not understood? Probably just X marks the spot: Unable To

  The study of architectural acoustics focuses on the rich interplay between sound and interior design. Consider, for example, how an enclosed space will naturally increase sound pressure and raise the frequency. Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls. The following formula describes the resonance frequencies [/] in a room

  Proceed—then in the awful second arc and second descent, after the sound, the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather might have even caused, and mine too, this unread trauma, driving him to consciousness with a scream, not even a word, a scream, and even that never heard, so not a scream but the clutch of life held by will alone, no 911, no call at all, just his own misunderstanding of the reality that had broken into the Hall, the silence then of a woman and an only son, describing in an agonizing hour all it takes to let go, broken, bleeding, ragged, twisted, savaged, torn and dying too, so permanently wronged, though for how many years gone untold, unseen, reminiscent of another silver shape, so removed and yet so dear, kept on a cold gold chain, years on, this fistful of twitching injured life, finally recovering on its own until eventually like a seed conceived, born and grown, the story of its injured beat survives long enough to destroy and devour by the simple telling of its fall, all his hope, his home, his only love, the very color of his flesh and the dark marrow of his bone.

  "You okay Truant?" Lude asked.

  But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

  A thousand and one possible claws.

  Of course, Lude didn't see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of E heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how "empty hallways long past midnight" could slice inside of you, though I'm not so sure he wasn't sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn't mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I'm-Bleeding part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men shoved flakes of ice up a woman's bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I knew Lude would never care much about the dead. And maybe he was right. Maybe some things are best left untouched. Of course he didn't know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.

  But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I knew I'd failed.

  Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a single word, and what's worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.

  with a length of L, width of W, and height of H, where the velocity of sound equals c:

  f = c/2 [ (n/L)2 + (m/W)2 + (P/h)2] 1/2 Hz

  Notice that if L, W, and H all equal / will equal 0.

  Along with resonance frequencies, the study of sound also takes into account wave acoustics, ray acoustics, diffusion, and steady-state pressure level, as well as sound absorption and transmission through walls. A careful examination of the dynamics involved in sound absorption reveals how incident sound waves are converted to energy. (In the case of porous material, the subsurface lattice of interstices translates sound waves into heat.) Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume
fluctuations—the physics of 'otherness'—what matters most is a sound's delay.[35]

  Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit sound travels at approximately 1,130ft per second. A reflective surface must stand at least 56 l/2ft away in order for a person to detect the doubling of her voice.[36]

  In other words, to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or closed, is to have already "seen" a sizable space.

  Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.

  And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.