Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  As usual, Holloway orders numerous stops to procure wall samples. Jed has become quite handy with his chisel and hammer, cutting out small amounts of the black-ashen substance which he deposits into one of the many sample jars Reston equipped him with. As had been the case even on the stairway, Holloway personally takes responsibility for marking their path. He constantly tacks neon arrows to the wall, sprays neon paint on corners, and metes out plenty of fishing line wherever the path becomes

  Later, I don't even know how much later, she said we'd been great and she felt great even though I didn't. I didn't even know where I was, who she was, or how we'd done what she said we'd done. I had to get out, but fuck the sun hurt my eyes, it split my head open, I dropped her number before I reached the corner, then spent a quarter of an hour looking for my car. Something was beginning to make me feel panicky and bad again. Maybe it was to have been that lost, to lose sense, even a little bit about some event, and was I losing more than I knew, larger events? greater sense? In fact all I had to hold onto at that moment as I cautiously pointed the old car to that place I had the gall to still call a home—never again—was her face, that wry smile, Natasha's, seen but unknown, found in a restaurant, lost on a street corner, gone in a wind of traffic—as in "to wind something up." I looked at my hands. I was holding onto the steering wheel so tightly, all my knuckles were shiny points of white, and my blinker was on, CLICK-click CLICK-click CLICK- click, so certain, so plain, so clear, and yet for all its mechanical conviction, blinking me in the wrong direction.

  142_______________________________________________________________________________________

  especially complicated and twisted.0

  Oddly enough, however, the farther Holloway goes the more infrequently he stops to take samples or mark their path. Obviously deaf to Seneca's words.

  Jed is the first to voice some concern over how quickly their team leader is moving: "You know where you're going, Holloway?" But Holloway just scowls and keeps pushing forward, in what appears to be a determined effort to find something, something different, something defining, or at least some kind of indication of an outside- ness to that place. At one point Holloway even succeeds in scratching, stabbing, and ultimately kicking a hole in a wall, only to discover another windowless room with a doorway leading to another hallway spawning yet another endless series of empty rooms and passageways, all with walls potentially hiding and thus hinting at a possible exterior, though invariably winding up as just another border to another interior. As Gerard Eysenck famously described it: "Insides and in-ness never inside out."[72]

  This desire for exteriority is no doubt further amplified by the utter blankness found within. Nothing there provides a reason to linger. In part because not one object, let alone fixture or other manner of finish work has ever been discovered there.[73] Back in 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses On Art argued against the importance of the particular, calling into question, for example, "minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery ... the cloathing is neither Woollen, nor linen, nor silk, sattin or velvet: it is drapery: it is nothing more."[74] Such global appraisal seems perfectly suited for Navidson's house which despite its corridors and rooms of various sizes is nothing more than corridors and rooms, even if sometimes, as John Updike once observed in the course of translating the labyrinth: "The galleries seem straight but curve furtively."

  144Not only are there no hot-air registers, return air vents, or radiators, cast iron or other, or cooling systems—condenser, reheat coils, heating convector, damper, concentrator, dilute solution, heat exchanger, absorber, evaporator, solution pump, evaporator recirculating pump—or any type of duets, whether spiral lock- seam/standing rib design, double-wall duct, and Loloss™ Tee, flat oval, or round duct with perforated inner liner, insulation, and outer shell; no HVAC system at all, even a crude air distribution system—there are no windows—no water supplies.

  Of course rooms, corridors, and the occasional spiral staircase are themselves subject to patterns of arrangement. In some cases particular patterns. However, considering the constant shifts, the seemingly endless

  William J. Mitchell offers an alternate description of "grit" when he highlights Barthe's observation that reality incorporates "seemingly functionless detail 'because it is there' to signal that 'this is indeed an unfil- tered sample of the real.'[75]"192

  Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane's conclusion: "Navidson has still relied on F/X. Don't fool yourself into thinking any of this stuff's true. Grit's just grit, and the room stretching is all care of Industrial Light Magic."

  Ella Taylor, Charles Champlin, Todd McCarthy, Annette Insdorf, G. O. Pilfer, and Janet Maslin, all sidestep the issue with a sentence or two. However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or "live-footage," despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of The Navidson Record, cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.

  As Sonny Beauregard quipped: "Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we'd have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker."193

  Perhaps the best argument for the authenticity of The Navidson Record does not come from film critics, university scholars, or festival panel members but rather from the I.R.S. Even a cursory glance at Will Navidson's tax statements or for that matter Karen's, Tom's or Billy Reston's, proves the impossibility of digital manipulation.[76]

  They just never had enough money.

  Sonny Beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in The Navidson Record would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars. Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone's credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short. Beauregard again: "Considering the cost of special effects these days, it is inconceivable how Navidson could have created his house"

  Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unafTordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality.[77]

  couldn't X remember any of it in the morning?

  I checked to make sure my door was locked. Returned a second later to put on the chain. I need more locks. My heart started hammering. I retreated to the corner of my room but that didn't help. Fuck, fuck, fuck—wasn't helping either. Better go to the bathroom, try some water on the face, try anything. Only 1 couldn't budge. Something was approaching. I could hear it outside. I could feel the vibrations. It was about to splinter its way through the Hall door, my door. Walker in Darkness, from whose face earth and heaven long ago fled.

  Then the walls crack.

  All my windows shatter.

  A terrible roar.

  More like a howl more like a shriek.

  My eardrums strain and split.

  The chain snaps.

  I'm desperately trying to crawl away, but it's too late. Nothing can be done now.

  That awful stench returns and with it comes a scene, filling my place, painting it all anew, but with what? And what kind of brushes are being used? What sort of paint? And why that smell?

  Oh no.

  How do I know this?

  I cannot know this.

  The floor beneath me fails into a void.

  Except before I fall what's happening now only reverts to what was supposed to have happened which in the end never happened at all. The walls have remained, the glass has held and the only thing that vanished was my own horror, subsiding in that chaotic wake always left by even the most rational things.

  Here then was the darker side of whim.

  I tried to relax.

  I tried to forget.

  I imagined some world-weary travelers camped on the side of some desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion
of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines finally collude, or so they think. Except those stars are never born on such far away horizons as that. The light in fact comes from their own gathering and their own conversation, surrounding and sustaining the fire they have built and kept alive through the night, until inevitably, come morning, cold and dull, the songs are all sung, the stories lost or taken, soup eaten, embers dark. Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of 'trope* and it means 'turn."

  Though here's a song they might of sung:

  Mad woman on another tour;

  Everything she is she spits on the floor.

  An old man tells me she's sicker than the rest.

  God I've never been afraid like this.

  Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey.197 I don't know what to do.

  Eventually Jed tries again to carry Wax toward what he hopes is home. He also attempts periodically to signal Navidson on the radio though never gets a response. Regrettably very little footage exists from this part of the voyage. Battery levels are running low and there is not much desire on Jed's part to exert any energy towards memorializing what seems more and more like a trek toward his own end.

  The penultimate clip finds Jed huddled next to Wax in a very small room. Wax is silent, Jed completely exhausted. It is remarkable how faced with his own death, Jed still refuses to leave his friend. He tells the camera he will go no further, even though the growl seems to be closing in around them.

  In the final shot, Jed focuses the camera on the door. Something is on the other side, hammering against it, over and over again. Whatever comes for those who are never seen again has come from[78] him, and Jed can do nothing but focus the camera on the hinges as the door slowly begins to give way.

  Bibliography

  Architecture:

  Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. New York: Viking, 1994.

  Jordan, R. Furneaux. A Concise History of Western Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson Limited, 1969.

  Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

  Pothorn, Herbert. Architectural Styles: An Historical Guide to World Design. New York: Facts On File Publications, 1982.

  Prevsner, Nikolaus. A History of Building Types. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.

  Prost, Antoine and Gerard Vincent, eds. A History of Private Life: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

  Prussin, Labelle. African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

  Travis, Jack, ed. African American Architecture In Current Practice. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. 1991.

  Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. 2nd ed. London: Laurence King Publishing, 1996.

  Whiffen, Marcus. American Architecture Since 1780. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

  Wu, Nelson Ikon. Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man, the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1963.

  Film:

  Too numerous to list here.

  Every house is an architecturally structured "path": the specific possibilities of movement and the drives toward movement as one proceeds from the entrance through the sequence of spatial entities have been pre-determined by the architectural structuring of that space and one experiences the space accordingly. But at the same time, in its relation to the surrounding space, it is a "goal", and we either advance toward this goal or depart from it.

  — Dagobert Frey

  Grundlegung zu einer vergleichenden Kunstwissenschaft

  Karen may lose herself in resentment and fear, but the Navidson we see seems joyful, even euphoric, as he sets out with Reston and his brother to rescue Holloway and his team. It is almost as if entrance let alone a purpose—any purpose—in the face of those endless and lightless regions is reason enough to rejoice.

  Using 16mm motion picture (colour and BAV) and 35mm stills, Navidson for the first time begins to capture the size and sense of that place. Author Denise Lowery writes the following evocative impression of how Navidson photographs the Anteroom:

  The hot red flame spits out light, catching on Tom, entwining in the spokes of Reston's wheelchair, casting Shape Changers and Dragons on a nearby wall. But even this watery dance succeeds in only illuminating a tiny portion of a corner. Navidson, Tom and Reston continue forward beneath those gables of gloom and walls buttressed with shadow, lighting more flares, penetrating this world with their halogen lamps, until finally what seemed undefinable comes forth out of the shimmering blank, implacable and now nothing less than obvious and undeniable—as if there never could have been a question about the shape, there never could have been a moment when only the imagination succeeded in prodding those inky folds, coming up with its own sense, something far more perverse and contorted and heavy with things much stranger and colder than even this brief shadow play performed in the irregular burn of sulfur—mythic and inhuman, flickering, shifting, and finally dying around the men's continuous progress.199

  Of course, the Great Hall dwarfs even this chamber. As Holloway reported in Exploration #2, its span approaches one mile, making it practically impossible to illuminate. Instead the trio slips straight through the black, carefully marking their way with ample fishing line, until the way ahead suddenly reveals an even greater darkness, pitted in the centre of that immense, incomprehensible space.

  In one photograph of the Great Hall, we find Reston in the foreground holding a flare, the light barely licking an ashen wall rising above him into inky oblivion, while in the background Tom stands surrounded by flares which just as ineffectually confront the impenetrable wall of nothingness looming around the Spiral Staircase.

  As Chris Thayil remarks: "The Great Hall feels like the inside of some preternatural hull designed to travel vast seas never before observed in this world."[79]

  Since rescuing Holloway's team is the prime objective, Navidson takes very few photographs. Luckily for us, however, the beginning of this sequence relies almost entirely on these scarce but breathtaking stills instead of the far more abundant but vastly inferior video tapes, which are used here mainly to provide sound.

  Eventually when they realize Holloway and his team are nowhere near the Great Hall, the plan becomes for Reston to set up camp at the top of the stairway while Navidson and Tom continue on below.

  Switching to Hi 8, we follow Navidson and Reston as they react to Tom's announcement.

  "Bullshit," Navidson barks at his brother.

  "Navy, I can't go down there," Tom stammers.

  "What's that supposed to mean? You're just giving up on them?"

  Fortunately, by barely touching his friend's arm, Billy Reston forces Navidson to take a good hard look at his brother. As we can see for ourselves, he is pale, out of breath, and in spite of the cold, sweating profusely. Clearly in no condition to go any further let alone tackle the profound depths of that staircase.

  Navidson takes a deep breath. "Sorry Tom, I didn't mean to snap at you like that."

  Tom says nothing.

  "Do you think you can stay here with Billy or do you want to head home? You'll have to make it back on your own."

  "I'll stay here."

  "With Billy?" Reston responds. "What's that supposed to mean? The hell if you think I'm letting you go on alone."

  But Navidson has already started down the Spiral Staircase.

  "I should sue the bastards who designed this house," Reston shouts after him. "Haven't they heard of handicap ramps?"

  The
dark minutes start to slide by. Based on Holloway's descent, Navidson had estimated the stairway was an incredible thirteen miles down. Less than five minutes later, however, Tom and Reston hear a shout. Peering over the banister, they discover Navidson with a lightstick in his hand standing at the bottom—no more than 100ft down. Tom immediately assumes they have stumbled upon the wrong set of stairs.

  Further investigation by Navidson, though, reveals the remnants of neon trail markers left by Holloway's team.

  Without another word, Reston swings out of his chair and starts down the stairs. Less than twenty minutes later he reaches the last step.

  Navidson knows he has no choice but to accept Reston's participation, and heads back up to retrieve the wheelchair and the rest of their gear.

  Amazingly enough, Tom seems fine camping near the staircase. Both Navidson and Reston hope his presence will enable them to maintain radio contact for a much longer time than Holloway could. Even if they both know the house will still eventually devour their signal.