Mark Z Danielewski
Page 31
My mother keeps telling me to get rid of him and sell the house. I'm thinking about it but in the meantime I've been working on the film. There was so much of it I decided to cut it down to thirteen minutes ^ to find out what people thought of it.
And I showed it to everyone I could think of too—professors, scientists, my therapist, village poets, even some of the famous people Navy knew.
[Coughs again]
Anne Rice, Stephen King, David Copperfield, and Stanley Kubrick actually responded to unsolicited copies of the video I sent them.
Without further ado then, here is what everyone had to say about that house.325
□ □□□
A Partial Transcript Of
What Some Have Thought
by Karen Green^
though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green's own ineptitude: "She simply must have misstated the length of the tape."
325Interestingly enough neither___________ nor__________ , both of whom actually saw the
hallway, ever provided any comments. Perhaps XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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326Crossed out with what looked suspiciously like black crayon and tar. 3270riginally The Navidson Record contained both of Karen's pieces: What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love. However when Miramax put the film in wide release. What Some Have Thought was absent. At a Cannes press junket. Bob Weinstein argued that the section was too self- referential and too far from "the spine of the story" to justify its inclusion. "Audiences just want to get back to the house" he explained. "The delay that piece caused was unbearable. But don't worry, you'll have it in the DVD release."328
328To date, I haven't heard back from any of the people quoted in this "transcript" with the exception of Hofstadter who made it very clear he'd never heard of Will Navidson, Karen Green or the house and Paglia who scribbled on a postcard: "Get lost, jerk."
Leslie Stern, M.D. Psychiatrist.
Setting: Her office. Well lit, Chagal print on the far wall, requisite couch.
Stern: It's quirky. What do you need my opinion for?
Karen: What do you think it is? Does it have some kind of, well, ... meaning ?
Stern: There you go again with "meaning." I gave up meaning a long time ago. Trying to get a table at Elaine's is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means?
Jennifer Antipala. Architect Structural
Engineer.
Setting: Inside St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Antipala: [Very high-strung; speaks very fast] The things that came to me, now I guess this is just the way my mind works or something, but the whole house prompted these questions, which I guess, like you said, is, uh, what you're after. Though they're not exactly concerned with meaning, I think.
[Pause]
Karen: What were the questions?
Antipala: Oh god, a whole slew of them. Anything from what the soil bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh... Well first, I mean go back to just soil bearing capacity. That's a very complicated question. I mean, look "massive rock" like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, will crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter. And soft clay's not even worth 10 metric tons. So that place, beyond dimension, impossibly high, deep, wide —what kind of foundation is it sitting on? And if it's not, I mean if it's like a planet, surrounded by space, then its mass is still great enough it's gonna have a lot of gravity, driving it all inward, and what kind of material then at its core could support all that?
Douglas R. Hofstadter. Computer and cognitive science professor at Indiana University.
Setting: At a piano.
Hofstadter: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, they all love this stuff. Your piece is fun too. The way you handled the Holloway
expedition, reminded me of Bach's Little Harmonic Labyrinth. Some of the thematic modulations, I mean.
Karen: Do you think such a place is possible? I have a structural engineer friend who's more than a little skeptical.
Hofstadter: Well, from a mathematical point of view.. . infinite space into no space . . . Achilles and the tortoise, Escher, Zeno's arrow. Do you know about Zeno's arrow?
Karen: No.
Hofstadter: [illustrating on a scrap of staff paper] Oh it's very simple. If the arrow is here at A and the target is here at B, then in the course of getting to B the arrow must travel at least half that distance which 111 call point C. Now in getting from C to B the arrow must travel half that distance, call that point D, and so on. Well the fun starts when you realize you can keep dividing up space forever, paring it down into smaller and smaller fractions until .. . well, the arrow never reaches B.
Byron Baleworth. British Playwright.
Setting: La Fortuna on 71st street.
Baleworth: "And St. Sebastian died of heartburn," to reference another famous British playwright. The infinite here is not a matter for science. You've created a semiotic dilemma. Just as a nasty virus resists the body's immune system so your symbol—the house—resists interpretation.
Karen: Does that mean it's meaningless?
Baleworth: That's a long conversation. I'm staying at the Plaza Athenee for the next few nights. Why don't we have dinner? [Pause] That thing's off, right?
Karen: Well give me a rough idea how you'd tackle the question?
Baleworth: [Suddenly uncomfortable] I'd probably turn to the filmmaking. Meaning would come if you tied the house to politics, science, or psychology. Whatever you like but something. And the monster. I'm sorry but the monster needs work. For Pete's sake, is that thing on?!
Andrew Ross. Literature professor at Princeton University.
Setting: Gym. Ross works out with a medicine ball.
Ross: Oh the monster's the best part. Baleworth's a playwright and as far as the English go probably a
traditionalist when it comes to ghost stories. Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe and cobweb, candelabra in one hand. Your monster, however, is purely American. Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse cultures definitely requires. You cant identify this creature with any one group. Its individuality is imperceptible, and like the dark side of the moon, invisible but not without influence.
You know when I first saw the monster, I thought it was a Keeper. I still think that. It's a very mean House Keeper who vigilantly makes sure the house remains void of absolutely everything. Not even a speck of dust. It's a maid gone absolutely nutso.
Have you ever worn a maid's outfit?
Jennifer Antipala.
Antipala: And what about the walls? Load-bearing? Or non- load-bearing walls? That takes me from questions about foundation material to building material. What could that place possibly be made of? And I'm thinking right now of the shifting that goes on, so that means we're not talking dead loads, which means a fixed mass, but live loads which must deal with wind, earthquakes and varianc
e of motion within the structure. And that shifting is that the same say as wind-pressure distributions?, which is something like, something like, uh, oh yeah, P equals one half beta times V squared times C times G, uh, uh, uh, that's it, that's it, yeah that's it, or something like that, where P is wind pressure on the structure's surface ... or do I have to go someplace else, look at wall bending or wall stresses, axial and lateral forces, but if we're not talking wind, what from then and how? how implemented? how offset? and I'm talking now about weight disbursement, some serious loading's going on there ... I mean anything that big has got to weigh a lot. And I mean at the very least a lot-lot. So I keep asking myself: how am I going to carry that weight? And I really don't have a clue. So I start looking for another angle.
[Moves closer to Karen]
Camille Paglia. Critic.
Setting: The Bowery Bar patio.
Paglia: Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don't have to. They know there's nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. They're haunted by that infinite hollow and its sense- making allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by it. It really comes down to what men lack. They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any
creative life-yielding physiological incavation. The whole thing's about womb envy or vagina envy, whatever you prefer.[152]
Karen: What about my character's fear of darkness.
Paglia: Pure fabrication. The script was written by a man, right? What self-respecting woman is afraid of the dark? Women are everything that's internal and hidden. Women are darkness. I cover some of this in my book Sexual Personae due out from Vintage in a few months. Are you busy this afternoon?
Anne Rice. Novelist.
Setting: The Museum of Natural History.
Rice: Oh I'm not so sure I care for that. So much sexual pairing, this masculine, this feminine ... I think it's too political and obviously a bit strained.
Darkness isn't male or female. It's the absence of light, which is important to us because we are all retinal creatures who need light to move around, sustain ourselves and protect ourselves. George Foreman uses his eyes much more than his fists.
Of course, light and dark mean a lot less to a bat. What matters more to a bat is whether or not FM frequencies are jamming its radar.
Harold Bloom. Critic.
Setting: His private library. Walls loaded with books. General disarray.
Bloom: My dear girl, Kierkegaard once wrote, "If the young man had believed in repetition, of what might he not been capable? What inwardness he might have attained."
We'll touch on your, uh, unfinished piece shortly, but please permit me first to read you a page from my book The Anxiety Of Influence. This is from the chapter on Kenosis:
The unheimlich, or "unhomely" as the "uncanny," is perceived wherever we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action. Overruling the pleasure principle, the daemonic in oneself yields to a "repetition compulsion." A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before. Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that "every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety." Among cases of anxiety, Freud finds the class of the uncanny, □ "in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs." But this "unhomely" might as well be called 'Ihe homely," he observes, "for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old- established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression."
You see emptiness here is the purported familiar and your house is endlessly familiar, endlessly repetitive. Hallways, corridors, rooms, over and over again. A bit like Dante's house after a good spring cleaning. It's a lifeless objectless place. Cicero said "A room without books is like a body without a soul." So add souls to the list. A lifeless, objectless, soulless place. Godless too. Milton's abyss pre-god or in a Nietzschean universe post-god.
It is so pointedly against symbol, the house requires a symbol destroyer. But that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob's angel, Mary's Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing poetic independence no matter how lonely, empty, and agonizing the final result may be.
My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this?
A Poe t. 21 years old. No tattoos. No piercings.
Setting: In front of a giant transformer.
Poe t: No capitals. [She takes out a paper napkin and reads from it] i was on line, i had no recollection of how i got there, of how i got sucked in there, it was pitch black, i suspected the power had failed, i started moving, i had no idea which direction i was headed, i kept moving, i had the feeling i was being watched, i asked "who's there?" the echoes created a passage and disappeared, i followed them
Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Hofstadter: Similar to Zeno's arrow, consider the following equation: 1/a =D EMBED "Equation" V mergeformat □□□ where 1/» = 0.
If we apply this to your friend Bloom's poetics we get an interesting perspective on the monster.
Let 1 mean the artist, then let "a" equal 1 which stands for one influence and we get 1 for an answer, A =1, or a level of one influence which I take to mean Ish ta! influence.
If however we divide by 2 then the influence level drops to 1/2 and so on. Take the number of influences to infinity, where a = », and voila you have an influence level of zero, A=0.
Now let's take this formula into account as we consider your monster. It has cleared the walls and corridors of everything. In other words, it has been influenced by infinity and therefore not influenced at all. But then look at the result: it's lightless, featureless, and empty.
I don't know maybe a little influence is a good
thing.
Byron Baleworth.
Baleworth: You need to refine how the house itself serves as a symbol —
Stephen King. Novelist.
Setting: P.S. 6 playground.
King: Symbols shmimbols. Sure they're important but . . . Well look at Ahab's whale. Now there's a great symbol. Some say it stands for god, meaning, and purpose. Others say it stands for purposelessness and the void. But what we sometimes forget is that Ahab's whale was also just a whale.
Steve Wozniak. Inventor Philanthropist.
Setting: The Golden Gate Bridge.
Woz: Sure I agree with King. An icon for a bridge game, it's a symbol for the program, the data, and more. But in some respects, it can also be looked at as that bridge game. The same is true with this house you created. It could represent plenty of things but it also is nothing more than itself, a house—albeit a pretty weird house.
Jennifer Antipala.
Antipala: I look at Hadrian's Pantheon, Justinian's Hagia Sophia, Suger's St. Denis, the roof of Westminster Hall, thanks to Herland, or Wren's dome for St. Paul's, and anything else that is seemingly above and beyond this world, and by the way, in my mind, those places I just mentioned really are above and beyond this world, and first it sparks awe, maybe disbelief, and then, after doing the math, tracing the lines, studying the construction, though it's still awesome, it also makes sense. Consequently it's unforgettable. Well that house of yours in your movie definitely sparks awe and all the disbelief, but in my mind it never makes sense. I trace the lines, do the math, study the construction, and all I come up with is . . . well the whole thing's just a hopeless, structural impossibility. And therefore substanceless and forgettable. Despite its weight, its magnitude, its mass ... in the end it a
dds up to nothing.
[Moving away]
Jacques Derrida. French philosopher.
Setting: Artaud exhibit.
Derrida: Well that which is inside, which is to say, if I may say, that which infinitely patterns itself without the outside, without the other, though where then is the other? Finished? Good. [Pause]
Hold my hand. We stroll.
Andrew Ross.
Karen: Anything else?
Ross: The house was windowless. I loved that.
Byron Baleworth.
Baleworth: [Defensive] It's very sloppy. Why that type of house? Why in Virginia? These questions should have answers. There would be more cohesion. Mind you there is promise. [Pause] I hope you don't think I just made a pass at you.
Camille Paglia.
Paglia: [Laughing] Baleworth said that? You should have asked him why Dante's entrance to hell was in Tuscany? Why Young Goodman Brown's path was in New England? Baleworth's just jealous and besides he can't write a screenplay to save his pecker. [Pause] And incidentally I'm not afraid to tell you that I did make a pass at you.
So are you free this afternoon?
Walter Mosley. Novelist.