Mark Z Danielewski
Page 32
Setting: Fresh Kills Park
Mosley: Strange place. The walls changing all the time. Everything's similar, familiar, and yet without signposts or friends. Plenty of clues but no solutions. Just mystery. Strange, very strange. [He looks up, genuinely baffled] I don't know. I sure would hate to be stuck there.
Leslie Stern, M.D.
Karen: What else do you think about the film?
Stern: I'm no Siskel and Ebert—though IVe been called Ebert before. There's a lot about emptiness, darkness, and distance. But since you created that world I don't think it's unfair to ask why you were so drawn to those themes?
Stephen King.
King: You didn't make this up, did you? [Studying Karen] I'd like to see this house.
Kiki Smith. Figurative Artist.
Setting: The New York Hospital - Cornell Medical Center E.R.
Kiki: Well gosh, without color and hardly even any grey, the focus moves to the other stuff—the surfaces, the shapes, dimensions, even all that movement. I'd have to say it comes down to that. Down to the construction, the interior experience, the body-sense there, which—well gosh—what makes the whole thing so visceral, so authentic.
Hunter S. Thompson. Journalist.
Setting: Giants Stadium.
Thompson: It's been a bad morning.
Karen: What did you think of the footage?
Thompson: I've been staying with friends, but they kicked me out this morning.
Karen: I'm sorry.
Thompson: Your film didn't help. It's, well... one thing in two words: fucked up .. .very fucked up. Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares . . . very very fucked up. What I'd call a bad trip. I never thought I'd hear myself say this but lady you need to lay off the acid, the mescaline, or whatever else you're snorting, inhaling, ingesting . . . check yourself into rehab, something, anything because you're gonna be in a bad way if you don't do something fast. I've never seen anything so goddamn fucked up, so fucking fucked up. I broke things because of it, plates, a small jade figurine of a penguin. A glass bullfrog. I was so upset I even threw my friend's fishtank at their china cabinet. Ugly, very ugly. Salt water, dead fish everywhere, me screaming "so very very fucked up." Five words. They threw me out. Do you think I could spend the night at your place?
Stanley Kubrick. Filmmaker.
Setting: (on-line)
Kubrick: "What is it?" you ask. And I answer, "It's a film. And it's a film because it uses film (and videotape)." What matters is how that film affects us or in this case how it affects me. The quality of image is often terrible except when Will Navidson handles the camera which does not happen often enough. The sound is poor. The elision of many details contributes to insufficiently developed characters. And finally the overall structure creaks and teeters, threatening at any minute to collapse. That said (or in this case typed) I remain soberly impressed and disturbed. I even had a dream about your house. If I didn't know better I'd say you weren't a filmmaker at all. I'd say the whole thing really happened.
David Copperfield. Magician.
Setting: The Statue of Liberty
Copperfield: It looks like a trick but it's a trick that constantly convinces you it's not a trick. A levitation without wires. A hall of mirrors without mirrors. Dazzling really.
Karen: So how would you describe the house?
Copperfield: A riddle.
[Behind him the Statue of Liberty disappears.] Camille Paglia.
Paglia: How would I describe it? The feminine void.
Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Hofstadter: A horizontal eight.
Stephen King.
King: Pretty darn scary.
Kiki Smith.
Kiki: Texture.
Harold Bloom.
Bloom: Unheimlich—of course.
Byron Baleworth.
Baleworth: Don't care to.
Andrew Ross.
Ross: A great circuit in which individuals play the part of electrons, creating with their paths bits of information we are ultimately unable to read. Just a guess.
Anne Rice.
Rice: Dark.
Jacques Derrida.
Derrida: The other. [Pause] Or what other, which is to say then, the same thing. The other, no other. You see?
Steve Wozniak.
Woz: I like Ross' idea. A giant chip. Or a series of them even. All interconnected. If only I could see the floor plan then I could tell you if it's for something sexy or just a piece of hardware— like a cosmic toaster or blender.
Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick: I'm sorry. I've said enough.
Leslie Stern, M.D.
Stern: More importantly Karen, what does it mean to you?
[End Of Transcript]"'
"'So many voices. Not that I'm unfamiliar with voices. A rattle of opinion, need and compulsion but masking what? //
Thumper just called (hence the interruption; the "II").
A welcome voice.
Strange how that works. I'm no longer around and suddenly out of the blue she calls, for the very first time too, returning my old pages I guess, wanting to know where I've been, why I haven't stopped by the Shop at all, filling my ear with all kinds of stuff. Apparently even my boss has been asking about me, acting all hurt that I haven't dropped by to hang out or at least say hello.
"Hey Johnny," Thumper finally purred over the phone. "Why don't you come over to my place. I'll even cook you dinner. I've got some great pumpkin pie left over from Thanksgiving."
But I heard myself say "No, uh that's okay. No thanks but thank you anyway," thinking at the same time that this might very well be the closest I'll ever come to an E ticket invite to The Happiest Place On Earth.
It's too late. Or maybe that's wrong. Maybe not too late, maybe it's just not right. Beautiful as her voice is, it's just not strong enough to draw me from this course. Where eight months ago I'd have already been out the door. Today, for whatever sad reason. Thumper no longer has any influence over me.
For a moment, I flashed on her body, imagining those beautiful round breasts with creamy brown aureolas, making saints out of nipples, her soft, full lips barely hiding her teeth, while in the deep of her eyes her Irish and Spanish heritage keep closing like oxygen and hydrogen, and will probably keep on closing until the very day she dies. And yet in spite of her shocking appeal, any longing I should have felt vanished when I saw, and accepted, how little I knew about her. The picture in my head, no matter how erotic, hardly sufficing. An unfinished portrait. A portrait never really begun. Even taking into
Funny how out of this impressive array of modern day theorists, scientists, writers, and others, it is Karen's therapist who asks, or rather forces, the most significant question. Thanks to her, Karen goes on to fashion another short piece in which she, surprisingly enough, never mentions the house, let alone any of the comments made by the gliterati.
It is an extraordinary twist. Not once are those multiplying hallways ever addressed. Not once does Karen dwell on their darkness and cold. She produces six minutes of film that has absolutely nothing to do with that place. Instead her eye (and heart) turn to what matters most to her about Ash Tree Lane; what in her own words (wearing the same russet sweater; sitting on the same Central Park bench; coughing less) "that wicked place stole from me."
So in the first black frame, what greets us is not sinister but blue: the strains of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker coaxing out of the darkness the precocious face of a seventeen year old Will Navidson.
Piece after piece of old Kodak film, jerky, over exposed, under exposed, usually grainy, yellow or overly red, coalesce to form a rare glimpse of Navidson's childhood—nicht allzu glatt und gekiinstelt.[153] His father—drinking ice tea. His mother—a black and white headshot on the mantle. Tom—watering the lawn. Their golden retriever, the archetype for all home movie dogs, frolicking in the sprinklers, pouncing on the pale green hose as if it were a python, barking at Tom, then at their father, even though as its jaws snap open and shut
it is impossible to hear a bark—only Charlie Parker playing to the limits of his art, lost in rare delight.
As professor Erik Von Jarnlow poignantly remarked:
I don't think I'm alone in feeling the immutable sadness contained in these fragments. Perhaps that is the price of remembering, the price of perceiving accurately. At least with such sorrow must come knowledge.[154]
Karen progresses steadily from Navidson's sundrenched backyard to a high school prom, his grandmother's funeral, Tom covering his eyes in front of a barbecue, Navidson diving headfirst into a swimming hole. Then college graduation, Will hugging Tom good-bye as he prepares to leave for Vietnam,[155] a black and white shot catching the wing of his plane in flight.
And then the whole private history explodes.
Suddenly a much larger world intrudes on the boyish Navidson. Family portraits are replaced by pictures of tank drivers in Cambodia, peasants hauling empty canisters of nerve gas to the side of the road, children selling soda near body bags smeared with red oil-soaked clay, crowds in Thailand, a murdered man in Israel, the dead in Angola; fractions plucked from the stream, informing the recent decades, sometimes even daring to suggest a whole.
And yet out of the thousands of pictures Navidson took, there does not exist a single frame without a person in it. Navidson never snapped scenery. People mattered most to him, whether soldiers, lepers, medics, or newlyweds eating dinner at a trattoria in Rome, or even a family of tailors swimming alone at some sandy cove north of Rio. Navidson religiously studied others. The world around only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.
Though Karen gives her piece the somewhat faltering tide A Brief History Of Who I Love, the use of Navidson's photos, many of them prize-winning, frequently permits the larger effects of the late 20th century to intrude. Gordon Burke points out the emotional significance of this alignment between personal and cultural pasts:
Not only do we appreciate Navidson more, we are inadvertently touched by the world at large, where other individuals, who have faced such terrible horrors, still manage to walk barefoot and burning from the grave.335
Each of Navidson's photographs consistently reveals how vehemently he despised life's destruction and how desperately he sought to preserve its fleeting beauties, no matter the circumstances.
Karen, however, does not need to point any of this out. Wisely she lets Navidson's work speak for itself. Interestingly enough though, her labor of love does not close with one of his photographs but rather with a couple of shots of Navidson himself. The first image—purportedly taken by a famous though now deceased photojoumalist—shows him when he was a young soldier in South East Asia, dressed in battle fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with howitzer shell casings stacked on a nearby trunk marked "VALUABLES." An open window to the right is obviously not enough to clear the air. Navidson is alone, head down, fingertips a blur as he sobs into his hands over an experience we will undoubtedly never share but perhaps can still imagine. From this heart-wrenching portrait, Karen ever so gently dissolves to the last shot of her piece, actually a clip of Super 8 which she herself took not long before they moved to Virginia. Navidson is goofing around in the snow with Chad and Daisy. They are throwing snowballs, making snow angels, and enjoying the clarity of the day. Chad is laughing on his father's shoulders as Navidson scoops up Daisy and holds her up to the blinding sun. The film, however, cannot follow them. It
is badly overexposed. All three of them vanish in a burst of light.
□ □□□
The diligence, discipline, and time-consuming research required to fashion this short—there are easily over a hundred edits—allowed Karen for the first time to see Navidson as something other than her own personal fears and projections. She witnessed for herself how much he cherished the human will to persevere. She again and again saw in his pictures and his expressions the longing and tenderness he felt toward her and their children. And then quite unexpectedly, she came across the meaning of his privately guarded obsession.
While Navidson's work has many remarkable images of individuals challenging fate, over a third captures the meaning of defeat—those seconds after an execution, the charred fingers found in the rubble of a bombed township, or the dull-blue look of eyes which in the final seconds of life could still not muster enough strength to close. In her filmic sonnet, Karen includes a shot of Navidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. As she explains in a voice-over: "The print comes from Navy's personal collection." The same one hanging in their home and one of the first things Navidson placed in their car the night they fled.
As the world remembers, the renowned image shows a Sudanese child dying of starvation, too weak to move even though a vulture stalks her from behind.[156] Not only does Karen spend twenty seconds on this picture, she then cuts to a ten second shot of the back of the print. Without saying a word, she zooms in tighter and tighter on the lower right hand comer, until her subject finally becomes clear: there, almost lost amidst so much white, lie six faintly penciled in block letters cradled in quotes—
"Delial"
□ □□□
There are only 8,160 frames in Karen's film and yet they serve as the perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs. The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love, and colour.
By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place was not. She also discovered what she needed more than anything else. She stopped seeing Fowler, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, selling the house, and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliation.
Of course she had no idea what that would entail. Or how far she would have to go.
When mathematical propositions refer to reality they are not certain; when they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
— Albert Einstein
Up until now The Navidson Record has focused principally on the effects the house has had on others: how Holloway became murderous and suicidal, Tom drank himself into oblivion, Reston lost his mobility, Sheriff Axnard went into a state of denial, Karen fled with the children, and Navidson grew increasingly more isolated and obsessed. No consideration, however, has been given to the house as it relates purely to itself.
Examined then from as objective a point of view as possible the house offers these incontrovertible facts:
1.0 No light. I, iv-xiii*
2.0 No humidity. I. V-XIII
3.0 No air movement (i.e. breezes, drafts etc). I, v-xm
4.0 Temperature remains at 32° F ± 8 degrees. ix
5.0 No sounds. iv-xiii
5.1 Except for a dull roar which arises v, vii, ix- xm
intermittently, sometimes seeming far off, sometimes sounding close at hand.
6.0 Compasses do not function there. vii
6.1 Nor do altimeters. vii
6.2 Radios have a limited range. vii-xid
7.0 Walls are uniformly black with a slightly I, iv-xiii
'ashen' hue.
8.0 There are no windows, moldings, or other IX
decorative elements. (See 7.0)
9.0 Size and depth vary enormously. I, iv-vii, ix-xm
9.1 The entire place can instantly and without I, iv-vii, IX-XIII apparent difficulty change its geometry.
9.2 Some have suggested the dull roar or vn 'growl' is caused by these metamorphoses. (See 5.1)
9.3 No end has been found there. v-xm
10.0 The place will purge itself of all things, ix-xin including any item left behind.
10.1 No object has ever been found there. i, iv-vn, ix-xm
10.2 There is no dust. xi
11.0 At least three people have died inside. x, xm
11.1
Jed Leeder, Holloway Roberts and Tom Navidson.
11.2 Only one body was recovered. Xlii (See 10.0)
See Chapter.
Where objective data is concerned, this was all Navidson had to work with. Once he left the house, however, he began to consider new evidence: namely the collected wall samples.
In lush colour, Navidson captures those time-honored representations of science: test tubes bubbling with boric acid, reams of computer paper bearing the black-ink weight of analysis, electron microscopes resurrecting universes out of dust, and mass-spectrometers with retractable Faradays and stationary Balzers humming in some dim approximation of life.