Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  [Page Five]

  world im sorry i cant stop thinking of her never have never will cant forget how i ran with her like where was i going to really run i was twelve miles from nowhere i had no one to her to no window to pass her through out of harms way no torn there i was no torn there and then that tiny bag of bones just started to shake and it was over she died right in my hands the hands of the guy who took three minutes two minutes whatever a handful of seconds to photograph her and now she was gone that poor little girl in this god awful world i miss her i miss delial i miss the man i thought i was before i met her the man who would have saved her who would have done something who would have been torn maybe hes the one im looking for or maybe im looking for all of them

  i miss u i love u

  there's no second ive lived you can't call your own

  Navy[166]

  The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria pays a great deal of attention to the incoherence present in the letter, the dissatisfaction with the self, and most of all the pain Navidson still feels over the image he burned into the retina of America almost two decades ago.

  As was already mentioned in Chapter II, before the release of The Navidson Record neither friends nor family nor colleagues knew that Delial was the name Navidson had given to the starving Sudanese child. For reasons of his own, he never revealed Delial's identity to anyone, not even to Karen. Billy Reston thought she was some mythological pin-up girl: " I didn't know. I sure as hell never connected the name with that photo."[167]

  The Navidson Record solved a great mystery when it included Karen's shot of the name written on the back of the print as well as Navidson's letter. For years photojoumalists and friends had wondered who Delial was and why she meant so much to Navidson. Those who had asked usually received one of several responses: "I forget," "Someone close to me," "Allow a man a little mystery" or just a smile. Quite a few colleagues accused Navidson of being enigmatic on purpose and so out of spite let the subject drop.

  Few were disappointed when they learned that Delial referred to the subject of his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. "It made perfect sense to me," said Purdham Huckler of the New York Times. "That must have been a crushing thing to witness. And he paid the price too."[168] Lindsay Gerknard commented, "Navidson ran straight into the brick wall all great photojoumalists inevitably run into: why aren't I doing something about this instead of just photographing it? And when you ask that question, you hurt."[169] Psychologist Hector Llosa took Gerknard's observation a little further when he pointed out at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics last March: "Photojoumalists especially must never underestimate the power and influence of their images. You may be thinking, I've done nothing in this moment except take a photo (true) but realize you have also done an enormous amount for society at large (also true!)."[170]

  Nor did evaluations of Navidson's burden stop with comments made by his associates. Academia soon marched in to interrogate the literary consequences created by the Delial revelation. Tokiko Dudek commented on how "Delial is to Navidson what the albatross is to Coleridge's mariner. In both cases, both men shot their mark only to be haunted by the accomplishment, even though Navidson did not actually kill Delial."[171]Caroline Fillopino recognized intrinsic elements of penance in Navidson's return to the house but she preferred Dante to Coleridge: "Delial serves the same role as Beatrice. Her whispers lead Navidson back to the house. She is all he needs to find. After all locating (literally) the souls of the dead =

  safety in loss."[172] However unlike Dante, Navidson never encountered his Beatrice again.[173]

  In the most sardonic tones, Sandy Beale of The New Criticism once considered how contemporary cinema would have treated the subject of Navidson's guilt:

  If The Navidson Record had been a Hollywood creation, Delial would have appeared at the heart of the house. Like something out of Lost Horizon, dark fields would have given way to Elysian fields, the perfect setting for a musical number with a brightly costumed Delial front and center, drinking Shirley Temples, swinging on the arms of Tom and Jed, backed by a chorus line which would have included Holloway and everyone else in Navidson's life (and our life for that matter) who had ever died. Plenty of rootbeer and summer love375 to go around.[174]

  But The Navidson Record is not a Hollywood creation and through the course of the film Delial appears only once, in Karen's piece, bordered in black, frozen in place without music or commentary, just Delial: a memory, a photograph, an artifact.

  To this day the treatment of Delial by The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria is still considered harsh and particularly insensate toward international tragedy. While Navidson's empathy for the child is not entirely disregarded, The Criteria asserts that she soon exceeded the meaning of her own existence: "Memory, experience, and time turned her bones into a trope for everything Navidson had ever lost."

  The BFJ Criteria posits that Delial's prominence in Navidson's last letter is a repressive mechanism enabling him to at least on a symbolic level deal with his nearly inexpressible loss. After all in a very short amount of time Navidson had seen the rape of physics. He had watched one man murder another and then pull the trigger on himself. He had stood helplessly by as his own brother was crushed and consumed. And finally he had watched his lifelong companion flee to her mother and probably another lover, taking with her his children and bits of his sanity.

  It is not by accident that all these elements appear like ghosts in his letter. A more permanent end to his relationship with Karen seems to be implied when he writes "I'm leaving tomorrow" and describes his missive as a "will." His invocation of the memory of the members of the first team as well as others sounds almost like a protracted good-bye. Navidson is tying up loose ends and the reason, or so The BFJ Criteria claims, can be detected in the way he treats the Sudanese girl still haunting his past: "It is no coincidence that as Navidson begins to dwell on Delial he mentions his brother three times: 'I had no one to pass her to. There was no window to pass her through out of harms way. There was no Tom there. I was no

  Tom there. Tom, maybe he's the one I'm looking for.' It is a harrowing admission full of sorrow and defeat—'I was no Tom there' —seeing his brother as the life-saving (and line-saving) hero he himself was not."[175]

  Thus The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria staunchly refutes The Kellog-Antwerk Claim by reiterating its argument that Navidson's return to the house was not at all motivated by the need to possess it but rather "to be obliterated by it."

  Then on January 6, 1997 at The Assemblage of Cultural Diagnosticians Sponsored By The American Psychiatric Association held in Washington, D.C., a husband and wife team brought before an audience of 1,200 The Haven-Slocum Theory which in the eyes of many successfully deflated the prominence of both The Kellog-Antwerk Claim and the infamously influential Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria.

  Ducking the semantic conceits of prior hypotheses, The Haven- Slocum Theory proposed to first focus primarily on "the house itself and its generation of physiological effects." How this direction would resolve the question of "why Navidson returned to the house alone" they promised to show in due course.

  Relying on an array of personal interviews, closely inspected secondary sources, and their own observations, the married couple began to carefully adumbrate their findings in what has since become known as The Haven-Slocum Anxiety Scale or more simply as PEER. Rating the level of discomfort experienced following any exposure to the house, The Haven- Slocum Theory assigned a number value "0" for no effect and " 10" for extreme effects:

  POST-EXPOSURE EFFECTS RATING

  0-1: Alicia Rosenbaum: sudden migraines.

  0-2: Audrie McCullogh: mild anxiety.

  2- 3: Teppet C. Brookes: insomnia.

  3- 4: Sheriff Axnard: nausea; suspected ulcer.1"

  4- 5: Billy Reston: enduring sensation of cold.

  5- 6: Daisy: excitement; intermittent fever; scratches; echolalia.

  6- 7: Kirby "Wax" Hook: stupor; enduring impotenc
e.1"1'

  7- 8: Chad: tangentiality; rising aggression; persistent wandering.

  9: Karen Green: prolonged insomnia; frequent unmotivated

  panic attacks; deep melancholia; persistent cough.1"!"1

  10: Will Navidson: obsessive behavior; weight loss; night terrors; vivid dreaming accompanied by increased mutism.

  1No previous history of stomach ailments.

  ''"''Neither the bullet wound nor the surgery should have effected potency. i"i"i'All of which radically diminished when Karen began work on What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love.

  The Haven-Slocum Theory™ — 1

  The Haven-Slocum Theory does not lightly pass over Karen's remarkable victory over the effects of the house: "With the eventual exception of Navidson, she was the only one who attempted to process the ramifications of that place. The labor she put into both film shorts resulted in more moderate mood swings, an increase in sleep, and an end to that nettlesome cough."

  Navidson, however, despite his scientific inquiries and early postulations, finds no relief. He grows quieter and quieter, often wakes up seized by terror, and through Christmas and the New Year starts eating less and less. Though he frequently tells Reston how much he longs for Karen and the company of his children, he is incapable of going to them. The house continues to fix his attention.

  So much so that back in October when Navidson first came across the tape of Wax kissing Karen he hardly responded. He viewed the scene twice, once at regular speed, the second time on fast forward, and then moved on to the rest of the footage without saying a word. From a dramatic point of view we must realize it is a highly anticlimactic moment, but one which, as The Haven-Slocum Theory argues, only serves to further emphasize the level of damage the house had already inflicted upon Navidson: "Normal emotional reactions no longer apply. The pain anyone else would have felt while viewing that screen kiss, in Navidson's case has been blunted by the grossly disproportionate trauma already caused by the house. In this regard it is in fact a highly climactic, if irregular moment, only because it is so disturbing to watch something so typically meaningful rendered so utterly inconsequential. How tragic to find Navidson so bereft of energy, his usual snap and alacrity of thought replaced by such unyielding torpor. Nothing matters anymore to him, which as more than a handful of people have already observed, is precisely the point."

  Then at the beginning of March, "while tests on the wall samples progressed," as The Haven-Slocum Theory observes, Navidson begins to eat again, work out, and though his general reticence continues, Reston still sees Navidson's new behavior as a change for the better: "I was blind to his intentions. I thought he was starting to deal with Tom's death, planning to end his separation with Karen. I figured he had put the Fowler letters behind him along with that kiss. He seemed like he was coming back to life. Hell, even his feet were on the mend. Little did I know he was stock-piling equipment, getting ready for another journey inside. What everyone knows now as Exploration #5."[176]

  Where The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria made Navidson's letter to Karen the keystone of its analysis, The Haven-Slocum Theory does away with the document in a footnote, describing it as "drunken babble chock-full of expected expressions of grief, re-identification with a lost object, and plenty of transference, having less to do with Navidson's lost brother and more to do with the maternal absence he endured throughout his life. The desire to save Delial must partly be attributed to a projection of Navidson's own desire to be cradled by his mother. Therefore his grief fuses his sense of self with his understanding of the other, causing him not only to mourn for the tiny child but for himself as well."[177]

  What The Haven-Slocum Theory treats with greater regard are the three dreams[178] Navidson described for us in the Hi 8 journal entries he made that March. Again quoting directly from the Theory: "Far better than words influenced by the depressive effects of alcohol, these intimate glimpses of Navidson's psyche reveal more about why he decided to go back and what may account for the profound physiological consequences that followed once he was inside."

  Mia Haven entitles her analysis of Dream #1: "Wishing Well: A Penny For Your Thoughts ... A Quarter For Your Dreams . . . You For The Eons." Unfortunately, as her treatment is difficult to find and purportedly exceeds 180 pages, it is only possible to summarize the contents here.

  As Haven recounts, Navidson's first dream places him within an enormous concrete chamber. The walls, ceiling, and floor are all veined with mineral deposits and covered in a thin ever-present film of moisture. There are no windows or exits. The air reeks of rot, mildew, and despair.

  Everywhere people wander aimlessly around, dressed in soiled togas. Toward the centre of this room there lies what appears to be a large well. A dozen people sit on the edge, dangling their feet inside. As Navidson approaches this aperture, he realizes two things: 1) he has died and this is some kind of half-way station, and 2) the only way out is down through the well.

  As he sits on the edge, he beholds a strange and very disconcerting sight. No more than twenty feet below is the surface of an incredibly clear liquid. Navidson presumes it is water though he senses it is somewhat more viscous. By some peculiar quality intrinsic to itself, this liquid does not impede but actually clarifies the impossible vision of what lies beneath: a long shaft descending for miles ultimately opening up into a black bottomless pit which instantly fills Navidson with an almost crippling sense of dread.

  Suddenly next to him, someone leaps into the well. There is a slight splash and the figure begins to sink slowly but steadily toward the darkness below. Fortunately after a few seconds, a violent blue light envelops the figure and transports it somewhere else. Navidson realizes, however, that there are other figures down there who have not been visited by that blue light and are instead writhing in fear as they continue their descent into oblivion.

  Without anyone telling him, Navidson somehow understands the logic of the place: 1) he can remain in that awful room for as long as he likes, even forever if he chooses—looking around, he can tell that some people have been there for thousands of years—or he can jump into the well. 2) If he has lived a good life, a blue light will carry him to some ethereal and gentle place. If, however, he has lived an "inappropriate life," (Navidson's words) no light will visit him and he will sink into the horrible blackness below where he will fall forever.

  The dream ends with Navidson attempting to assess the life he has led, unable to decide whether he should or should not leap.

  Haven goes to great lengths to examine the multiple layers presented by this dream, whether the classical inferences in the togas or the sexless " figure" Navidson observes immolated by the blue light. She even digresses for a playful romp through Sartre's Huis Clos, hinting how that formidable work helped shape Navidson's imagination.

  In the end though, her most important insight concerns Navidson's relationship to the house. The concrete chamber resembles the ashen walls, while the bottomless pit recalls both the Spiral Staircase and the abyss that appeared in his living room the night Tom died. Still what matters most is not some discovery made within those walls but rather within himself. In Haven's words: "The dream seems to suggest that in order for Navidson to properly escape the house he must first reach an understanding about his own life, one he still quite obviously lacks."

  For Dream #2, Lance Slocum provides the widely revered analysis entitled "At A Snail's Place." Since his piece, like Haven's, is also impossible to locate and reportedly well over two hundred pages long, summary will again have to suffice.

  Slocum retells how in the second dream Navidson finds himself in the centre of a strange town where some sort of feast is in progress. The smell of garlic and beer haunts the air. Everyone is eating and drinking and Navidson understands that for some undisclosed reason they will now have enough food to last many decades.

  When the feast finally comes to an end, everyone grabs a candle and begins to march out of the town. Navidson follow
s and soon discovers that they are heading for a the hill on which lies the shell of an immense snail. This sight brings with it a new understanding: the town has slain the creature, eaten some of it and preserved the rest.

  As they enter the enormous wind (as in "to wind something up"), their candlelight illuminates walls that are white as pearl and as opalescent as sea shells. Laughter and joy echoes up the twisting path and Navidson recognizes that everyone has come there to honor and thank the snail. Navidson, however, keeps climbing up through the shell. Soon he is alone and as the passageway continues to get tighter and tighter, the candle he holds grows smaller and smaller. Finally as the wick begins to sputter, he stops to contemplate whether he should turn around or continue on. He understands if the candle goes out he will be thrust into pitch darkness, though he also knows finding his way back will not be difficult. He gives serious thought to staying. He wonders if the approaching dawn will fill the shell with light.