Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  Slocum begins with an amusing reference to Doctor Dolittle before turning to consider the homes which ancient ammonites[179] constructed around an almost logarithmic axis, a legacy they would eons later bestow upon the imagination of countless poets and even entire cultures.[180]Primarily Slocum concentrates on chapter 5 of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space as translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), choosing to allow Navidson's dream the same consideration literature of its kind receives.

  For example, Slocum views the question of Navidson's personal growth in terms of the enigma posed by the snail before it was eventually solved. Here he quotes from the translated Bachelard text:

  How can a little snail grow in its stone prison? This is a natural question, which can be asked quite naturally. (I should prefer not to ask it, however, because it takes me back to the questions of my childhood.) But for the Abbe de Vallemont it is a question that remains unanswered, and he adds: "When it is a matter of nature, we rarely find ourselves on familiar ground. At every step, there is something that humiliates and mortifies proud minds." In other words, a snail's shell, this house that grows with its inmate, is one of the marvels of the universe. And the Abbe de Vallemont concludes that, in general . . . shells are "sublime subjects of contemplation for the mind."[181]

  (Page 118)

  In particular, Slocum's attention is held by Bachelard's parentethical[182]reference to his own childhood and presumably the rite of growing up: "How extraordinary to find in those ever expandable brackets such a telling correlation between the answer to the Sphinx's riddle and Navidson's crisis."

  Indeed, by continuing to build on Bachelard, Slocum treats the snail in Navidson's dream as a "remarkable inversion" of the house's Spiral Staircase: "Robinet believed that it was by rolling over and over that the snail built its 'staircase.' Thus, the snail's entire house would be a stairwell. With each contortion, this limp animal adds a step to its spiral staircase. It contorts itself in order to advance and grow" (Page 122; The Poetics of Space).

  Still more remarkable than even this marvelous coincidence is the poem Bachelard chooses to quote by Rene Rouquier:

  C'est un escargot enorme

  Qui descend de la montagne

  Et le ruisseau I'accompagne

  De sa bave blanche

  Tres vieux, il n 'a plus qu 'une corne

  C'est son court clocher carre.[183]

  Navidson is not the first to envision a snail as large as a village, but what fascinates Slocum more than anything else is the lack of threat in the dream.

  "Unlike the dread lying in wait at the bottom of the wishing well," Slocum comments. "The snail provides nourishment. Its shell offers the redemption of beauty, and despite Navidson's dying candle, its curves still hold out the promise of even greater illumination. All of which is in stark contrast to the house. There the walls are black, in the dream of the snail they are white; there you starve, in the dream the town is fed for a lifetime; there the maze is threatening, in the dream the spiral is pleasing; there you descend, in the dream you ascend and so on."

  Slocum argues that what makes the dream so particularly resonant is its inherent balance: "Town, country. Inside, outside. Society, individual. Light, dark. Night, day. Etc., etc. Pleasure is derived from the detection of these elements. They create harmonies and out of harmonies comes a balm for the soul. Of course the more extensive the symmetry, the greater and more lasting the pleasure."

  Slocum contends that the dream planted the seed in Navidson's mind to try a different path, which was exactly what he did do in Exploration #5.Or more accurately:"The dream was the flowering of a seed previously planted by the house in his unconsciousness." When bringing to a conclusion "At A Snail's Place," Slocum further opens up his analysis to the notion that both dreams, "The Wishing Well" and "The Snail," suggested to Navidson the possibility that he could locate either within himself or" within that vast missing" some emancipatory sense to put to rest his confusions and troubles, even put to rest the confusions and troubles of others, a curative symmetry to last the ages.

  For the more troubling and by far most terrifying Dream #3, Mia Haven and Lance Slocum team up together to ply the curvatures of that strange stretch of imaginings. Unlike #7 and #2, this dream is particularly difficult to recount and requires that careful attention be paid to the various temporal and even tonal shifts.

  [2 pages missing][184]

  389 to resurrect it there in my dream. Stiff hair sprouts up all over the fingers and around the long, yellow fingernails. Even worse, this awful scarring does not end at my wrists, but continues down my arms, making the scars I know I have when I'm not dreaming seem childish in comparison. These ones reach over my shoulders, down my back, extend even across my chest, where I know ribs still protrude like violet bows.

  When I touch my face, I can instantly tell there's something wrong there too. I feel plenty of hair covering strange lumps of flesh on my chin, my nose and along the ridge of my cheeks. On my forehead there's an enormous bulge harder than stone. And even though I have no idea how I got to be so deformed, I do know. And this knowledge comes suddenly. I'm here because I am deformed, because when I speak my words come out in cracks and groans, and what's more I've been put here by an old man, a dead man, by one who called me son though he was not my father.

  Which is when this frat boy, swaying back and forth before me like an idiot, raises his ax even higher above his head. His plan I see is not too complicated: he intends to drive that heavy blade into my skull, across the bridge of my nose, cleave the roof of my mouth, the core of my brain, split apart the very vertebrae in my neck, and he won't stop there either. He'll hack my hands from my wrists, my thighs from my knees, pry out my sternum and hammer it into tiny fragments. He'll do the same to my toes and my fingers and he'll even pop my eyes with the butt of the handle and then with the heal of the blade attempt to crush my teeth, despite the fact that they're long, serrated and unusually strong. At least in this effort, he will fail; give up finally; collect a few. Where my internal organs are concerned, these too he'll treat with the same respect, hewing, smashing and slicing until he's too tired and too covered with blood to finish, even though of course he really finished awhile ago, and then he'll slouch exhausted, panting like some stupid dog, drunk on his beer, this killing, this victory, while I lie strewn about that bleak place, der absoluten Zerrissenheit (as it turned out I ran into Kyrie at the supermarket this last November. She was buying a 14.75 ounce can of Alaskan salmon. I tried to slip away but she spotted me and said hello, collecting me then in the gentle coils of her voice. We talked for a while. She knew I was no longer working at the Shop. She'd been by to get a tattoo. Apparently a stripper had gotten a little catty with her. Probably Thumper. In fact maybe that's why Thumper had called me, because this exquisite looking woman had out of the blue spoken my name. Anyway Kyrie had gotten the BMW logo tattooed between her shoulder blades, encircled by the phrase "The Ultimate Driving Machine." This apparently had been Gdansk Man's idea. The $85,000 car it turns out is his. Kyrie didn't mention any ire on his part or history on our part, so I just nodded my approval and then right there in the canned food aisle, asked her for the translation of that German phrase which I should have amended, could even do it now, but, well, Fuck 'em Hoss.391 And so voila it appears here instead: "utter dismemberment" the same as "dejected member" which I thought she said though she wrote it down a little differently, explaining while she did that she had decided to marry Gdansk Man and would soon actually be living, instead of just driving, up on that windy edge known to some as Mullholland. As I conjure this particular memory I can see more clearly her expression, how appalled she was by the way I looked: so pale and weak, clothes hanging on me like curtains on a curtain rod, sunglasses teetering on bone, my slender hands frequently shaking beyond my control and of course the stench I continued to emanate. What was happening to me, she probably wanted to know, but didn't ask. Then again maybe I'm wrong, maybe she didn't notice. Or if
she did, maybe she didn't care. When I started to say goodbye, things took an abrupt turn for the weird. She asked me if I wanted to go for another drive. "Aren't you getting married?" I asked her, trying, but probably failing, to conceal my exasperation. She just waited for my answer. I declined, attempting to be as polite as possible, though something hard still closed over her. She crossed her arms, a surge of anger suddenly igniting the tissue beneath her lips and finger tips. Then as I walked back down the aisle, I heard a crash off to my left. Bottles of ketchup toppled from the shelf, a few even shattered as they hit the floor. The thrown can of salmon rolled near my feet. I twisted around but Kyrie was already gone.) Anyway back to the dream, me chopped up into tiny pieces, spread and splattered in the bowels of that ship, and all at the hands of a drunken frat boy who upon beholding his heroic deed pukes all over what's left of me. Except before he achieves any of this, I realize that now, for some reason, for the first time, I have a choice: I don't have to die, I can kill him instead. Not only are my teeth and nails long, sharp and strong, I too am strong, remarkably strong and remarkably fast. I can rip that fucking ax out of his hands before he even swings it once, shatter it with one jerk of my wrist, and then I can watch the terror seep into his eyes as I grab him by the throat, carve out his insides and tear him to pieces.

  But as I take a step forward, everything changes. The frat boy I realize is not the frat boy anymore but someone else. At first I think it's Kyrie, until I realize it's not Kyrie but Ashley, which is when I realize it's neither Kyrie nor Ashley but Thumper, though something tells me that even that's not exactly right. Either way, her face glows with adoration and warmth and her eyes communicate in a blink an understanding of all the gestures I've ever made, all the thoughts I've ever had. So extraordinary is this gaze, in fact, that I suddenly realize I'm unable to move. I just stand there, every sinew and nerve easing me into a world of relief, my breath slowing, arms dangling at my sides, my jaw slack, legs melting me into ancient waters, until suddenly my eyes on their own accord, commanded by instincts darker and older than empathy or anything resembling emotional need, dart from her beautiful and strangely familiar face to the ax she still holds, the ax she is now lifting, the smile she is still making even as she starts to shake, suddenly swinging the ax down on me, at my head, though she will miss my head, barely, the ax floating down instead towards my shoulder, finally cutting into the bone and lodging there, producing shrieks of blood, so much blood, and pain, so much pain, and instantly I understand I'm dying, though I'm not dead yet, even if I am beyond repair, and she has started to cry, even as she dislodges the ax and raises it again, to swing again, again at my head, though she is crying harder and she is much weaker than I thought, and she needs more time than I thought, to get ready, to swing again, while I'm bleeding and dying, which now doesn't compare at all to the feeling inside, also so familiar, as the atriums of my heart on their own accord suddenly rupture, like my father's ruptured. So this, I suddenly muse in a peculiarly detached way, was this how he felt?

  I've made a terrible mistake, but it's too late and I'm now too full of fury hate to do anything but look up as the blade slices down with appalling force, this time the right arc, not too far left, not too far right, but right center, descending forever it seems, though it's not forever, not even close, and I realize with a shade of citric joy, that at least, at last, it will put an end to the far more terrible ache

  As they start to sum up The Haven-Slocum Theory, the couple quotes from Johanne Scefing's posthumously published journal:

  At this late hour I'm unable to put aside thoughts of God's great sleeper whose history filled my imagination and dreams when I was a boy. I cannot recall how many times I read and re-read the story of Jonah, and now as I dwell on Navidson's decision to return to the house alone I turn to my Bible and find among those thin pages these lines:

  So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging.

  (Jonah 1: 15)[185]

  It seems a somewhat bizarre reference, until Haven and Slocum produce a second PEER table documenting what happened once Navidson entered the house on Ash Tree Lane:

  POST-EXPOSURE EFFECTS RATING

  0: Alicia Rosenbaum: headaches stopped. 0: Audrie McCullogh: no more anxiety. 1: Teppet C. Brookes: improved sleeping. 1: Sheriff Axnard: end of nausea. 2: Billy Reston: decreased sensation of cold. 3: Daisy: end of fever; arms healing; occasional echolalia. 1: Kirby "Wax" Hook: return of energy and potency. 4: Chad: better goal-directed flow of ideas and logical sequences; decreased aggression and wandering. 1: Karen Green: improved sleeping; no more unmotivated

  panic attacks1; decreased melancholia; cessation of cough. 1: Will Navidson: no more night terrors; cessation of mutism.1"1'

  ^Dark enclosed places will still initiate a response. +1"Evidenced by Navidson's use of the Hi 8 to record his thoughts.

  The Haven-Slocum Theory™ —2

  Even more peculiar, the house became a house again.

  As Reston discovered, the space between the master bedroom and the children's bedroom had vanished. Karen's bookshelves were once again flush with the walls. And the hallway in the living room now resembled a shallow closet. Its walls were even white. The sea, it seemed, had quieted.

  " Was Navidson like Jonah?" The Haven-Slocum Theory asks." Did he understand the house would calm if he entered it, just as Jonah understood the waters would calm if he were thrown into them?"

  Perhaps strangest of all, the consequences of Navidson's journey are still being felt today. In what remains the most controversial aspect of The Haven-Slocum Theory, the concluding paragraphs claim that people not even directly associated with the events on Ash Tree Lane have been affected. The Theory, however, is careful to distinguish between those who have merely seen The Navidson Record and those who have read and written, in some cases extensively, about the film.

  Apparently, the former group shows very little evidence of any sort of emotional or mental change:" At most, temporary." While the latter group seems to have been more radically influenced: "As evidence continues to come in, it appears that a portion of those who have not only meditated on the house's perfectly dark and empty corridors but articulated how its pathways have murmured within them have discovered a decrease in their own anxieties. People suffering anything from sleep disturbances to sexual dysfunction to poor rapport with others seem to have enjoyed some improvement."[186]

  However, The Haven-Slocum Theory also points out that this course is not without risk. An even greater number of people dwelling on The Navidson Record have shown an increase in obsessiveness, insomnia, and incoherence: "Most of those who chose to abandon their interest soon recovered. A few, however, required counseling and in some instances medication and hospitalization. Three cases resulted in suicide."

  Ashe, good for caske hoopes: and ifneede require, plow worke, as alfofor many things els.

  — A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia by Thomas Hariot servant to Sir Walter Raleigh — "a member of the Colony, and there imployed in difcouering."

  Though Karen and Navidson both went back to Ash Tree Lane, Karen did not go there for the house. As she explains in a video entry: "I'm going because of Navy."

  During the first week of April, she stayed in close contact with Reston who made the long drive from Charlottesville more than a few times. As we can see for ourselves, Navidson's car never moves from the driveway and the house continues to remain empty. In the living room a closet still stands in place of the hallway, while upstairs the space between the master bedroom and the children's bedroom is lost to a wall.

  At the start of the second week of April, Karen realizes she will have to leave New York. Daisy and Chad seem to have shaken off the debilitating effects of the house and their grandmother is more than happy to look after them while Karen is gone, believing her daughter's trip will take her one step closer toward selling the house and suing Navidson.

  On April 9th, Kar
en heads south to Virginia. She checks into a Days Inn but instead of going directly to the house makes an appointment with Alicia Rosenbaum. The real estate agent is more than happy to see Karen and discuss the prospects of putting the house on the market.