Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  In his own note buried within the already existing footnote, in this case not 5 but enlarged now to 9, Alan Bass (—Trans for Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)) further illuminates the above by making the following comments here below:

  "There is an elaborate play on the words limagon and conque here. Limagon (aside from meaning snail) means spiral staircase and the spiral canal that is part of the inner ear. Conque means both conch and concha, the largest cavity of the external ear."

  386"Tympanum, Dionysianism, labyrinth, Ariadne's thread. We are now traveling through (upright, walking, dancing), included and enveloped within it. never to emerge, the form of an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner walls, a city, therefore (labyrinth, semicircular canals—warning: the spiral walkways do not hold) circling around like a stairway winding around a lock, a dike (dam) stretched out toward the sea; closed in on itself and open to the sea's path. Full and empty of its water, the anamnesis of the choncha resonates alone on the beach." As translated by Alan Bass. — Ed.

  388"A giant snail comes down from the mountain followed by a stream of its white slime. So very old, it has only one horn left, short and square like a church tower." — Ed.

  3903:19 AM I woke up, slick with sweat. And I'm not talking wet in the pits or wet on the brow. I'm talking scalp wet, sheet wet, and at that hour, an hour already lost in a new year—shivering wet. I'm so cold my temples hurt but before I can really focus on the question of temperature I realize I've remembered my first dream.

  Only later after I find some candles, stomp around my room, splash water on the old face, micturate, light a sterno can and put the kettle on, only then can I respond to my cold head and my general physical misery, which I do, relishing every bit of it in fact. Anything is better than that unexpected and awful dream, made all the more unsettling because now for some reason I can recall it. Nor do I have an inkling why. I cannot imagine what has changed in my life to bring this thing to the surface.

  The guns sure as hell were useless, instantly confiscated at sleep's border, even if I did manage to pick up the Weatherby before my credit ran out.

  An hour passes. I'm blinking in the light, boiling more water for more coffee, ramming my head into another wool hat, sneezing again though all I can see is the fucking dream, torn straight out of the old raph6 nuclei care of the very brainstem I thought had been soundly severed.

  This is how it starts:

  I'm deep in the hull of some enormous vessel, wandering its narrow passages of black steel and rust. Something tells me I've been here a long time, endlessly descending into dead ends, turning around to find other ways which in the end lead only to still more ends. This, however, does not bother me. Memories seem to suggest I've at one point lingered in the engine room, the container holds, scrambled up a ladder to find myself alone in a deserted kitchen, the only place still shimmering in the mirror magic of stainless steel. But those visits took place many years ago, and even though I could go back there at any time, I choose instead to wander these cramped routes which in spite of their ability to lose me still retain in every turn an almost indiscreet sense of familiarity. It's as if I know the way perfectly but I walk them to forget.

  And then something changes. Suddenly I sense for the first time ever, the presence of another. I quicken my pace, not quite running but close. I am either glad, startled or terrified, but before I can figure out which I complete two quick turns and there he is, this drunken frat boy wearing a plum-colored Topha Beta sweatshirt, carrying the lid of a garbage can in his right hand and a large fireman's ax in his left. He burps, sways, and then with a lurch starts to approach me, raising his weapon. I'm scared alright but I'm also confused. "Excuse me, mind explaining why you're coming after me?" which I actually try to say except the words don't come out right. More like grunts and clouds, big clouds of steam.

  That's when I notice my hands. They look melted, as if they were made of plastic and had been dipped in boiling oil, only they're not plastic, they're the thin effects of skin which have in fact been dipped in boiling oil. I know this and I even know the story. I'm just unable

  inside me, born decades ago, long before I finally beheld in a dream the

  face and meaning of my horror.

  39'See footnote 310 and corresponding reference. — Ed.

  Luckily, I've managed to put enough money together to get the hell away. My Vifa was canceled a month ago but I had some good fortune selling my mother's locket (though I kept the gold necklace).

  400Jamestown Colony Papers: The Tiggs, Verm I Diary (Lacuna Library founded by The National Heritage Society) v. xxiii. n. 139, January 1610, p. 18-25.

  416Presumably Zampano's blindness prevented him from providing an actual diagram of the Delial photograph. — Ed.

  4I7M. G. Cafiso's Mortality and Morality in Photography (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985), p. xxiii. Interestingly enough in one of his early footnotes, Cafiso broaches a troubling but highly provocative aesthetic concern when he observes how even "the finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else." Regrettably he takes this matter no further nor applies it later on to the photographic challenges Navidson ultimately had to face.

  430See Appendix II-C. — Ed.

  448"The odor of silence is so old." — Ed.

  * * *

  Link'A topic more carefully considered in Chapter IX.

  [2]Or for that matter the Cottingley Fairies, Kirlian photography, Ted Serios' thoughtography or Alexander Gardner's photograph of the Union dead.

  [3]That first bit comes from Milton's Paradise Lost. Book I, lines 65-67. The second from Dante's Inferno. Canto III, lines 7-9. In 1939, some guy named John D. Sinclair from the Oxford University Press translated the Italian as follows: "Before me nothing was created but eternal things and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye that enter."5

  Link'Arguably interpretive, especially in the case of Holloway's garbled patter where even the subtitles appear as incomprehensible onomatopoeia or just question marks.

  [5]i.e. 1993.

  [5]Mirjana Gortchakova's "Home Front" in Gentleman's Quarterly, v. 65, October 1995, p. 224.

  [6]Isaiah Rosen, Ph.D., Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus (Baltimore: Eddie Hapax Press, 1995), p. 73.

  [7]In his article "Years of Those" in The New Republic, v. 213, November 20, 1995, p. 33-39, Helmut Kereincrazch puts Navidson's age at forty-eight.

  [8]The question of lengthy narrative descriptions in what is purportedly a critical exegesis is addressed in Chapter 5; footnote 67. — Ed.

  [8]Donna York's "In Twain" in Redbook, v. 186, January 1996, p. 50.

  [9]See "The Heart's Device" by Frances Leiderstahl in Science, v. 265 August 5, 1994, p. 741; Joel Watkin's "Jewelry Box, Perfume, and Hair" in Mademoiselle, v. 101 May, 1995, p. 178-181; as well as Hardy Taintic's more ironic piece "Adult Letters and Family Jewels" The American Scholar, v. 65 spring 1996, p. 219-241.

  Link,6Samuel T. Glade's "Omens Signs" in Notes From Tomorrow ed. Lisbeth Bailey (Delaware: Taema Essay Publications, 1996).

  [11]Max C. Garten's "100 Looks" in Vogue, v. 185, October 1995, p. 248.

  [12]I got up this morning to take a shower and guess what? No fucking hot water. A pretty evil discovery especially when you're depending on that watery wake-up call, me being massively dehydrated from a long night drunk my road-dog Lude and I winged our way onto last night. As I'm remembering it now, we somehow ended up at this joint on Pico, and soon thereafter found ourselves in conversation with some girls wearing black cowboy hats, supposedly lost in their own private-blend of brain- hatching euphoria—Thank you Herbal Ecstasy—prompting us to put a little Verbal Ecstasy on them which would, as it turned out, ultimately lead them giggling into the night.

  I've forgotten now what we did exactly to get the whole thing rolling. I think Lude started giving one of them a trim, whipping out his scissors which he always has on
hand, like old gunslingers I guess always had on hand their Colts—there he goes, snipping locks bangs, doing a great fucking job too, but hey he's a pro, and all of it in the dark too, on a barstool, surrounded by dozens of who knows who, fingers steel clicking away, tiny bits of hair spitting off into the surrounding turmoil, the girls all nervous until they see he really is the shit and then they're immediately chirping "me, next" "do me" which is too easy to remark upon, so instead Lude I remark upon something else which this time round is all about some insane adventure I supposedly had when I was a Pit Boxer. Mind you I'd never heard that term before nor had Lude. Lude just made it up and I went with it.

  "Aw come on, they don't want to hear about that," I said with about as much reluctance as I could reasonably feign.

  "No Hoss, you're wrong," Lude insisted. "You must."

  "Very well," I said, starting then to recall for everyone how at the lonely age of nineteen I had climbed off a barge in Galveston.

  [13]"A Horny Duo" by David Liddel, Utne Reader, July/August 1993, p. 78.

  [14]Ascencion Gerson's "The Vanity of Self-Loathing" in Collected Essays on Self-Portraiture ed. Haldor Nervene (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p. 58.

  [15]Since the revelation, there has been a proliferation of material on the subject. Chapter XIX deals exclusively with the subject. See also Chris Ho's "What's in a name?" Afterimage, v. 31, December, 1993; Dennis Stake's DeliaI (Indianapolis: Bedeutungswande! Press, 1995); Jennifer Caps' Delial, Beatrice, and Dulcinea (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Thumos Inc., 1996); Lester Breman's "Tis but a Name" in Ebony, no. 6, May 1994, p. 76; and Tab Fulrest's Ancient Devotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.

  As a counselor once told me—a Counselor For Disaffected Youth, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either. Seems pretty dead on and probably has everything to do with the fact that when I was ten my father died and almost nine years later my crazy Shakespearean mother followed him, a story I've already lived and really don't need to retell here.

  Still for whatever reason, and this my Counselor For Disaffected Youth could never explain, accepting his analysis hardly altered the way I felt.

  I just glanced over at the trunk. The first time I saw it, I mean when I discovered what was inside, it appalled me. Like I was staring at the old guy's corpse. Now it's just a trunk. Of course, I also remember thinking I was going to toss it by the end of the week. That was before I started reading. Long before I began putting it all together.

  You know this is still the simple answer.

  I guess the complicated one I don't feel like getting into.

  26RegrettabIy, Pollit's proclivity to pun and write jokes frequently detracts from his otherwise lucid analysis. The Incident (Chicago: Adlai Publishing, 1995), p. 108, is a remarkable example of brilliant scholarship and exemplary synthesis of research and thought. There are also some pretty good illustrations. Unfortunately almost everything he concludes is wrong.

  [15]Michelle Nadine Goetz recalls how on one occasion Navidson's father climbed onto the hood of the family's recently purchased car, used a thermos to crack up the windshield, then marched back into the kitchen, picked up a pan full of sizzling pork chops and threw it against the wall. (See the Goetz interview published in The Denver Post, May 14, 1986, B-4). Terry Borowska, who used to babysit both brothers, remembers how every so often Navidson's father would vanish, sometimes for up to five weeks at a time, without telling his family where he was going or when he might return. Inevitably when he did come back—typically after midnight, or early in the morning, sitting in his truck, waiting for them to wake up since he had either left his key or lost it—there would be a few days of warmth and reconciliation. Eventually though, Tony Navidson would return to his own moods and his own needs, forcing Will and Tom to realize they were better off just trying to keep clear of their father. (See Borowska's interview published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 1992, D-3, column one.)

  [16] A selection of personal interviews with Adam Zobol, Anthony Freed and Anastasia Cullman. September 8-11,1994.

  [17]Rita Mistopolis M.D., in her book Black Heart, Blue Heart (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1984), p. 245, describes the seriousness of emotional deprivation:

  It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care if their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.

  [18]Keillor Ross in his article "Legal Zoning" for Atlantic Monthly, v. 278, September 1996, p. 43, does not wish to discount the possibility of irony: "After all Navidson has just moved from the extremely populated confines of New York City and is now only poking fun at the relative wilderness of this suburb." Ross makes a good point, except for the fact that Navidson is a man who understands the meaning of outpost and his tone seems too straight forward to imply any kind of jest.

  [19] Zampan6. This chapter first appeared as "The Matter Of Why" in LA Weekly, May 19, 1994.

  [20]In Appendix II-A, Mr. Truant provides a sketch of this floor plan on the back of an envelope. — Ed.

  [21]Easily that whole bit from "coffee arcing tragically" down to "the mourning paper" could have been cut. You wouldn't of noticed the absence. I probably wouldn't of either. But that doesn't change the fact that I can't do it. Get rid of it, I mean. What's gained in economy doesn't really seem to make up for what you lose of Zampand, the old man himself, coming a little more into focus, especially where digressions like these are concerned.

  I can't tell you why exactly but more and more these days I'm struck by the fact that everything Zampand had is really gone, including the bowl of betel nuts left on his mantle or the battered shotgun bearing the initials RLB under his bed—Flaze appropriated that goody; the shotgun, not the bed—or even the curiously preserved bud of a white rose hidden in the drawer of his nightstand. By now his apartment has been scrubbed with Clorox, repainted, probably rented out to someone else. His body's either molding in the ground or reduced to ash. Nothing else remains of him but this.

  So you see from my perspective, having to decide between old man Z and his story is an artificial, maybe even dangerous choice, and one I'm obviously not comfortable making. The way I figure it, if there's something you find irksome—go ahead and skip it. I couldn't care less how you read any of this. His wandering passages are staying, along with all his oddly canted phrases and even some warped bits in the plot. There's just too much at stake. It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.

  Zampand himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

  [22]Look at David Conte's "All Thing Being Equal" in Maclean's, v. 107, n. 14, 1994, p. 102. Also see Martin Gardner's "The Vanishing Area Paradox" which appeared in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific America, May 1961.

  [23]Edith Skourja's "Riddles Without" in Riddles Within, ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago: Sphinx Press, 1994), p. 17-57.

  LinkLeo Tolstoy, 1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885.

/>   [25]Know what, Latin's way out of my league. I can find people who speak Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian and even German but the Roman tongue's not exactly thriving in the streets of LA.

  Linkthrew up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.

  And so only now, days later, as I give these moments shape here, do I re-encounter what my high briefly withheld; the covering memory permanently hitched to everything preceding it and so prohibiting all of it, those memories, the good ones, no matter how different, how blissful, eclipsed by the jack-knifed trailer across the highway, the tractor truck lodged in the stony ditch off the shoulder, oily smoke billowing up into the night, and hardly deterred by the pin prick drizzle, the fire itself crawling up from the punctured fuel tanks, stripping the paint, melting the tires and blackening the shattered glass, the windshield struck from within, each jagged line telling the story of a broken heart which no ten year old boy should ever have to recollect let alone see, even if it is only in half-tone, the ink, all of it, over and over again, finally gathered on his delicate finger tips, as if by tracing the picture printed in the newspaper, he could in some way retract the details of death, smooth away the cab where the man he saw and loved like a god, agonized and died with no word of his own, illegible or otherwise, no god at all, and so by dissolving the black sky bring back the blue. But he never did. He only wore through one newspaper after another which was when the officials responsible for the custody of parentless children decided something was gravely wrong with him and sent him away, making sure he had no more clippings and all the ink, all that remained of his father, was washed from my hands. 42In an effort to keep the translations as literal as possible, both Latin phrases read as follows: Then in fact all of Troy seemed to me to sink into flames" (Aeneid II, 624) and "Carthage must be destroyed." — Ed.