Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  [59]Rosemary Park considers Karen's dilemma highly emblematic of the absence of cultural polarities: "In this case, Karen's inability to determine a direction is not a fault but a challenge, requiring tools more capable than compasses and reference points more accurate than magnetic fields." See "Impossible Directions" in Inside Out (San Francisco: Urban B-light, 1995), p. 91.

  [60]Devon Lettau wrote an amusing if ultimately pointless essay on the compass' behavior. He asserted that the minute fluctuations of the needle proved the house was nothing less than a vestibule for pure energy which if harnessed correctly could supply the world with unlimited power. See The Faraday Conclusion (Boston: Maxwell Press, 1996). Rosie O'Donnell, however, offered a different perspective when she wryly remarked on Entertainment Tonight: "The fact that Holloway waited that long to use a compass only goes to show how men—even explorers—still refuse to ask for directions."

  [61]Neekisha Dedic's "The Study: Tom's Place" Diss. Boston University, 1996, examines the meaning of "study" when juxtaposed with the ritual of territory, sleep, and memory.

  [61]Leon Robbins' Operation #4: The Art of Internal Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 479.

  [62]Gavin Young, Shots In The Dark (Stanford: University of California Press, 1995), p. 151.

  [63]Again Florencia Calzatti's The Fraying of the American Family proves full of valuable insight. In particular see "Chapter Seven: The Last Straw" where she decries the absolute absurdity of end-series items: "There is no such thing as the last straw. There is only hay."

  [64]See Exhibit Four for the complete transcript of The Last Interview.

  Link""There's something weird going on here, as if Zampano can't quite make up his mind whether this is all an exploration (i.e. 'Base Camp') or a war (i.e. 'Command Post')?

  Link"'Frizell Clary's Tick-Tock-Fade: The Representation of Time in Film Narrative (Delaware: Tame An Essay Publications, 1996), p. 64.

  [67]Naguib Paredes' Cinematic Projections (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 84.

  Linkof shells, the maze like way equipment and furniture are arranged, all reveal how the everyday can contain objects emblematic of what's lyrical and what's epic in our lives. Navidson shows us how a sudden sense of the world, of who or where we are or even what we do not have can be found in even the most ordinary things."

  [69]See Corning Qureshy's essay "D D, Myst, and Other Future Paths" in MIND GAMES ed. Mario Aceytuno (Rapid City, South Dakota: Fortson Press, 1996); M. Slade's "Pawns, Bishops Castles" http://cdip.ucsd.edu/; as well as Lucy T. Wickramasinghe's "Apple of Knowledge vs. Windows of Light: The Macintosh-Microsoft Debate" in Gestures, v.2, November 1996, p. 164-171.

  [70]Janice Whitman's Red Cross Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 235.

  [71]Though this chapter was originally typed, there were also a number of handwritten corrections, "make love" wasn't crossed out but

  "FUCK" was still scratched in above it. As I've been doing my best to incorporate most of these amendments, I didn't think it fair to

  suddenly exclude this one even if it did mean a pretty radical shift in tone.

  By now you've probably noticed that except when safely contained by quotes, Zampand always steers clear of such questionable four-letter language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool

  [72]Gerard Eysenck's "Break Through (not a) Breakthrough: Heuristic Hallways In The Holloway Venture."

  LinkProceedings from The Navidson Record Semiotic Conference Tentatively Entitled Three Blind Mice and the Rest As Well. American Federation of Architects. June 8, 1993. Reprinted in Fisker and Weinberg, 1996.

  [74]See Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art (1771) (New York: Collier, 1961).

  [75] Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect," in French Literary Theory Today ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11-17.

  [75]Sonny Beauregard's "Worst of Times" The San Francisco Chronicle, July 4,1995. C-7, column 2. Difficult to ignore here is the matter of that recent and most disturbing piece of work La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau

  Chien. As many already know, the film portrayed the murder of a little girl in such comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Buiiuel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it was discovered that there really was such a little Lithuanian girl and she really was murdered and by none other than the wealthy filmmaker himself. It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick. Emir Kusturica's Underground finally replaced Nicoise as the winner of the Cannes Palm d'Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully Active. About Yugoslavia.

  The Navidson Record looks like a gritty, shoestring documentary. La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien looks like a lushly executed piece of cinema. Both pieces are similar in one way: what one could believe one doubts, Nicoise because one depends upon the moral sense of the filmmaker, The Navidson Record because one depends upon the moral sense of the world. Both are assumptions neither film deserves. As Murphy Gruner might have observed: "Rumpled vs. Slick. Your choice."

  [76]The records were made public in the Phillip Newharte article "The House The I.R.S. Didn't Build" published in Seattle Photo Zine v. 12, 118, p.92-156.

  The locks may have held, the chain too, but my room still stinks of gore, a flood of entrails spread from wall to wall, the hacked remains of hooves and hands, matted hair and bone, used to paint the ceiling, drench the floor. The chopping must have gone on for days to leave only this. Not even the flies settle for long. Connaught B. N. S. Cape has been murdered along with his donkeys but nobody knows by whom. For as we know, there cannot be an escape. I'm too far from here to know anything or anyone anymore. I don't even know myself.

  [77]Despite claiming in Chapter One that 'the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film,* Zampan6 has still wandered into his own discussion of "the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank" within The Navidson Record.196 I have no idea whether it's on purpose or not. Sometimes I'm certain it is. Other times I'm sure it's just one big fucking train wreck.

  1%195 (cont.) Which, in case you didn't realize, has everything to do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air . . . for as we know there can only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that's it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr. Cape really did come across four donkeys winnowing the air with their hooves . . .

  Thoughts blazing through my mind while I was walking the aisles at the Virgin Megastore, trying to remember a tune to some words, changing my mind to open the door instead, some door, I don't know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was when I found Hailey, disturbed face, incredible body, only eighteen, smoking like a steel mill, breath like the homeless but eyes bright and pure and she had an incredible body and I said hello and on a whim invited her over to my place to listen to some of the CD's I'd just bought, convinced she'd decline, surprised when she accepted, so over she came, and we put on the music and smoked a bowl and called Pink Dot though they didn't arrive with our sandwiches and beer until we were already out of our clothes and under the covers and coming like judgment day (i.e. for the second time) and then we ate and drank and Hailey smiled and her face seemed less disturbed and her smile was naked and gentle and peaceful and as I felt myself drift off next to her, I wanted her to fall asleep next to me, but Hailey didn't understand and for some reason when I woke up a little later, she was already gone, leaving neither a note nor a number.

  A few days later, I heard her on KROQ's Love Line, this time drenched in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Ca
rolla how I—'this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere, everywhere! and weird drawings all over his walls too, all in black. I couldn't understand any of it.'—had dozed off only to start screaming and yelling terrible things in his sleep, about blood and mutilations and other crazy which had scared her and had it been wrong of her to

  LinkI98ipyp0- should read 'for*.

  (No punctuation point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg's The Labyrinth (New York: Harper Brothers, 1960)/

  1 "See chapter ten of Denise Lowery's Sketches: The Process of Entry (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).

  [79]Chris Thayil's "Travel's Legacy" in National Geographic, v. 189, May 1996, p. 36-53.

  [80] Missing. — Ed.

  [81]lbid. Curiously Dahl fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

  [82]See also Dr. Helen Hodge's American Psychology: The Ownership Of Self (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 297 where she writes:

  What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson's corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any A/yjt-like discoveries [ see Chad; p. 99.] thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That permanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

  See also Otto Fenichel's 1934 essay "The Psychology of Boredom" in which he describes boredom as "an unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse." Kierkegaard goes a little further, remarking that "Boredom, extinction, is precisely a continuity of nothingness." While William Wordsworth in his preface for Lyrical Ballads (1802) writes:

  The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability . .. [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

  See Sean Healy's Boredom, Self and Culture (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks' Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and finally Celine Arlesey's Perversity In Dullness . . . and Vice-Versa (Denver: Blederbiss Press, 1968).

  [83]Giinter Nitschke's "Anatomie der gelebten Umwelt" (Bauen + Wohnen , September 1968).206

  [84]Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space Architecture, p. 13.

  [85]Michael Leonard's "Humanizing Space," Progressive Architecture, April 1969.

  [86]Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1960), p. 4.

  [87]J. Piaget and B. Inhelder's The Child's Conception of Geometry (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 6.

  Link21 'no doubt about that. My fear's gotten worse. Hearing Hailey describing my screams on the radio like that has really upset me. I no longer wake up tired. I wake up tired and afraid. I wonder if the morning rasp in my voice is just from sleep or rather some inarticulate attempt to name my horror. I'm suspicious of the dreams I cannot remember, the words only others can hear. I've also noticed the inside of my cheeks are now all mutilated, lumps of pink flesh dangling in the wet dark, probably from grinding, gritting and so much pointless chewing. My teeth ache. My head aches. My stomach's a mess.

  I went to see a Dr. Ogelmeyer a few days ago and told him everything I could think of about my attacks and the awful anxiety that haunts my every hour. He made an appointment for me with another doctor and then prescribed some medication. The whole thing lasted less than half an hour and including the prescription cost close to a hundred and seventy-five dollars.

  I tore up the appointment card and when I got back to my studio I grabbed my radio/ CD player and put it out on the street with a For Sale sign on it. An hour later, some guy driving an Infiniti pulled over and bought it for forty-five dollars. Next, I took all my CDs to Aaron's on Highland and got almost a hundred dollars.

  I had no choice. I need the money. I also need the quiet.

  As of now, I still haven't taken the medicine. It's a low-grade sedative of some kind. Ten flakes of chalk-blue. I hate them. Perhaps when night comes I'll change my mind. I arrange them in a tidy line on the kitchen counter. But night finally does come and even though my fear ratchets towards the more severe, I fear those pills even more.

  Ever since leaving the labyrinth, having had to endure all those convolutions, those incomplete suggestions, the maddening departures and inconclusive nature of the whole fucking chapter, I've craved space, light and some kind of clarity. Any kind of clarity. I just don't know how to find it, though staring over at those awful tablets only amps my resolve to do something, anything.

  Funny as it sounds—especially considering the amounts of drugs I've been proud to consume—those pills, like dots, raised particular, look more and more like some kind of secret Braille spelling out the end of my life.

  Perhaps if I had insurance; if one hundred and seventy-five dollars meant I was twenty-five over my deductible, I'd think differently. But it's not and so I don't.

  As far as I can see, there's no place for me in this country's system of health, and even if there were I'm not sure it would make a difference. Something I considered over and over again while I was sitting in that stark office, barely looking at the National Geographic or People magazines, just waiting on the bustle of procedure and paper work, until the time came, quite a bit of time too, when I had to answer a call, a call made by a nurse, who led me down a hall and then another hall and still another hall, until I found myself alone in a cramped sour smelling room, where I waited again, this time on a slightly

  [89]See Gaston Bachelard's La Poetique de L'Espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p. 78, where he observes:

  Frangoise Minkowska a exposd une collection particuliferement emou- vante de dessins d'enfants polonais ou juifs qui ont subi les sevices de l'occupation allcmande pendant la demifere guerre. Telle enfant qui a vdcu cache, a la moindre alerte, dans une armoire, dessine longtemps aprfes les heures maudites, des maisons 6troites, froides et fermees. Et c'est ainsi que Fran9oise Minkowska parle de "maisons immobiles," de maisons immobilises dans leur raideur: "Cette raideur et cette immobility se retrouvent aussi bien la Jumfe que dans les rideaux des fenetres. Les arbres autour d'elle sont droits, ont Pair de la garder."...

  A un detail, la grande psychologue qu'etait Fran^oise Minkowska re- connaissait le mouvement de la maison. Dans la maison dessinSe par un enfant de huit ans, Fran;oise Minkowska note qu'a la porte, il y a "une poi- gnee; on y entre, on y habite." Ce n'est pas simplement une maison- construction, "c'est une maison-habitation." La poign£e de la porte designe dvidemment une fonctionnalit6. La kinesthesie est marquee par ce signe, si souvent oublie dans les dessins des enfants "rigides."

  Remarquons bien que la "poignde" de la porte ne pourrait guere etre dessinee a 1'^chelle de la maison. C'est sa fonction qui prime tout souci de

>   [90]Though still see Danton Blake's Violent Verses: Cinema's Treatment of Death (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

  [91]Typo. "T" should read "t" with a period following "with."

  [92]i.e. Demerol.

  [93]A bit of dialogue which of course only makes sense when Navidson's history is taken into account.219

  [94]Something about the terror of the staircase.221

  [95]Anne Kligman's "The Short List" in Paris Review, spring, 1995, p. 43-44.

  [96]"[They] shall be separated." — Ed.

  [97]Eta Ruccalla's exemplary Not True, Man: Mi Ata Beni? (Portland: Hineini Press, May 1995), p. 97. It probably should be noted that while Ruccalla equates Jacob with Navidson,

  [98]What follows here is hopelessly incomplete. Denise Neiman who is now married and lives in Tel Aviv claims to have worked on this section when it was intact.

  "The whole thing was really quite brilliant," she told me over the phone. "I helped him a little with the Hebrew but he really didn't need my assistance, except to write down what he said, this incredible analysis about parental blessings, sibling rivalry, birthright, and all the time quoting from memory entire passages from the most obscure books. He possessed a pretty uncanny ability to recite verbatim almost anything he'd read, and let me tell you, he'd read alot. Incredible character.

  "It took us about two weeks to write everything he had to say about Esau and Jacob. Then I read it back to him. He made corrections, and we eventually got around to a second draft which I felt was pretty polished." She took a deep breath. I could hear a baby crying in the background.