Barely caught in the frame, we can just make out Jed's fist rapping incessantly against the floor, which as it turns out, has the exact same timbre as those knocks heard back in the living room. Alan P. Winnett, however, remarks on one notable difference: Curiously enough, despite the similarity of intonation and pitch, the pattern does not even remotely resemble the three short - three long- three short SOS signal heard by the Navidson & Carlos Avital has suggested the house itself not only carried the signal an incredible distance but interpreted it as well. Maria Hulbert disagrees, positing that the rhythm of the knocking hardly matters: "By the eighth day, the absence of any word from Holloway's team was already a distress signal in and of itself." [163-Alan P. Winnett's Heaven's Door (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 452. Also see Carlos Avital's widely read though somewhat prolix pamphlet Acoustic Intervention (Boston: Berklee College of Music, 1994) as A'eil as Maria Hulbert's "Knock Knock, Who Cares?" in The Phenomenology of Coincidence in The Navidson Record (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).]
Regardless of its meaning and the reasons behind its transfiguration, Jed only produces this strange tattoo for a short time before returning to the needs of his badly wounded friend. [164-Once, in the dining hail of a certain boarding school-it was my second and nothing fancy-I met a ghost. I'd been talking with two friends, but due to all the seven o'clock din, the place being packed with fellow gorgers, it was almost impossible to hear much of what anyone said, unless you shouted, and we weren't shouting because our conversation had to be kept secret. Not that what we said offered a whole lot of anything new. Not even variation.
Girls.
That was all. One word to pretty much sum up the whole of all we cared about. Week in, week out. Where to meet them. What to say to them. How not to need them. That was unattractive. Girls could never know you needed them, which was why our conversation had to be kept secret, because that's all it was about: needing them.
Back then, I was living life like a ghost, though not the ghost I'm about to tell you about. I was all numb & stupid and dazed too I guess, a pretty spooky silentiary for matters I knew by heart but could never quite translate for anyone I knew let alone myself. I constantly craved the comforts of feminine attention, even though the thought of actually getting a girlfriend, one who was into me and wanted to be with me, seemed about as real as any dozen of the myths I'd been reading about in class.
At least the same guy who explained my attachment to junk, The Counselor For Disaffected You-I mean Youth-, helped me see how influenced I remained by my past.
Unfortunately it was a lesson delivered tongue in cheek, as he ultimately believed I'd made most of my past up just to impress him.
About one thing he was right, my mother wasn't actually dead yet. Telling everyone she was though made my life far less complicated. I don't think anyone at the boarding school, including my friends, teachers, certainly not my counselor, ever found out the truth, which was fine with me. That's the way I liked it.
My arms, however, were another story. It's kinda funny, but despite my current professional occupation, I don't have any tattoos. Just the scars, the biggest ones of course being the ones you know about, this strange seething melt running from the inside of both elbows all the way up to the end of both wrists, where-I might as well tell you-a skillet of sizzling corn oil unloaded its lasting wrath on my efforts to keep it from the kitchen floor. 'You tried to catch it all,' my mother had often said of that afternoon when I was only four. See, not nearly as dramatic as a Japanese Martial Arts Cult run by Koreans in Indiana. I mean Idaho. Just a dropped pan. That's all.
As for the rest of the scars, there are too many to start babbling on about here, jagged half-moon reminders on my shoulders and shins, plenty stippled on my bones, a solemn white one intersecting my eyebrow, another obvious ie still evident in my broken, now discolored front tooth, a central incisor to be more precise, and some ,en deeper than all of the above, telling a tale much longer than anyone has ever heard or probably ever will hear. All of it true too, though of course scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease of any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colorful or elaborate the design. Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.
My Counselor For Disaffected Youth had no idea what kept me going- though he never phrased it exactly like that. He just asked me how, in light of all my stories, I'd still managed to sustain myself. I couldn't answer him. I know one thing though, whenever I felt particularly bad I'd instantly cling a favorite daydream, one I was willing to revisit constantly, a pretty vivid one too, of a girl, a certain girl, though one I'd yet to meet or even see, whose eyes would sparkle just like the Northern sky I would describe for her when once while sitting on a splintered deck heaving on top of the black-pitch ck of the world, I beheld all the light not of this world.
Which was when, as I was briefly revisiting this me daydream in the presence of my two friends, I heard a voice in my ear-the ghost-softly saying my name.
By the way, this is what got me on this whole thing in the first place. The knocking in the house turning this vivid recollection.
"Johnny" she said in a sigh even more gentle than a whisper.
I looked around. No one sitting at my table s saying anything even remotely like my name. Quite the contrary, their voices were pitched in me egregiously felt debate over something having do with scoring, the details which I know I'll never call, thrown up amidst the equally loud banter of a hundred plates, glasses, knives and forks clattering here and there, and yes everywhere, serving to quickly dispel my illusion until it happened again- "Johnny."
For an instant then, I understood she was my ghost, a seventeen year old with gold braided hair, as wild as a will-o'-the-wisp, encountered many years ago, maybe even in another life, now encountered again, and perhaps here too to find me and restore me to some former self lost on some day no boy can ever really remember-something I write now not really even understanding though liking the sound of it just the same.
"He's so dreamy. I just love the way he smiles when he talks, even if he doesn't say that much."
Which was when I realized, a moment later, that this Ghost was none other than the domed ceiling, rising above the dining hall, somehow carrying with particular vividness, from the far wall to my wall, in one magnificent arc, the confession of a girl I would never see or hear again, a confession I could not even respond to-except here, if this counts.
Sadly enough, my understanding of the rare acoustic dynamics in that hail came a fraction of a second too late, coinciding with the end of dinner, the voice vanishing as suddenly as it appeared, lost in a cumulative leaving, so that even as I continued to scan the distant edge of the dining room or the line forming to deposit trays, I could never find the girl whose expressions or even gestures might match such sentiments.
Of course, ghostly voices don't just have to rely exclusively on domed ceilings. They don't even have to be just voices.
I finally hooked up with Ashley. I went over to her place yesterday morning. Early. She lives in Venice. Her eyebrows look like flakes of sunlight. Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground. And for the life of me I didn't know who she was or where we'd met. For a moment I wondered if she was that voice. But before she said even a word, she held my hand and led me through her house to a patio overgrown with banana trees and rubber plants. Black, decomposing leaves covered the ground but a large hammock hung above it all.
We sat down together and I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask her who she was, where we'd met, been before, but she just smiled and held my hand as we sat down on the hammock and started to swing above all those dead leaves. She kissed me once and then suddenly sneezed, a tiny beautiful sneeze, which made her smile even more and my heart started hurting because I couldn't share her happiness, not knowing what it was, or why it was or who for that matter I was-to her. So I lay there hurting, even when she sat on top of me, covering me in the folds of her dress, and her with no underwear and me doing nothing as her hands briefly unbuttoned my jeans and pulled me out of my underwear, placing me where it was rough and dry, until she sank down without a gasp, and then it was wet, and she was wet, and we were wet, rocking together beneath a small patch of overcast sky, brightening fast, her eyes watching the day come, one hand kneading her dress, the other hand under her dress needing herself, her blonde hair covering her face, her knees tightening around my ribs, until she finally met that calendrical coming without a sound-the only sign-and then even though I had not come, she kissed me for the last time and climbed out of the hammock and went inside.
Before I left she told me our story: where we'd met-Texas-kissed, but never made love and this had confused her and haunted her and she had needed to do Lt before she got married which was in four months to man she loved who made a living manufacturing TNT exclusively for a highway construction firm up in Colorado where he frequently went on business trips and where one night, drunk, angry and disappointed he had invited a hooker back to his motel room and so on and who cared and what was I doing there anyway? I Left, considered jerking off, finally got around to Lt back at my place though in order to pop I had to think of Thumper. It didn't help. I was still hurting, abandoned, drank three glasses of bourbon and fumed on some weed, then came here, thinking of voices, real and imagined, of ghosts, my ghost, of her, at long last, in this idiotic footnote, when she gently pushed me out her door and I said quietly "Ashley" causing her to stop pushing me and ask "yes?" her eyes bright with something she saw that I could never see though what she saw was me, and me not caring though now at least knowing the truth and telling her the truth: "I've never been to Texas."]
Wax, for his part, tries to be brave, forcing a smile hr the camera, even if it is impossible to miss how pale ie looks or misunderstand the meaning of his request- 'Jed, man, I'm so thirsty"-especially since a few seconds earlier he had swallowed a big gulp of water.
No stranger to shock, [ "The following definition is from Medicine for Mountaineering, 3 edition. Edited by James A. Wilkerson, M.D. (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1985), P. 43: "Mild shock results from loss of ten to twenty percent of blood volume. The patient appears pale and his skin feels cool, first over the extremities and later over the trunk. As shock becomes more severe, the patient often complains of feeling cold and he is often thirsty. A rapid pulse and reduced blood pressure may be present. However, the absence of these signs does not indicate shock is not present since they may appear rather late, particularly in previously healthy young adults.
"Moderate shock results from loss of twenty to forty percent of the blood volume. The signs characteristic of mild shock are present and may become more severe. The pulse is typically fast and weak or 'thready.' In addition, blood flow to the kidneys is reduced as the available blood is shunted to the heart and brain and the urinary output declines. A urinary volume of less than 30 cc per hour is a late indication of moderate shock. In contrast to the dark, concentrated urine observed with dehydration, the urine is usually a light color.
"Severe shock results from loss of more than forty percent of the blood volume and is characterized by signs of reduced blood flow to the brain and heart. Reduced cerebral blood flow initially produces restlessness and agitation, which is followed by confusion, stupor and eventually coma and death. Diminished blood flow to the heart can produce abnormalities of the cardiac rhythm."
In his essay "Critical Condition" published in Simple Themes (University of Washington Press, 1995) Brendan Beinhorn declared that Navidson's house, when the explorers were within it, was in a state of severe shock. "However without them, it is completely dead. Humanity serves as its life blood. Humanity's, end would mark the house's end." A statement which provoked sociologist Sondra Staff to claim "Critical Condition" was "just another sheaf of Beinhorn bullshit." (A lecture delivered at Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio on June 26, 1996.)] Jed immediately raises Wax's legs to increase blood flow to the head, uses pocket heaters and a solar blanket to keep him warm, and never stops reassuring him, smiling, telling jokes, promising a hundred happy endings. A difficult task under any circumstances. Nearly impossible when those guttural cries soon find them, the walls too thin to hold any of it back, sounds too obscene to be shut out, Holloway screaming like some rabid animal, no longer a man but a creature stirred by fear, pain, and rage.
"At least he's far off," Jed whispers in an effort to console Wax.
But the sound of distance brings little comfort to either one.
Perhaps [165-Mr. Truant refused to reveal whether the following bizarre textual layout is Zampano's or his own. - Ed.]
here is as good a place as any to consider some of the ghosts haunting The Navidson Record. And since more than a handful of people have pointed out similarities between Navidson's film and various commercial productions, it seems worthwhile to at least briefly examine what distinguishes documentaries from Hollywood releases. [166-In his essay "It Makes No Difference" Film Quarterly v.8, July, 1995, p. 68, Daniel Rosenblum wrote: "In response to the suggestion that the names of the ghosts haunting Navidson's house are none other than The Shining, Vertigo, 20021, Brazil, Lawrence of Arabia, Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, John Carpenter's The Thing, Labyrinth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, Taxi Driver, Crime and Misdemeanors, Repulsion, Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, C'est arrive pres de chez vous, or even The Abyss, I hasten to point out that each one of the above mentioned movies ultimately resorts to some form of delusion, whether reincarnation, phobia, ascent to godhood, paranoia, desert, reverse affirmation of spiritual perdurability ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, title, totemic assumption, submarine, absence of past, vision, psychosis, technology, ibid, serial killer or aliens. All of which The Navidson Record refuses to indulge.] [167-In her elegantly executed piece entitled "Vertical Influence" reproduced in Origins of Faith (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) p. 261, Candida Hayashi writes: "For that matter, what of literary haunting? Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Stephen King's "The Breathing Method" in Different Seasons as well as "Tebular" in More Tales, Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations, John Fante's The Road to Los Angeles, not to mention Henri Bosco's L'Antiquaire, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, B. Walton's Cave of Danger, Jean Genet's Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, John Gardner's October Light, many stories by Lovecraft, Pynchon's gator patrol in V, Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Jim Kalin's One Worm, Sartre's Huis Clos, or Les Mouches, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Lem's Solaris, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or The House of Seven Gables, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. C. Lewis? To say nothing of Brodsky & Utkin, Friday Kahlo's "Blue House" in Coyoacan, Diego Rivera's "Nocturnal Landscape: Paisaje Nocturno" (1947), Rachel Whiteread's House or Charles Ray's Ink Box, Bill Viola's Room for St. John of the Cross or more words by Robert Venturi, Aldo van Eyck, James Joyce, Paolo Portoghesi, Herman Melville, Otto Friedrich Bollnow (Mensch und Raum, 1963), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, in which he declares "depth is the most 'existential' of all dimensions")? To all of it, I have only one carefully devised response: Ptooey!"] [168-Aside from cinematic, literary, architectural, or even philosophical ghosts, history also offers a few of its own. Consider two famous expeditions where those involved confronted the unknown under circumstances of deprivation and fear only to soon find themselves caught in a squall of terrible violence.]
I.
On September 20th, 1519 Ferdinand Magellan embarked from Sanlucar de Barrameda to sail around the globe. The voyage would once and for all prove the world was round and revolutionize people's thoughts on navigation and trade, but the journey would also be dangerous, replete with enough horror and hardship that in the end it would cost Magellan his life.
In March of 1520 when Magellan's five vessels reached Patagonia and sailed into the Bay of St. Julian, things were far from harmonious, Fierce winter weather, a shortage of stores, not to mention the anxiety brought on by the uncertainty of the future, had caused tensions among the sailors to increase, until on or around April Fools Day, which also happened to be Easter Day, Captain Gaspar Quesada of the Concepcion and his servant Luiz de Molino planned and executed a mutiny, resulting in the death of at least one officer and the wounding of many more. [169-While mutiny is not terribly common today, consider the 1973 Skylab mission where astronauts openly rebelled against a mission controller they felt was too imperious. The incident never resulted in violence, but it does emphasize how despite constant contact with the society at home, plenty of food, water, and warmth, and only a slight risk of getting lost, tensions among explorers can still surface and even escalate.
Holloway's expedition had none of the amenities Skylab enjoyed. 1) There was no radio contact; 2) they had very little sense of where they were; 3) they were almost out of food and water; 4) they were operating in freezing conditions; and 5) they suffered the implicit threat of that 'growl'.] [155-In describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how "when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within."] Unfortunately for Quesada, he never stopped to consider that a man who could marshal an expedition to circle the globe could probably marshal men to retaliate with great ferocity. This gross underestimation of his opponent cost Quesada his life.
Like a general, Magellan rallied those men still loyal to him to retake the commandeered ships. The combination of his will and his tactical acumen made his success, especially in retrospect, seem inevitable. The mutineer Mendoza of the Victoria was stabbed in the throat. The Santo Antonia was stormed, and by morning the Concepcion had surrendered. Forty-eight hours after the mutiny had begun, Magellan was again in control. He sentenced all the mutineers to death and then in an act of calculated good-will suspended the sentence, choosing instead to concentrate maritime law and his own ire on the three directly responsible for the uprising: Mendoza's corpse was drawn and quartered, Juan de Cartagena was marooned on a barren shore and Quesada was executed.
Quesada, however was not hung, shot or even forced to walk the plank. Magellan had a better idea. Molino, Quesada's trusty servant, was granted clemency if he agreed to execute his master. Molino accepted the duty and together both men were set in a shallop and directed back to their ship, the Trinidad, to fulfill their destiny. [171-Taken from Zampano's journal: "As often as I have lingered on Hudson in his shallop, I have in the late hours turned my thoughts to Quesada and Molino's journey across those shallow waters, wondering aloud what they said, what they thought, what gods came to keep them or leave them, and what in those dark waves they finally saw of themselves? Perhaps because history has little to do with those minutes, the scene survives only in verse: The Song of Quesada and Molino by [XXXX].[172-Illegible.] I include it here in its entirety." [175-See Appendix E.]
Then: "Forgive me please for including this. An old man's mind is just as likely to wander as a young man's, but where a young man will forgive the stray, [177-For instance, youth's peripatetic travail's in The PXXXXXXX Poems; a perfect example why errors should be hastily exised] [178-i.e. The Pelican Poems.] [179-See Appendix II-B. - Ed.] an old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don't think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead."] [173-You got me. [176-See Appendix B.] Gnome aside, I don't even know how to take 'I've killed many men.' Irony? A confession? As I already said 'You got me.'] [174-For reasons entirely his own, Mr. Truant de-struck the last six lines In footnote 171. - Ed.]
Like Magellan, Holloway led an expedition into the unknown. Like Magellan, Holloway faced a mutiny. And like the captain who meted out a penalty of death, Holloway also centered the cross-hairs upon those who had spurned his leadership. However unlike Magellan, Holloway's course was in fact doomed, thus necessitating a look at Henry Hudson's fate.
II.
By April of 1610, Hudson left England in his fourth attempt to find the northwest passage. He headed west across arctic waters and eventually ended up in what is known today as the Hudson Bay. Despite its innocuous sounding name, back in 1610 the bay was Hell in ice. Edgar M. Bacon in his book Henry Hudson (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907) writes the following: On the first of November the ship was brought to a bay or inlet far down into the south-west, and hauled aground; and there by the tenth of the month she was frozen in. Discontent was no longer expressed in whispers. The men were aware that the provisions, laid in for a limited number of months, were running to an end, and they murmured that they had not been taken back for winter quarters to Digges Island, where such stores of wild fowl had been seen, instead of beating about for months in "a labyrinth without end.
[italics added for emphasis]
This labyrinth of blue ice drifting in water cold enough to kill a man in a couple of minutes tested and finally outstripped the resolve of Hudson's crew. Where Magellan's men could fish or at least enjoy the cove of some habitable shore, Hudson's men could only stare at shores of ice. [180-Though written almost two hundred years after Hudson's doomed voyage, it is hard not to think of Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, especially this fabled moment- With sloping masts and dripping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as Emerald.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken - The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!
Till a great sea-bird called the Albatross...
At length did cross an Albatross, Through the fog it came...
This was not some feverish world concocted in a state of delirium but a very real place which Hudson had faced despite the evident terror it inflicted upon everyone, especially his crew. Nor was such terror vanquished by the modern age. Consider the diary entry made in 1915 by Reginald James, expedition physicist for Shackleton's Endurance which was trapped and finally crushed by pack ice off the coast of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea: "A terrible night with the ship sullen dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her... seeming like the cries of a living creature." See also Simon Alcazaba's Historic Conditions (Cleveland: Annwyl Co., Inc., 1963) as well as Jack Denton Scott's "Journey Into Silence" Playboy, August 1973, p. 102.]
Inevitably, whispers rose to shouts until finally shouts followed action. Hudson, along with his son and seven others, was forced into a shallow without food and water. They were never heard from again, lost in that labyrinth without end. [170-Also see The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XX VIII (San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1886).]
Like Hudson, Holloway found himself with men who, short on reserves and faith, insisted on turning back. Like Hudson, Holloway resisted. Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that labyrinth.
Fortunately for audiences everywhere, only Hudson's final moments continue to remain a mystery.
For one thing, Hollywood films rely on sets, actors, expensive film stock, and lush effects to recreate a story. Production value coupled with the cultural saturation of trade gossip help ensure a modicum of disbelief, thus reaffirming for the audience, that no matter how moving, riveting, or terrifying a film may be, it is still only entertainment. Documentaries, however, rely on interviews, inferior equipment, and virtually no effects to document real events. [181-Consider Stephen Mamber's definition of cinema verite which seems an almost exact description of how Navidson made his film: Cinema verite is a strict discipline only because it is in many ways to simple, so "direct." The filmmaker attempts to eliminate as much as possible the barriers between subject and audience.. These barriers are technical (large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment, special lights, costumes and makeup), procedural (scripting, acting, directing), and structural (standard editing devices, traditional forms of melodrama, suspense, etc.). Cinema verite is a practical working method based upon a faith of unmanipulated reality, a refusal to tamper with life as it presents itself. Any kind of cinema is a process of selection, but there is (or should be) all the difference in the world between the cinema verite aesthetic and the methods of fictional and traditional documentary film.
Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 4.] Audiences are not allowed the safety net of disbelief and so must turn to more challenging mechanisms of interpretation which, as is sometimes the case, may lead to denial and aversion. [182-not included]
While in the past, live footage was limited to the aftermath-the oral histories given by survivors of photographs taken by pedestrian-these days of the proliferation of affordable video cameras and tapes has created more of an opportunity for someone to record a place wreck or bank robbery as it is actually taking place.
Of course, no documentary is ever entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed-much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of "reenactment."
By now it is common knowledge that Flaherty recreated certain scenes in Nanook for the camera. Similar accusations have been made against shows like America's Funniest Home Videos. For the most part, professionals in the field do their best to police, or at least critique, the latest films, well aware that to lose the public's trust would mean the death rattle for an already besieged art form.
Currently, the greatest threat comes from the area of digital manipulation. In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote: "In the future, readers of newspaper and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do, the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they once did." [184-Andy Grundberg, "Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie," The New York Times, August 12, 1990, Section 2, 1, 29. All of which reiterates in many ways what Marshall McLuhan already anticipated when he wrote: "To say 'the camera cannot lie' is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name."]
Also in 1990, Associated Press executive, Vincent Alabiso, acknowledged the power of digital technology and condemned its use to falsify images: "The electronic darkroom is a highly sophisticated photo editing tool. It takes us out of a chemical darkroom where subtle printing techniques such as burning and dodging have long been accepted as journalistically sound. Today these terms are replaced by 'image manipulation' and 'enhancement.' In a time when such broad terms could be misconstrued we need to set limits and restate some basic tenets.
"The content of photographs will NEVER be changed or manipulated in any way."
A year later, the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) also recognized the power of electronic imaging techniques: "As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy: therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in a way that deceives the public.
"As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images. The technology enables the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable. In light of this, we, the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession." [185-See Chapter 20 in Howard Chapnick's Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (University of Missouri Press, 1994.) Then in 1992, MIT professor William J. Mitchell offered this powerful summation: "Protagonists of the institutions of journalism, with their interest in being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for provably reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image-but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography's construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition." [W-William J. Mitchell's The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 8.]
Ironically, the very technology that instructs us to mistrust the image also creates the means by which to accredit it.
As author Murphy Gruner once remarked: "Just as is true with Chandler's Marlowe, the viewer is won over simply because the shirts are rumpled, the soles are worn, and there's that ever present hat. These days nothing deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive. Which is how video and film technology comes to us: rumpled or slick.
"Rumpled Technology-capital M for Marlowe-hails from Good Guys, Radio Shack or Fry's Electronics. It is cheap, available and very dangerous. One needs only to consider The George Holliday Rodney King Video to recognize the power of such low- end technology. Furthermore, as the recording time for tapes and digital disks increases, as battery life is extended, and as camera size is reduced, the larger the window will grow for capturing events as they occur.
"Slick Technology - capital S for Slick- is the opposite: expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming. But it too is also very powerful. Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite, equipped with 24 hour catering and an on site masseuse." [186-Murphy Gruner's Document Detectives (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 37. [187-One can imagine a group of Documentary Detectives whose sole purpose is to uphold Truth & Truth [Or TNT. Truth And Truth therefore becoming another name for the nitrating of toluene or C7H5N3O6 - not to be confused with C16H10N2O2-in other words one word: trinitrotoluene. TNT [188-Which also stands for Technological Neural Transmitters (TNT) [189-Or what as Lude once pointed out also means Tits And Tail. i.e. also explosive. i.e. orgasmic. i.e. a sudden procreating pun which turns everything into something entirely else, which now as I catch up with myself, where I've gone and where I haven't gone and what I better get back to, may very well have not been a pun at all but plain and simple just the bifurcation of truth, with an ampersand tossed in for unity. A sperm twixt another form of similar unity, and look there's an echo at hand. The articulation of conflict may very well be a better thing upon which to stand-Truth & Truth 'z all, after all, or not at all. In other words, just as Zampano wrote it.] 196 another pun and another story altogether.] telegraphing a weird coalition of sense. On one hand transcendent and lasting and on the other violent and extremely flammable.] by guaranteeing the authenticity of all works. Their seal of approval would create a sense of public faith which could only be maintained if said Documentary Detectives were as fierce as pit bulls and as scrupulous as saints. Of course, this is more the kind of thing a novelist or playwright would deal with, and as I am pointedly not a novelist or playwright I will leave that tale to someone else.]
As Grundberg, Alabiso and Mitchell contend, this impressive ability to manipulate images must someday permanently deracinate film and video from its now sacrosanct position as "eyewitness." The perversion of image will make The Rodney King Video inadmissible in a court of law . Incredible as it may seem, Los Angele s Mayor Bradley's statement- "Our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw and what we saw was a crime."-will seem ludicrous. Truth will once again revert to the shady territories of the word and humanity's abilities to judge its peculiar modalities. Nor is this a particularly original prediction Anything from Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, to Delgado's Card Tricks, or Lisa Mane "Slit Slit" Bader's Confession of a Porn Star delve into the increasingly protean nature of a digital universe. In his article "True Grit", Anthony Lane at The New Yorker claims "grittiness is the most difficult element to construct and will always elude the finest studio magician. Grit, however, does not elude Navidson." Consider the savage scene captured on grainy 16mm film of a tourist eaten alive by lions in a wildlife preserve in Angola (Traces of Death ) and compare it to the ridiculous and costly comedy Eraser in which several villains are dismembered by alligators. [190-Jennifer Kale told me she'd visited Zampano around seven times: 'Me liked me to teach him filmic words. You know, film crit kind of stuff. Straight out of Christian Metz and the rest of that crew. He also liked me to read him some of the jokes I'd gotten on the Internet. Mostly though I just described movies I'd recently seen.' Eraser was one of them.]
William J. Mitchell offers an alternate description of "grit" when he highlights Barthe's observation that reality incorporates "seemingly functionless detail 'because it is there' to signal that 'this is indeed an unfiltered sample of the real. [191-Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect," in French Literary Theory Today ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11-17.] [192-William J. Mitchell's The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic Era, p. 27.] Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane's conclusion: "Navidson has still relied on FIX. Don't fool yourself into thinking any of this stuff's true. Grit's just grit, and the room stretching is all care of Industrial Light & Magic."
Ella Taylor, Charles Champlin, Todd McCarthy, Annette Insdort G. 0. Pilfer, and Janet Maslin, all sidestep the issue with a sentence or two. However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or "live-footage," despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of The Navidson Record, cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.
As Sonny Beauregard quipped: "Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we'd have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker" [193-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 Bufluel, 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 fictive. 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."]
Perhaps the best argument for the authenticity of The Navidson Record does not come from film critics, university scholars, or festival panel members but rather from the I.R.S. Even a cursory glance at Will Navidson's tax statements or for that matter Karen's, Tom's or Billy Reston's, proves the impossibility of digital manipulation. [194-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.]
They just never had enough money.
Sonny Beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in The Navidson Record would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars. Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone's credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short. Beauregard again: "Considering the cost of special effects these days, it is inconceivable how Navidson could have created his house"
Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality. [195-Despite claiming in Chapter One that the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film, Zampano has still wandered into his own discussion of "the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank" within The Navidson Record. 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.]
[196-195 (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 Carolla how I-"this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere, evervwhere! 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 leave even though when he'd been awake he'd seemed alright?
An ugly shiver ripped up my back then. All this time I'd believed the cavorting and drinking and sex had done away with that terrible onslaught of fear. Clearly I was wrong. I'd only pushed it off into another place. My stomach turned. Screaming things was bad enough, but the thought that I'd also frightened someone I felt only tenderness for made it far worse.
Did I scream every night? What did I say? And why in the hell couldn't I remember any of it in the morning?
I checked to make sure my door was locked. Returned a second later to put on the chain. I need more locks. My heart started hammering. I retreated to the corner of my room but that didn't help. Puck, fuck, fuck-wasn't helping either. Better go to the bathroom, try some water on the face, try anything. Only I couldn't budge. Something was approaching. I could hear it outside. I could feel the vibrations. It was about to splinter its way through the Hall door, my door, Walker in Darkness, from whose face earth and heaven long ago fled.
Then the walls crack.
All my windows shatter.
A terrible roar.
More like a howl more like a shriek.
My eardrums strain and split.
The chain snaps.
I'm desperately trying to crawl away, but it's too late. Nothing can be done now.
That awful stench returns and with it comes a scene, filling my place, painting it all anew, but with what? And what kind of brushes are being used? What sort of paint? And why that smell?
Oh no.
How do I know this?
I cannot know this.
The floor beneath me fails into a void.
Except before I fall what's happening now only reverts to what was supposed to have happened which in the end never happened at all. The walls have remained, the glass has held and the only thing that vanished was my own horror, subsiding in that chaotic wake always left by even the most rational things.
Here then was the darker side of whim.
I tried to relax.
I tried to forget.
I imagined some world-weary travelers camped on the side of some desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder & wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines finally collude, or so they think. Except those stars are never born on such far away horizons as that. The light in fact comes from their own gathering and their own conversation, surrounding and sustaining the fire they have built and kept alive through the night, until inevitably, come morning, cold and dull, the songs are all sung, the stories lost or taken, soup eaten, embers dark. Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of 'trope' and it means 'turn.'