House Of Leaves - House of Leaves Part 13
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House of Leaves Part 13

Though here's a song they might of sung: Mad woman on another tour; Everything she is she spits on the floor.

An old man tells me she's sicker than the rest.

God I've never been afraid like this.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey. [197-Following the release of the first edition over the Internet, several responses were received by e-mail including this one: I think Johnny was a little off here. I wanted to write and tell you about It. We actually had a pretty rad time (though his screams were really weird and definately scarred me.) He was very sweet and really gentle and kinda crude too but we still had a lot of fun. It did hurt my feelings the part about my breath. Tell him lye been brushing my teeth more and trying to quit smoking. But one part he didn't mention. He said the nicest things about my wrists. I was sorry to hear he disappeared. Do you know what happened to him?

- Hailey. February 13, 1999.

-Ed.]

I don't know what to do.

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.

Eventually Jed tries again to carry Wax toward what he hopes is home. He also attempts periodically to signal Navidson on the radio though never gets a response. Regrettably very little footage exists from this part of the voyage. Battery levels are running low and there is not much desire on Jed's part to exert any energy towards memorializing what seems more and more like a trek toward his own end.

The penultimate clip finds Jed huddled next to Wax in a very small room. Wax is silent, Jed completely exhausted. It is remarkable how faced with his own death, Jed still refuses to leave his friend. He tells the camera he will go no further, even though the growl seems to be closing in around them.

In the final shot, Jed focuses the camera on the door. Something is on the other side, hammering against it, over and over again. Whatever comes for those who are never seen again has come from [198-Typo Should read "for".] him, and Jed can do nothing but focus the camera on the hinges as the door slowly begins to give way. [No punctuation point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg's The Labyrinth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).]

Bibliography Architecture: Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. New York: Viking, 1994.

Jordan, R. Furneaux. A Concise History of Western Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson Limited, 1969.

Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pothorn, Herbert. Architectural Styles: An Historical Guide to World Design. New York: Facts On File Publications, 1982.

Prevsner, Nikolaus. A History of Building Types. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Prost, Antoine and Gerard Vincent, eds. A History of Private Lfe: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. Trans. Arthur Goidhaminer. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Prussin, Labelle. African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Travis, Jack, ed. African American Architecture In Current Practice. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. 1991.

Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. 2nd ed. London: Laurence King Publishing, 1996.

Whiffen, Marcus. American Architecture Since 1780. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

Wu, Nelson Ikon. Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man, the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1963.

Film: Too numerous to list here.

X.

Every house is an architecturally structured "path": the specific possibilities of movement and the drives toward movement as one proceeds from the entrance through the sequence of spatial entities have been pre-determined by the architectural structuring of that space and one experiences the space accordingly. But at the same time, in its relation to the surrounding space, it is a "goal", and we either advance toward this goal or depart from it.

- Dagobert Frey Grundlegung zu einer vergleichenden Kunstwissenschaft Karen may lose herself in resentment and fear, but the Navidson we see seems joyful, even euphoric, as he sets out with Reston and his brother to rescue Holloway and his team. It is almost as if entrance let alone a purpose-any purpose-in the face of those endless and lightless regions is reason enough to rejoice.

Using 16mm motion picture (colour and B/W) and 35mm stills, Navidson for the first time begins to capture the size and sense of that place. Author Denise Lowery writes the following evocative impression of how Navidson photographs the Anteroom: The hot red flame spits out light, catching on Tom, entwining in the spokes of Reston's wheelchair, casting Shape Changers and Dragons on a nearby wall. But even this watery dance succeeds in only illuminating a tiny portion of a corner. Navidson, Tom and Reston continue forward beneath those gables of gloom and walls buttressed with shadow, lighting more flares, penetrating this world with their halogen lamps, until finally what seemed undefinable comes forth out of the shimmering blank, implacable and now nothing less than obvious and undeniable - as if there never could have been a question about the shape, there never could have been a moment when only the imagination succeeded in prodding those inky folds, coming up with its own sense, something far more perverse and contorted and heavy with things much stranger and colder than even this brief shadow play performed in the irregular burn of sulfur-mythic and inhuman, flickering, shifting, and finally dying around the men's continuous progress.

[199-See chapter ten of Denise Lowery's Sketches: The Process of Entry (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).]

Of course, the Great Hall dwarfs even this chamber. As Holloway reported in Exploration #2, its span approaches one mile, making it practically impossible to illuminate. Instead the trio slips straight through the black, carefully marking their way with ample fishing line, until the way ahead suddenly reveals an even greater darkness, pitted in the centre of that immense, incomprehensible space.

In one photograph of the Great Hall, we find Reston in the foreground holding a flare, the light barely licking an ashen wall rising above him into inky oblivion, while in the background Tom stands surrounded by flares which just as ineffectually confront the impenetrable wall of nothingness looming around the Spiral Staircase.

As Chris Thayil remarks: "The Great Hall feels like the inside of some preternatural hull designed to travel vast seas never before observed in this world." [200-Chris Thayil's "Travel's Legacy" in National Geographic, v. 189, May 1996, p. 36-53.]

Since rescuing Holloway's team is the prime objective, Navidson takes veiy few photographs. Luckily for us, however, the beginning of this sequence relies almost entirely on these scarce but breathtaking stills instead of the far more abundant but vastly inferior video tapes, which are used here mainly to provide sound.

Eventually when they realize Holloway and his team are nowhere near the Great Hall, the plan becomes for Reston to set up camp at the top of the stairway while Navidson and Tom continue on below.

Switching to Hi 8, we follow Navidson and Reston as they react to Tom's announcement.

"Bullshit," Navidson barks at his brother.

"Navy, I can't go down there," Tom stammers.

"What's that supposed to mean? You're just giving up on them?"

Fortunately, by barely touching his friend's arm, Billy Reston forces Navidson to take a good hard look at his brother. As we can see for ourselves, he is pale, out of breath, and in spite of the cold, sweating profusely. Clearly in no condition to go any further let alone tackle the profound depths of that staircase.

Navidson takes a deep breath. "Sorry Tom, I didn't mean to snap at you like that."

Tom says nothing.

"Do you think you can stay here with Billy or do you want to head home? You'll have to make it back on your own."

"I'll stay here."

"With Billy?" Reston responds. "What's that supposed to mean? The hell if you think I'm letting you go on alone."

But Navidson has already started down the Spiral Staircase.

"I should sue the bastards who designed this house," Reston shouts after him. "Haven't they heard of handicap ramps?"

The dark minutes start to slide by. Based on Holloway's descent. Navidson had estimated the stairway was an incredible thirteen miles down. Less than five minutes later, however, Tom and Reston hear a shout. Peering over the banister, they discover Navidson with a lightstick in his hand standing at the bottom-no more than 100ft down. Tom immediately assumes they have stumbled upon the wrong set of stairs.

Further investigation by Navidson, though, reveals the remnants of neon trail markers left by Holloway's team.

Without another word, Reston swings out of his chair and starts down the stairs. Less than twenty minutes later he reaches the last step.

Navidson knows he has no choice but to accept Reston's participation, and heads back up to retrieve the wheelchair and the rest of their gear.

Amazingly enough, Tom seems fine camping near the staircase.

Both Navidson and Reston hope his presence will enable them to maintain radio contact for a much longer time than Holloway could. Even if they both know the house will still eventually devour their signal.

As Navidson and Reston head out into the labyrinth, they occasionally come upon pieces of neon marker and shreds of various types of fishing line. Not even multi-strand steel line seems immune to the diminishing effects of that place.

"It looks like its impossible to leave a lasting trace here," Navidson observes.

"The woman you never want to meet," quips Reston, always managing to keep his wheelchair a little ahead of Navidson.

Soon, however, Reston begins to suffer from nausea, and even vomits. Navidson asks him if he is sick. Reston shakes his head.

"No, it's more. . . shit, I haven't felt this way since I went fishing for marlin."

Navidson speculates Reston's sea sickness or his "mat de mer," as he calls it, may have something to do with the changing nature of the house: "Everything here is constantly shifting. It took Holloway, Jed, and Wax almost four days to reach the bottom of the staircase, and yet we made it down in five minutes. The thing collapsed like an accordion." Then looking over at his friend: "You realize if it expands again, you're in deep shit."

"Considering our supplies," Reston shoots back. "I'd say we'd both be in deep shit."

As was already mentioned in Chapter III, some critics believe the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it. Dr. Haugeland asserts that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data. [201-Missing. - Ed.] Ruby Dahi, in her stupendous study of space, calls the house on Ash Tree Lane "a solipsistic heightener," arguing that "the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self-collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual." [202-Ibid. Curiously DahI fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

If one accepts Dahi's reading, then it follows that Holloway's creature comes from Holloway's mind not the house; the tiny room Wax finds himself trapped within reflects his own state of exhaustion and despair; and Navidson's rapid descent reflects his own knowledge that the Spiral Staircase is not bottomless. As Dr. Haugeland observes: The epistemology of the house remains en- tirely commensurate with its size. After all, one always approaches the unknown with greater caution the first time around. Thus it appears far more expansive than it literally is.

Knowledge of the terrain on a second visit dramatically contracts this sense of distance.

Who has never gone for a walk through some unfamiliar park and felt that it was huge, only to return a second time to discover that the park is in fact much smaller than ini- tially perceived?

When revisiting places we once frequented as children, it is not unusual to observe how much smaller everything seems.

This experience has too often been attributed to the physical differences between a child and an adult. In fact it has more to do with epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions: knowledge is hot water on wool.

It shrinks time and space.

(Admittedly there is the matter where boredom, due to repetition, stretches time and space. I will deal specifically with this problem in a later chapter entitled "Ennui.") [203-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 comdors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Mysr-like discoveries f 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, ' 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 pennanently 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, NJ.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks' Boredom: The Literary I-f istory 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).]

When Holloway's team traveled down the stairway, they had no idea if they would find a bottom. Navidson, however, knows the stairs are finite and therefore has far less anxiety about the descent.

Unlike the real world, Navidson's jour- ney into the house is not just figuratively but literally shortened. [204-Missing. - Ed.]

This theme of structures altered by perception is not uniquely observed in The Navidson Record. Almost thirty years ago, Gunter Nitschke described what he termed "experienced or concrete space": It has a centre which is perceiving man, and it therefore has an excellent system of directions which changes with the movements of the human body; it is limited and in no sense neutral, in other words it is finite, heterogeneous, subjectively defined and perceived; distances and directions are fixed relative to man...

[205-Gunter Nitschke's "Anatomie der gelebten Umweit" (Bauen + Wohnen , September 1968)] [206 Which you are quite right to observe makes no sense at all.]

Christian Norberg-Schulz objects; condemning subjective architectural experiences for the seemingly absurd conclusion it suggests, mainly that "architecture comes into being only when experienced." [207-Christi Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture, p. 13.]

Norberg-Schulz asserts: "Architectural space certainly exists independently of the casual perceiver, and has centres and directions of its own." Focusing on the constructions of any civilization, whether ancient or modem, it is hard to disagree with him, it is only when focusing on Navidson's house that these assertions begin to blur.

Can Navidson's house exist without the experience of itself?

Is it possible to think of that place as "unshaped" by human perceptions?

Especially since everyone entering there finds a vision almost completely-though pointedly not completely-different from anyone else's?

Even Michael Leonard, who had never heard of Navidson's house, professed a belief in the "psychological dimensions of space." Leonard claimed people create a "sensation of space" where the final result "in the perceptual process is a single sensation-a 'feeling' about that particular place..." [208-Michael Leonard's "Humanizing Space," Progressive Architecture, April 1969.]

In his book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch suggested emotional cognition of all environment was rooted in histoiy, or at least personal history: [Environmental image, a generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world] is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action.

[Italics added for emphasis]

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

Or as Jean Piaget insisted: "It is quite obvious that the perception of space involves a gradual construction and certainly does not exist ready-made at the outset of mental development." [210-J. Piaget and B. Inhelder's The Child's Conception of Geometry (New York; Basic Books, 1960), p. 6] Like Leonard's attention to sensation and Piaget's emphasis on constructed perception, Lynch's emphasis on the importance of the past allows him to introduce a certain degree of subjectivity to the question of space and more precisely architecture.

Where Navidson's house is concerned, subjectivity seems more a matter of degree. The Infinite Corridor, the Anteroom, the Great Hall, and the Spiral Staircase, exist for all, though their respective size and even layout sometimes changes. Other areas of that place, however, never seem to replicate the same pattern twice, or so the film repeatedly demonstrates.

No doubt speculation will continue for a long time over what force alters and orders the dimensions of that place. But even if the shifts turn out to be some kind of absurd interactive Rorschach test resulting from some peculiar and as yet undiscovered law of physics, Reston's nausea still reflects how the often disturbing disorientation experienced within that place, whether acting directly upon the inner ear or the inner labyrinth of the psyche, can have physiological consequences.

[211-No doubt about that. My fear's gotten worse. Hearing Bailey 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 hail and then another hall and still another hail, until I found myself alone in a cramped sour smelling room, where I waited again, this time on a slightly different set of procedures and routines carried out by these white draped ministers of medicine, Dr. Ogelmeyer & friends, who by their very absence forced me to wonder what would happen if I were really unhealthy, as unhealthy as I am now poor, how much longer would I have to wait, how much more cramped and sour would this room be, and if I wanted to leave would I? Could I? Perhaps I wouldn't even know how to leave. Incarcerated forever within the corridors of some awful facility. 5051. Protective custody. Or just as terrifying: no 5051, no protective custody. Left to wander alone the equally ferocious and infernal corridors of indigence.

To put it politely: no fucking way.

I know what it means to go mad.

I'll die before I go there.

But first I have to find out if that's where I'm really heading.