House Of Leaves - House of Leaves Part 4
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House of Leaves Part 4

It is beneficial to consider the origins of "riddle." The Old English rFde1se means "opinion, conjure" which is related to the Old English r&don "to interpret" in turn belonging to the same etymological history of "read." "Riddling" is an offshoot of "reading" calling to mind the participatory nature of that act-to interpret-which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.

"To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit." Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons." It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms. Charmingly enough Karen Green and Audrie MeCullogh "fit it" with a bookshelf.

As we all know, both reason and weapons wifi eventually be resorted to. At least though for now-before the explorations, before the bloodshed-a drill, a hammer, and a Phillips screwdriver suffice.

Karen refers to her books as her "newly found day to day comfort." By assembling a stronghold for them, she provides a pleasant balance between the known and the unknown. Here stands one warm, solid, and colorful wall of volume after volume of history, poetry, photo albums, and pulp. And though irony eventually subsumes this moment, for now at least it remains uncommented upon and thus wholly innocent. Karen simply removes a photo album, as anyone might do, and causes all the books to fall like dominos along the length of the shelf. However instead of tumbling to the floor, they are soundly stopped, eliciting a smile from both women and this profound remark by Karen: "No better book ends than two walls."

Lessons from a library. [38-Edith Skourja's "Riddles Without" in Riddles Within, ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago: Sphinx Press, 1994), p. 17-57.]

Skourja's analysis, especially concerning the inherent innocence of Karen's project, sheds some light on the value of patience.

Walter Joseph Adeltine argues that Skourja forms a dishonest partnership with the shelf building segment: "Riddle me this-Riddle me that-Is all elegant crap. This is not a confrontation with the unknown but a flat-out case of denial." [39-Walter Joseph Adeltine "Crap," New Perspectives Quarterly, V. 11, winter 1994, p. 30.] What Adeltine himself denies is the need to face some problems with patience, to wait instead of bumble, or as Tolstoy wrote: "Dans le doute, mon cher... abstiens-toi." [40-Something like "When in doubt, friend, do nothing." War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885.]

Gibbons when working on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would go on long walks before sitting down to write. Walking was a time to organize his thoughts, focus and relax. Karen's shelf building serves the same purpose as Gibbon's retreats outside. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of "not knowing." Of course not knowing hardly prevents the approaching chaos.

Turn vero omne mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium: Delenda est Cartha go. [41-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.

A girl named Amber Rightacre suggested it might have something to do with the destruction of Carthage. [42-In 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.] She's the one who translated and sourced the previous Tolstoy phrase. I've actually never read War and Peace but she had, and get this, she read it to Zampano.

I guess you might say in a roundabout way the old man introduced us.

Anyway since that episode in the tattoo shop, I haven't gone out as much, though to tell you the truth I'm no longer convinced anything happened. I keep cornering myself with questions: did I really experience some sort of decapacitating seizure, I mean in-? Or did I invent it? Maybe I just got a little creative with a residual hangover or a stupid head rush?

Whatever the truth is, I've been spending more and more time riddling through Zampano's bits-riddling also means sifting; as in passing corn, gravel or cinders through a coarse sieve; a certain coed taught me that. Not only have I found journals packed with bibliographies and snaking etymologies and strange little, I don't know what you'd call them, aphorisms??? epiphanies???, I also came across this notepad crammed with names and telephone numbers. Zampano's readers. Easily over a hundred of them, though as I quickly discovered more than a few of the numbers are now defunct and very few of the names have last names and for whatever reason those that do are unlisted. I left a couple of messages on some machines and then somewhere on page three, Ms. Rightacre picked up. I told her about my inheritance and she immediately agreed to meet me for a drink.

Amber, it turns out, was quite a number; a quarter French and a quarter Native American with naturally black hair, dark blue eyes and a beautiful belly, long and flat and thin, with a slender twine of silver piercing her navel. A barbed wire tattoo in blue & red encircled her ankle. Whether Zampano knew it or not, she was a sight I'm sure he was sorry to miss.

"He loved to brag about how uneducated he was," Amber told me. "I never even went to high school' he would say. "Good, that makes me smarter than you.' We talked like that a little, but most of the time, I just read to him. He insisted on Tolstoy. Said I read Tolstoy better than anyone else. I think that was mainly because I could manage the French passages okay, my Canadian background and all."

After a few more drinks, we ambled over to the Viper. Lude was hanging out at the door and walked us in. Much to my surprise, Amber grabbed my arm as we headed up the stairs. This thing we shared in common seemed to have created a surprisingly intense bond. Lude listened to us for a while, hastening to add at every pause that he was the one who'd found the damn thing, in fact he was the one who'd called me, he'd even seen Amber around his building a few times, but because he hadn't taken the time to read any of the text he could never address the particulars of our conversation. Amber and I were lost to a different world, a deeper history. Lude knew the play. He ordered a drink on my tab and went in search of other entertainment.

When I eventually got around to asking Amber to describe Zampano, she just called him "imperceivable and alone, though not I think so lonely." Then the first band came on and we stopped talking. Afterwards, Amber was the one who resumed the conversation, stepping a little closer, her elbow grazing mine. "I never got the idea he had a family," she continued. "I asked him once-and I remember this very clearly-I asked him if he had any children. He said he didn't have any children any more. Then he added: 'Of course, you're all my children,' which was strange since I was the only one there. But the way he looked at me with those blank eyes-" she shuddered and quickly folded her arms as if she'd just gotten cold. "It was like that tiny place of his was suddenly full of faces and he could see them all, even speak to them.

It made me real uneasy, like I was surrounded by ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts?"

I told her I didn't know.

She smiled.

"I'm a Virgo, what about you?"

We ordered another round of drinks, the next band came up, but we didn't stay to hear them finish. As we walked to her place-it turned out she lived nearby, right above Sunset Plaza in fact-she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts.

"So not so lonely," she murmured. "I mean with all those ghosts, me and his other children, whoever they were, though actually, hmmm I forgot about this, I don't know why, I mean it was why I finally stopped going over there. When he blinked, his eyelids, this is kind of weird, but they stayed closed a little bit longer than a blink, like he was consciously closing them, or about to sleep, and I always wondered for a fraction of a second if they would ever open again. Maybe they wouldn't, maybe he was going to go to sleep or maybe even die, and looking at his face then, so serene and peaceful made me sad, and I guess I take back what I said before, because with hi-8 eyes closed he didn't look alone, then he looked lonely, terribly lonely, and that made me feel real sad and it made me feel lonely too. I stopped going there after a while. But you know what, not visiting him made me feel guilty. I think I still feel guilty about just dropping out on him like that."

We stopped talking about Zampano then. She paged her friend Christina who took less than twenty minutes to come over. There were no introductions. We just sat down on the floor and snorted lines of coke off a CD case, gulped down a bottle of wine and then used it to play spin the bottle. They kissed each other first, then they both kissed me, and then we forgot about the bottle, and I even managed to forget about Zampano, about this, and about how much that attack in the tattoo shop had put me on edge. Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, always laughing, surrendering to its ease, especially when he soared in great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw 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.

Karen's project is one mechanism against the uncanny or that which is "un-home-like." She remains watchful and willing to let the bizarre dimensions of her house gestate within her. She challenges its irregularity by introducing normalcy: her friend's presence, bookshelves, peaceful conversation. In this respect, Karen acts as the quintessential gatherer. She keeps close to the homestead and while she may not forage for berries and mushrooms she does accumulate tiny bits of sense.

Navidson and Tom, on the other hand, are classic hunters. They select weapons (tools; reason) and they track their prey (a solution). Billy Reston is the one they hope will help them achieve their goal. He is a gruff man, frequently caustic and more like a drill sergeant than a tenured professor. He is also a paraplegic who has spent almost half his life in an aluminum wheelchair. Navidson was barely twenty-seven when he first met Reston. Actually it was a photograph that brought them together. Navidson had been on assignment in India, taking pictures of trains, rail workers, engineers, whatever caught his attention. The piece was supposed to capture the clamor of industry outside of Hyderabad. What ended up plastered on the pages of more than a few newspapers, however, was a photograph of a black American engineer desperately trying to out run a falling high voltage wire. The cable had been cut when an inexperienced crane operator had swung wide of a freight car and accidentally collided with an electrical pole. The wood had instantly splintered, tearing in half one of the power cables which descended toward the helpless Billy Reston, spitting sparks, and lashing the air like Nag or Nagaina. [43-Nag and Nagaina were the names of the two cobras iii Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Eventually both were defeated by the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.]

That very photograph hangs on Reston's office wall. It captures the mixture of fear and disbelief on Reston's. face as he suddenly finds himself running for his life. One moment he was casually scanning the yard, thinking about lunch, and in the next he was about to die. His stride is stretched, back toes trying to push him out of the way, hands reaching for something, anything, to pull him out of the way. But he is too late. That serpentine shape surrounds him, moving much too fast for any last ditch effort at escape. As Fred de Stabenrath remarked in April 1954, "Les jeux sontfait. Nous sommes fucked." [44-Fred de Stabenrath purportedly exclaimed this right before he was ki[xxxxxx part missing xxxxxxxx] [45-Zampano left the rest of this footnote buried beneath a particularly dark spill of ink. At least I'm assuming it's ink. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's something else. But then that's not really important.. In some cases, I've managed to recover the lost text (see Chapter Nine). Here, however, I failed. Five lines gone along with the rest of Mr. Stabenrath.]

Tom takes a hard look at this remarkable 11 x 14 black and white print. "That was the last time I had legs," Reston tells him. "Right before that ugly snake bit 'em off. I used to hate the picture and then I sort of became grateful for it. Now when anyone walks into my office they don't have to think about asking me how I ended up in this here chariot. They can see for themselves. Thank you Navy. You bastard. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi with a Nikon."

Eventually the chat subsides and the three men get down to business. Reston's response is simple, rational, and exactly what both brothers came to hear: "There's no question the problem's with your equipment. I'd have to check out Tom's stuff myself but I'm willing to bet university money there's something a little outta whack with it. I've got a few things you can borrow: a Stanley Beacon level and a laser distance meter." He grins at Navidson. "The meter's even a Leica. That should put this ghost in the grave fast. But if it doesn't, I'll come out and measure your place myself and I'll charge you for my time too."

Both Will and Tom chuckle, perhaps feeling a little foolish. Reston shakes his head.

"If you ask me Navy, you've got a little too much time on your hands. You'd probably be better off if you just took your family for a nice long drive."

On their way back, Navidson points the Hi 8 toward the darkening horizon.

For a while neither brother says a word.

Will breaks the silence first: "Funny how all it took was a fraction of an inch to get us in a car together."

"Pretty strange."

"Thanks for coming Tom."

"Like there was really a chance I'd say no."

A pause. Again Navidson speaks up.

"I almost wonder if I got tangled up in all this measuring stuff just so I'd have some pretext to call you."

Despite his best efforts, Tom cannot hold back a laugh: "You know I hate to tell you this but there are simpler reasons you could of come up with."

"You're telling me," Navidson says, shaking his head.

Rain starts splashing down on the windshield and lightning cracks across the sky. Another pause follows.

This time, Tom breaks the silence: "Did you hear the one about the guy on the tightrope?"

Navidson grins: "I'm glad to see some things never change."

"Hey this one's true. There was this twenty-five year old guy walking a tightrope across a deep river gorge while half way around the world another twenty-five year old guy was getting a blow job from a seventy year old woman, but get this, at the exact same moment both men were thinking the exact same thought. You know what it was?"

"No clue."

Tom gives his brother a wink.

"Don't look down."

And thus as one storm begins to ravage the Virginias, another one just as easily dissipates and vanishes in a flood of bad jokes and old stories.

When confronting the spatial disparity in the house, Karen set her mind on familiar things while Navidson went in search of a solution. The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths. But children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies.

Similar to the ingenuous opening sequence of The Navidson Record, seeing these two giddy children romp around is an equally unsettling experience, perhaps because their state of naivete is so appealing to us, even seductive, offering such a simple resolution to an enigma. Unfortunately, denial also means ignoring the possibility of peril.

That possibility, however, seems at least momentarily irrelevant when we cut to Will and Tom hauling Billy Reston's equipment upstairs, the authority of their tools quickly subduing any sense of threat.

Just watching the two brothers use the Stanley Beacon level to establish the distance they will need to measure communicates comfort. When they then turn their attention to the Leica meter it is nearly impossible not to at last expect some kind of resolution to this confounding problem. In fact Tom's crossed fingers as the Class 2 laser finally fires a tiny red dot across the width of the house manages to succinctly represent our own sympathies.

As the results are not immediate, we wait along with the whole family as the internal computer calibrates the dimension. Navidson captures these seconds in 16mm. His Arriflex, already pre-focused and left running, spools in 24 frames per second as Daisy and Chad sit on their beds in the background, Hillary and Mallory linger in the foreground near Tom, while Karen and Audrie stand off to the right near the newly created bookshelves.

Suddenly Navidson lets out a hoot. It appears the discrepancy has finally been eliminated.

Tom peers over his shoulder, "Good-bye Mr. Fraction."

"One more time" Navidson says. "One more time. Just to make sure."

Oddly enough, a slight draft keeps easing one of the closet doors shut. It has an eerie effect because each time the door closes we lose sight of the children.

"Hey would you mind propping that open with something?' Navidson asks his brother.

Tom turns to Karen's shelves and reaches for the largest volume he can find. A novel. Just as with Karen, its removal causes an immediate domino effect. Only this time, as the books topple into each other, the last few do not stop at the wall as they had previously done but fall instead to the floor, revealing at least a foot between the end of the shelf and the plaster.

Tom thinks nothing of it.

"Sorry," he mumbles and leans over to pick up the scattered books. Which is exactly when Karen screams.

V.

Raju welcomed the intrusion-something to relieve the loneliness of the place.

-R.K.Narayan It is impossible to appreciate the importance of space in The Navidson Record without first taking into account the significance of echoes. However, before even beginning a cursory examination of their literal and thematic presence in the film, echoes reverberating within the word itself need to be distinguished.

Generally speaking, echo has two coextensive histories: the mythological one and the scientific one. [46-David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one. Of course, the implication that the current categories of myth and science ignore the reverberation of knowledge itself is not true. Katz's treatment of repetition, however, is still highly rewarding. His list of examples in Table iii are particularly impressive. See The Third Beside You: An Analysis of the Epistemological Echo by David Eric Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).] Each provides a slightly different perspective on the inherent meaning of recurrence, especially when that repetition is imperfect.

To illustrate the multiple resonances found in an echo, the Greeks conjured up the story of a beautiful mountain nymph. Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [*-Adonta ta... = "Her still singing limbs."] [47-Note that luckily in this chapter, Zampano penciled many of the translations for these Greek and Latin quotations into the margins. I've gone ahead and turned them into footnotes.] In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo's body and the near negation of her voice. [48-Ivan Largo Stilets, Greek Mythology Again (Boston: Biloquist Press, 1995), p. 343-497; as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, ifi. 356-410.]

But Echo is an insurgent. Despite the divine constraints imposed upon her, she still manages to subvert the gods' ruling. After all, her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog. Echo colours the words with faint traces of sorrow (The Narcissus myth) or accusation (The Pan myth) never present in the original. As Ovid recognized in his Metamorphoses: Spreta latet silvis pudibundaque frondibus ora protegit et solis ex jib vivit in antris; sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae; extenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae adducitque cutem macies et in aera sucus corporis omnis abit; vox tantum atque ossa supersunt: vox manet, ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram. Inde latet silvis nulloque in monte videtur, omnibus auditur: sonus est, qui vivit in i11a.

[*-Eloquently translated by Horace Gregory as: "So she was turned away! To hide her face, her lips, her guilt among the trees) Even their leaves, to haunt caves of the forest,! To feed her love on melancholy sormw/ Which, sleepless, turned her body to a shade) First pale and wrinkled, then a sheet of air) Then bones, which some say turned to thin-worn rocks; / And last her voice remained. Vanished in forest) Far from her usual walks on hills and valleys,! She's heard by all who call; her voice has life." The Metamorphoses by Ovid. (New York: A Mentor Book, 1958), p. 97.]

To repeat: her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful story, in spite of telling the same story. [49-Literary marvel Miguel de Cervantes set down this compelling passage in his Don Quixote (Part One, Chapter Nine): Ia verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, depdsito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. [51-Which Anthony Bonner translates as".. . truth, whose mother Is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future." - Ed.]

Much later, a yet untried disciple of arms had the rare pleasure of meeting the extraordinary Pierre Menard in a Paris cafe following the second world war. Reportedly Menard expounded on his distinct distaste for Madelines but never mentioned the passage (and echo of Don Quixote ) he had penned before the war which had subsequently earned him a fair amount of literary fame: la verdad, cuya madre es Ia historia, emula del tiempo, depOsito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.

This exquisite variation on the passage by the "ingenious layman" is far too dense to unpack here. Suffice it to say Menard's nuances are so fine they are nearly undetectable, though talk with the Framer and you will immediately see how haunted they are by sorrow, accusation, and sarcasm.]

[50-Exactly How the fuck do you write about "exquisite variation" when both passages are exactly the same?

I'm sure the late hour has helped, add to that the dim light in my room, or how poorly I've been sleeping, going to sleep but not really resting, if that's possible, though let me tell you, sitting alone, awake to nothing else but this odd murmuring, like listening to the penitent pray-you know it's a prayer but you miss the words-or better yet listening to a bitter curse, realizing a whole lot wrong's being ushered into the world but still missing the words, me like that, listening in my way by comparing in his way both Spanish fragments, both written out on brown leaves of paper, or no, that's not right, not brown, more like, oh I don't know, yes brown but in the failing light appearing almost colored or the memory of a color, somehow violent, or close to that, or not at all, as I just kept reading both pieces over and over again, trying to detect at least one differing accent or letter, wanting to detect at least one differing accent or letter, getting almost desperate in that pursuit, only to repeatedly discover perfect similitude, though how can that be, right? if it were perfect it wouldn't be similar it would be identical, and you know what? I've lost this sentence, I can't even finish it, don't know how- Here's the point: the more I focused in on the words the farther I seemed from my room. No sense where either, until all of a sudden along the edges of my tongue, towards the back of my mouth, I started to taste something extremely bitter, almost metallic. I began to gag. I didn't gag, but I was certain I would. Then I got a whiff of that same something awful I'd detected outside of the Shop in the hail. Faint as hell at first until I knew I'd smelled it and then it wasn't faint at all. A whole lot of rot was suddenly packed up my nose, slowly creeping down my throat, closing it off. I started to throw up, watery chunks of vomit flying everywhere, sluicing out of me onto the floor, splashing onto the wall, even onto this. Except I only coughed. I didn't cough. I lightly cleared my throat and then the smell was gone and so was the taste. I was back in my room again, looking around in the dim light, jittery, disoriented but hardly fooled.

I put the fragments back in the trunk. Walked the perimeter of my room. Glass of bourbon. A toke on a blunt. There we go. Bring on the haze. But who am I kidding? I can still see what's happening. My line of defense has not only failed, it failed long ago. Don't ask me to define the line either or why exactly it's needed or even what it stands in defense against. I haven't the foggiest idea.

This much though I'm sure of: I'm alone in hostile territories with no clue why they're hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no Sound way to determine where the hell I'm going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.

In his own befuddled way, John Hollander has given the world a beautiful and strange reflection on love and longing. To read his marvelous dialogue on echo [52-See John Hollander's The Figure of Echo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). ] is to find its author standing perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes wild with a cascade of internal reckonings, lips acting out some unintelligible discourse, inaudible to the numerous students who race by him, noting his mad appearance and quite rightly offering him a wide berth as they escape into someone else's class. [53-Kelly Chamotto makes mention of Hollander in her essay "Mid-Sentence, Mid-Stream" in Glorious Garrulous Graphomania ed. T. N Joseph Truslow (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 345.]

Hollander begins with a virtual catalogue of literal echoes. For example, the Latin "decem lam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone" echoed by the Greek "one!" ["I've spent ten years on Cicero" "Ass!"] Or "Musarum studia" (Latin) described by the echo as "dia" (Greek). ["The Muses' studies" "divine ones."] Or Narcissus' rejection "Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri" to which Echo responds "sit tibi copia nostri." [Narcissus: "May I die before I give you power over me." Echo: "I give you power over me."] On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher's Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (Nordlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange " clamore" for four echoes:" amore," "more," "ore," and finally "re." ["O outcry" returns as "love," "delays," "hours" and "king."] Nor does Hollander stop there. His slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration, though in an effort to keep from repeating the entire book, let this heart-wrenching interchange serve as a final example: Chi dara fine a! gran dolore?

L'ore.

["Who will put an end to this great sadness?" "The hours passing"]

While The Figure of Echo takes special delight in clever word games, Hollander knows better than to limit his examination there. Echo may live in metaphors, puns and the suffix-solis ex jib vivit in antris ["Literatures rocky caves"] [54-"From that time on she lived in lonely caves." - Ed.] - but her range extends far beyond those literal walls. For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means "daughter of a voice" which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word "echo." Milton knew it "God so commanded, and left that Command! Sole Daughter of his voice." [55-John Milton's Paradise Lost, IX, 653-54.] So did Wordsworth: "stern Daughter of the Voice of God." Quoting from Henry Reynold's Mythomystes (1632), Hollander evidences religious appropriation of the ancient myth (page 16): This Winde is (as the before-mentioned lamblicus, by consent of his other fellow Cabalists sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, the reflection of this divine breath, or spirit upon us; or (as they interpret it) the daughter of the divine voice; which through the beatifying splendor it shedds and diffuses through the Soule, is justly worthy to be reverenced and adored by us. This Ecco descending upon a Narcissus, or such a Soule as (impurely and vitiously affected) slights, and stops his eares to the Divine voice, or shutts his harte from divine Inspirations, through his being enamour'd of not himselfe, but his owne shadow meerely . . . he becomes thence . . . an earthy, weake, worthiesse thing, and fit sacrifize for only etemall oblivion...

Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god's messenger, a female Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.

In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose dramatically revised this reading. In a series of lectures delivered at Chapel Hill, Rose referred to "God's Grand Utterance" as "The Biggest Bang Of Them All." After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek logos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John, chapter 1, Verse 1 -"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and sill infamous conclusion: "Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god's echoes and god is Narcissus." [56-Hanson Edwin Rose, Creationist Myths (Detroit, Michigan: Pneuma Publications, 1989), p. 219.]

Rose's pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation: Why did god create a dual universe?

So he might say, "Be not like me. I am alone."

And it might be heard.

[57-These lines have a familiar ring though I've no clue why or where I've heard them before.]

[58-Though we were ultimately unsuccessful, all efforts were made to determine who wrote the above verse. We apologize for this inconsistency. Anyone who can provide legitimate proof of authorship will be credited In future editions. - Ed.]

There is not time or room to adequately address the complexity inherent in this passage, aside from noting how the voice is returned-or figuratively echoed-not with an actual word but with the mere understanding that it was received, listened to, or as the text explicitly states "heard." What the passage occludes, no doubt on purpose, is how such an understanding might be attained.

Interestingly enough, for all its marvelous observation, The Figure of Echo contains a startling error, one which performs a poetic modulation on a voice sounded over a century ago. While discussing Wordsworth's poem "The Power of Sound" Hollander quotes on page 19 the following few lines: Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice - to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and in the sky's blue care reborn - [Italics added for emphasis]

Perhaps it is simply a typographical error committed by the publisher. Or perhaps the publisher was dutifully transcribing an error committed by Hollander himself, not just a scholar but a poet as well, who in that tiny slip where an "r" replaced a "v" and an "s" miraculously vanished reveals his own relation to the meaning of echo. A meaning Wordsworth did not share. Consider the original text: Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice-to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky's blue caves reborn - [Italics added for emphasis]

[59-William Wordsworth, The Poems Of William Wordsworth, ed. Nowell Charles Smith, M.A. vol. 1. (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), p. 395. Also of some interest is Alice May Williams letter to the observers at Mount Wilson (CAT. #0005) in which she writes: "I believe that sky opens & closes on certain periods, When you see all that cloud covering the sky right up, & over. Those clouds are called. Blinds, shutters, & verandahs. Sometimes that sky opens underneath." See No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1 935, edited and transcribed by Sarah Simons (West Covina, California: Society For the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993), p. 11.]

While Wordsworth's poetics retain the literal properties and stay within the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander' s find something else, not exactly 'religious'-that would be hyperbole-but 'compassionate', which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.

Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

Hollander is wrong when he writes on page 55: The apparent echoing of solitary words [reminds] us ... that acoustical echoing in empty places can be a very common auditory emblem, redolent of gothic novels as it may be, of isolation and often of unwilling solitude. This is no doubt a case of natural echoes conforming to echo's mythographic mocking, rather than affirming, role.

In an empty hall that should be comfortably inhabited, echoes of our voices and motions mock our very presence in the hollow space.

It is not by accident that choirs singing Psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. In the case of a verbal echo, the spoken word acts as the pebble and the subsequent repetition serves as "the plunk." In this way, speaking can result in a form of "seeing."