House of Leaves (46 page)

Luckily they haven’t heard me or if they have they’ve sense enough to ignore me.

I wish I could ignore me.

There’s only one choice now: finish what Zampanô himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in a binding tomb. Make it
only
a book, and if that doesn’t help
…
retrieve what I’ve been hiding in the trunk, something I ordered three weeks ago and finally picked up today, purchased in Culver city at Martin B. Retting (11029 Washington Blvd)—one Heckler & Koch US? .45 ACP, kept for that moment when I’m certain nothing’s left. The thread has snapped. No sound even to mark the breaking let alone the fall. That long anticipated disintegration, when the darkest angel of all, the horror beyond all horrors, sits at last upon my chest, permanently enfolding me in its great covering wings, black as ink, veined in Bees’ purple. A creature without a voice. A voice without a name. As immortal as my life. Come here at long last to summon the wind.

One of the most excruciating and impudent works on the subject was written by Jeremy Flint. Regrettably this reprehensible concoction of speculation, fantasy, and repellent prose, also includes or refers to primary documents not available anywhere else. Through hard work, luck, or theft, Flint managed to
[ ]
across some of the notes and summations made by psychiatrist Nancy Tobe who for a br[ ]f period treated Holloway for
[ ]
depression:

Page one of Dr. Tobe’s notes contains only two words, capitalized, written in pencil, dead center on a page torn from a legal pad:

CONSIDERING SUICIDE.

[ ]he next two pages are for the most part illegible, with words such as “family” “father”
“
loyalty” “the old home” appearing every now and then in an otherwise dark scribble of ink.

However, Tobe’s typed summation following the first session offers a few [ ] details concerning Holloway’s life: “Despite his own achievement [sic] which range from Scuba Diving expeditions in the G[ ]Aqaba, leading climbers up the Matterhorn, organizing numerous [ ]as well as expeditions to the North and South Pole, Holloway feels inadequate and suffers from acute and chronic depression. Unable to see how much he has already accomplished, he constantly dwells on suicide. I am considering several anti-depressants [ ] and have recommended daily counseling.” [278—Jeremy Flint’s
Violent Seeds: The Holloway Roberts Myst
[
]
y
(Los[ ] Angel[]: 2.13.61, 1996), p. 48.]

Flint goes on to cover the second visit which [ I much repeats his observations concerning the first. The third visit, however, gives up the first th[ ]rn.

In another series of notes Tobe describes Holloway’s first love: “At seventeen, he met a young woman named Eliz[]beth who he described to me as ‘Beautiful like a doe. Dark eyes. Brown hair. Pretty ankles, kinda skinny and weak.’ A short courtship ensued and for a brief time they were a couple.[ ] In Holloway’s
XXXXXXX
[
279—These Xs
indicate text was inked out—not burned.]
,
the relationship ended because he didn’t [sic] the Varsity football squad. By his own admission he was never any good at ‘team sports.’ Her interest in him faded and she soon beg[ ] dating the starting tackle, leaving Holloway broken hearted with an increased sen[ ]e of [illegible] and inadequacy.” [280—Flint, p.
53.]

Nancy Tobe
was
a fairly
green
therapist and took
far too many
notes. Perhaps she felt that by studying these pages later, she could synthesize the
material and
present her patient with a solution. She had not yet real[
I that
her notes or her solutions would mean absolutely no[ 1g. Patients must discover their peace for themselves. Tobe
[ ]
only a guide. The solution is personal. It is
ironic
then
that had
it not been for Tobe’s inexperience, the notes so intrinsic to
achieving
at least a
fair
understanding of Holloway’s inner torment would never have come
into
existence. People always demand
experts,
though sometimes they
are
fortunate enough to find a
beginner.
[281—Refer back to Chapter 5;
footnote
67.
—
Ed.]

On the fourth visit, Tobe
[ ] transcribed
Holloway’s words verbatim. It is i[ ]possible to
tell
from Flint’s text whether Tobe
actually
record[ ]d Hollow[
]
or just wrote down his words from memory:

“I
had already been
out there for
two
days
and
then that morning, before dawn, I
[
] to the ridge
and waited.
I
waited a
long time
and
I didn’t move. It
was
cold. Real cold. Up till then everyone
had been
talking about the big buck but no one
had
seen anything. Not even a rabbit. Even though I’d
been
deer hunting a few times, I’d never
actually
shot a deer, but with, well the football team
[ ],
Elizabeth gone
like that,
I was gonna set it
right
by dropping
that big
buck.

“When the sun finally
came
out, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There he was,
right
across the valley, the
[ ]
buck
tasting
the air. [
]
I
was a good
shot. I knew what to do and I did it. I took my time,
centered
the reticule, let out my breath,
squeezed
slowly,
and
listened to that round as it
cracked
across the valley. I must have closed my eyes ‘cause the next
thing
I saw the deer
[ ]
to the ground.

“Everyone heard my shot
and [
] Funny
thing was, because
of
where
I’d been, I
was
the last one to get there. My
dad was waiting
for me, just shaking his
head,
angry, and [ ]shamed.

“Look what you done boy,’ he said in a whisper but I could have heard
that
whisper across the whole valley. “Look
what
you done.
[ ]
shot yourself a doe.”
[
]
I almost
killed myself
then but I guess I thought it couldn’t get
any
worse.
[ ] that
was the worst. Staring at that dead
doe and
then watching my
dad turn
his back on me
and
just walk away.” [282—Flint, p. 61.]

At this point Flint’s analysis heads into a fairly pejorative and unoriginal analysis of vi[ ]lence. He also makes a little
t[
] much of the word “doe” which Holloway used to describe his first love E[ ]zabeth. However since Flint is not the only one to make this association, it is worth at least a cursory gl[ ]nce.

“A vengeance transposed on the wild,” Flint calls Holloway’s killing of the doe, implying that to Holloway’s eye the doe had become Elizabeth. What Flint, however, fails to acknowledge is that with no certainty can he determine whether Hollow[ ]y described Elizabeth as a “doe”
while
he was going out with her [ ]r
afterward.
Holloway may have described her as such
following
the ill-fated hunting trip as a means to comp[ md his guilt, thus blaming himself not only for the death of the doe but for the death of love as well. In
[ ]
Flint’s suggestion of brimming violence may be nothing more than a gross renaming of self[ ]reproach.

Flint
[ ]
argue that Holloway’s aggressive nature was bound to su[]face in what he calls Navidson’s [ ]Hall of Amplification.”

Holloway’s latent suicidal urges
[ ]
when Wax and Jed insist on turning back. He
sees this (incorrectly) as an admission of failure,
another
failure, th[]s incr[ ]sing his
sense of inadequacy. Holloway had over the years developed
enough psychic defense mechanisms to avoid
the destructive consequences of this self determine[
]f defeat.

What made
this
incident different from all the rest was the [ ]ou[ ]e.

In many ways, Navidson’s house functions like an immense isolation tank. Deprived of light, change in temperature and any sense of time, the individual begins to create his own sensory
[
],
[I ] depen[ ]ng on the duration of his stay begins to project more and more of
[ ]
personality on those bare walls and vacant [ ]allways.

In Holloway’s case, the house as well as everything inside it becomes an exten[ ]n o himself, e.g. Jed and Wax become the psy[ ]logical demons responsible for his failue

[sic]. Thus his first act—to sh[ jt Wax—is in fact the beginning of a nearly operatic

s[ ]i[ ide.
283—IbXXXXXX SuiXXXXXXX
[
XXXXXX]
[284—Inked out as well as burned.]

Certainly Flint [ ] not alone in emphasiz[ ]g the impl[ ]t violence i[ ]suicide. In 1910 at []conference in Vienna, Wilhelm Stekel cla[ ]med
[ ]
“no one killed himself unless he[]either wanted to kill another person [ ]r wished a[]other’s death’s [
285—Ned H.
Cassem, “The
Person C[]nfronting Death” in
The Ne
[
]Harvard Guide
to
Psychiatry
ed. Armand M.
Nicholi, jr[
I
M.D. (C[
]brid[]e: Harvard
University Press, 1 [188), p. 743.]
[ ]1983 Buie and Maltzberger described s[ ]cide [ ]resulting from “two types of imperative impulses: murder[]us hate and an ur[ ]ent need to es[ ]ape suff[]ring.”
[
286—[ ]id.,
[ ] 744.]

Robert Jean Cam[ ]ell sums up t[ ]e psych[]dynamics of suic[ ]s as fol[ ]ws:

sui[ ] or a suicide atte[
]t
is seen most freque[ ]ly to be an agg[ ]sive attack directed against a loved one or against society in ge[ ]al; in others, it may be a mis[ ]ded bid for attention or may be conceived of as a means of ef[ ]ting reunion with the id[ ]al love-object or m[ ]ther.
That
suicide
[
In
one
sense a means of
relea[ ]e
for aggressive impulses
is sup[ ]ed by the change of wartime
suicide rates. In Wo[
]
War II, for example,
rates among the participating nations fell,
[
]times by as much as 30%; but in ne[ ]l
countries, the rates remained the same.

In involutional depressions and in the depr[ ]ed type of manic[]depressive psychosis, the following dynamic elements are of[ ]n clearly operative: the d[ ]essed patient loses the object that he depends upon for narcissistic s[ ]lies; in an atte[
]t
to force the object’s return, he regre[]es to the oral stage and
inc[
]porates (swallows up) the object, t[]us regressively identi[]ing with the object:
the sadism originally directed against the desert[
] o
bject is ta[ ]en up by the patient’s
sup[ ]go and is directed against the incorporated
object, w[ ]h now lodges wit[ In the
ego; suicide oc[ Is, not so much as an attempt
on the ego’s part to esc[ ]pe the
inexorable demands of the superego, but
rather as a[ ]enraged attack on the in
[ ]
orated object in retaliation []or its having
dese[ ]d the pati[ ] in the first place?
[287—Robert
J[ ]n Campbell, M.D[ ]
Psychiatric Dictionary
(Oxford Univ[ ]ity Press, 1981)
[ ] 608[]]

[It[ ]s added f[ ]r em[ ]asis]

Of course the anni[ ]il[ ]tion of [ ]self does not necessarily preclude the anni[ ]n of others. As is evident in sh[ ]ung sprees that culminate in suicide, an attack on the[ ]incorporated object” may extend first to [ ]attack on loved ones, co-work[ ] or even innocent by[ ]ders—a description, which ev[ ] Flint would agree, fits H[]Iloway.

Nevertheless th[ ]re are also numer[ Is objections to Flint[ ]s asser[

] that Hollow[ i’s suicidal disposition would within that place inevitabl[ ] lead to murder. The most enlight[ ]g refutation comes from Rosemary Enderheart w[ ]o not onl[ ]uts F[ ]in[ ] in his place but also reveals somet[ ]g new about Navidson’s history:

Where Flint’s argument makes the impulse to destroy others the result of an impulse to destroy the self, we only have to consider someone with similar self-destructive urges who when faced with similar conditions did not attempt to murder two individuals [ ]

SUBJECT: Will “Navy” Navidson

COMMENT: “I think too often too seriously a[]out killing myself.”

Will Navidson was no stranger
to
s[ ]ide. It sat on his shoulder more often than not: “It’s there before I sleep, there when I wake, it’s there a lot. But as Nietzsche said, ‘The t[]ought of suicide is a consolation. It can get one through many a bad night.” (See Dr. Hetterman Stone’s
Confidential: An In[ ]view With Karen Green
19[ ]

Navidson often viewed his achievements with disdain, considered his direction vague,

and frequently assumed his desires would [ ]ever be met by life [ ]o matter how f[ ]ly he lived it. However, unlike H[ ]ioway, he converted his d[ ]pair into art. He [ ]lied on his eye and film
to
bring meaning
to
virt[ ] everything he e[]count[ led, and though he paid the high price of lost interaction, he frequently conceived beautiful instances worthy of our time; what Robert Hughes famously referred to [ ] “Navidson’s little windows of

light.”

Flint would [ ]test [ ] while both Holloway and [ ]vidson camped in the same dale of depression, they were very dif[ ]rent in[ ]viduals: Navidson was merely a photographer while, to quote F[ ]nt “Holloway was a hunter who [ I crossed the line into territories of aggress[]on,”

Flint sh[ ]ld have done his [ ]omework, if he thought Navidson never crossed that line.

In the 70’s Navidson became a career p[ ]journ[ ]list and ultimately a famous one

but at the begin[ ]ing of that de[]ade he wasn’t carrying a Nikon. He was manning an M-60

with the 1St cav[ ]y at Rock Island East where he would eventually receive a Bronze

Star for saving the l[]ves of two [ ] soldiers he dra[]ged from a burning personnel carrier. He[]ver, no longer has the medal. He sent it along with a
[ ]
oto of h[]s first kill to Richard Nixon to pr[]test the war. [288—Rosemary End[ ]art’s
How Have You Who Loved Ever Loved A Next
Time?
(New York:
Times Books, 19[ ]
p.
1432-1436).]

Unfortun[ ]ely when Navi[]son stumbled upon Hol[ l’s H[ ]8 tapes, he had no idea their contents would
[
]spire such a heated and lasting debate over what l[]rked in the []art of that p[]ace. Despite the radically differ[]nt behavior pattern[] demonst[]ated by the hunter from Me[ ]mo[
],
Wi[ ]sin and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist[ ]in the house, The Hollow[
I
Tape revealed that e[ ]ther one could just as easily have been devo[]r[]d in the same way. The gli[ ]se rescued from that t[ ]r[ ]b[]le [lark warned that while paths might differ, the end might no[ ].

9.