House of Leaves (54 page)

As professor Virgil Q. Tomlinson observes:

That place is so alien to the kingdom of the imagination let alone the eye — so perfectly unholy, hungry, and inviolable—it easily makes a fourth of July sparkler out of an A-bomb, and reduces the aliens of
The X-Files
and
The Outer Limits
to Sunday morning funnies. [356—See Virgil
Q.
Tomlinson’s “Nothing Learned, Nothing Saved: By Suggestion Of Science” in
Geo
v. 83, February 7, 1994, p. 68.]

Glossary

Deuterium: A hydrogen isotope twice the mass of ordinary hydrogen. Needed for heavy water.

Diachronic: Relating to the historical developments and changes occurring in language.

D-Structure: Deep Structure. The tree providing a place for words as defined by phrase structure rules.

Igneous: Rocks formed from
magma
(molten material). Classified on the basis of texture and mineral composition. Examples: granite, basalt, pumice.

Interstellar: Originating or occurring among the stars.

Isotope: One of two or more forms of an element with the same atomic number and chemical behavior but different atomic mass.

Linguistics: Study of the structure, sounds, meaning, and history of language.

Metamorphic: Preexisting rocks reformed by heat and pressure. Examples: slate and marble.

Meteors: Nonterrestrial objects surviving passage through the Earth’s atmosphere. Often divided into three groups:
siderites
(iron meteorites),
aerolites
(meteorites primarily composed of silicates), and
siderolites
(stony iron meteorites).

Morpheme: Smallest meaningful part of a word.

Nucleosynthesis: Creation of nucleons (neutrons and protons). Typically discussed when formulating theories about the origins of the universe.

Sedimentary: Rocks created from hardened layers of sediment comprised of organic and inorganic material. Classified on the basis of chemical and particle shape and size. Examples: sandstone, shale, and coal.

Semantics: Study of the relationship between words and meaning.

Spectrometer: An instrument calibrated to measure transmitted energy whether radiant intensities at various wavelengths, the refractive indices of prism materials, or radiation.

S-Structure: Surface Structure. The phrase tree formed when applying movement transformations to the d-structure.

Synchronic: Concerning language as it exists at a single point in time.

Trace: A silent element in a sentence which still indicates the d-structure position of a moved
phrase.

XVII

Wer dii auch seist: Am abend tritt hinaus

aus deiner Stube, drin dii alles we/3t;

als letzres vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:

Wer dii auch seist.

—
Rilke

[
357—Whoever you are,
go
out into the evening,! leaving your room, of which you know
each bit;! your house is the last
before the
infinite,!
whoever you
are.” As
translated by C. F. Macintyre.
Rilke: SelectecLpoems
(Berkeley: University of
California Press,
1940), p. 21.
—
Ed.]

While Reston continued to remain curious about the properties of the house, he had absolutely no desire to return there. He was grateful to have survived and smart enough not to tempt fate twice. “Sure I was obsessed at first, we all were,” he says in The Reston Interview. “But I got over it pretty quick. My fascination was never the same as Navy’s. I enjoy my life at the University. My colleagues, my friends there, the woman I’ve started to see. I’ve no desire to court death. After we escaped, going back to the house just didn’t interest me.”

Navidson had a completely different reaction. He could not stop thinking about those corridors and rooms. The house had taken hold of him. In the months following his departure from Ash Tree Lane, he stayed at Reston’ s apartment, alternately sleeping on the couch and the floor, continuously surrounded by books, proofs, and notebooks packed with sketches, maps, and theories. “I put Navy up because he needed help, but when the sample analysis brought back minimal results, I knew the time had come to have a heart to heart with him about the future.” (The Reston Interview again.)

As we witness for ourselves, following their meeting with Dr. O’Geery, Navidson and Reston both return home. Reston breaks open a bottle of Jack, pours two three-finger glasses and hands one to his friend. A little time passes. They finish a second drink. Reston gives it his best shot.

“Navy” he says slowly. “We made a helluva try but now we’re at a dead end and you’re broke. Isn’t it time to contact
National Geographic
or The Discovery Channel?”

Navidson does not respond.

“We can’t do this thing alone. We don’t
need
to do it alone.”

Navidson puts his drink down and after a long uncomfortable silence nods.

“Okay,
tomorrow morning we’ll call them, we’ll send them invitations, we’ll get the ball rolling.”

Reston sighs and refills their glasses for a third time.

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Here’s to opening things up,” Navidson says by way of a toast, then glancing at the photograph of Karen and the children he keeps by the sofa, adds: “And here’s to me going home.”

“After that we got pretty drunk.” (The Reston Interview.) “Something neither one of us had done in a long while. When I packed it in, Navy was still awake. Still drinking. Writing in some journal he had. Little did I know what he had planned.”

The next morning when Reston woke up, Navidson was gone. He had left behind a note of thanks and an envelope for Karen. Reston called New York but Karen had heard nothing. A day later he drove to the house. Navidson’s car sat in the driveway. Reston wheeled himself to the front door. It was unlocked. “I sat there for an hour and a half, at least, before I could get the guts to go in.”

But as Reston eventually found out the house was empty and most startling of all the hallway that had loomed for so long in the east wall was gone.

Why Did Navidson Go Back To The House?

A great deal of speculation has gone into determining the exact reason why Navidson chose to reenter the house. It is a question
The Navidson Record
never deals with specifically and which after several years of intense debate has produced no simple answer. Currently there are three schools of thought:

I.
The Kellog-Antwerk Claim

II.
The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria

III.
The Haven-Slocum Theory

Though it would be impossible here to address all their respective nuances, at the veiy least some consideration needs to be given to their views. [358—While bits and pieces of these readings still circulate, they have yet to appear anywhere in their entirety. Purportedly Random House intends to publish a complete volume, though the scheduled release is not until the fall of 2001.]

On July 8, 1994 at
The Symposium for the Betterment of International Cultural Advancement
held in Reykjavik, Iceland, Jennifer Kellog and Isabelle Antwerk presented their paper on the meaning and authority of title in the 2Oth and 21St century. In their study, they cited Navidson as the perfect example of “one dictated by the logic born out of the need to possess.”

Kellog and Antwerk point out how even though Navidson and Karen own the house together (both their names appear on the mortgage), Navidson frequently implies that he is the sole proprietor. As he snaps at Reston during a heated argument on the subject of future explorations:

“Let’s not forget that’s
my
house.” Kellog and Antwerk regard this possessiveness as the main reason for Navidson’s mind-boggling decision

to enter the house alone. A month later Norman Paarlberg wryly offered up the following response to the Reykjavik duo: “The obsession just grew and grew until it was Navidson who was finally
possessed
by some self- destructive notion to go back there and yet completely
dispossessed
of any rational mechanism to override such an incredibly stupid idea.” [359—Norman Paarlberg, “The Explorer’s Responsibility,”
National Geographic,
v. 187, January
1995,
p. 120-138.]

Kellog and Antwerk argue that the act of returning was an attempt to territorialize and thus preside over that virtually unfathomable space. However, if their claim is correct that Navidson’s preoccupation with the house grew solely out of his need to own it, then other behavioral patterns should have followed suit, which was not the case. For instance, Navidson never sought to buy out Karen’s share of their home. He refused to lure television programs and other corporate sponsors to his doorstep which would have further enforced his titular position, at least in the eye of the media. Nor did he ever invest himself in any kind paper writing, lectures, or other acts of publicity.

And even if Navidson did mentally equate ownership with knowledge, as both Kellog and Antwerk assert he did, he should have more adamantly sought to name the aspects of his discoveries, which as others would later observe he most certainly did not.

A year later at
The Conference on the Aesthetics of Mourning
held in Nuremberg, Germany on August 18,
1995,
an unnamed student read on behalf of his professors a paper which people everywhere almost instantly began hailing as The Bister-Fneden-Josephson Criteria. More than its content, its tone practically assured a contentious response.

Here for example is the opening salvo directed specifically at The Kellog-Antwerk Claim and their followers:

“Refutation One: We do not accept that filmmaking constitutes an act of naming. Image never has and never will posses proprietary powers. Though others may deny it, we believe that to this day the Adamic strengths of the word, and hence language, have never been or ever will be successfully challenged.”

The BFJ Criteria defined ownership as an act of verbal assertion necessarily carned out in public. By refusing to acknowledge
The Navidson Record
as such an act, The BFJ Criteria could make the question of personal necessity the salient point for rhetorical negotiation.

For the first half of its discourse, The BFJ Criteria chose to concentrate on guilt and grief. Careful consideration was given to Navidson’s excessive exposure to traumatic events throughout the world and how he was affected by witnessing scores of “life-snaps” (The language of The Criteria), ironically enough, however, it was not until he resigned from those assignments and moved to Ash Tree Lane that death crossed over the threshold and began to roam the halls of his own home. His twin brother died there along with two others whom he had personally welcomed into the house.

Losing Tom nearly destroyed Navidson. A fundamental part of himself and his past had suddenly vanished. Even worse, as The BFJ Criteria emphasizes, in the final moments of his life, Tom displayed characteristics entirely atypical of his day to day behavior. Navidson saw his brother in a completely different light. Not at all sluggish or even remotely afraid, Tom had acted with determination and above all else heroism, carrying Daisy out of harm’s way before falling to his death.

Navidson cannot forgive himself. As he repeatedly tells Karen over the phone: “I
was
my brother’s keeper. It was me, I was the one who should have been with Daisy. I was the one who should have died.”

The most controversial claim made by The Bister-Frieden-Josephson contingency is that Navidson began believing darkness could offer something other than itself. Quite cleverly The Criteria first lays the groundwork for its argument by recalling the now famous admonition voiced by Louis Merplat, the renowned speleologist who back in 1899 discovered the Blue Skia Cavern: “Darkness is impossible to remember. Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been. It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.” [360—Quoted in Wilfred Bluffton’s article “Hollow Dark” in
The New York Times,
December 16, 1907, p.
515.
Also consider Esther Harlan James’ “Crave The Cave: The Color of Obsession,” Diss. Trinity College, 1996, P. 669, in which she describes her own addiction to
The Navidson Record
:
“I never shook the feeling that the film, while visceral and involving, must pale in comparison to an actual, personal exploration of the house. Still, just as Navidson needed more and more of that endless dark, I too found myself feeling the same way about
The Navidson Record
.
In fact as I write this now, I’ve already seen the film thirty-eight times and have no reason to believe I will stop going to see it.”] Not stopping there, The Criteria then turns to Lazlo Ferma who almost a hundred years later echoed Merplat’s views when he slyly observed: “Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.” [361—Lazlo Ferma’s “See No Evil” in
Film Comment,
v. 29, September! October 1993, p.
58.]
Before finally quoting A. Ballard who famously quipped: “That house answers many yearnings remembered in sorrow.”
[
362—A. Ballard “The Apophatic Science Of Recollection (Following Nuance)”
Ancient Greek,
v. cvii, April
1995
,
p. 85.]

The point of recounting these observations is simply to show how understandable it was that for Navidson the impenetrable sweep of that place soon acquired greater meaning simply because, to quote the Criteria directly, “it was full of
unheimliche vorklanger
[363— “Ghostly anticipation.”
—
Ed.] and thus represented a means to his own personal propitiation.” The sharp-bladed tactics of The BFJ Criteria, however, are not so naive as to suddenly embrace Navidson’s stated convictions about what he might find. Instead the Criteria quite adroitly acknowledges that when Tom died every “angry, rueful, self- indicting tangle” within Navidson suddenly “lit up,” producing projections powerful and painful enough to “occlude, deny, and cover” the only reason for their success in the first place: the blankness of that place, “the utter and
perfect
blankness.”

It is nevertheless the underlying position of The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria that Navidson in fact relied on such projections in order to deny his increasingly more “powerful and motivating Thanatos.” In the end, he sought nothing less than to see the house exact its annihilating effects on his own being. Again quoting directly from The Criteria:

“Navidson has one deeply acquired organizing perception: there is no hope of survival there. Life is impossible. And therein lies the lesson of the house, spoken in syllables of absolute silence, resounding within him like a faint and uncertain echo.
..
If we desire to live, we can only do so in the
margin
of that place
.”

The second half of The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria focuses almost entirely on this question of “desire to live” by analyzing in great detail the contents of Navidson’s letter to Karen written the night before his departure. To emphasize the potential “desire” for self-destruction, The Criteria supplies for this section the following epigraph: