House of Leaves (50 page)

It’s a letter I wrote.

The very first one my mother ever received from the son she left when he was only seven. It’s also the only one she saved.

It is safe to assume Navidson knew Karen better than anyone else. No doubt his knowledge of Fowler, the cache of letters, certainly the discovery of Wax and Karen’s kiss, contributed to his decision to return to the house for one more exploration. [320—Covered in greater detail in Chapters XVII and XIX.] He left her to New York because by then he knew she was already gone. And she was.

Jerry Lieberman who wrote the original
People
interview with Fowler had spoken with the would-be-actor for a possible follow up article but lack of interest in the affair caused him to shelve the story. After a little haggling, he agreed to send the tape of their last conversation. Here then for the first time is what Fowler told Lieberman on July 13, 1995:

Yeah, she called me up, said she was in town, how ‘bout a drink, that sort of thing. So

we go out a few times. I fuck her a few times, you know what I mean, but she’s not talking much now. Only thing she says is she’s working on some film short. I asked her if there’s a part for me but she tells me it’s not that kind of film.

I must have seen her two or three maybe four times. It was fun and all but she looked like

hell and I didn’t like taking her around. She’d changed over the months, pale, darker, didn’t smile much, and when she did it was kinda different than before, kinda quirky, weird, real personal.

She looked her age too. Too old for me really and with kids and all and well, time to move on. Those things happen you know.

Anyway I didn’t need to worry that she’d get clingy or anything. She wasn’t that type of

lady. The last time we went out, she said she only had a few minutes. She had to get back to that film she was editing or whatever. Something
about interviews and
family
movies. And that was that. She shook my hand
and
left.

But I’ll tell you, she
was
different
from
when I
first
met her. I’ve
fucked around with married
women before. I know how they get off on dicking over their husband. She wasn’t like that now. She
needed him. I
could see that in her eyes. It wasn’t the first
time
either I
seen a
married woman get eyes
like
that. Suddenly they want what they got off getting away from in the first
place. It’s all flicked up. And
she
was like
that. All
flicked up and needing him. But as that story usually goes,
he wasn’t
around
no more.
[
321—Courtesy of
Jerry
Lieberman.]

Which was
true. Navidson was
no longer around, except of course Karen
still saw
him every
day and
in a way she
had
never seen him before—not as a projection of her own insecurities
and
demons but just as Will Navidson,
in flickering light,
flung up by a
16mm projector
on a
paint-white wall.

XV

Mit semen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen

Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus.

—
Heine

[
322— “With his nightcaps
and
the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe”—which he quoted in full to his wife, as well as alluded to in chapter Six of
The Interpretation of Dreams
and in a letter to Jung dated February
25,
1908.]
[323—Heine?]
[Freud.
—
Ed.]

Karen Green sits on a park bench in Central Park. She wears a russet sweater and a black cashmere scarf. All around her we see people milling about, enjoying one of those sparkling February days New Yojic City sometimes deigns to deliver. Patches of snow lie on the ground, children shriek, carriages clatter past taxi cabs and traffic cops. A war is going on in the Persian Gulf but those affairs hardly seem to matter here. As Karen explains, more than a little time has passed:

It’s been four months since
we
escaped from our house. It’s also four months since I’ve seen Navy. As far as I know, he’s still in Charlottesville with Billy— conducting experiments.

[She coughs lightly]

We used to talk on the phone but now even that’s stopped. This whole experience has changed him. Losing Tom, I think changed him the most.

I’ve called, written, done everything short of going down there, which is something I refuse to do. I’m up here taking care of our children and looking after his film. He did some work on it but then he just stopped and shipped me all of it, the negatives, the tapes, the whole mess. Still, he won’t leave Virginia. And to think, two months ago he told me he was only going to need a few more days.

My mother keeps telling me to get rid of him and sell the house. I’m thinking about it but in the meantime I’ve been working on the film. There was so much of it I decided to cut it down to thirteen minutes
[*—More than likely, an eight minute version of Karen’s abridgment became the second short now known as “
Exploration #4
.” However, it remains a mystery who cut out five minutes (which must have included Holloway’s suicide) before distributing
it. Kevin Stanley in
“What Are You
Gonna
Do Now, Little Man?”
and Other Tales of Grass Roots Distribution
(Cambridge: Vallombrosa Inc., 1994) points out how easy it would have been for one of the professors or authors who received a copy to make a dupe. As to why though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green’s own ineptitude: “She simply must have misstated the length of the tape.”]
to find out what people thought of it.

And I showed it to everyone I could think of too—professors, scientists, my therapist, village poets, even some of the famous people Navy knew.

(Coughs again]

Anne Rice, Stephen King, David Copperfield, and Stanley Kubrick actually responded to unsolicited copies of the video I sent them.

Without further ado then, here is what everyone had to say about that house, [325—Interestingly enough neither __________ nor __________ , both of whom actually saw the hallway, ever provided any comments. Perhaps
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX .
[
326—Crossed out with what looked suspiciously like black crayon and tar.]

* * * *

A Partial Transcript Of

What Some Have Thought

by Karen Green

[327—Originally
The Navidson Record
contained both of Karen’s pieces:
What Some Have Thought
and
A Brief History Of Who I Love.
However when Miramax put the film in wide release,
What Some Have Thought
was absent. At a Cannes press junket, Bob Weinstein argued that the section was too self- referential and too far from “the spine of the story” to justify its inclusion. “Audiences just want to get back to the house” he explained. “The delay that piece caused was unbearable. But don’t worry, you’ll have it in the DVD release.”
[328—To date, I haven’t heard back from any of €he people quoted in this “transcript” with the exception of Hofstadter who made it very clear he’d never heard of Will Navidson, Karen Green or the house and Paglia who scribbled on a postcard: “Get lost, jerk.”]
]

Leslie Stern, M.D. Psychiatrist.

Setting: Her office. Well lit, Chagal print on the far wall, requisite couch.

Stern: It’s quirky. What do you need my opinion for?

Karen: What do you think it is? Does it have some kind of, well, … meaning?

Stern: There you go again with “meaning.” I gave up meaning a long time ago. Trying to get a table at Elaine’s is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means?

Jennifer Antlpala. Architect & Structural Engineer.

Setting: Inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Antipala: [Very high-strung; speaks very fastJ The things that came to me, now I guess this is just the way my mind works or something, but the whole house prompted these questions, which I guess, like you said, is, uh, what you’re after. Though they’re not exactly concerned with meaning, I think.

(Pause)

Karen: What were the questions?

Antipala: Oh god, a whole slew of them. Anything from what the soil bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh… Well first, I mean go back to just soil bearing capacity. That’s a very complicated question. I mean, look “massive rock” like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, wili crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter. And soft clay’s not even worth 10 metric tons. So that place, beyond dimension, impossibly high, deep, wide —what kind of foundation is it sitting on? And if it’s not, I mean if ft’s like a planet, surrounded by space, then its mass is still great enough it’s gonna have a lot of gravity, drMng it all inward, and what kind of material then at its core could support all that?

Douglas R. Hotstadter. Computer and cognitive science professor at Indiana University.

Setting: At a piano.

Hofstadter: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, they all love this stuff. Your piece is fun too. The way you handled the Holloway expedition, reminded me of Bach’s Little Harmonic Labyrinth. Some of the thematic modulations, I mean.

Karen; Do you think such a place is possible? I have a structural engineer friend who’s more than a little skeptical.

Hofstadter: Well, from a mathematical point of view… infinite space into no space … Achilles and the tortoise, Escher, Zeno’s arrow. Do you know about Zeno’s arrow?

Karen: No,

Hofstadter: [illustrating on a scrap of staff paper] Oh It’s very simple. If the arrow is here at A and the target is here at B, then in the course of getting to B the arrow must travel at least half that distance which I’ll call point C. Now in getting from C to B the arrow must travel half that distance, call that point D, and so on. Well the fun starts when you realize you cart keep dividing up space forever, paring it down into smaller and smaller fractions until . . well, the arrow never reaches B.

Byron Baleworth. British Playwright.

Setting: La Fortuna on 71st Street.

Baleworth: “And St. Sebastian died of heartburn,” to reference another famous British playwright. The infinite here is not a matter for science. You’ve created a semiotic dilemma. Just as a nasty virus resists the body’s immune system so your symbol—the house—resists interpretation.

Karen: Does that mean it’s meaningless?

Baleworth: That’s a long conversation. I’m staying at the Plaza Athénée for the next few nights. Why don’t we have dinner? [Pause] That thing’s off, right?

Karen: Well give me a rough idea how you’d tackle the question?

Baleworth: [Suddenly uncomfortable] I’d probably turn to the filmmaking. Meaning would come if you tied the house to politics, science, or psychology. Whatever you like but something. And the monster. I’m sorry but the monster needs work. For Pete’s sake, is that thing on?!

Andrew Ross. Literature professor at Princeton University.

Setting:
Gym. Ross works
out
with a
medicine ball.

Ross: Oh the monster’s the best
part. Baleworth’s a playwright
and as far as the English go probably a traditionalist when it comes to ghost stories. Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe and cobweb, candelabra in one hand. Your monster, however, is purely American, Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse cultures definitely requires. You can’t identify this creature with any one group. Its individuality is imperceptible, and hke the dark side of the moon, invisible but not without influence. You know when (first saw the monster, (thought it was a Keeper. (still think that. It’s a very mean House Keeper who vigilantly makes sure the house remains void of absolutely everything. Not even a speck of dust. It’s a maid gone absolutely nutso.

Have you ever worn a maid’s outfit?

Jennifer Antipala.

Antipala: And what about the walls? Load-bearing? Or non- load-bearing walls? That takes me from questions about foundation material to building material. What could that place possibly be made of? And I’m thinking right now of the shifting that goes on, so that means we’re not talking dead loads, which means a fixed mass, but live loads which must deal with wind, earthquakes and variance of motion within the structure. And that shifting is that the same say as wind-pressure distributions?, which is something like, something like, uh, oh yeah, P equals one half beta times V squared times C times G, uh, uh, uh, that’s it, that’s It, yeah that’s it, or something like that, where
P
is wind pressure on the structure’s surface … or do I have to go someplace else, look at wall bending or wall stresses, axial arid lateral forces, but if we’re not talking wind, what from then and how? how Implemented? how offset? and ftn talking now about weight disbursement, some serious loading’s going on there… I mean anything that big has got to weigh a lot. And I mean at the very least a lot-lot. So I keep asking myself: how an I going to carry that weight? And I really don’t have a clue. So I start looking for another angle.

[Moves closer to Karen]

Camille Pagila. Critic.

Setting: The Bowery Bar patio.

Paglia: Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don’t have to. They know there’s nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. They’re haunted by that infinite hollow and its sense- making allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by It. It really comes down to what men lack. They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any creative life-yielding physiological incavation. The whole thing’s about womb envy or vagina envy, whatever you prefer. [329—Melissa Schemell in her book
Absent Identification
(London: Emunah Publishing Group, 1995), p.
52.
discusses sexual modes of recognition:

The house as vagina:
The adolescent boy’s primary identification lies with the mother. The subsequent realization that he is unlike her (he has a penis; she doesn’t; he is different) results in an intense feeling of displacement and loss. The boy must seek out a new identity (the father) … Navidson explores that loss, that which he first identified with: the vagina, the womb, the mother.

Eric Keplard’s
Maternal Intrusions
(Portland: Nescience Press, 1995), p. 139, also speaks of that place as something motherly, only his reading is far more historical than Schemel’s: “Navidson’s house is an incarnation of his
own mother. In other worth: absent. It
represents
the unresolved
Oedipal drama which continually intrudes on his relationship with Karen.” That said it would be unfair not to mention Tad Exier’s book
Our Father
(Iowa City: Pavemockumest Press, 1996) which rejects “the over-enthusiastic parallels with motherdom” in favor of “narcissism’s paternal darkness.”]

Karen: What about my character’s fear of darkness.

Paglia: Pure fabrication. The script was written by a man, right? What self-respecting woman is afraid of the dark? Women are everything that’s internal and hidden. Women are darkness. I cover some of this in my book
Sexual Personae
due out from Vintage in a few months.

Are you busy this afternoon?

Anne Rice. Novelist.

Setting: The Museum of Natural History.

Rice: Oh I’m not so sure I care for that. So much sexual pairing, this masculine, this feminine … I think it’s too political and obviously a bit strained.

Darkness isn’t male or female. It’s the absence of light, which is important to us because we are all retinal creatures who need light to move around, sustain ourselves and protect ourselves. George Foreman uses his eyes much more than his fists.

Of course, light and dark mean a lot less to a bat. What matters more to a bat is whether or not FM frequencies are jamming its radar.

Harold Bloom. Critic.

Setting: His private library. Walls loaded with books. General disarray.

Bloom: My dear girl, Kierkegaard once wrote, “If the young man had believed in repetition, of what might he not been capable? What inwardness he might have attained.”

We’ll touch on your, uh, unfinished piece shortly, but please permit me first to read you a page from my book The Anxiety Of Influence. This is from the chapter on Kenosis:

The unheimlich, or “unhomely” as the “uncanny,” is perceived wherever

we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action. Overruling the

pleasure principle, the dasmonic in oneself yields to a “repetition compulsion.” A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before, Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety.” Among cases of anxiety, Freud finds the class of the uncanny, * [
330—While
unheimlich
has
already
recurred within this text, there has up to now been no treatment of the English word
uncanny.
While lacking the Germanic sense of “home,”
uncanny
builds its meaning on the Old English root
cunnan
from the Old Norse
Kunna
which has risen from the Gothic
Kuniwn
(preteritepresent verbs) meaning
know
from the Indo-European (see
OED).
The “y” imparts a sense of “full of” while the “un” negates that which follows. In other words, un-cann-y literally breaks down or disassembles into that which is
li
of ing or conversely fljj of
j
ing; and so without understanding exactly what repetitive denial still successfully keeps repressed and thus estranged, though indulging in repetition nonetheless, that which is
uncanny
may be defined as empty of knowledge and knowing or at the same time surfeit with the absence of knowledge and knowing. In the words of Perry Ivan Nathan Shaftesbury,
author
of
Murder’s Gate: A
Treatise On Love and Rage
(London: Verso, 1996), p. 183: “It is therefore sacred, inviolate, forever preserved. The ultimate virgin. The husbandless madonna. Mother of God. Mother of Mother. Inhuman.” See also Anthony Vidler’s
The Architectural Uncanny: Essays In The
Modern
Unhomely
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992).]
“in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs.” But this “unhomely” might as well be called “the homely,” he observes, “for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”