House of Leaves (57 page)

For a more modem treatment of shell growth see Geerat J. Vermeij’s
A Natural History of Shells
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Chapter 3 “The Economics of Construction and Maintenance” deals directly with matters of calcification and the problems of dissolution, while chapter 1 “Shells and the Questions of Biology” considers the sense of the shell in a way that differs slightly fmrn Vallemont’s: “We
can
think of shells as houses. Construction, repair, and maintenance by the builder require energy and time, the same cunencies used for such other life functions as feeding, locomotion, and reproduction. The energy and time invested in shells depend on the supply of raw materials, the labor costs of transforming these resources into a serviceable structure, and the functional demands placed on the shell… The words ‘economics” and “ecology” are especially apt in this context, for both are derived from the Greek
oikos,
meaning house. In short, the questions of biology can be phrased in terms of supply and demand, benefits and costs, and innovation and regulation, all set against a backdrop of environment and history.”]

(Page 118)

In particular, Slocum’s attention is held by Bachelard’s parentethical
[384—I haven’t corrected this typo because it seems to me less like an error of transcription and more like a revealing slip on Zampanô’s part, where a “parenthetical” mention of youth suddenly becomes a “parent— ethical” question about how to relate to youth.]
reference to
his
own childhood and presumably the rite of growing up:

“How extraordinary to find in those ever expandable brackets such a telling correlation between the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle and Navidson’s crisis.”

Indeed, by continuing to build on Bachelard, Slocum treats the snail in Navidson’s dream as a “remarkable inversion” of the house’s Spiral Staircase: “Robinet believed that
it
was by roiling over and over that the snail built its ‘staircase.’ Thus, the snail’s entire house would be a stairwell. With each contortion, this limp animal adds a step to its spiral staircase. It contorts itself in order to advance and grow” (Page 122;
The Poetics of Space).
[
385—Original text:

Robinet a pensé que c’est en roularn sur lui-même que Ic limacon a fabriqué son “esca.Lier.” Ainsi, toute la maison de l’escargot serait une cage d’escalier. A chaque contorsion, l’animal mou fait une marche de son escalier en colimacon. II se contorsionne pour avancer et grandfr.

And of course who can forget Derrida’s remarks on this subject in footnote
5
in “Tympan” in
Marges de Ia philosophie
(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. xi-xii:

Tympanon. dionysie, labyrinthe, fils d’Ariane. Nous parcourons rnaintenant (debout, marchant, dansant), compris et enveloppés pour n’en jamais sortir, Ia forme d’une oreille construite autour d’un barrage, tournant autour de sa paroi interne, une yule, donc (labyrinthe, canaux semi-.circulaires—on vous prévient que les rampes ne tiennent pas) enroulée comme un limacon autour d’une vanne, d’une digue
(dam)
et tendue vers Ia mer; fennée sur elle-même et ouverte sur Ia voie de Ia mer. Pleine et vide de son eau, l’anainnèse de Ia conque résonne seule sur une plage. Comment une fIure pourrait-elle s’y produire, entre terre et mer? [386—Tympanum, Dionyslanism, labyrinth, Ariadne’s thread. We are now traveling through (upright, walking, dancing), included and enveloped within it, never to emerge, the form of an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner walls, a city, therefore (labyrinth, semicircular canals—warning: the spiral walkways do not hold)
circling around like a
stairway winding
around a
lock, a dike (dam) stretched out toward the sea; closed In on itself and open to the sea’s path. Full and empty of its water, the anamnesis of the choncha resonates alone on the beach.” As translated by Alan Bass. — Ed.]

In his own note buried within the already existing footnote, in this case
nor
5
but enlarged now to 9, Alan Bass (—Trans for
Margins of Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)) further illuminates the above by making the following comments here below:

“There is an elaborate play on the words
Iimaçon
and
conque
here.
Limo con
(aside from meaning snail) means spiral staircase and the spiral canal that is part of the inner ear.
Conque
means both conch and concha, the largest cavity of the external ear.”]

Still more remarkable than even this marvelous coincidence is the poem Bachelard chooses to quote by René Rouquier:

C’est un escargot énorme

Qui descend de Ia montagne

Et le ruisseau l’accompagne

De sa bave blanche

Très vieu, ii n ‘a plus qu ‘une come

C’est son court clocher carré.

[387—René Rouquier’s
L boule de
verre
(Paris: Seghers), p. 12.] [388— “A giant snail comes down from the mountain followed by a stream of its white slime. So very old, it has only one horn left, short and square like a church tower.” — Ed.]

Navidson is not the first to envision a snail as large as a village, but what fascinates Slocum more than anything else is the lack of threat in the dream.

“Unlike the dread lying in wait at the bottom of the wishing well,” Slocum comments. “The snail provides nourishment. Its shell offers the redemption of beauty, and despite Navidson’s dying candle, its curves still hold out the promise of even greater illumination. All of which is in stark contrast to the house. There the walls are black, in the dream of the snail they are white; there you starve, in the dream the town is fed for a lifetime; there the maze is threatening, in the dream the spiral is pleasing; there you descend, in the dream you ascend and so on.”

Slocum argues that what makes the dream so particularly resonant is its inherent balance: “Town, country. Inside, outside. Society, individual. Light, dark. Night, day. Etc., etc. Pleasure is derived from the detection of these elements. They create harmonies and out of harmonies comes a balm for the soul. Of course the more extensive the symmetry, the greater and more lasting the pleasure.”

Slocum contends that the dream planted the seed in Navidson’s mind to try a different path, which was exactly what he did do in
Exploration #5
. Or
more accurately:” The dream was the flowering of a seed previously planted by the house in his unconsciousness.” When bringing to a conclusion “At A Snail’s Place,” Slocum further opens up his analysis to the notion that both dreams, “The Wishing Well” and “The Snail,” suggested to Navidson the possibility that he could locate either within himself or” within that vast missing” some emancipatory sense to put to rest his confusions and troubles, even put to rest the confusions and troubles of others, a curative symmetry to last the ages.

For the more troubling and by far most terrifying
Dream #3,
Mia Haven and Lance Slocum team up together to ply the curvatures of that strange stretch of imaginings. Unlike
#1
and
#2,
this dream is particularly difficult to recount and requires that careful attention be paid to the various temporal and even tonal shifts.

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

[2
pages missing]

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

[389— ____________________________] [390 — 3:19 AM I woke up, slick with sweat. And I’m not talking wet in the pits or wet on the brow. I’m talking scalp wet, sheet wet, and at that hour, an hour already lost in a new year—shivering wet. I’m so cold my temples hurt but before I can really focus on the question of temperature I realize I’ve remembered my first dream.

Only later after I find some candles, stomp around my room, splash water on the old face, micturate, light a Sterno can and put the kettle on, only then can I respond to my cold head and my general physical misery, which I do, relishing every bit of it in fact. Anything is better than that unexpected and awful dream, made all the more unsettling because now for some reason I can recall it. Nor do I have an inkling why. I cannot imagine what has changed in my life to bring this thing to the surface.

The guns sure as hell were useless, instantly confiscated at sleep’s border, even if I did manage to pick up the Weatherby before my credit ran out.

An hour passes. I’m blinking in the light, boiling more water for more coffee, ramming my head into another wool hat, sneezing again though all I can see is the fucking dream, torn straight out of the old raphé nuclei care of the very brainstem I thought had been soundly severed.

This is how it starts:

I’m deep in the hull of some enormous vessel, wandering its narrow passages of black steel and rust. Something tells me I’ve been here a long time, endlessly descending into dead ends, turning around to find other ways which in the end lead only to still more ends. This, however, does not bother me. Memories seem to suggest I’ve at one point lingered in the engine room, the container holds, scrambled up a ladder to find myself alone in a deserted kitchen, the only place still shimmering in the mirror magic of stainless steel. But those visits took place many years ago, and even though I could go back there at any time, I choose instead to wander these cramped routes which in spite of their ability to lose me still retain in every turn an almost indiscreet sense of familiarity. It’s as if I know the way perfectly but I walk them to forget.

And then something changes. Suddenly I sense for the first time ever, the presence of another. I quicken my pace, not quite running but close. I am either glad, startled or terrified, but before I can figure out which I complete two quick turns and there he is, this drunken frat boy wearing a plum-colored Topha Beta sweatshirt, carrying the lid of a garbage can in his right hand and a large fireman’s ax in his left. He burps, sways, and then with a lurch starts to approach me, raising his weapon. I’m scared alright but I’m also confused. “Excuse me, mind explaining why you’re coming after mg?” which I actually try to say except the words don’t come out right. More like grunts and clouds, big clouds of steam.

That’s when I notice my hands. They look melted, as if they were made of plastic and had been dipped in boiling oil, only they’re not plastic, they’re the thin effects of skin which have in fact been dipped in boiling oil. I know this and I even know the story. I’m just unable to resurrect it there in my dream Stiff hair sprouts up all over the fingers and around the long, yellow fingernails. Even worse, this awful scarring does not end at my wrists, but continues down my arms, making the scars I know I have when I’m not dreaming seem childish in comparison. These ones reach over my shoulders, down my back, extend even across my chest, where I know ribs still protrude like violet bows.

When I touch my face, I can instantly tell there’s something wrong there too. I feel plenty of hair covering strange lumps of flesh on my chin, my nose and along the ridge of my cheeks. On my forehead there’s an enormous bulge harder than stone. And even though I have no idea how I got to be so deformed, I do know. And this knowledge comes suddenly. I’m here
because
I am deformed,
because
when I speak my words come out in cracks and groans, and what’s more I’ve been put here by an old man, a dead man, by one who called me son though he was not my father.

Which is when this frat boy, swaying back and forth before me like an idiot, raises his ax even higher above his head. His plan I see is not too complicated: he intends to drive that heavy blade into my skull, across the bridge of my nose, cleave the roof of my mouth, the core of my brain, split apart the very vertebrae in my neck, and he won’t stop there either. He’ll hack my hands from my wrists, my thighs from my knees, pry out my sternum and hammer it into tiny fragments. He’ll do the same to my toes and my fingers and he’ll even pop my eyes with the butt of the handle and then with the heal of the blade attempt to crush my teeth, despite the fact that they’re long, serrated and unusually strong. At least in this effort, he will fail; give up finally; collect a few. Where my internal organs are concerned, these too he’ll treat with the same respect, hewing, smashing and slicing until he’s too tired and too covered with blood to finish, even though of course he really finished awhile ago, and then he’ll slouch exhausted, panting like some stupid dog, drunk on his beer, this killing, this victory, while I lie strewn about that bleak place,
der absoluten Zerrissenheit
(as it turned out I ran into Kyrie at the supermarket this last November. She was buying a 14.75 ounce can of Alaskan salmon. I tried to slip away but she spotted me and said hello, collecting me then in the gentle coils of her voice. We talked for a while. She knew I was no longer working at the Shop. She’d been by to get a tattoo. Apparently a stripper had gotten a little catty with her. Probably Thumper. In fact maybe that’s why Thumper had called me, because this exquisite looking woman had out of the blue spoken my name. Anyway Kyrie had gotten the BMW logo tattooed between her shoulder blades, encircled by the phrase “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” This apparently had been Gdansk Man’s idea. The $85,000 car it turns out is his. Kyrie didn’t mention any ire on his part or history on our part, so I just nodded my approval and then right there in the canned food aisle, asked her for the translation of that German phrase which I should have amended, could even do it now, but, well, Fuck ‘em Hoss.
[391—See footnote 310 and corresponding reference. — Ed.]
And so voil it appears here instead:

“utter dismemberment” the same as “dejected member” which I thought she said though she wrote it down a little differently, explaining while she did that she had decided to marry Gdansk Man and would soon actually be living, instead of just driving, up on that windy edge known to some as Mullholland. As I conjure this particular memory I can see more clearly her expression, how appalled she was by the way I looked: so pale and weak, clothes hanging on me like curtains on a curtain rod, sunglasses teetering on bone, my slender hands frequently shaking beyond my control and of course the stench I continued to emanate. What was happening to me, she probably wanted to know, but didn’t ask. Then again maybe I’m wrong, maybe she didn’t notice. Or if she did, maybe she didn’t
care.
When I started to say goodbye, things took an abrupt turn for the weird. She asked me if I wanted to go for another drive. “Aren’t you getting married?” I asked her, trying, but probably failing, to conceal my exasperation. She just waited for my answer. I declined, attempting to be as polite as possible, though something hard still closed over her. She crossed her arms, a surge of anger suddenly igniting the tissue beneath her lips and finger tips. Then as I walked back down the aisle, I heard a crash off to my left. Bottles of ketchup toppled from the shelf, a few even shattered as they hit the floor. The thrown can of salmon rolled near my feet. I twisted around but Kyrie was already gone.) Anyway back to the dream, me chopped up into tiny pieces, spread and splattered in the bowels of that ship, and all at the hands of a drunken f rat boy who upon beholding his heroic deed pukes all over what’s left of me. Except before he achieves any of this, I realize that now, for some reason, for the first time, I have a choice: I don’t have to die, I can kill him instead. Not only are my teeth and nails long, sharp and strong, I too am strong, remarkably strong and remarkably fast. I can rip that fucking ax out of his hands before he even swings it once, shatter it with one jerk of my wrist, and then I can watch the terror seep into his eyes as I grab him by the throat, carve out his insides and tear h.im to pieces.

But as I take a step forward, everything changes. The f rat boy I realize is not the f rat boy anymore but someone else. At first I think it’s Kyrie, until I realize it’s not Kyrie but Ashley, which is when I realize it’s neither Kyrie nor Ashley but Thumper, though something tells me that even that’s not exactly right. Either way, her face glows with adoration and warmth and her eyes communicate in a blink an understanding of all the gestures I’ve ever made, all the thoughts I’ve ever had. So extraordinary is this gaze, in fact, that I suddenly realize I’m unable to move. I just stand there, every sinew and nerve easing me into a world of relief, my breath slowing, arms dangling at my sides, my jaw slack, legs melting me into ancient waters, until suddenly my eyes on their own accord, commanded by instincts darker and older than empathy or anything resembling emotional need, dart from her beautiful and strangely familiar face to the ax she still holds, the ax she is now lifting, the smile she is still making even as she starts to shake, suddenly swinging the ax down on me, at my head, though she will miss my head, barely, the ax floating down instead towards my shoulder, finally cutting into the bone and lodging there, producing shrieks of blood, so much blood, and pain, so much pain, and instantly I understand I’m dying, though I’m not dead yet, even if I am beyond repair, and she has started to cry, even as she dislodges the ax and raises it again, to swing again, again at my head, though she is crying harder and she is much weaker than I thought, and she needs more time than I thought, to get ready, to swing again, while I’m bleeding and dying, which now doesn’t compare at all to the feeling inside, also so familiar, as the atriums of my heart on their own accord suddenly rupture, like my father’s ruptured. So this, I suddenly muse in a peculiarly detached way, was this how he felt?

I’ve made a terrible mistake, but it’s too late and I’m now too full of fury & hate to do anything but look up as the blade slices down with appalling force, this time the right arc, not too far left, not too far right, but right center, descending forever it seems, though it’s not forever,
not even
close,
and I realize with a shade of citric joy,
that at least, at last, it will put an end to the far more terrible ache
inside me, born decades ago, long before I finally beheld in a
dream the face and meaning of my horror.]

As they start to sum up The Haven-Slocum Theory, the couple quotes from Johanne Scefing’s posthumously published journal:

At this late hour I’m unable to put aside thoughts of God’s great sleeper whose history filled my imagination and dreams when I was a boy. I cannot recall how many times I read and re-read the story of Jonah, and now as I dwell on Navidson’s decision to return to the house alone I turn to my Bible and find among those thin pages these lines: