Falter

This is why they continue:

I saw my friends turn and falter
one by one
turning a lie on its heels,
their rationalisation of inhaled defences
had failed. Their ashen lungs heaved,

but try as they might, the rain continued to fall.

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Are you beginning to understand?

Quote of the day [night].

"The angel of his youth became the devil of his maturity. He went out with women when he was young, always holding something in reserve. There would always be a reason to break it off, which opened the door to a multitude of relationships. Heaven. Or so he thought. As age encroached upon his sensibilities and form, he longed for something with enough vitality to endure. But the covering cherub of his Lothario days had stayed with him and was no longer so angelic. It haunted him, guarded him, kept him from intimacy promising the ash dry glory of so many toppling relationships, toppling like dominos, one after another, ad infinitum, or at least until he died."

Of course, I'm paraphrasing.

A proffessor of theology asked what the problem with merely following emotional dispositions in ethics would be.

A student replied, "All people would be whimsical".

"Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word - perhaps your word - flung down empty hallways long past midnight"

"Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children..." - A quote from H.O.L. I'd attribute to old man Z.

I've been looking back at my oldest posts today. Did that boy think he'd grow? Well he did, in a way. Heroin, ketamine, LSD, coke, glue, crack, shrooms, alcohol... Anything to help me forget. That's all we do these days, isn't it? The wild youth? We try to burn our memories.

Ever since I moved out of the house and got an apartment near the uni things have been getting exagerrated. I read a lot more now. And not only because I'm studying English Literature: there's no tv in my room, no phone reception, dodgy wifi that barely lets me make a post on here. No students live in these apartments either, just a few quiet middle-aged people sleepwalking through their lives. A few doors away a Frenchman with a habit of talking too long, midway through a divorce. And the landlord, although I only saw him once, and he was more interested in me paying a rent than making conversation. At least he doesn't care when the smell of cannabis seeps into the curtains, escapes through the cracks beneath the floorboards and permeates the hallways.

I thought I'd be fine, I'm an introvert anyway. This is my own private squalid sanctuary. Although of course it isn't squalid. The rent is reasonable and the rooms are clean. I suppose things seem dingy when you're rotting inside. Good old Doctor Louise knocked up the dose of fluoxetine. That should help add to my trench, my fortifications, my wall and Maginot line of defense. Along with the other drugs. Being alone a lot has led me to the books. Any book really, as it always happens. Doesn't help lessen my growing obsession with House of Leaves. But why would I mind that?

I settled for making a few alterations to the old posts. Maybe later I'll have the courage to delete them, maybe the whole blog. Let the URL sink into oblivion. Right now I've spent too much time on it to feel like ending it.

I thought you should know,

Daddy died today.

He closed his eyes and he left here

At 12:03,

He sends his love.

He wanted you to know

He isn’t holding no grudge

And if you are, you should let it go.

Posioned

I'm beginning to r  t again.
                            o

Blogger crashed so I'll have to rewrite this. The second copy of House of Leaves arrived this week. It came in an elderly yellow package, that had done little to prevent whatever event caused a few of the corners to bend. That said, I'm not sending it back after waiting two weeks for it to arrive. I don't really mind its injuries. This new copy's the full colour edition. Though I'm sure it isn't missing any pages, it feels a lot lighter than my original version.

If I look at the husk of packaging now I can see darkness still clings to the far corners of its mouth, despite the fact that it has been opened. I wonder how many days the book slumbered (or paced) in the envelope. How many hours it spent drenched in night. How it existed in that eternal span of time before any eyes set upon it again. I wonder if that black journey means anything, changes anything about the book. It certainly changes how I look at it. As I waited for my cheap oven pizza to 'cook', I walked in ellipses around my kitchen, holding the light copy, reading the opening from where the words spring (or more accurately: drift) off the page, into my mind, through me. It takes a powerful book to do that to you. If you've ever read one, you'll understand the sensation I'm talking about.

The formatting on that last post came out a bit oddly, probably because I had to use Open Office to insert the footnote. I'll keep it though, it reminds me of the shifts in font and size that you get in H.O.L.

History

The house has been described as history. Zampanò suggests that "The house is history and history is uninhabited." (p. 540). As we know, the noun history stems from two words. His story. It would be foolish to put it past Mark Z. Danielewski not to have understood the etymology of the word.

Let's imagine that this is in reference to Zampanò's own story, the myth buried within his essay - the myth that is The Navidson Record. The house is thus the story of Zampanò. However, we can look deeper than this simple inference. History, the story of a person, is in essence, his past experience. And the house has been called a "solipsistic enhancer". I can't remember the page of that one. What it suggested however, was that one's own cognitions influence the behaviour of the house. For instance, after the staircase is first completely descended, it takes a significantly lower amount of time to reach the top again. It is proposed that this is because the explorers are aware of the fact that the stairs are finite, and that the knowledge that there was an end in sight created a feeling of optimism, which in turn caused the house to shift, reflecting their own more confident, positive emotions.

In essence, their experience at having found the bottom of the stairs influenced their perception of that place, and as we have discussed, the house responds to perception. It echos and reflects it. People's individual past experiences, or as we can now call it, history - whether it is as short-term as remembering the end and beginning of the spiral steps you have found, or as long-term as Tom's reasons for adopting fatalism, which ultimately results in his death - defines their perception. We are but the sum of our past experiences, behaviorists would claim. In the house on Ash Tree Lane, our history can have colossal repercussions.

I've probably made this more wordy than it needs to be, and I'm sure there's a typo or two, but it's late evening now and I'm tired. I just needed to get this out. God this book is brilliant. I'm currently waiting for a second copy to arrive. I bought the full colour edition on ebay so that I can make notes in one of them, and leave the other clear.

Still no reply from KCRW.

A potential lead

Still rereading House of Leaves. On page 347 of my edition Zampanò in his essay mentions a interview with  Audrie Mcullogh, a friend of Karen Green, who briefly entered the house. Zampanò claims a transcript of her interview can be obtained by writing to KCRW.

Which is exactly what I'm going to do.

I'll update the blog once I've got a reply. The work is fiction, but can I find any ghosts in the book's paper shell?

Edit: No progress so far, I've sent another email to an alternate address I managed to find for them.

"...the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

That Particular House

Today, as usual, I can't help but think of that House on Ash Tree Lane. Much of House of Leaves is set in the residence, though we shouldn't ignore Johnny's flat, or Zampano's flat, the rest of the city for that matter, including places one hardly thinks of and never visits; Johnny's Hotel room, many other hotel rooms, though not belonging to him; New York (and more specifically, Central Park), the Whalestoe Institute, the tattoo parlor (aka The Shop), Ashley's house, Texas[sic], and Texas; to say nothing of Johnny's original home, Karen's childhood home - and the nearby well and barnyard - though I cannot forget Raymond's House, the hospital, the bloody curb, the strip club by the airport, and the airport; the labyrinth of Kyrie's inner ear, a match to Johnny's own; the Skylab, the Atrocity; Gdansk man's oil rig, the two-door BMW Coup (if that can be defined as a place), and the windy edge known to some as Mulholland, or to others as a sinuous road running the edge of the Santa Monica mountains; the Santa Monica mountains, with that one lonely spot beneath one lonely lamp; the state of Virginia, Antarctica, the coast of Spain, a laundry room, a swimming pool, car parks, the many bars, pubs, parties and mansions, Yggdrasil.

Ah, Yggdrasil. Barely mentioned in the entire novel. But I have more than a suspicion that it is there. The great tree of life connecting the worlds of the Nordic mythos. Perhaps no coincidence, I met an Odinist recently, which only served to strengthen my belief that I could find the tree in the House. The last page denotes its presence.

 

The tree that supports the nine worlds. And what supports it? The same question has been applied to the dark hallways of House on Ash Tree Lane. Perhaps the House is a manifestation of it, and the darkness that tears through Holloway, the claws that rip Zampano's floorboards, perhaps the roots wreck such havoc. Perhaps. The tree is an ash. An ash on Ash Tree Lane.

I have pictured many times a web that holds the secrets and mysteries of the book, suspends them and conceals them throughout the pages. Call it Calypso. But this is not a fitting image, a web is flimsy, like leaves before the wind. What if this was not a web, but roots? Where then, is the whole, where is the rest of the tree?

Homophones

Do you know what they are?

"Please!"
Pleas.

So Far

I didn't expect to have made it this far.

But fuck, what do my ramblings matter? A vanity of sorts, blurring the edges of inadequacy and intolerability. Not that intolerability is even a real word.

Still rereading House of Leaves, my progress has been somewhat hindered by Hard Times, A Tale of two Cities, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

I can imagine that my heart is pumping at an alarming rate. Not just that, but I can hear its muted, choking gulps; the convulsions that wrack it; and I feel the sensation of it tearing its sinuous self apart, raging against the bars of my ribcage, struggling to distend itself and be free of the bones.

It's past midnight now, and I feel rememberances of summer nights years and yesterdays ago. All brought back by that elusive scent.


"Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories..."

Older eyes than the rest

I feel ancient sometimes.

Soon.

Maybe not today. Maybe not even this month.

But fucking soon.

"True" Stories

I realised last night that the phrase "based on a true story" - I'd just seen the phrase appear at the beginning of the film 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher' - didn't make much sense.

It suggests that a story is either true or false (or, something in between?). "An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment" was the first definition I found. But all stories exist, they're all true in that respect. Just because we know the events of one story occurred does not make it necessarily a better story than one that did not - as the dichotomy of "true" and "false" would suggest. "False" has the connotation of something being wrong with the subject. This shouldn't be the case.

If anything, an imaginary story has more truth to it, less false details, than a "true" story. In the telling of true stories we aim to recount an event accurately. But this is nearly impossible, especially orally - take a look at how myths change over time, details lost and invented in the telling. There's too many variations of just one myth - the Odyssey, Orpheus' descent, Theseus and the Minotaur - to count.

At least an imaginary story has integrity. It doesn't claim to be true, and because of that, none of its details are inaccurate ("false"), there's no reference point to judge these details as such. Besides, in my weird, nihilistic philosophy, at times I have a paradoxical frame of mind. I take everything as impossible to discern as truth, as real - see my other post on nihilism. But this means that the imaginary holds as much validity as the "true". So, somehow, sometimes, I end up believing in both everything, and nothing.

Weird.

Uh oh...

I found Reddit. Or maybe it's found me.

Fedoras aside it has a pretty good forum for discussing  House of Leaves.

I'm living in a House of Leaves

Right guys, it's about time I put my 'skills' acquired from studying English Literature in college to use tonight, following up on a promise (for once), and write a post about House of Leaves.
primrose
So House of Leaves is a - Horror(?), Thriller(?), Romance(!?), Maze(...) - novel, spawned by the genius mind of Mark Z. Danielewski. It concerns a man named Johnny Truant, who findsanextensiveessaywrittenbyablindmancalledZampanoaboutafilmcalledTheNavidsonRecordwhichdidn'tactually happen.

You only need to take a look at the fanbase's discussions of the novel to understand the reaction this book can ignite (not in a bad way). Whilst a prose novel (for the most part (we'll get to that later)), I found that I could read much of it as something more like poetry.

There's a bloody lot of interpretations you can take on even the smallest of passages. One page is dedicated to containing only the statement "Muss es sein?" (roughly German for "Must it be?"). Of course you can take it at face value, but behaving this way gets you only so far in the novel. If you want to read it, I'd strongly advise that as your eyes explore the pages, you take the time to ponder over the implications, the hints Danielewski gives (or chooses not to give).

Take the quote I just gave, for instance. "Must it be?" sounds a lamentative statement, you could consider whether it is an existential question, the author of the phrase (be it Johnny, Zampano, or Danielewski) asking why such suffering should exist in their lives - trust me, the characters have issues.

But remember that "es" is Dutch for "ash". Of course, the connotations of destruction could easily be foreshadowing for the dark events to come - "Tum vero omni mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium" - but readers will know at once that the main location of The Navidson Record is a house on Ash Tree Lane.

The book veers and swerves at times, both structurally and in terms of plot. For instance, at some points in the novel the pace will slow to one or two phrases per line. At other times it will accelerate into whimsical tangents in a stream of consciousness. There is a collection of poems embedded in the book, as well as letters sent from the protagonist's schizophrenic mother.

It's hard to dismiss things as coincidence in this book. Though filled at times with typos and seeming anachronisms, when you start to look closely, you realise you were in Plato's cave all along. Nothing is accidental in here; nothing is without meaning, except what is limited by your interpretations. Tread lightly in the House of Leaves, readers, it's easy to miss the details hidden in plain sight.

Or were the readers, perhaps, in the shadow all along?

House of Leaves

I'm rereading a book today, it's one of my favorites. I might do a few posts about it.