Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 — Chapter V
Echo in myth, poetry, religion and physics.
R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) was an Indian novelist who wrote in English. The line comes from the opening of The Guide (1958): Raju, a former tourist guide, sits alone in an old temple and welcomes a stranger’s visit.
Vv Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. — R. K. Narayan Iris impossible to appreciate the importance of space in The Navidson Record without first taking into account the significance of echoes.
Quick and not careful.
However, before even beginning a cursory examination of their literal and thematic presence in the film, echoes reverberating within the word itself need to be distinguished.
To echo again and again.
However, before even beginning a cursory examination of their literal and thematic presence in the film, echoes reverberating within the word itself need to be distinguished.
In Ovid’s version, the nymph Echo kept Hera talking while Zeus was with other nymphs. Hera punished her: Echo can only repeat the last words she hears. Echo then loved the beautiful Narcissus, who loved only himself, and she wasted away until only her voice was left.
Generally speaking, echo has two coextensive histories: the mythological one and the scientific one.4° Each provides a slightly different perspective on the inherent meaning of recurrence, especially when that repetition is imperfect.
In the Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (2nd century AD), Echo refuses the god Pan, and Pan has shepherds tear her to pieces. The Earth hides her “still singing limbs” (Greek adonta ta melē). Zampanò calls Pan the god of “civility and restraint”, which is ironic, and the misspelling “pisces” (fish) looks like a joke.
Generally speaking, echo has two coextensive histories: the mythological one and the scientific one.4° Each provides a slightly different perspective on the inherent meaning of recurrence, especially when that repetition is imperfect.
Covering the same area or time.
Generally speaking, echo has two coextensive histories: the mythological one and the scientific one.4° Each provides a slightly different perspective on the inherent meaning of recurrence, especially when that repetition is imperfect.
In Greek myth, a young female nature spirit.
To illustrate the multiple resonances found in an echo, the Greeks conjured up the story of a beautiful mountain nymph.
To grow weak and ill from sadness or love.
Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained.
Showing sexual love.
Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pisces, burying all of her except her voice.
“Her still singing limbs.”
Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pisces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta melé.® In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo’s body and the near negation of her voice.48 But Echo is an insurgent.
The act of cancelling or destroying; the opposite of something.
Adonta ta melé.® In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo’s body and the near negation of her voice.48 But Echo is an insurgent.
A rebel.
Adonta ta melé.® In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo’s body and the near negation of her voice.48 But Echo is an insurgent.
To weaken authority from inside.
Despite the divine constraints imposed upon her, she still manages to subvert the gods’ ruling.
Digital copies are exact; analog copies change a little each time. Zampanò says Echo’s repetitions are “analog”: she adds sorrow or accusation that the original did not have.
After all, her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog.
Ovid (43 BC – about AD 17) retold Greek and Roman myths of transformation in this long Latin poem. Zampanò quotes the Latin lines on Echo’s end: her body wastes away, her bones turn to stone, and only her voice lives. Footnote 50 gives Horace Gregory’s real English translation (1958).
As Ovid recognized in his Metamorphoses: “David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one.
An invented study of a third, “epistemological” echo: the echo of knowledge. The title recalls T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”
As Ovid recognized in his Metamorphoses: “David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one.
About knowledge: how we know what we know.
As Ovid recognized in his Metamorphoses: “David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one.
Johnny says that in this chapter Zampanò penciled translations of the Greek and Latin in the margins, and Johnny turned them into footnotes.
… An Analysis of the Epistemological Echo by David Eric Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ® adonta ta... = “Her still singing limbs."47 47Note that luckily in this chapter, Zampand penciled many of the translations for these Greek and Latin quotations into the margins.
An invented book. A biloquist is a person who can speak in two voices, which fits a chapter about echoes.
‘48Ivan Largo Stilets, Greek Mythology Again (Boston: Biloquist Press, 1995), p, 343-497; as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, M1.
A person who can speak in two voices.
‘48Ivan Largo Stilets, Greek Mythology Again (Boston: Biloquist Press, 1995), p, 343-497; as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, M1.
Ovid on Echo: rejected, she hides in the woods and caves; her body wastes away; only her voice lives.
Spreta latet silvis pudibundaque frendibus ora protegit et solis ex illo vivit in antris; sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae; extenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae adducitque cutem macies et in aera sucus corporis omnis abit; vox …
Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) wrote Don Quixote. The quoted Spanish sentence calls history the “mother” of truth, “witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future”.
49Literary marvel Miguel de Cervantes set down this compelling passage in his Don Quixote (Part One, Chapter Nine) : ...
Cervantes: “truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, … witness of the past, … warning to the future.”
49Literary marvel Miguel de Cervantes set down this compelling passage in his Don Quixote (Part One, Chapter Nine) : ... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tempo, depdsito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de Jo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.>!
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Menard, an invented French writer, rewrites parts of Don Quixote word for word, and the narrator praises the copy as richer than the original. Zampanò copies Borges’s joke: he prints the same Spanish passage twice and admires the “variation”. The Editors’ footnote 51 uses Anthony Bonner’s translation of Borges.
Much later, a yet untried disciple of arms had the rare pleasure of meeting the extraordinary Pierre Menard in a Paris café following the second world war.
To explain in detail.
Reportedly Menard expounded on his distinct distaste for Madelines but never mentioned the passage (and echo of Den Quixote ) he had penned before the war which had subsequently earned him a fair amount of literary fame: …
A joke on Marcel Proust. In In Search of Lost Time, the taste of a madeleine cake brings back the narrator’s childhood. Menard, says Zampanò, disliked madeleines.
Reportedly Menard expounded on his distinct distaste for Madelines but never mentioned the passage (and echo of Den Quixote ) he had penned before the war which had subsequently earned him a fair amount of literary fame: ...
Johnny’s footnote under the Menard passage asks the obvious question: how can two identical passages differ? Then the same bitter taste and the same smell from the tattoo shop come back to him.
A very small difference in meaning or tone.
Suffice it to say Menard’s nuances are so fine they are nearly undetectable, though talk with the Framer and you will immediately see how haunted they are by sorrow, accusation, and sarcasm.
A person who is sorry for a sin and prays.
… how poorly I’ve been sleeping, going to sleep but not really resting, if that’s possible, though let me tell you, sitting alone, awake to nothing else but this odd murmuring, like listening to the penitent pray—you know it's a prayer but you miss the words—or better yet listening to a bitter curse, realizing a whole lot wrong’s being ushered into the world but still missing the words, me like …
Confused.
In his own befuddled way, John Hollander has given the world a beautiful and strange reflection on love and longing.
John Hollander (1929–2013) was an American poet and Yale professor. The Figure of Echo (University of California Press, 1981) is a real study of echo in English poetry. Zampanò’s picture of him mumbling on a sidewalk is invented.
In his own befuddled way, John Hollander has given the world a beautiful and strange reflection on love and longing.
A calculation; a judgment.
To read his marvelous dialogue on echo*? is to find its author standing perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes wild with a cascade of internal reckonings, lips acting out some unintelligible discourse, inaudible to the numerous students who race by him, noting his mad appearance and quite rightly offering him a wide berth as they escape into someone else’s class.*3 …
A large distance kept from someone to avoid him.
… the sidewalk, eyes wild with a cascade of internal reckonings, lips acting out some unintelligible discourse, inaudible to the numerous students who race by him, noting his mad appearance and quite rightly offering him a wide berth as they escape into someone else’s class.*3 Hollander begins with a virtual catalogue of literal echoes.
“I have spent ten years on Cicero.”
For example, the Latin “decem iam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone” echoed by the Greek “one!”O Or “Musarum studia” (Latin) described by the echo as “dia” (Greek).% Or Narcissus’ rejection “Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia letter, wanting to detect at least one differing accent or …
Likeness, similarity.
… echo as “dia” (Greek).% Or Narcissus’ rejection “Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia letter, wanting to detect at least one differing accent or letter, getting almost desperate in that pursuit, only to repeatedly discover perfect similitude, though how can that be, right?
To flow out quickly, as through a water gate.
I started to throw up, watery chunks of vomit flying everywhere, sluicing out of me onto the floor, splashing onto the wall, even onto this.
Nervous and shaky.
I was back in my room again, looking around in the dim light, jittery, disoriented but hardly fooled.
One breath of smoke from a joint.
A toke on a blunt.
A cigar filled with cannabis.
A toke on a blunt.
A safe place, a harbour.
I haven’t the foggiest idea.
Johnny calls his guide blind (“amaurotic”), the word Zampanò used in Chapter III. The zonules of Zinn are tiny fibres that hold the lens of the eye in place; if they break, the eye cannot focus.
… why they’re hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago …
To laugh in a loud, harsh way.
… how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago like piano wires, …
A long repeated prayer; a long list.
… Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no sound way to determine …
An invented essay in an invented book with a real press (University of Iowa Press). The title is a joke: “graphomania” was Johnny’s word for Zampanò in the Introduction.
53Kelly Chamotto makes mention of Hollander in her essay “Mid-Sentence, Mid-Stream” in Glorious Garrulous Graphomania ed.
Hollander lists old “echo verses”, in which an echo repeats the last syllables and makes a new word. In Erasmus’s dialogue “Echo”, a man says he spent ten years on Cicero, and the echo answers one, Greek for “ass”. Musarum studia (“the Muses’ studies”) returns as dia (“divine ones”). In Ovid, Narcissus says “May I die before I give you power over me”, and Echo repeats only “I give you power over me”.
345. o“Pve spent ten years on Cicero” “Ass!”
Ovid, Narcissus: “May I die before I give you power over me.”
For example, the Latin “decem iam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone” echoed by the Greek “one!”O Or “Musarum studia” (Latin) described by the echo as “dia” (Greek).% Or Narcissus’ rejection “Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia letter, wanting to detect at least one differing accent or letter, getting almost desperate in that pursuit, only to repeatedly discover perfect similitude, though how can that be, right?
A print made from a carved block of wood.
nostri" to which Echo responds “sit tibi copia nostri.”"€@ On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher’s Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (No6rdlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange “ clamore” for four echoes:“ amore,” “ more,’ “ore,” and finally “re.”
Kircher (1602–1680) was a German Jesuit scholar who wrote on almost every science. His book on sound shows an echo machine that turns clamore (“outcry”) into amore, more, ore and re: “love”, “delays”, “hours”, “king”.
nostri" to which Echo responds “sit tibi copia nostri.”"€@ On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher’s Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (No6rdlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange “ clamore” for four echoes:“ amore,” “ more,’ “ore,” and finally “re.”
A complete change in form.
His slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration, though in an effort to keep from repeating the entire book, let this heart-wrenching interchange serve as a final example: Chi dara fine al gran dolore?
An Italian echo verse: “Who will put an end to this great sadness?” The echo answers “The hours”, that is, time.
… slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration, though in an effort to keep from repeating the entire book, let this heart-wrenching interchange serve as a final example: Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore.*° While The Figure of Echo takes special delight in clever word games, Hollander knows better than to limit his examination there.
About rabbis and their teachings.
For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means “daughter of a voice” which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word “echo.”
In rabbinic Judaism, the bat kol is a heavenly voice that speaks after prophecy ended. In modern Hebrew the phrase means “echo”.
For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means “daughter of a voice” which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word “echo.”
Two poets use the phrase: Milton calls God’s command the “Sole Daughter of his voice”, and Wordsworth opens his “Ode to Duty” (1807) with “Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!”
For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means “daughter of a voice” which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word “echo.” Milton knew it: “God so commanded, and left that Command/ Sole Daughter of his voice.”55 So did Wordsworth: “stern Daughter of the Voice of God.”
Reynolds was an English poet and critic who read Greek myths as hidden religious truths. Iamblichus (about 245–325) was a Neoplatonist philosopher; the Cabalists are students of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah. In the quoted passage, Echo is the reflection of God’s breath upon the soul.
Quoting from Henry Reynold’s Mythomystes (1632), Hollander evidences religious appropriation of the ancient myth (page 16): This Winde is (as the before-mentioned Iamblicus, by consent of his other fellowCabalists sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, …
Making holy or blessed.
… sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, the reflection of this divine breath, or spirit upon us; or (as they interpret it) the daughter of the divine voice; which through the beatifying splendor it shedds and diffuses through the Soule, is justly worthy to be reverenced and adored by us.
Old spelling of “viciously”: in a sinful way.
This Ecco descending upon a Narcissus, or such a Soule as (impurely and vitiously affected) slights, and stops his eares to the Divine voice, or shutts his harte from divine Inspirations, through his being enamour’d of not himselfe, but his owne shadow meerely .
Mercury (Greek Hermes) is the messenger of the gods, with winged sandals called talaria. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Zampanò imagines Echo as a female messenger of God.
Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god’s messenger, a female Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.
The winged sandals of Mercury.
Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god’s messenger, a female Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.
A half-line from Ovid: “From that time on she lived in lonely caves.” Zampanò’s gloss calls these “Literature’s rocky caves”.
An invented theologian with invented lectures at Chapel Hill (the University of North Carolina). He compares the Hebrew davar and the Greek logos, the two words for “word”, and ends with “we are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus”. Pneuma is Greek for “breath” or “spirit”.
In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose dramatically revised this reading.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The first verse of the Gospel of John. Rose calls God’s first word “The Biggest Bang Of Them All”.
After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek Jogos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John, chapter 1, Verse 1—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Showing great technical skill.
It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still …
To send to a lower, forgotten place.
It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: “Look to the sky, look to yourself …
A college that trains priests or ministers.
It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: “Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus.”*° Rose’s …
Causing fire; causing anger and conflict.
… was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: “Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus.”*° Rose’s pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation: Why did god create a …
A four-line poem that Zampanò quotes without a source. Johnny says the lines have “a familiar ring”; the Editors say they could not find the author and ask readers for help.
… his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: “Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus.”*° Rose’s pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation: Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, “Be not like me.
To block or hide.
What the passage occludes, no doubt on purpose, is how such an understanding might be attained.
A change in tone, pitch or key.
Interestingly enough, for all its marvelous observation, The Figure of Echo contains a startling error, one which performs a poetic modulation on a voice sounded over a century ago.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) wrote “On the Power of Sound” (1835). The original line has “the sky’s blue caves”. Hollander’s book prints “blue care”, and Zampanò reads the misprint as Hollander’s own hidden feeling. The 1908 Methuen edition by Nowell Charles Smith is real.
While discussing Wordsworth’s poem “The Power of Sound” Hollander quotes on page 19 the following few lines: Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, …
Both mean “word”; logos also means reason.
Accepted as standard or authoritative.
… hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky's blue caves reborn —‘? [Italics added for emphasis] While Wordsworth’s poetics retain the literal properties and stay within the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander’s find something else, not exactly ‘religious’ —that would be hyperbole—but ‘compassionate’, which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.
Exaggeration.
… sky's blue caves reborn —‘? [Italics added for emphasis] While Wordsworth’s poetics retain the literal properties and stay within the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander’s find something else, not exactly ‘religious’ —that would be hyperbole—but ‘compassionate’, which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.
Equal in size or degree; matching.
Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness.
Able to recover quickly.
Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.
Strongly suggesting something.
Hollander is wrong when he writes on page 55: The apparent echoing of solitary words [reminds] us . . . that acoustical echoing in empty places can be a very common auditory emblem, redolent of gothic novels as it may be, of isolation and often of unwilling solitude.
Short for reverberation: the echo effect in a recording.
It is not by accident that choirs singing Psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb.
Two examples of holy music recorded with a lot of echo. The monks are the Benedictines of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain: their album Chant became a world hit in 1994.
Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow.
Holy.
Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow.
Causing worry.
If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting.
A real book (1993) of strange letters that ordinary people sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory in California between 1915 and 1935. The publisher is linked to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Alice May Williams wrote that the sky opens and closes.
Also of some interest is Alice May Williams letter to the observers at Mount Wilson (CAT.
Having knowledge or skill in something.
The descriptive ability of the audible is easily designated with the following formula: © Sound + Time = Acoustic Light As most people know who are versed in this century’s technological effects, exact distances can be determined by timing the duration of a sound’s round trip between the deflecting object and its point of origin.
A doctor for pregnancy and birth.
This principle serves as the basis for all the radar, sonar and ultrasonics used every day around the world by air traffic controllers, fishermen, and obstetricians.
Echolocation is how animals “see” with sound: they send a sound and read the echo. Bats, toothed whales, dolphins and the South American oilbird use it. Radar, sonar and medical ultrasound do the same with machines. The Doppler shift is the change in pitch when the source or the target moves.
Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology.
Finding objects by sending sound and hearing the echo.
Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology.
The voice box in the throat.
Bats, for example, create frequency modulated [FM] images by producing constant-frequency signals [0.5 to 100+ ms] and FM signals [0.5 to 10 ms] in their larynx.
The part of the brain that processes sound.
The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect’s velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter.
A change in the pitch of a wave when the source or listener moves.
The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect’s velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter.
A real British-American ocean acoustician. He worked on “acoustic daylight”, a way to make images from the natural noise of the sea.
As Michael J. Buckingham noted in the mid-80s, imaging performed by the human eye is neither active nor passive.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester has lost his eyes. When the mad Lear asks how he sees the world, he answers “I see it feelingly.”
Based on these observations, the already mentioned formula reflects a more accurate understanding of vision with the following refinement: © Sound + Time = Acoustic Touch As Gloucester murmured, “I see it feelingly.”®!
Footnote 62 is Johnny’s longest yet. It starts at “perhaps your word” and runs into a dense, broken passage about his father and his own scars.
Donald Griffin (1915–2003), an American zoologist, proved that bats navigate by echoes and named the process “echolocation”. Listening in the Dark (1958) is his classic book.
Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of See D. R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (1986).
One of the two lower chambers of the heart.
… were it not for those six lines, especially the last bit “— perhaps your word —"” conjuring up, at least for me, one of those deep piercing reactions, the kind that just misses a ventricle, the old man making his way—feeling his way—around the walls of another evening, a slow and tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me …
Here: to push out (claws).
… tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me completely by surprise, a sudden charge from out of the dullest moment, jaws lunging open, claws protracting, and just so you understand where I'm coming from, I consider ".
A bar at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, fashionable in the late 1990s.
Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real coronary like: “Hoss, a claw’s made of bone just like a stilt’s made of steel.”
To bleed heavily; here, to lose a lot of money.
Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real coronary like: “Hoss, a claw’s made of bone just like a stilt’s made of steel.”
A thin, sharp knife.
… pitching my own defenses into something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O'Reilly @ 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more …
Samuel O’Reilly, a New York tattoo artist, patented the first electric tattoo machine in 1891. It was based on an electric pen by Thomas Edison.
… something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O'Reilly @ 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves …
An EKG (electrocardiogram) records the electric activity of the heart as a line of waves. The QRS complex is one heartbeat’s main spike. A deep Q wave can show an old infarction, that is, a heart attack in which part of the heart muscle died.
… Samuel O'Reilly @ 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in …
Death of tissue when blood supply stops, as in a heart attack.
… bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in the first place, probably right after one burning maze but still years ahead of the Other loss, a horrible violence, …
A very large number.
… prisms of salt will always slip through fingers, shimmering, raining, confused, and no matter how spectacular forever unable to prevent his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even?
Johnny’s misspelling echoes différance, a term of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: meaning is never fully present, because each word differs from other words and defers its meaning to them.
… his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even?
The highest speed a falling body reaches in air.
… differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even? or never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that mark mean?
A set of large letters that survivors mark on the ground for rescue planes. In older survival manuals, an X meant “unable to proceed”.
… never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that mark mean?
The formula gives the natural frequencies of a closed rectangular room from its length, width and height. Zampanò notes that if the room is infinite, the frequency is 0: an endless room has no resonance at all.
Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls.
A natural frequency at which a system vibrates (German eigen, “own”).
Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls.
A female servant.
The following formula describes the resonance frequencies [f] in a room Proceed—then in the awful second arc and second descent, after the sound, the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless & unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather …
In folklore, a child secretly left by fairies in place of a stolen one.
… the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless & unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather might have even caused, and mine too, this unread trauma, driving him to consciousness with a scream, not even a word, a scream, …
A movement back and forth.
But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, …
A secret cooperation.
But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.
To leave secretly, often with something stolen.
And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him.
Small spaces between things.
(In the case of porous material, the subsurface lattice of interstices translates sound waves into heat.)
A sabin is a real unit of sound absorption, named after the physicist Wallace Sabine. Transmission loss measures how well a wall blocks sound. Pequity’s article in Science and Noi’s “Echo’s Verse” in Science News are invented.
There is only silence.® §3Further attention should probably be given to sabins and Transmission Loss as described by TL = 10 log 1/ T dB, where T= a transmission coefficient and a high TL indicates a high sound insulation.
A unit of sound absorption.
There is only silence.® §3Further attention should probably be given to sabins and Transmission Loss as described by TL = 10 log 1/ T dB, where T= a transmission coefficient and a high TL indicates a high sound insulation.
A fast rattling echo between two parallel hard walls. A small angle between the walls stops it.
64Parallel surfaces will create a flutter echo, though frequently a splay of as little as 16mm (5/8 inch) can prevent the multiple repetitions.
A slant; a surface set at an angle.
64Parallel surfaces will create a flutter echo, though frequently a splay of as little as 16mm (5/8 inch) can prevent the multiple repetitions.
Directly opposite.
There is something more at work here, some sort of antithetical reasoning and proof making, and what about light?, all of which actually made sense to me at a certain hour before midnight or at least came close to making sense.
The ear hears a reflection as a separate echo only if it comes back after about 50 milliseconds. Sound travels about 1,130 feet a second, so the wall must be at least 56½ feet away. Fifty-six and a half feet will matter again in this chapter.
Johnny spends the night with a woman named Lucy but thinks only of another woman. He twice refuses to write a word: “(—can’t write the word—)”.
The total suddenly climbing to an impossible six words. “Johnny,” I mumbled, promptly earning four more words.
Johnny’s boss uses one name, The Ghost, for two real Hollywood places: a club on La Brea Avenue and the famous rock bar on Sunset Boulevard.
… for reasons unknown to me still continuing to endure as a center to my thoughts; her— —first encountered in the company of Lude and my boss at a place my boss likes to call The Ghost.
A system of names.
Private nomenclature seems to rapidly develop in tight set-upon circles, though truth be told we were only set-upon on a good day, and tight here should be taken pretty loosely.
Heroin.
My boss was chattering incessantly about his junk days in London and how he‘d contemplated sobriety and what those contemplations had been like.
Eager.
Truth be known, I‘d been waiting for this chance for a while, keen on getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they were—diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, …
Colours in Johnny’s tattoo designs: cinnabar is a bright red mineral, celadon a pale grey-green (from Chinese pottery), indigo a deep blue dye, umber a dark brown earth.
… keen on getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they were—diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, celadon and indigo, incarnated in the scales of dragons, the bark of ancient roods, shields welded by generations cast aside in the oily umber of shadow & blood not to speak of lifeless …
A junction between two nerve cells.
And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor.
Like a labyrinth: complicated and full of turns.
And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor.
The bones of the neck.
The first turn definitely the toughest, necessitating the breaking of cervical vertebrae and the snapping of the spinal cord, but after that, another six or so turns, and voila—the head was off.
“There it is.”
To stare with the mouth open.
He just left me to gape.
To change a strong desire into another, more accepted activity.
… thinking of her now and I’m lost, lost in the smell of her, the way of her and everything she conjures up inside me, a mad rush of folly & oddly muted lusts, sensations sublimated faster than I can follow, into— oh hell I don’t know what into, I probably shouldn't even be using a word like sublimate, but that’s beside the point, her hair reminding me of a …
Joined with hot metal; here, hot and bright.
… follow, into— oh hell I don’t know what into, I probably shouldn't even be using a word like sublimate, but that’s beside the point, her hair reminding me of a shiny gold desert wind brazed in a hot August sun, hips curving like coastal norths, tits rising and falling beneath her blue sweatshirt the way an ocean will do long after the storm has passed.
Triumph is an old British motorcycle maker. Johnny’s daydream puts him and Thumper on one, escaping a burning coast.
… battered by the clutch of holding on—I don't know what to, but holding just the same—and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are ona motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn’t that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don’t know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one.
Regions, climates (literary).
… same—and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are ona motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn’t that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don’t know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one.
Too sentimental.
I wasn't even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.
Clothing (literary).
Gratefully I received her clothes, lifting them from her fingers tips like they were some sacred vesture bestowed upon me by the Virgin Mary herself.
The stripper Johnny mentioned in the Introduction. She comes to the shop to have her rabbit tattoo retouched. Johnny does not know her real name.
Suffice it to say, the second I saw that rabbit the second I started calling her Thumper.
Violent disorder.
… him thinking to myself, “Who’s this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?” which it turns out I didn’t think at all but accidentally said aloud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.
Fainting from strong emotion, especially love.
Quick note here: if this crush—slash—swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might …
In a falsely shy, teasing way.
“Just an inch away from my perfectly shaved pussy,” she announced very matter-afactly, only to add somewhat coyly, slipping two fingers beneath her Gstring and pulling it aside; no need to wink now: “The Happiest Place On Earth.”
Completely captured by interest or delight.
I'm taken; I love how enthralled 33
To make someone a god.
To talk fast and a lot.
she remains by this festival of living, nothing reserved or even remotely ashamed about who she is or what she does, always talking blue streak to my boss about her three year old child, her boyfriend, her boyfriends, the hand jobs she gets extra for, eleven years of sobriety, her words always winding up the way it feels to …
The Rite of Spring is Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet. “Rabbit rabbit” is an old British superstition: say it on the first day of a month for luck. April Fool’s Day is 1 April, a day for tricks.
… years of sobriety, her words always winding up the way it feels to wake up wide awake, everything about her awakening at every moment, alive to the world and its quirky opportunities, a sudden rite of spring, Thumper's spring, though spring’s already sprung, rabbit rabbit, and now April’s ruling April’s looming April’s fooling, around, in yet another round, for this year’s ruling April fool.
To gather (courage, words).
It doesn’t matter that she always gives me a wink and sometimes even a full throated laugh when I call her “Thumper”, “Hi Thumper” “Bye Thumper” the only words I can really muster, she still really only exists for me as a strange mixture of daydream and present day edge, by which I mean something without a past or a future, an icon or idyll of sorts, …
A happy, peaceful scene or time.
… can really muster, she still really only exists for me as a strange mixture of daydream and present day edge, by which I mean something without a past or a future, an icon or idyll of sorts, for some reason forbidden to me, but seductive beyond belief and probably relief, her image feeling permanently fixed within me, but not new, more like it's been there all along, even if …
The Editors note that Johnny would not explain this passage.
Truant declined to comment further on this particular passage.
The hallway appears, and Navidson goes in for the first time.
Billy Reston climbs to the second floor with his arms only. He measures the house again and again and still finds the inside larger than the outside.
As tape and film reveal, in the month following the expansion of the walls bracketing the book shelves, Billy Reston made several trips to the house where despite all efforts to the contrary, he continued to confirm the confounding impossibility of an interior dimension greater than an exterior one.
Strong arm muscles.
“You got a pair of guns there, don’t you partner.”
Another of Zampanò’s readers, a doctoral student in comparative literature. She objected to the long retellings of the film in a critical work. Zampanò answered with a pun: “We always look for doctors but sometimes we’re lucky to find a frosh” (a first-year student).
Slyesterday I managed to get Maus Fife-Harris on the phone.
A first-year student.
And he replied—I remember this very distinctly: ‘We always look for doctors but sometimes we’re lucky to find a frosh.’
Washington Dulles International Airport, west of Washington, D.C.
Tom, however, realizes he cannot afford to stay any longer and asks Reston to give him a lift to Charlottesville where he can catch a ride up to Dulles.
Joking.
While there is no question the tone of this exchange is jocular and perhaps even slightly combative, what matters most here is unspoken.
A large number of things in a short time.
… any new friends in Virginia, they keep to themselves, romping around the backyard, shouting, screaming, stinging each other with darts until eventually they drift farther and farther out into the neighborhood for increasingly longer spates of time.
Tarot is a deck of 78 picture cards used for fortune-telling. Karen lays the cards in a cross, as in the common “Celtic Cross” spread.
Karen is upstairs, sitting on the bed playing with a deck of Tarot cards.
Oliver North was a US Marine officer at the centre of the Iran–Contra affair. His convictions were vacated in July 1990, which dates this scene.
News of Oliver North’s annulled conviction plays on the TV.
In film: moving between two scenes that happen at the same time.
With superb cross-cutting, Navidson depicts how both he and Karen react to the next moment.
About magic and hidden powers.
Karen has drawn another card from the deck but instead of adding it to the cross slowly forming before her crossed legs, the occult image hangs unseen in the air, frozen between her two fingers, Karen’s eyes already diverted, concentrating on a sound, a new sound, almost out of reach, but reaching her just the same.
A small fairy or spirit.
Navidson soon reappears with Chad and Daisy in each arm, both of them still clutching a homemade candle, their faces lit like sprites on a winter’s eve.
The fear of enclosed spaces. Here the film shows Karen’s claustrophobia for the first time.
Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia.
Cool and distant.
Whether it is the lasting flush of terror still in Karen’s cheeks or her absolute need for him, so markedly different from her frequently aloof posture, Navidson cradles her in his arms like a child and promises.
An invented book about Karen’s teenage years, placed in a real university press. Posah says that the bold child Karen was “died” at fifteen and left a perfect smile behind.
Since the release of The Navidson Record, Virginia Posah has written extensively about Karen Green’s adolescent years.
Real books about women and girls. Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening (1899); Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison are major American writers. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (1950) is a patient’s own account. Francesca Lia Block wrote the Weetzie Bat novels. Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia (1994) and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) argue that girls lose their voice and confidence in adolescence.
Along with an exceptional background in everything ranging from Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Autobiography of a 688there’s a problem here concerning the location of “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”
Johnny notices that Chapter I put the doorway on the north wall and this chapter puts it on the west wall. He does not know if it is a mistake.
Initially the doorway was supposed to be on the north wall of the living room (page 4), but now, as you can see for yourself, that position has changed.
The children’s voices echo from a new doorless hallway in the living room. Their echoes mean a space over 56½ feet long, and no room in the house is longer than 25 feet.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the French philosopher, wrote many letters to his companion Sophie Volland. In one he says girls “die” at fifteen, meaning that their true nature is lost.
In her introduction (page xv), Posah provides this brief overview: When Diderot told the teenage Sophie Volland “You all die at fifteen” he could have been speaking to Karen Green who at fifteen did die.
Not weakened.
All her choices reflected unattenuated self-confidence—a remarkably healthy sign for a thirteen year old girl.
Full of energy and joy.
Karen Green was exuberant, feisty, charming, independent, spontaneous, sweet, and most of all fearless.
Brave and full of fight.
Karen Green was exuberant, feisty, charming, independent, spontaneous, sweet, and most of all fearless.
Loss of the voice.
Tragically her creation proved flawless and though her near aphonia should have alarmed any adept teacher or guidance counselor, it was invariably rewarded with the pyritic prize of high school popularity.
Like pyrite, “fool’s gold”: it looks valuable but is not.
Tragically her creation proved flawless and though her near aphonia should have alarmed any adept teacher or guidance counselor, it was invariably rewarded with the pyritic prize of high school popularity.
An invented magazine reports a real kind of diagnosis. The DSM-IV is the real psychiatric manual of 1994. The drugs are real: Tofranil (imipramine), propranolol (a beta blocker), tranylcypromine (an MAOI) and fluoxetine (Prozac, an SSRI). The Sheehan scales are real anxiety tests.
of Karen’s claustrophobia, Navidson chose instead to focus strictly on the house.® Of course by the following morning, Karen has already molded her desperation into a familiar pose of indifference.
The feeling that the world around you is not real.
The attacks are consistently characterized by (1) accelerated heart rate (2) sweating (3) trembling (4) sensation of suffocation (5) feeling of choking (6) chest pain (7) severe dizziness (8) derealization (feelings of unreality) and eventual depersonalization (being detached from oneself) (9) culmination in an intense fear of dying.
The feeling of being outside your own body or self.
… attacks are consistently characterized by (1) accelerated heart rate (2) sweating (3) trembling (4) sensation of suffocation (5) feeling of choking (6) chest pain (7) severe dizziness (8) derealization (feelings of unreality) and eventual depersonalization (being detached from oneself) (9) culmination in an intense fear of dying.
Treatment with drugs.
Because behavioral-cognitive techniques have thus far failed to modify perspectives on anxiety-provoking stimuli, subject was considered ideal for current pharmacotherapy study .
Changes of fortune, usually for the worse.
At least the implication seems clear, vicissitudes in Karen’s life, whatever those may be, affect her sensitivity to space.
Invented articles on Karen’s attacks. Berezin links them to intimacy.
453) Celine Berezin, M.D.
A mirror of a real book: Men Who Can’t Love (1987) by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol. Here the sex in the title is reversed and the two authors’ surnames are swapped.
Also see Steve Sokol and Julia Carter’s Women Who Can’t Love: When a Woman’s Fear Makes Her Run from Commitment and What a Smart Man Can Do About It (New Hampshire: T.
A pointer to one of the plates (exhibits) at the back of the book.
Devans and Company, 1978). See Exhibit Six.
The film shows more of “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” than the VHS copy did. In the film you can see that the hallway has shrunk from over sixty feet to less than ten.
The Five and a Half Minute Hallway in The Navidson Record differs slightly from the bootleg copy which appeared in 1990.
Copied or made without permission.
The Five and a Half Minute Hallway in The Navidson Record differs slightly from the bootleg copy which appeared in 1990.
A sudden cut in film that jumps forward in time.
Their personalities almost crowd that place and suddenly too, as an abrupt jump cut redelivers Tom from Massachusetts and Billy Reston from Charlottesville, the UVA professor once again wheeling around the periphery of the angle, unable to take his eyes off the strange, dark corridor.
The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) was a TV series of strange short stories that often end with a clear twist. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a black monolith appears and nobody can explain it. Zampanò says the hallway is like the monolith.
Unlike The Twilight Zone, however, or some other like cousin where understanding comes neat and fast (i.e.
An order that forbids something.
As Navidson threatens to reenter it for a closer inspection, Karen reiterates her previous plea and injunction with a sharp and abrupt rise in pitch.
The person who carries the flag; a leader of a cause.
Karen, on the other hand, remains the standard bearer of responsibility and is categorically against risks especially those which might endanger her family or her happiness.
An invented critic who blames a “dark force” in the walls for the couple’s fight. Zampanò calls her “tedious”. Bodhi is Sanskrit for “awakening” in Buddhism.
Without sound or movement but by presence alone, the hallway creates a serious rift in the Navidson household. Bazine Naodook suggests that the hallway exudes a “conflict creating force”: “It’s those oily walls radiating badness which maneuver Karen and Will into that nonsensical fight.”’?
To give off (a smell, a feeling).
Bazine Naodook suggests that the hallway exudes a “conflict creating force”: “It’s those oily walls radiating badness which maneuver Karen and Will into that nonsensical fight.”’?
A real design magazine, an invented article.
In the film, 71Consider Drew Bluth’s “Summer’s Passage” in Architectural Digest, v.
Divination from marks on the ground; here, feng shui.
… make out a number of books lying around the house, including The Elements of Feng Shui by Kwok Man-Ho and Joanne O’Brien (Element Books: Shaftesbury, 1991), Feng Shui Handbook: A Practical Guide to Chinese Geomancy and Environmental Harmony by Derek Walters (Aquarian Press, 1991), Interior Design with Feng Shui by Sarah Rosbach (Rider: London, 1987) and The I Ching or Book of Changes, 3rd Edition translated by Richard Wilhelm …
Feng shui is the Chinese art of placing buildings and objects to bring good energy. The four books on Karen’s table are real, including the I Ching (“Book of Changes”), an ancient Chinese book of divination, in Richard Wilhelm’s famous translation. The Kua number is a feng shui number worked out from your birth year.
… (Element Books: Shaftesbury, 1991), Feng Shui Handbook: A Practical Guide to Chinese Geomancy and Environmental Harmony by Derek Walters (Aquarian Press, 1991), Interior Design with Feng Shui by Sarah Rosbach (Rider: London, 1987) and The I Ching or Book of Changes, 3rd Edition translated by Richard Wilhelm (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
Of steel: coated with zinc against rust.
Then he hangs a single door with 24-gauge hot-dipped, galvanized steel skins and an acoustical performance rating coded at ASTM E413-70TSTC 28.
Tom closes the hallway with a steel door. STC (Sound Transmission Class), defined by the standard ASTM E413, rates how well a wall or door blocks sound. Schlage is an American lock brand.
Then he hangs a single door with 24-gauge hot-dipped, galvanized steel skins and an acoustical performance rating coded at ASTM E413-70TSTC 28.
A strong lock bolt moved by a key.
Last but not least, he puts in four Schlage dead bolts and colour codes the four separate keys: red, yellow, green, and blue.
The metal plate in a door frame that the bolt enters.
As the dead bolt glances the strike plate, the resulting click creates an unexpected and very unwelcome echo.
With strong feeling.
… to town as she searches for various Feng Shui objects guaranteed to change the energy of the home, while Daisy follows her father around the house as he paces from room to room, talking vehemently on the phone with Reston, trying to come up with a feasible and acceptable way to investigate the phenomenon lurking in his living room, until finally, in the middle of all this, he lifts …
A final demand with a threat.
Until finally the lack of physical intimacy and emotional understanding leads both of them to make privately voiced ultimatums.
This Old House is a real home-repair magazine and TV show; the article is invented. The footnote hangs on Tom’s doll house for Daisy.
73See Lewis Marsano’s “Tom’s 1865 Shelter” in This Old House, September/October 1995, p.
Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying (1973) and the sex guides by Anne Hooper and Chris Allen are real. Broken Daisy-Chains by “X.Y.” seems invented.
“Nor does it seem to help that Navidson and Karen both have among their books Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), Anne Hooper’s The Ultimate Sex Book : A Therapist’s Guide to the Programs and Techniques That Will Enhance Your Relationship and Transform Your Life …
To move slowly and quietly sideways towards someone.
A little drunk.
Everyone is pretty tipsy and the general mood is so friendly and easy it seems impossible to disturb.
The title card of Navidson’s first walk into the hallway, at 3:19 a.m. A MagLite is a strong metal flashlight.
A title card reads: Exploration A The time stamp on Navidson’s camcorder indicates that it is exactly 3:19 A.M.
Acting fast without thinking.
“Call me impetuous or just curious,” we hear him mutter as he shoves his sore feet into a pair of boots.“ But a little look around isn’t going to hurt.”
A basket-like bed for a baby (spelled “basinet” in the book).
Two famous friends visit, but their names are blank lines. Johnny says Zampanò left the blanks and never filled them in.
To move lightly and quickly.
Flashlight and camera skitter across ceiling and floor in loose harmony, stabbing into small rooms, alcoves, or spaces reminiscent of closets, though no shirts hang there.
To meet at one point.
Still, no matter how far Navidson proceeds down this particular passageway, his light never comes close to touching the punctuation point promised by the converging perspective lines, sliding on and on and on, spawning one space after another, a constant stream of corners and walls, all of them unreadable and perfectly smooth.
The first names in a huge list of photographers of darkness and night. Brassaï photographed Paris at night (Paris de nuit, 1932). O. Winston Link made famous night photos of steam trains with huge flash set-ups. Andrew Bush photographed the rooms of an Irish house, Bonnettstown. Liza Speen and her Images Of Dark seem invented.
There is also the courage to face and shape the subject in an extremely original manner.75 75§ee Liza Speen’s Images Of Dark; Brassai’s Paris By Night; the tenderly encountered history of rooms in Andrew Bush’s Bonnettstown; work of O.
Nearly all the names are real photographers: Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Weegee, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Joel-Peter Witkin and hundreds more. Some groups stand out: surf photographers, and a long run of war photographers of the wars in Indochina, many of whom died there (Robert Capa in 1954, Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kyoichi Sawada, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone). Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut took the 1972 photo of a girl burned by napalm.
With the possible exception of Brassai, Speen, Bush and Link, Zampano was not very familiar with photographers.
Never changing.
In fact his creep into that place resembles the eerie faith required for any deep sea exploration, the beam of his flashlight scratching at nothing but the invariant blackness.
A long narrow crack.
Perhaps it will open up into some deep fissure.
Another reader tells Johnny that she and Zampanò picked the names at random from books and magazines, except Brassaï, Speen, Bush and Link. She says the list was never written down.
… Adams, Charles Hoff, Larry Burrows, and Don McCullin (“American soldiers tending wounded child in a cellar of a house by candlelight, 1968"), 76 7Alison Adrian Burns, another Zampand reader, told me this list was entirely random.
Lost in the dark, Navidson shouts words and chooses the direction whose echo comes back fastest. He puts down a penny as a marker, but the penny and the doorways move. A growl sounds three times.
When a minute passes and he has still failed to find the entrance, he returns to the penny.
Worn at the edges; of nerves: tense.
Catching his breath and doing his best to calm his frayed nerves, he tries to come up with a better plan.
A dangerous glacier icefall at the base of Mount Everest, on the climbing route from Nepal. Its seracs (towers of ice) and crevasses shift day and night.
Similar to the Khumbu Icefall at the base of Mount Everest where blue seracs and chasms change unexpectedly throughout the day and night, Navidson is the first one to discover how that place also seems to constantly change.
Footnote 77 starts from the phrase “nothing visible to the eye provides a reason” and becomes Johnny’s second attack, this time in the shop’s dark storeroom.
A tall block of ice on a glacier.
Similar to the Khumbu Icefall at the base of Mount Everest where blue seracs and chasms change unexpectedly throughout the day and night, Navidson is the first one to discover how that place also seems to constantly change.
The real name of Mata Hari (1876–1917), a Dutch exotic dancer famous for a dance of veils. The French shot her as a German spy in 1917.
She was doing this crazy Margaretha Geertruida Zelle dance, veil after colored veil thrown aside, though oddly enough never landing, rather flying around her as if she were in the middle of some kind of gentle twister, these sheer sheets of fabric …
Smoking cannabis just after waking up.
Wake & Bake.
Vista Street runs into Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The line echoes the song “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie (1977): “you’re only a day away”.
On Vista.
So thin you can see through it.
I want to find out if she’s really wearing any of that diaphanous rainbow fabric I was dreaming about.
Tattoo needles: several needles soldered together make a “point” for shading. An autoclave sterilizes tools with hot steam under pressure.
He will talk, he will ruin everything, except it suddenly penetrates that chalky material he actually insists on calling his brain, that I'm building his precious points, and sure enough this insight prohibits his trap from opening and he leaves me alone.
A steam machine that sterilizes tools.
… and only then, if I’m satisfied, which I usually am—though take heed “usually” does not always mean “always”—will I scrub the shafts and put them aside to be sterilized later in the ultrasound or Autoclave.
Dialect: to ramble, to be confused.
He calls me all the time on my tardiness, my tendency to drift & moither and of course the odds that I’'1ll ever get to tattoo anything—“Johnny, nothing you do, (shaking his head) no one’s ever gonna wanna make permanent, unless they’re crazy, and let me tell you something …
A deep cut or tear in the skin.
The laceration isn’t deep but important stuff has been struck, leaking over the table and floor.
An introduction; what comes before the main event.
Then as if this were nothing but a grim prelude, shit really starts to happen.
Smelling very bad.
The air’s rank with stench.
Pieces of metal from an exploding shell.
Words filling my head. fFragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere.
“The Battle of Maldon” is an Old English poem about a battle against Viking raiders in AD 991. It opens with a young man who lets his hawk fly away before the fight. Johnny’s broken phrases (“embattled”, “like a hawk”) point at the poem.
Another Maldon or no Maldon at all, on snowy days, or not snowy at all, far beyond the edge of any reasonable awareness.
Wild noise and confusion (from an old London madhouse).
None of this can truly approach the reality of that fear, there in the midst of all that bedlam, like the sound of a heart or some other unholy blast, desperate & dying, slamming, no banging into the thin wall of my inner ear, paper thin in fact, attempting to shatter inside what …
Death or loss of consciousness from lack of air.
And it’s true, I’m possessed by the premonition of what will be, what has to be, my inevitable asphyxiation.
To pour liquid over.
What they can’t see though is the omen seen in a fall, my fall, as I’m doused in black ink, my hands now completely covered, and see the floor is black, and—have you anticipated this or should I be more explicit?—jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my …
A deep glossy black (from the black stone called jet).
… the omen seen in a fall, my fall, as I’m doused in black ink, my hands now completely covered, and see the floor is black, and—have you anticipated this or should I be more explicit?—jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my hand vanish, in fact all of me has vanished, one hell of a disappearing act too, the already foreseen dissolution of the self, lost …
The breaking up or ending of something.
… should I be more explicit?—jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my hand vanish, in fact all of me has vanished, one hell of a disappearing act too, the already foreseen dissolution of the self, lost without contrast, slipping into oblivion, until mid-gasp I catch sight of my reflection in the back of the tray, the ghost in the way: seems I’m not gone, not quite.
The French phrase l’esprit de l’escalier: the clever answer you think of too late, on the stairs as you leave. Johnny thinks of it after his fall down the storeroom stairs.
Now though, I realize what I should of said—in the spirit of the dark; in the spirit of the staircase — “Known some call is air am.”
The sounds of the Latin non sum qualis eram, “I am not what I used to be”, from Horace, Odes IV.1. The line is also the title of a well-known poem by Ernest Dowson (1894). Johnny translates it himself.
Now though, I realize what I should of said—in the spirit of the dark; in the spirit of the staircase — “Known some call is air am.”
The Editors say that readers who want to understand Johnny’s past may read documents in the appendix now: his father’s obituary and letters from his mother. You may choose to wait.
Those, however, who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read _ his father's obituary in Appendix II-D as well as those letters written by his institutionalized mother in Appendix II-E.
“I am not what I used to be.”
The whole range.
And as they later confide in separate video entries, that night, for the first time in weeks, they made love again, their descriptions running the gamut of anything from “ gentle” and “comforting” to “familiar” and “very satisfying.”
An American TV and radio host famous for his interview show on CNN (1985–2010).
He promises to turn over the initial investigation to Billy Reston: “Then we’ll call The New York Times, Larry King, whoever, and we’ll move.
Daisy wants to play “Always”. Zampanò notes that the word sounds like “hallways”, and echoes it.
“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “Always.”
A new word.
… by Exploration A, no one has ever commented on the game Daisy wants to play with her father, perhaps because everyone assumes it is either a request “to play always” or just a childish neologism.