Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 — Chapter XX
The card names it Exploration #5. Navidson packs, rides in on a bicycle, and finds the corridor always slopes downward. The text spreads and thins across the pages to follow him.
The epigraph is credited to “Poe”. In this book that is the American singer Poe (Annie Decatur Danielewski), the author's sister, whose 2000 album Haunted answers and echoes House of Leaves. It is not the writer Edgar Allan Poe.
The line prepares the chapter: Navidson enters the “underworld” of the house alone.
XX No one should brave the underworld alone.
Face and endure something dangerous.
XX No one should brave the underworld alone.
Able to feel or sense things.
Even to the keenest eye or most sentient fingertip, they remain unreadable.
Destroy completely, leaving no trace.
The walls obliterate everything.
Freed from blame or from a record; here, kept clear of all marks.
They are permanently absolved of all record.
Slanting; not direct or clear.
They are permanently absolved of all record. Oblique, forever obscure and unwritten.
A boxed, hard-to-read passage the Editors call illegible. It describes the walls of the house as bare, textureless and unmarkable: they keep no record and obliterate everything.
It sets the mood of a place that gives back nothing.
Behold the perfect pantheon of absence.”
A grand temple or hall for all the gods; here used for a hall of pure absence.
Behold the perfect pantheon of absence.”
Real film gear. The Bolex H16 is a Swiss hand-crank 16mm camera; Kern-Paillard made its lenses; Kodak 7298 is a fast colour film stock. Navidson also carries a mountain bike with a trailer, a wheel generator for his lamp, and one book.
The thermal camera he wanted fell through, so he films the dark with ordinary light.
For recording the adventure, Navidson brought with him a 1962 H16 hand crank Bolex 16mm camera along with 16mm, 25mm, 75mm Kern-Paillard lenses and a Bogen tripod.
A lamp that burns a gas made from calcium carbide and water; used by cavers and miners.
… two weeks, 2 five-gallon containers of water, chemical heat packs, flares, high intensity as well as regular intensity lightsticks, plenty of neon markers, fishing line, three flashlights, one small pumper light, extra batteries, a carbide lamp, matches, toothbrush, stove, change of clothes, an extra sweater, extra socks, toilet paper, a small medical kit, and one book.
An odometer measures distance travelled. Navidson notices the hallway grows easier to ride: it seems to tilt downward whichever way he turns. In eight hours he coasts 163 miles.
Whichever direction he faces, he rolls down. The house has stopped obeying normal space.
For light, he mounted a lamp on the bike’s handlebars powered by a rechargeable battery connected to a small optional rear-wheel generator, He also installed an odometer.
A device that measures the distance a vehicle has travelled.
For light, he mounted a lamp on the bike’s handlebars powered by a rechargeable battery connected to a small optional rear-wheel generator, He also installed an odometer.
Over days the corridor changes size: the ceiling drops to graze his head, then lifts out of sight; the walls widen into a vast plateau, then return, each shift marked by the now familiar growl.
Riding fast in the dark, Navidson fears an edge. He reaches it: a sheer brink over an enormous void, and he slides to a stop with a torn leg.
Nor does this endless corridor he travels remain the same size.
A large flat area of high ground.
Sometimes the hallway widens. until at one point Navidson swears he is moving down some enormous plateau: “An infinitely large billiard table or the smooth face of some incredible mountain,” he tells us hours later while preparing a modest meal.
A sideways route across a slope or rock face.
“One time I stopped and set out to the right on what I thought would be a traverse.
So special it cannot be copied.
And then the walls reappear, along with the ceiling and numerous doorways; the shifts always accompanied by that inimitable, and by now very familiar, growl.
In an unsafe way; close to danger or failure.
As the days pass, Navidson becomes more and more aware that he is running precariously low on water and food.
Made worse by adding to it.
Even worse, the sense of inevitable doom this causes him is compounded by the sense of immediate doom he feels whenever he begins riding his bike: “I can’t help thinking I’m going to reach an edge to this thing.
Move back or away into the distance.
… On the twelfth or thirteenth day (Mt mates must have been idson es j leeping for what Navi ‘oe Which oT Ors he again sets off down the hallway Soon the walls and doorways recede and va n i s h, then sight of the out ceiling completely is out lifts too completely it is of too until sight 432
A photograph taken with the shutter held open for a set time to gather more light.
After the third time, he turns around and relying on a timed exposure photographs the twelve flares.
A dazed state, half asleep, cut off from the surroundings.
He just continues to ride, lost in a trance born out of motion describing the ash floor in front of him before it is already behind him, until all of a sudden, although “As if all along, during the last week, I had …
Jon Krakauer is an American writer. His article “Into Thin Air” in Outside magazine (September 1996) reported the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster in which eleven climbers died in a storm.
The footnote quotes the guide Neal Beidleman, who in a blizzard sensed a huge void beyond the edge. Zampanò compares that dread with what Navidson feels at the brink.
See Jon Kr akauer $ “Into Thin Air 435
By the brink stands a small tower with a staircase lying on its side. When Navidson sleeps, the whole house turns: down becomes a climb up a shaft. The text turns sideways and upside down with him.
The very edge of a steep drop.
Flush with the brink stands a structure reminiscent of a bartizan.
Reminding one of something else.
Flush with the brink stands a structure reminiscent of a bartizan.
A bartizan is a small turret that juts out from the top of a castle wall or tower. By the abyss Navidson finds a bartizan-like structure, about seven feet high, with one door and a staircase lying on its side, driven through the wall toward the void.
Flush with the brink stands a structure reminiscent of a bartizan.
A small turret that sticks out from the top corner of a wall or tower.
Flush with the brink stands a structure reminiscent of a bartizan.
A very deep or bottomless space.
Inside Navidson discovers a winding staircase, which instead of leading up somewhere, or down somewhere, liesonits side, penetrating through the wall facing the abyss.
The limits or narrow space inside something.
Instead, he decides to spend the night, or whatever time of day it is—for some reason the time stamp on the Hi 8 is no longer functioning—within the confines of _ that unanticipated shelter."
Not expected.
Instead, he decides to spend the night, or whatever time of day it is—for some reason the time stamp on the Hi 8 is no longer functioning—within the confines of _ that unanticipated shelter."
When Navidson wakes, the door and the stairs that were horizontal now rise straight up: the whole house has rotated. He must haul the bike and his gear up what is now a vertical shaft, hand over hand.
Danielewski turns the printing sideways and upside down so the reader must turn the book to follow, and feel the shift with Navidson.
A step or bar of a ladder.
standing inside a very” seconds and he is rung.
The quality of holding on and not giving up.
A few more he reaches the last Thirty minutes later, tenacity is rewarded.
Made into a hidden or underlying meaning.
Being saved or set free, often in a religious sense.
Erich Kästner (1899–1974) was a real German writer. The book credits him with a quote that climbing a mountain feels like redemption because of the force of the words “above” and “up”; even people who no longer believe in Heaven and Hell cannot swap “above” and “below”.
The footnote adds that M. C. Escher's lithograph House of Stairs subverts this, taking away the gravity of the world while adding a strange gravity of its own. The quote and its source look invented; the names are real.
At the top he opens a door into a corridor that grows steadily smaller. He removes his pack, crouches, then crawls on his belly, dragging his hurt leg, until he reaches a very large room where everything about the house suddenly changes.
The lines of text shrink and break to match the closing walls.
Causing extreme pain.
An abrupt cut that skips a piece of time, so the action seems to jump.
The jump cut suggests “he may h 454
Became less or smaller.
till not diminished.
A window of blue-black opens in the void. Navidson is trapped with one book and a matchbook. He burns the book to read it, then dies in the dark while the film runs black. Critics and comedians react to the six black minutes.
Ahead in the dark Navidson sees a great square, printed on the page as a black window. He fears it will vanish if he moves; when he does move, nothing changes. It gives no way out.
It is the pure image of absence the epigraph promised.
An invented researcher, Hans Staker of Geneva, magnifies a matchbook in one photo and traces it to an invented Oxford pub run by a former classics professor and matchbook collector, Eagley “Ege” Learnéd.
The cover reads the Latin Fuit Ilium (“Troy is no more”) and “Thanks To These Puppies”. Swan Vestas, named as a comparison, is a real British match brand.
Hans Staker from Geneva, Switzerland has researched the Navidson-match question.
“Troy has been” (Ilium was): the glory is now gone (from Virgil's Aeneid).
Navidson’s thumb obscures most of the design but the Latin words Fuit Ilium can still be made out along with the English words Thanks To These Puppies.
A person who collects matchbooks and matchboxes.
Based on this scant evidence, Staker successfully determined that the matches came from of all places a pub outside of Oxford, England, run by a former classics professor and amateur phillumenist by the name of Eagley “Ege” Learnéd who, as it turned out, had designed the matchbook himself.
A person in their seventies (aged 70 to 79).
“Most British septuagenarians have their gardens to putter about in.
Unable to control the bladder or bowels; here, an image of frail old people.
“I tinker constantly with my ale selection the way the incontinent fret about their tulips.
Able to start a fire; also, likely to stir up trouble.
A touch more incendiary than the old Swan Vestas, I think.
A large black raven of the high Himalayas, seen near Mount Everest.
Designed to keep the goraks away.”
Masturbation; here used for self-pleasing but useless effort.
Unfortunately Staker’s calculations are really more a form of academic onanism, a jerk of numeric wishful thinking, having very little to do with the real world.
Did badly or clumsily; botched.
Perhaps his reading slows or the paper burns unevenly or he has bungled the lighting of the next page.
Destruction by fire, as a sacrifice.
… one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption, And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson’s eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is …
Taken apart piece by piece.
… flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.
Staker calculates that 24 matches give under six minutes of light, but the book is 736 pages long. Navidson tears out pages, rolls them into torches, and reads each page by the flame that destroys it.
At the end he has one page and one match. He reads the last words as the fire eats the paper, then the light is gone and only ash remains.
There is a still photograph of the window, a few hundred feet of flares dropping, hovering, shooting up into the void, and several pictures of Navidson reading/ burning the book.
A joining of parts into one whole.
After all, the film does not provide an even remotely coherent synthesis of Navidson’s fall.
Zampanò reports the reception of the film's climax, which is nearly six minutes of black screen. Real critics and hosts are given invented lines: James Parshall in the real Rolling Stone; Michael Medved is appalled; Kenneth Turan calls it “a stunt”; Janet Maslin praises it; Jay Leno and David Letterman joke about a lens cap.
Tim Allen on Home Improvement does a dark parody. The mix of real names and invented quotes makes the fake film feel famous.
In Rolling Stone (November 14, 1996, p.
Impossible to calm, soften or change.
Even to this day, I can’t help smiling when I think about the audience squirming in their seats, squinting at that implacable screen, now and then glancing over at those luminous red exit signs in order to give their eyes a rest, while somewhere behind them a projector continues to spew out darkness.
Giving off light; glowing.
Even to this day, I can’t help smiling when I think about the audience squirming in their seats, squinting at that implacable screen, now and then glancing over at those luminous red exit signs in order to give their eyes a rest, while somewhere behind them a projector continues to spew out darkness.
A complete and embarrassing failure.
38) described it as “a wonderful fiasco—n’est-ce pas?”
“Isn't it?”: added to a statement to invite agreement.
38) described it as “a wonderful fiasco—n’est-ce pas?”
Slang for testicles; here, nerve or daring.
Janet Maslin, however, had a completely different reaction: “At last a picture with cojones!”
A keen and knowledgeable fan of something.
Meanwhile, a number of serious film aficionados began commenting on the quality of the audio.
Tom Holman is the real sound engineer who created the THX standard; here he cleans up Navidson's audio. The Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro is given the invented line “With sound that bright who needs light?”
In the black minutes, only Navidson's voice remains, close and without echo.
It is no great secret now that Tom Holman, California THX sound wizard, helped clean up the tapes and monitor all the transfers.
As is claimed, though it may not be true.
Numerous articles appeared in Audio, Film, and F/X. Purportedly Vittorio Storaro even said: “With sound that bright who needs light?”
Growing gradually thinner or fainter.
Even if some of Navidson’s words are impossible to understand, there is still a haunting proximity when he speaks, as if he were no longer buried in black, his words tapering without echo, his dying almost too close to bear.
Is the strongest or main thing present.
Now, except for when Navidson speaks, silence predominates.
As he dies, Navidson rambles about the people he loved: his children, and the name “Delial”. Zampanò notes that, unlike Floyd Collins (the trapped caver of Chapter XIII), Navidson does not speak of angels and chicken sandwiches; Holloway's madness pours into his own words.
A confused, wandering state of mind caused by illness or exhaustion.
Dying, Navidson sings a line of “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)”, an 1892 song. The choice fits: he came in on a bicycle.
It also echoes the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the computer HAL 9000 sings the same song as it is switched off and its mind fails.
“Daisy.
The sides of a stage, out of the audience's sight.
Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza 484
A group of lines in a poem; a verse.
Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza 484
Navidson croaks that he sees light. A footnote gives the Latin ignis fatuus (“foolish fire”), the old name for the will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly light seen over marshes at night.
The last frames show a tiny blue fleck crying light into the void: enough to see, not enough to see by.
I see light.' Care—” 'Ignis fatuus?
“Foolish fire”: the will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly light over marshland.
I see light.' Care—” 'Ignis fatuus?
A tiny spot or speck.
Sure enough the final frames of Navidson’s film capture in the upper righthand corner a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void.
The film ends in black, then a different black, followed by the name of the processing lab: “Yale”. The plain lab credit lands like a joke against the depth of the dark that came before.
Enough to see but not enough to see by. The film runs out.