House of Leaves (55 page)

Noli me tan gere.

Noli me legere.

Noli me videre.*

Noli me—

[364—In “Shout Not, Doubt Not” published in
Ewig-Weibliche
ed. P. V. N. Gable (Wichita, Kansas: Joyland Press, 1995) Talbot Darden translates these lines simply as “Do not touch me. Do not read me. Do not see me. Do Not Me.”]

*N enim videbit me homo ci vi vet.
[365—Sorry. No clue.]
[366—Maurice Blanchot translates this as whoever sees God dies.”
—
Ed.]

Thus emphasizing the potentially mortal price for beholding what must lie forever lost in those inky folds. Here The Criteria also points out how Navidson’s previous trespasses, with one exception, were structured around extremely concrete objectives: (1) rescuing the Holloway team; and after sinking down the Staircase (2) returning home. The exception, of course, is the very first visit, where Navidson seeks nothing else but to explore the house, an act which nearly costs him his life.

Oddly enough, The Criteria does not acknowledge the risk inherent in (1) and (2)—objective or no objective. Nor does it explain why one trespass/journey should suddenly be treated as two.

Because The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria then goes on to treat Navidson’s letter in great detail and since its appearance in the film is limited to only a few seconds of screen time, it seems advisable, before further commentary, to reproduce a facsimile here:

[Page One]

March 31, 1991

My dearest Karen,

I miss you. I love you. I don’t
deserve
expect your forgiveness. I’m leaving morrow
XXXXXXXX
though I plan to return. But who knows, right?

You’ve seen that place.

Guess I’m writing a will too. By the way I’m drunk. Sell the house, the film, everything I have, take it all. Tell the kids daddy loves! loved them. I love them, I love you.

Why am I doing this? Because it’s there and I’m not. I know that’s a pretty shitty answer. I should burn the place down, forget about it. But going after something like this is who I am. You know that.

If i wasn’t like this, we never would hve met in the first place becasue I never would have stopped my car in the middle of traffic, ran to the sidewalk, and asked you out.

No excuse huh? Guess I’m just another bastard abandoning
XXXX
woman and kids for a big adventure. I should grow up, right?

[Page Two]

I accept that, I’d like to it, I’ve tried to do it, easier said/written than done.

I need to go back to that place one more time. I know something now and I just have to confirm it. Slowly the pieces have been coming together. I’m starting to see that place for what it is and it’s not for cable shows or National Geographic.

Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. Well I do now. But my God isn’t your Catholic varietal or your Judaic or Mormon or Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist or whatever/ whoever. No burning bush, no angels, no cross. God’s a house. Which is not to say that our house is God’s house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house
is
God.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

Think I’ve lost my mind? Maybe, maybe, maybe Maybe just really drunk. Pretty crazy you have to admit. I just made God a street address. Forget all that last part. just forget

[Page Three]

it. I miss you. I
miss
you. I won’t reread this. If I do I’ll throw it away and write something terse, clean and sober. And all locked up. You know me so so well. I know you’ll strip out the alcohol fumes, the fear, the mistakes, and see what matters—a code to decipher written by a guy who thought he was speaking clearly. I’m crying now. I don’t think I can stop. But if I try to stop I’ll stop writing and I know I won’t start again. I miss you so much. I miss Daisy. I miss Chad. I miss Wax and Jed. I even miss Holloway.
And I miss Hansen and Latigo and PFC Miserette, Benton and Carl and Regio and 1st. lieutenant Nacklebend and of course Zips
and now I can’t get Delial out of my head. Delia!, Delial, Delial—the name I gave to the girl in the photo that won me all the fame and gory, that’s all she is Karen, just the photo. And now I can’t understand anymore why it meant so much to me to keep to keep her a secret—a penance or something. Inadequate. Well there it’s said. But the photo, that’s not what I can’t get out of my head right now.

[Page Four]

Not the photo—that photo, that thing—but who she was before one-sixtieth of a second sliced her out of thin air and won me the pulitzer though that didnt keep the vultures away i did that by swinging my tripodaround though that didnt keep her from dyding five years old daisy’s age except she was pciking at a bone you should have seen her not the but her a little girl squatting in a field of rock dangling a bone between her fingers I miss miss miss but i didn’t miss i got her along with the vulture in the background when the real vulture was the guy with the camera preying on her for his fuck pulitzer prize it doesnt matter if she was already ten minutes from dying i took threem minutes to snap a photo should have taken 10 minutes taking her somewhere so she wouldnt go away like that no family, no mother no day, no people just a vulture and a fucking photojournalist i wish i were dead right now i wish i were dead that poor little baby this god god awful

[Page Five]

world im sorry i cant stop thinking of her never have never will cant forget how i ran with her like where was i going to really run i was twelve miles from nowhere i had no one to her to no window to pass her through out of harms way no torn there i was no torn there and then that tiny bag of bones just started to shake and it was over she died right in my hands the hands of the guy who took three minutes two minutes whatever a handful of seconds to photograph her and now she was gone that poor little girl in this god awful world i miss her i miss delial I miss the man i thought i was before i met her the man who would have saved her who would have done something who would have been torn maybe hes the one im looking for or maybe irn looking for all of them

i miss u i love
U

there’s no second lye lived you can’t call your own

Navy

[
367—Reminding me here, I mean that line about “a code to decipher”, how the greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many.]

The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria pays a great deal of attention to the incoherence present in the letter, the dissatisfaction with the self, and most of all the pain Navidson still feels over the image he burned into the retina of America almost two decades ago.

As was already mentioned in Chapter II, before the release of
The Navidson Record
neither friends nor family nor colleagues knew that Delia] was the name Navidson had given to the starving Sudanese child. For reasons of his own, he never revealed Delial’s identity to anyone, not even to Karen. Billy Reston thought she was some mythological pin-up girl: “I didn’t know. I sure as hell never connected the name with that photo.” [368—Billy Reston interviewed by Anthony Sitney on “Evening Murmurs,” KTWL, Boulder, Colorado, January
4,
1996.]

The Navidson Record
solved a great mystery when it included Karen’s shot of the name written on the back of the print as well as Navidson’s letter. For years photojournalists and friends had wondered who Delia] was and why she meant so much to Navidson. Those who had asked usually received one of several responses: “I forget,” “Someone close to me,” “Allow a man a little mystery” or just a smile. Quite a few colleagues accused Navidson of being enigmatic on purpose and so out of spite let the subject drop.

Few were disappointed when they learned that Delial referred to the subject of his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. “It made perfect sense to me,” said Purdham Huckler of the New York Times. “That must have been a crushing thing to witness. And he paid the price too.”
[369—Personal interview with Purdham Huckler, February 17, 1995.]
Lindsay Gerknard commented, “Navidson ran straight into the brick wall all great photojournalists inevitably run into: why aren’t I doing something about this instead of just photographing it? And when you ask that question, you hurt.” [370—Personal interview with Lindsay Gerknard, February 24, 1995.] Psychologist Hector Liosa took Gerknard’s observation a little further when he pointed out at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics last March: “Photojournalists
especially
must never underestimate the power and influence of their images. You may be thinking, I’ve done nothing in this moment except take a photo (true) but realize you have also done an enormous amount for society at large (also true!).” [371—Hector Liosa speaking at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics on March 14, 1996.]

Nor did evaluations of Navidson’s burden stop with comments made by his associates. Academia soon marched in to interrogate the literary consequences created by the Delial revelation. Tokiko Dudek commented on how “Delial is to Navidson what the albatross is to Coleridge’s mariner. In both cases, both men shot their mark only to be haunted by the accomplishment, even though Navidson did not actually kill Delial.” [372—See Tokiko Dudek’s “Harbingers of Hell and/or Hope” in
Authenres Journal,
Palomar College, September,
1995.
p. 7.
Also
consider Larry Burrows who in the 1969 BBC film
Beautiful Beautiful
remarked:”.
. .
so often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is a reason for doing it.”] Caroline Fillopino recognized intrinsic elements of penance in Navidson’s return to the house but she preferred Dante to Coleridge: “Delial serves the same role as Beatrice. Her whispers lead Navidson back to the house. She is all he needs to find. After all locating (literally) the souls of the dead = safety in loss.” [373—Caroline Fillopino’s “Sex Equations”
Granta,
fall 1995. p. 45.] However unlike Dante, Navidson never encountered his Beatrice again. [374—During
Exploration #5
Navidson had no illusion about what he would find there. While staring into those infernal halls, we can hear him mutter: “Lazarus is dead again.”]

In the most sardonic tones, Sandy Beale of
The New Criticism
once considered how contemporary cinema would have treated the subject of Navidson’s guilt:

If
The Navidson Record
had been a Hollywood creation, Delial would have appeared at

the heart of the house. Like something out of
Lost Horizon,
dark fields would have given way to Elysian fields, the perfect setting for a musical number with a brightly costumed Delial front and center, drinking Shirley Temples, swinging on the arms of Tom and Jed, backed by a chorus line which would have included Holloway and everyone else in Navidson’s life (and our life for that matter) who had ever died. Plenty of rootbeer and summer love [375—See Appendix F.] to go around.[376—Sandy Beale’s “No Horizon” in
The New Criticism,
v. 13, November 3, 1993. p. 49.]

But
The Navidson Record
is not a Hollywood creation and through the course of the film Delial appears only once, in Karen’s piece, bordered in black, frozen in place without music or commentary, just Delial: a memory, a photograph, an artifact.

To this day the treatment of Delial by The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria is still considered harsh and particularly insensate toward international tragedy. While Navidson’s empathy for the child is not entirely disregarded, The Criteria asserts that she soon exceeded the meaning of her own existence: “Memory, experience, and time turned her bones into a trope for everything Navidson had ever lost.”

The BFJ Criteria posits that Delial’s prominence in Navidson’s last letter is a repressive mechanism enabling him to at least on a symbolic level deal with his nearly inexpressible loss. After all in a very short amount of time Navidson had seen the rape of physics. He had watched one man murder another and then pull the trigger on himself. He had stood helplessly by as his own brother was crushed and consumed. And finally he had watched his lifelong companion flee to her mother and probably another lover, taking with her his children and bits of his sanity.

It is not by accident that all these elements appear like ghosts in his letter. A more permanent end to his relationship with Karen seems to be implied when he writes “I’m leaving tomorrow” and describes his missive as a “will.” His invocation of the memory of the members of the first team as well as others sounds almost like a protracted good-bye. Navidson is tying up loose ends and the reason, or so The BFJ Criteria claims, can be detected in the way he treats the Sudanese girl still haunting his past: “It is no coincidence that as Navidson begins to dwell on Delial he mentions his brother three times: ‘I had no one to pass her to. There was no window to pass her through out of harms way. There was no Tom there. I was no Tom there. Tom, maybe he’s the one I’m looking for,’ It is a harrowing admission full of sorrow and defeat— ‘I was no Tom there’ —seeing his brother as the life-saving (and line-saving) hero he himself was not.” [377—Here then Jacob loses Esau and finds he is nothing without him. He is empty, lost and tumbling toward his own annihilation. But as Robert Hert poignantly asks in
Esau and Jacob
(BITTW Publications, 1969), p. 389: “What did God really know about brothers (or for that matter sisters)? He was after all an only child and before it all an equally lonely father.”]

Thus The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria staunchly refutes The Kellog-Antwerk Claim by reiterating its argument that Navidson’s return to the house was not at all motivated by the need to possess it but rather “to be obliterated by it.”

Then on January 6, 1997 at
The Assemblage of Cultural Diagnosticians Sponsored By The American Psychiatric Association
held in Washington, D.C., a husband and wife team brought before an audience of 1,200 The Haven-Slocum Theory which in the eyes of many successfully deflated the prominence of both The Kellog-Antwerk Claim and the infamously influential Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria.

Ducking the semantic conceits of prior hypotheses, The HavenSlocum Theory proposed to first focus primarily on “the house itself and its generation of physiological effects.” How this direction would resolve the question of “why Navidson returned to the house alone” they promised to show in due course.

Relying on an array of personal interviews, closely inspected secondary sources, and their own observations, the married couple began to carefully adumbrate their findings in what has since become known as The Haven-Slocum Anxiety Scale or more simply as PEER. Rating the level of discomfort experienced following any exposure to the house, The HavenSlocum Theory assigned a number value “0” for no effect and “10” for extreme effects: