Authors: Mark Z. Danielewski
…… in the ceiling where it lodges on
on a step. Other items,
like flashlights, batteries
and this journey’s
only book, Navid-
son stuffs into his
pockets. Cautiously
he then climbs onto
the handlebars of the
bike, grabs hold of
the first stair and
pulls himself up
through the only
exit out of that
cramped
room
.
No sooner does he start up this new staircase than the floor below him vanishes along with the bike, trailer, and everything else he left behind, including additional water, food, flares, and lenses. Navidson sprints upwards, trying to distance himself as quickly as possible from that gaping pit. Unfortunately the winding stairs offer no landings or exits. After who knows how many hours, he reaches the last step, finding himself in a small circular chamber without doorways or passages. Just a series of black rungs jutting out of the wall, leading up to an even narrower vertical shaft.
Slowly but surely,
hand over hand,
Navidson
pulls himself up
the ladder. But
after presumably
hours and hours
of climbing,
with only brief
stops to take a
gulp of water or
have a bite of some
high-caloric energy
bar, Navidson
admits he will
probably have to
tie himself to a
rung and try to
sleep. This idea,
however, is so
unappealing he
continues to push on
for a little longer. His
tenacity is rewarded.
Thirty minutes later
he reaches the last
rung. A few more
seconds and he is
standing inside a very
[Erich Kastner in Olberge Weinberg (Frankfurt, 1960, p. 95) comments on the force of vertical meanings:
The climbing of a
mountain reflects
redemption. That is
due to the force of
the word ‘above,’
and the power of
the word ‘up.’ Even
those who have
long ceased to
believe in Heaven
and Hell, cannot
exchange the words
‘above’ and ‘below.’
And idea Escher beautiful subverts in
House of Stairs
, disenchanting his audience of the gravity of the world, while at the same time enchanting them with the peculiar gravity of the self.]
small room with
one door which
he cautiously opens.
On the other
side, we find
a narrow cor
ridor sliding
into darknes
s. “These w
alls are actua
lly a
relief,”
Navidson co
mments after
he has been
walking for a
while. “I ne
ver thought t
his labyrinth
would be a p
leasant thin
g to return
to.” Excep
t the futhe
r he goes
t
he smaller t
he hallway
gets, unti
l he has t
o remove
his pack
and crou
ch. So
on he i
s
on all
fours
p
ushing
his pac
k in fro
nt of hi
m. Another
hundred yar
ds and he h
as to crawl on hi
s belly. As we c
an see, the pain f
rom his already i
njured leg is excru
ciating.
At
one poi
nt, he is unable t
o move another
i
nch. The jump cut
suggests he may h
ave rested or slept
. When he begins
dragging himself forw
ard again, the pain has
still
not
diminished. E
ventually
though, he e
merges inside a v
ery large room w
here everything
about
the house
suddenly
changes.
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
“I’m afraid it’ll vanish if I move closer. It’s almost worth spending an hour just basking in the sight. I must be nuts to enjoy this so much.”
But when Navidson finally does move forward, nothing changes.
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[
XXXXX
]
[
XXXXX
]
[
XXXXX
]
[
XXXXX
]
[
XXXXX
]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
With each step Navidson takes, we too grow more and more convinced that we are really looking at a window and furthermore and
open
window.
Doorways offer passage but windows offer vision. Here at last is a chance to behold something beyond the interminable pattern of wall, room, and door; a chance to reach a place of perspective and perhaps make some sense of the whole. And eye on the wind. Though as Navidson discovers, there was never a wind and there certainly is no eye.
Climbing out onto a narrow terrace on the other side, Navidson, for the second time during
Exploration #5
, confront that grotesque vision of absence. This time, however, he can do little else but laugh.
“Well isn’t this unexpected,” Navidson chuckles. But as he turns to go back, he finds the window has vanished along with the room. All that remains is the ashblack slab upon which he is standing, now apparently supported by nothing: darkness below, above, and of course darkness beyond.
It is only a matter of time before all of Navidson’s flashlights expire. Regrettably the hand powered pumper flashlight was lost with the bike and trailer. As for the three flares Navidson had been carrying with him, he soon uses them when he finds himself powerless to resist the promise of at least a little warmth and retinal activity. Who knows how many hours or days pass between each flare. Navidson’s watch stopped functioning long ago. But as he freely admits, he no longer cares about the meaning of a minute or even a week.
Since the batteries for the Hi 8 are also depleted, Navidson now has only his microcassette recorder to collect his thoughts and the 16mm Bolex to capture the sputtering bits of light. The first flare drops straight down, illuminating nothing but itself, never reaching a bottom, ultimately winking out in the darkness. The second flare, however, does not fall but floats instead: “at first it amazed me and then I got used to it. For a while, I treated it like a lamp, reading a few pages of the book I’d brought along.” The third flare flies straight up and vanished into the black above.
Though terribly short, these three segments reveal Navidson’s ability to find in even the barest moment a way to evoke tenderness. His frames care for their subject. Even when the three flares finally vanish Navidson still lets the camera roll, lingering on their departure, the ensuing darkness coming close to meaning the loss felt so often in the aftermath of light.
As Navidson indicates on the recorder, he is slowly becoming more and more disoriented. He suffers from surges of nausea, “like I’ve got a bad case of the spins.” Questions plague him. Is he floating, falling, or rising? Is he right side up, upside down or on his side? Eventually, however, the spins stop and Navidson accepts that the questions are sadly irrelevant.
Taking a tiny sip of water and burying himself deeper in his sleeping bag, he turns his attention to the last possible activity, the only book in his possession:
House of Leaves
.
“But all I have for light is one book of matches and the duration of each ma—” (for whatever reason the tape cuts off here).
Hans Staker from Geneva, Switzerland has researched the Navidson-match question. By carefully analyzing one black & white print which briefly appears after the flare vignettes, Staker managed to magnify the matchbook just visible in the lower left hand corner. Navidson’s thumb obscures most of the design but the Latin words
Fuji Ilium
can still be made out along with the English words
Thanks To These Puppies.
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 “Egg” Learned who, as it turned out, had designed the matchbook himself.
“Most British septuagenarians have their gardens to putter about in. I have my pub,” Learned told Staker in an interview. “I tinker constantly with my ale selection the way the incontinent fret about their tulips. The matches came out of that sort of tinkering. There’s actually a factory not too far from here. I merely applied twenty years of Latin to come up with the cover. Call it an old man’s hat tip to anarchy. A touch more incendiary than the old Swan Vestas, I think. Designed to keep the goraks away.” [
L—See Hans Staker’s “Thanks To These Puppies” in
Collected Essays on “
Exploration #5
(Liverpool: Batel Press, 1996) p. 89-142.]
Staker goes on to trace how the matchbook got from Learned’s pub to Navidson’s steady hands. Learned actually stopped ordering the matches back in
‘85
which was right after Navidson visited England and presumably the pub.
It is highly unlikely Navidson ever intended to use a book of ten year old matches on a journey as important as this one. In fact, he packed several boxes of recently purchased matches which he lost along with the trailer and bike. Probably some private history caused him to carry the matchbook on him.
To Learned’s credit, they are good matches. The heads ignite easily and the staffs burn evenly. Staker located one of these matchbooks and after recreating the conditions in the house (namely the temperature) found that each match burned an average of 12.1 seconds. With only 24 matches plus the matchbook cover, which Staker figured out would burn for 36 seconds, Navidson had a total of five minutes and forty-four seconds of light.
The book, however, is 736 pages long. Even if Navidson can average a page a minute, he will still come up 704 pages short (he had already read 26 pages). To overcome this obstacle, he tears out the first page, which of course consists of two pages of text, and rolls it into a tight stick, thus creating a torch which, according to Staker, will burn for about two minutes and provide him with just enough time to read the next two pages.
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. As Navidson reports, he soon begins falling behind. Perhaps his reading slows or the paper burns unevenly or he has bungled the lighting of the next page. Or maybe the words in the book have been arranged in such a way as to make them practically impossible to read. Whatever the reason, Navidson is forced to light the cover of the book as well as the spine. He tries to read faster, inevitably loses some of the text, frequently burns his fingers.
In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.
First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is 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 gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.
“I have nothing left,” Navidson says slowly into the microcassette recorder. “No more food. No more water. [Long pause] I have film but the flash is dead. I’m so cold. My feet hurt.”
Then (who knows how much later):
“I’m no longer sitting on anything. The slab, whatever it was, is gone. I’m floating or falling or I don’t know what.” [Perhaps it is worthwhile to mention here the response to what serves essentially as the climax to Navidson’s documentary. After all, the film does not provide an even remotely coherent synthesis of Navidson’s fall. 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. The rest is a jumble of audio clips recording Navidson’s impressions as he begins to die from exposure. All of which comes down to one incredible fact: nearly six minutes of screen time is black.
In
Rolling Stone
(November 14, 1996, p. 124) columnist James Parshall remarked:
Horrific, true, but also amusing. 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.
Michael Medved was appalled. In his mind, six minutes of nothing spelled the end of cinema. He was so shocked, indignant, even incoherent, he failed to consider that
The Navidson Record
might have absolutely nothing to do with cinema. Stuart Deweltrop in
Blind Spot
(v.42, spring, 1995, p. 38) described it as “a wonderful fiasco—n’est-ce pas?” Kenneth Turan called it “a stunt.” Janet Maslin, however, had a completely different reaction: “At last a picture with cojones!”
Nor did Navidson’s ending escape the gang in the monkey house. Jay Leno quipped, “You know how they made
The Navidson Record
?
Left the lens cap on. This really a home movie.” While Letterman scowled: “Think about it folks: no stars, no crew, no locations. Very inexpensive. A lot of studios are taking this idea very seriously… Seriously.” Whereupon the lights on the stage were turned off for several seconds. On
Home Improvement,
Tim Allen offered a one minute parody in the dark, mostly having to do with stubbed toes, broken dishware, and misdirected gropes.
Meanwhile, a number of serious film aficionados began commenting on the quality of the audio. It is no great secret now that Tom Holman, California THX sound wizard, helped clean up the tapes and monitor all the transfers. Numerous articles appeared in
Audio, Film,
and
FIX.
Purportedly Vittorio Storaro even said: “With sound that bright who needs light?” It is hard to disagree. 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.