⁵ In an effort to limit confusion, Mr. Truant's footnotes will appear in Courier font while Zampano's will appear in Times. We also wish to note here that we have never actually met Mr. Truant. All matters regarding the publication were addressed in letters or in rare instances over the phone. — The Editors

⁶ Lee Sinclair's "Degenerate" in Twentieth Century Dub, Dub edited by Tony Ross (New York: CCD Zeuxis Press, 1994), p. 57-91.

"Not the first and definitely not the last time Zampano implies that The NeyidgQn RegQrd exists.

my thoughts lost in another conversation, though something in her movement or perfume is disturbingly familiar, though how familiar is impossible to tell because by the time X realize she's someone I should know she's already gone, deep into the din, beyond the bar, taking with her any chance of recognition. Though she hasn't left. She's still there. Embracing shadows.

Is that it?

Had I been thinking of a woman?

I don't know.

I hope it doesn't matter.

I have a terrifying feeling it does.

⁴⁵ Zampano left the rest of this footnote buried beneath a particularly dark spill of ink. At least I'm assuming it's ink. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's something else. But then that's not really important. In some cases, I've managed to recover the lost text (see Chapter Nine). Here, however, I failed. Five lines gone along with the rest of Mr. Stabenrath.

⁴⁷ Note that luckily in this chapter, Zampand penciled many of the translations for these Greek and Latin quotations into the margins. I've gone ahead and turned them into footnotes.

^Narcissus: "May I die before I give you power over me." Echo: "I give you power over me."

outcry" returns as "love," "delays," "hours" and "king." ⁰⁰ "Who will put an end to this great sadness?" "The hours passing" ^"Literature's rocky caves" ⁵⁴

⁵⁸ Though we were ultimately unsuccessful, all efforts were made to determine who wrote the above verse. We apologize for this inconsistency. Anyone who can provide legitimate proof of authorship will be credited in future editions. — Ed.

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 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.

Yeah I know, I know. This shit's getting ridiculous.

Even worse, I feel like I could continue in that vein for years, maybe even decades.

And yet, listen to this, to date I've hardly said a word to her. Don't have a decent explanation for my silence either. Maybe it's my boss and his guard dog glare. Maybe it's her. I suspect it's her. Every time she visits (though I admit there haven't been that many visits), she overwhelms me. 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, 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 I know that's not true, and come last night going so far as to entwine, entangle and finally completely replace her with the (—can't write the word—) of—

—Thumper's flashing eyes, her aching lips, her heart-ending moans, those I had imagined, an ongoing list, so minute and distracting that long after, when the sheets were gathered, wet with sex, cold with

rest, I did not know who lay beside me (--- ) and seeing this stranger,

the vessel of my dreams, I withdrew to the toilet, to the shower, to my table, enough racket and detachment to communicate an unfair request, but poor her she heard it and without a word dressed, and without a smile requested a brush, and without a kiss left, leaving me alone to return to this passage where I discovered the beginnings of a sense long since taken and strewn, leading me away on what I guess amounts to another hopeless digression.

Perhaps when I'm finished I'll remember what I'd hoped to say in the first place. ⁶⁶

^M Mr. Truant declined to comment further on this particular passage. — Ed.

⁷⁰ See Exhibit Six.

⁷¹ Consider Drew Bluth's "Summer's Passage" in Architectural Digest, v. 50, n. 10, October 1993, p. 30.

Gonzales, Pierre Jahan, Catherine Leroy, Leonard Hekcl, Kim Van Tuoc, W.B. Bass Jr., Sean Flynn, Heng Ho, Dana Stone, Nguyen Dung, Landon K. Thorne II, Gerard Hebert, Michel Laurent, Robert Jackson Ellison, Put Sophan, Nguyen Trung Dinh, Huynh Van Tri, Neil K. Hulbert, James McJunkin, Le Dinh Du, Chhor Vuthi, Claude Arpin-Pont, Raymond Martinoff, Jean Peraud, Nguyen Huong Nam, Dickey Chapelle, Lanh Daunh Rar, Bryan Grigsby, Henri Huet, Huynh Thang My, Peter Ronald Van Thiei, Everette Dixie Reese, Jerry A. Rose, Oliver E. Noonan, Kim Savath, Bernard Moran, Kuoy Sarun, Do Van Vu, Nguyen Man Hieu, Charles Richard Eggleston, Sain Hel, Nguyen Oanh Liet, Dick Durance, Vu Van Giang, Bernard Kolenberg, Sou Vichith, Ronald D. Gallagher, Dan Dodd, Francois Sully, Kent Potter, Alfred Batungbacal, Dieter Bellendorf, Nick Mills, Ronald L. Haeberle, Terry Reynolds, Leroy Massie, Sam Castan, A1 Chang, Philip R. Boehme. And finally Eddie Adams, Charles Hoff, Larry Burrows, and Don McCullin ("American soldiers tending wounded child in a cellar of a house by candlelight, 1968"). ⁷⁶

⁷⁶ Alison Adrian Burns, another Zampano reader, told me this list was entirely random. With the possible exception of Brassai, Speen, Bush and Link, Zampano was not very familiar with photographers. "We just picked the names out of some books and magazines he had lying around," Burns told me. "I'd describe a picture or two and he'd say no or he'd say fine. A few times he just told me to choose a page and point. Hey, whatever he wanted to do. That was what I was there for. Sometimes though he just wanted to hear about the LA scene, what was happening, what wasn't, the gloss, the names of clubs and bars. That sort of thing. As far as I know, that list never got written down."

⁷⁹ See Selwyn Hyrkas' "The End of City Life" in Interview , v. 25 October 1995, p. 54.

⁹⁷ Marjorie Preece uses this one line to launch into her powerfully observed essay "The Loss of Authority: Holloway's Challenge" Kaos Journal, v. 32, September, 1996, p. 44. Preece wonderfully shows how

She was still crying when she drove off.

In the end, the whole thing had been so frantic and fast and strange and even sad in some ways, I completely forgot to ask her about the German phrase." I suppose I could call her (Lude has her number) but for some reason these days dialing seven let alone eleven numbers feels like an infinite stretch. The phone's right in front of me but it's out of reach. When it rings at four AM I don't answer it. All I have to do is extend my hand but I can't run that far. Sleep never really arrives. Not even rest. There's no satisfaction anymore. Morning shrinks space but leaves no message.

""But here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear." As translated by Stephen Mitchell. — Ed.

" ³ Navidson's camera work is an infinitely complex topic. Edwin Minamide in Objects of a Thousand Facets (Bismark, North Dakota: Shive Stuart Press, 1994), p. 421, asserts that such "resonant images," especially those in this instance, conjure up what Holloway could never have achieved: "The fact that Navidson can photograph even the dirtiest blue mugs in a way that reminds us of pilgrims on a quest proves he is the necessary narrator without whom there would be no film; no understanding of the house." Yuriy Pleak in Semiotic Rivalry (Casper, Wyoming: Hazard United, 1995), p. 105, disagrees, claiming Navidson's lush colors and steady pans only reveal his competitiveness and bitterness toward Holloway: "He seeks to eclipse the team's historical descent with his own limited art." Mace Roger-Court, however, finds In These Things I Find, Series #18 (Great Falls, Montana: Ash Otter Range Press, 1995) that Navidson's posture is highly instructive and even enlightening: "His lonely coffee cups, his volcanic bowl

¹¹⁸ Tasha K. Wheelston's "M.O.S.: Literal Distress," Film Quarterly , v. 48, fall 1994, p. 2-11.

^x "Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering" Aeneid 6. 27. "The house difficult of exit" (Ascensius (Paris 1501)); "difficult to enter" (Trevet (Basel 1490)). ¹³⁵ See H. J. Thomson's "Fragments of Ancient Scholia on Virgil Preserved in Latin Glossaries" in W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson's Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries (London: St. Andrews University Publications, 1921). ¹²⁰

^l20 In fact all of this was quoted directly from Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) p. 21, 97, 145 and 227. A perfect example of how Zampan6 likes to obscure the secondary sources he's using in order to appear more versed in primary documents. Actually a woman by the name of Tatiana turned me onto that bit of info. She'd been one of Zampand's scribes and—'lucky for me* she told me over the phone— still had, among other things, some of the old book lists he'd requested from the library.

I do have to say though getting over to her place was no easy accomplishment. I had trouble just walking out my door. Things are definitely deteriorating. Even reaching for the latch made me feel sick to my stomach. I also experienced this awful tightening across my chest, my temples instantly registering a rise in pulse rate. And that's not the half of it. Unfortunately I don't think I can do justice to how truly strange this all is, a paradox of sorts, since on one hand I'm laughing at myself, mocking the irrational nature of my anxiety, what I continue in fact to perceive as a complete absurdity—"I mean Johnny what do you really have to be afraid of?*— while on the other hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular—there were no particulars as far as I could see—then of the reaction itself, as undeniable unimpeachable as Zampand's black trunk.

I know it makes no sense but there you have it: what should have negated the other only seemed to amplify it instead.

Fortunately, or not fortunate at all, Thumper's advice continued to echo in my head. I accepted the risk of cardiac arrest, muttered a flurry of fucks and charged out into the day, determined to meet Tatiana and retrieve the material.

Of course I was fine.

Except as I started walking down the sidewalk, I watched a truck veer from its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily redirect itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me. Suddenly I understood what it meant to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity

In terms of spontaneous perception, man's space is 'subjectively centered.' The development of schemata, however, does not only mean that the notion of centre is established as a means of general organization, but that certain centres are 'externalized' as points of reference in the environment. This need is so strong that man since remote times has thought of the whole world as being centralized. In many legends the 'centre of the world' is concretized as a tree or a pillar symbolizing a vertical axis mundi. Mountains were also looked upon as points where sky and earth meet. The ancient Greeks placed the 'navel' of the world ( omphalos) in Delphi, while the Romans considered their Capitol as caput mundi. For Islam ka'aba is still the centre of the world. Eliade points out that in most beliefs it is difficult to reach the centre. It is an ideal goal, which one can only attain after a 'hard journey.' To 'reach the centre is to achieve a consecration, an initiation. To the profane and illusory existence of yesterday, there succeeds a new existence, real, lasting and powerful.' But Eliade also points out that 'every life, even the least eventful, can be taken as the journey through a labyrinth.' ¹³²

See Christian Norberg-Schulz's Existence, Space Architecture (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), p. 18 in which he quotes from Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 380-382.

¹³² What Derrida and Norberg-Schulz neglect to consider is the ordering will of gravitation or how between any two particles of matter exists an attractive force (this relationship usually represented as G with a value of 6.670 X IO-' ¹ N-m ² / kg ² ). Gravity, as opposed to gravitation, applies specifically to the earth's effect on other bodies and has had as much to say about humanity's sense of centre as Derrida and Norberg-Schulz. Gravity informs words like 'balance', 'above', 'below', and even 'rest'. Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned. Albert Einstein's work on this matter is also worth studying, though it is important not to forget how Navidson's house ultimately confounds even the labyrinth of the inner ear. ¹³³

' ³³ This gets at a Lissitzky and Escher theme which Zampan6 seems to constantly suggest without ever really bringing right out into the open. At least that's how it strikes me. Pages 30, 356 and 441, however, kind of contradict this. Though not really.

^D Aside from the practical aspect of fishing line—a readily available and cheap way to map progress through that complicated maze—there are of course obvious mythological resonances. Minn-.' daughter. Ariadne. ■.applied I ho'iOLi'. with a thread v,Inch he used I" escape the labyrinth. Thread has repeatedly served as a metaphor for an umbilical cord, for life, and for destiny. The Greek Fates (called Moerae) or the Roman Fates (called Fata or Parcae) spun the thread of life and also cut it off. Curiously in Orphic cults, thread symbolized semen.

²⁰⁶ Which you are quite right to observe makes no sense at all.

²¹⁹ See page 332-333.

²² '"The poet, sick, and with his chest half bare/ Tramples a manuscript in his dark stall,/ Gazing with terror at the yawning stair/ Down which his spirit finally must fall." As translated by Roy Campbell. — Ed.

²⁴³ Wrong. See Genesis 27:29. ²⁴⁴

²⁴⁴ Mr. Truant also appears to be in error. The correct reference is Genesis 25:27. — Ed.

²⁵⁸ Also refer back to footnote 212 dealing with Frangoise Minkowska.

²⁶⁸ 0n several occasions, Zampano also uses the word "grave." ²⁶⁹

²⁶⁹ See Index. — Ed.

²⁷⁵ In the following excerpt from The Last Interview, Navidson sheds some more light on how he managed to emerge from those dark hollows: "I remember I had found Jed's pack so I knew I was okay on water and food for a while. Then I just started climbing up the stairs, one step at a time. At first it was slow going. That roar would frequently rise up the central shaft like some awful wail. At times it sounded like voices. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Calling after me. And then other times it sounded like the wind only there is no wind there.

"I remember finding The Holloway Tape off one of the landings. I had caught sight of a few bits of neon marker still attached to the wall and wandered over to take a look. A minute later I saw his pack and the camera. It was all just sitting there. The rifle was nearby too, but there was no sign of him.

²⁸⁴ Inked out as well as burned.

²⁸⁷ Robert J[ ]n Campbell, M.D[ }Psychiatric Dictionary (Oxfo[]d Univ[ ]ity Press, 1981) [ ] 608[]

³¹⁰ A line for Kyrie, though these days she's a little unapproachable as Gdansk Man is now officially on some kind of Halloween rampage. He apparently cornered Lude at Dragonfly intending to exact some kind of serious physical retribution. Lude smiled and kicked him hard in the balls. The bouncers there, all friends of Lude's, quickly threw the madman into the street. Gdansk Man in turn, being one of this century's truly great logicians, left some yelling message on my machine. A powerful bit of articulation on his part, frequently juxtaposing murder and my name with just the right amount of grunting incoherence. Who cares? Fuck him. As if he's really going to change any of this, which also applies to that scrap of German up there, as if a translation will somehow decrease the shattering effect this whole thing has had on me. It won't. I know that now. There's little else I can do now but copy it all down. And fast.

³¹ 'Interview with Audrie McCullogh. KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16, 1993.

³¹⁷ See Clarence Sweeney's Privacy and Intrusion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Apeneck Press, 1996), p. 140, as well as works already mentioned in footnote 15. Also reconsider the moment discussed in Chapter II (pages 10-11) where Navidson opens the jewelry box and then moments later throws out some of the hair he has just removed from Karen's brush. ³¹⁸

³ⁱ⁸ N o matter whether you're an electrician, scholar or dope addict, chances are that somewhere you've still got a letter, postcard or note that's meaningful to you. Maybe only to you.

It's amazing how many people save at least a few letters during their lifetime, leaves of feeling, tucked away in a guitar case, a safety deposit box, on a hard drive or even preserved in a pair of old boots no one will ever wear. Some letters keep. Some don't. I have a few that haven't spoiled. One in particular hides inside a locket shaped like a deer.

It's actually a pretty clunky thing, supposedly over a hundred years old, made out of polished sterling silver with platinum plated antlers, emerald eyes, small diamonds on the fringe of its mane and a silver latch disguised as the tail. A thread of braided gold secures it to whoever wears it, which in this case has never been me. I just keep it by my bed, in the locked lower drawer of my nightstand.

My mother was the one who used to wear it. Whenever I saw her, from the time I was thirteen till I was almost eighteen, she always had it around her neck. I never knew what she kept inside. I saw it before I left for Alaska and I guess even back then there was something about its shape I resented. Most lockets I'd seen were small, round and warm. They made sense. Hers I didn't get. It was awkward, ornate and most of all cold, every now and then blinking out odd bits of light, a warped mirror, attempting a reflection when she took care of it. For the most part only achieving a blur.

I saw it again before I left for Europe. An essay I'd written on the painter Paulus de Vos (1596-1678) had won me an all-paid summer abroad. I lasted two days in the program. By the third day I was heading for the station, looking for something, maybe someone, a bindle on my back, a Eurorail pass in hand, not more than three hundred bucks in traveler checks in my pocket. I ate very little, hustled from place to place, peeking into Czechoslovakia, Poland and Sweden before looping west so I could race all the way down from Denmark to Madrid where I stalked the halls of the Prado like a pack of hounds howling for a hart. Star stung chess games in Toledo soon gave way to a mad trek east for the littered lore of Naples and eventually a ferry ride to Greece where I made my way among Ionian islands before heading on towards destinations even further south. Back in Rome, I spent almost a week at a whorehouse, talking to the women about the simplest stuff while they waited for their next turn—another story waiting on other days. In Paris I lived at the bistros during the night, occasionally splurging on beer and escargots, while during the day I slept brokenhearted on the quays of the Seine. I don't know why I say brokenhearted. I guess it's the way I felt, all emaciated and without company. Everything I saw in me somehow only reflecting my destitution. I often thought about the

³²³ Heine? ³²⁴

³²⁴ Freud. — Ed.

^ More than likely, an eight minute version of Karen's abridgment became the second short now known as "Exploration #4." However, it remains a mystery who cut out five minutes (which must have included Holloway's suicide) before distributing it. Kevin Stanley in "What Are You Gonna Do Now, Little Man?" and Other Tales of Grass Roots Distribution (Cambridge: Vallombrosa Inc., 1994) points out how easy it would have been for one of the professors or authors who received a copy to make a dupe. As to why

³³⁰ While unheimlich has already recurred within this text, there has up to now been no treatment of the English word uncanny. While lacking the Germanic sense of "home," uncanny builds its meaning on the Old English root cunnan from the Old Norse Kunna which has risen from the Gothic Kunnan (preterite- present verbs) meaning know from the Indo-European (see OED). The "y" imparts a sense of "full of' while the "un" negates that which follows. In other words, un-cann-y literally breaks down or disassembles into that which is not full of knowing or conversely full of nat knowing: and so without understanding exactly what repetitive denial still successfully keeps repressed and thus estranged, though indulging in repetition nonetheless, that which is uncanny may be defined as empty of knowledge and knowing or at the same time surfeit with the absence of knowledge and knowing. In the words of Perry Ivan Nathan Shaftesbury, author of Murder's Gate: A Treatise On Love and Rage (London: Verso, 1996), p. 183: "It is therefore sacred, inviolate, forever preserved. The ultimate virgin. The husbandless madonna. Mother of God. Mother of Mother. Inhuman." See also Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny: Essays In The Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992).

³⁵⁴ Don't worry that thought crossed my mind too. Unfortunately Exhibit Three doesn't make up for the spillage back there because there is no Exhibit Three. Aside from a few notes, it's missing. I've looked everywhere, especially for the Zero folder. Nothing. Who knows, maybe it's for the best.

Today, for no reason in particular, I started thinking about Dr.Ogelmeyer, wondering what I might have found out if I'd had the money, if I'd taken the time to see his specialist, if I'd opted for the tests. Of course if if were a fifth I'd be drunk, which I'm definitely not. Maybe that kind of confirmation is unnecessary anyway.

Still I wonder.

I grew up on certain words, words I've never mentioned to Lude or anyone for that matter, words orbiting around my mother mainly, sometimes whispered, more often written in letters my father would never have let me read had he lived.

(Now that I think about it, I guess I've always gravitated towards written legacies (private lands surrounded by great bewildering oceans (a description I don't entirely understand even as I write it down now (though the sense of adventure about words (that little "1" making so little difference), appeals to me—ah but to hell with the closing parent)he)see)s)(sic)

Before I understood the significance of things like "auditory hallucinations," "verbigeration," "word salad," "derealization," "depersonalization" I sensed in them all kinds of adventure. To reach their meaning would require a great journey, which I eventually found out was in fact true, though the destinations did not exactly turn out to be Edenic places full of gold leaf, opal or intricately carved pieces of jade.

Count yourself lucky if you've never wandered by the house of Kurt Schnieder or Gabriel Langfeldt, or if the criterias of St. Louis, Taylor and Abrams or Research Diagnostic leave you puzzled. The New Haven Schizophrenia Index should give more than enough away.

In my case, would Ogelmeyer have turned to those tools or would he have begun first with a biological examination? Look for hyperactivity of dopaminergic systems? Check for an increase in norepinephrine? Or more than likely run an MRI on my brain to see if the lateral and third ventricles were getting larger? Maybe he'd even take a peek at my delta activity on the good old electroencephalogram (EEG)?

What sort of data streams would be generated and how conclusively could he or his specialists read them?

I'll never know. Which is not to imply it's the wrong road. Quite the contrary. It's just not mine. All I hope for is a moment of rational thought and one shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.

As it stands, I've dropped eighteen pounds. A couple of eviction notices lie near my door. I feel like I haven't slept in months. My neighbors are scared of me. Whenever I pass them in that dim brown- walled hall, which happens rarely, only when I have to go out for more tuna, books from the library or to sell blood to buy candles, I hear

³⁶³ "Ghostly anticipation." — Ed.

³⁶⁶ Maurice Blanchot translates this as "whoever sees God dies." — Ed.

³⁸⁵ Original text:

Robinet a pens6 que c'est en roulant sur lui-meme que le limacon a fabriqu6 son "escalier." Ainsi, toute la maison de l'escargot serait une cage d'escalier. A chaque contorsion, l'animal mou fait une marche de son escalier en colimacon. II se contorsionne pour avancer et grandir.

And of course who can forget Derrida's remarks on this subject in footnote 5 in "Tympan" in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. xi-xii:

Tympanon. dionysie, labyrinthe, fils d'Ariane. Nous parcourons maintenant (debout, marchant, dansant), compris et envelopes pour n'en jamais sortir, la forme d'une oreille construite autour d'un barrage, tournant autour de sa paroi interne, une ville, done (labyrinthe, canaux semi-circulaires—on vous prdvient que les rampes ne tiennent pas) enroulee comme un limacon autour d'une vanne, d'une digue (dam) et tendue vers la mer; ferm£e sur elle-meme et ouverte sur la voie de la mer. Pleine et vide de son eau, I'anamnese de la conque r£sonne seule sur une plage. Comment une felure pourrait-elle s'y produire, entre terre et mer? ³⁸⁶

In his own note buried within the already existing footnote, in this case not 5 but enlarged now to 9, Alan Bass (—Trans for Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)) further illuminates the above by making the following comments here below:

"There is an elaborate play on the words limagon and conque here. Limagon (aside from meaning snail) means spiral staircase and the spiral canal that is part of the inner ear. Conque means both conch and concha, the largest cavity of the external ear."

³⁸⁶ "Tympanum, Dionysianism, labyrinth, Ariadne's thread. We are now traveling through (upright, walking, dancing), included and enveloped within it. never to emerge, the form of an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner walls, a city, therefore (labyrinth, semicircular canals—warning: the spiral walkways do not hold) circling around like a stairway winding around a lock, a dike (dam) stretched out toward the sea; closed in on itself and open to the sea's path. Full and empty of its water, the anamnesis of the choncha resonates alone on the beach." As translated by Alan Bass. — Ed.

³⁸⁸ "A giant snail comes down from the mountain followed by a stream of its white slime. So very old, it has only one horn left, short and square like a church tower." — Ed.

³⁹⁰ 3:19 AM I woke up, slick with sweat. And I'm not talking wet in the pits or wet on the brow. I'm talking scalp wet, sheet wet, and at that hour, an hour already lost in a new year—shivering wet. I'm so cold my temples hurt but before I can really focus on the question of temperature I realize I've remembered my first dream.

Only later after I find some candles, stomp around my room, splash water on the old face, micturate, light a sterno can and put the kettle on, only then can I respond to my cold head and my general physical misery, which I do, relishing every bit of it in fact. Anything is better than that unexpected and awful dream, made all the more unsettling because now for some reason I can recall it. Nor do I have an inkling why. I cannot imagine what has changed in my life to bring this thing to the surface.

The guns sure as hell were useless, instantly confiscated at sleep's border, even if I did manage to pick up the Weatherby before my credit ran out.

An hour passes. I'm blinking in the light, boiling more water for more coffee, ramming my head into another wool hat, sneezing again though all I can see is the fucking dream, torn straight out of the old raph6 nuclei care of the very brainstem I thought had been soundly severed.

This is how it starts:

I'm deep in the hull of some enormous vessel, wandering its narrow passages of black steel and rust. Something tells me I've been here a long time, endlessly descending into dead ends, turning around to find other ways which in the end lead only to still more ends. This, however, does not bother me. Memories seem to suggest I've at one point lingered in the engine room, the container holds, scrambled up a ladder to find myself alone in a deserted kitchen, the only place still shimmering in the mirror magic of stainless steel. But those visits took place many years ago, and even though I could go back there at any time, I choose instead to wander these cramped routes which in spite of their ability to lose me still retain in every turn an almost indiscreet sense of familiarity. It's as if I know the way perfectly but I walk them to forget.

And then something changes. Suddenly I sense for the first time ever, the presence of another. I quicken my pace, not quite running but close. I am either glad, startled or terrified, but before I can figure out which I complete two quick turns and there he is, this drunken frat boy wearing a plum-colored Topha Beta sweatshirt, carrying the lid of a garbage can in his right hand and a large fireman's ax in his left. He burps, sways, and then with a lurch starts to approach me, raising his weapon. I'm scared alright but I'm also confused. "Excuse me, mind explaining why you're coming after me?" which I actually try to say except the words don't come out right. More like grunts and clouds, big clouds of steam.

That's when I notice my hands. They look melted, as if they were made of plastic and had been dipped in boiling oil, only they're not plastic, they're the thin effects of skin which have in fact been dipped in boiling oil. I know this and I even know the story. I'm just unable

inside me, born decades ago, long before I finally beheld in a dream the

face and meaning of my horror.

³⁹ 'See footnote 310 and corresponding reference. — Ed.

Luckily, I've managed to put enough money together to get the hell away. My Vifa was canceled a month ago but I had some good fortune selling my mother's locket (though I kept the gold necklace).

⁴⁰⁰ Jamestown Colony Papers: The Tiggs, Verm I Diary (Lacuna Library founded by The National Heritage Society) v. xxiii. n. 139, January 1610, p. 18-25.

⁴¹⁶ Presumably Zampano's blindness prevented him from providing an actual diagram of the Delial photograph. — Ed.

^4I7 M. G. Cafiso's Mortality and Morality in Photography (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985), p. xxiii. Interestingly enough in one of his early footnotes, Cafiso broaches a troubling but highly provocative aesthetic concern when he observes how even "the finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else." Regrettably he takes this matter no further nor applies it later on to the photographic challenges Navidson ultimately had to face.

⁴³⁰ See Appendix II-C. — Ed.

⁴⁴⁸ "The odor of silence is so old." — Ed.

---

Link 'A topic more carefully considered in Chapter IX.

[2] Or for that matter the Cottingley Fairies, Kirlian photography, Ted Serios' thoughtography or Alexander Gardner's photograph of the Union dead.

[3] That first bit comes from Milton's Paradise Lost. Book I, lines 65-67. The second from Dante's Inferno. Canto III, lines 7-9. In 1939, some guy named John D. Sinclair from the Oxford University Press translated the Italian as follows: "Before me nothing was created but eternal things and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye that enter." ⁵

Link 'Arguably interpretive, especially in the case of Holloway's garbled patter where even the subtitles appear as incomprehensible onomatopoeia or just question marks.

[5] i.e. 1993.

^[5] Mirjana Gortchakova's "Home Front" in Gentleman's Quarterly , v. 65, October 1995, p. 224.

[6] Isaiah Rosen, Ph.D., Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus (Baltimore: Eddie Hapax Press, 1995), p. 73.

[7] In his article "Years of Those" in The New Republic, v. 213, November 20, 1995, p. 33-39, Helmut Kereincrazch puts Navidson's age at forty-eight.

[8] The question of lengthy narrative descriptions in what is purportedly a critical exegesis is addressed in Chapter 5; footnote 67. — Ed.

^[8] Donna York's "In Twain" in Redbook, v. 186, January 1996, p. 50.

[9] See "The Heart's Device" by Frances Leiderstahl in Science, v. 265 August 5, 1994, p. 741; Joel Watkin's "Jewelry Box, Perfume, and Hair" in Mademoiselle, v. 101 May, 1995, p. 178-181; as well as Hardy Taintic's more ironic piece "Adult Letters and Family Jewels" The American Scholar, v. 65 spring 1996, p. 219-241.

Link ^,6 Samuel T. Glade's "Omens Signs" in Notes From Tomorrow ed. Lisbeth Bailey (Delaware: Taema Essay Publications, 1996).

[11] Max C. Garten's "100 Looks" in Vogue , v. 185, October 1995, p. 248.

[12] I got up this morning to take a shower and guess what? No fucking hot water. A pretty evil discovery especially when you're depending on that watery wake-up call, me being massively dehydrated from a long night drunk my road-dog Lude and I winged our way onto last night. As I'm remembering it now, we somehow ended up at this joint on Pico, and soon thereafter found ourselves in conversation with some girls wearing black cowboy hats, supposedly lost in their own private-blend of brain- hatching euphoria—Thank you Herbal Ecstasy—prompting us to put a little Verbal Ecstasy on them which would, as it turned out, ultimately lead them giggling into the night.

I've forgotten now what we did exactly to get the whole thing rolling. I think Lude started giving one of them a trim, whipping out his scissors which he always has on hand, like old gunslingers I guess always had on hand their Colts—there he goes, snipping locks bangs, doing a great fucking job too, but hey he's a pro, and all of it in the dark too, on a barstool, surrounded by dozens of who knows who, fingers steel clicking away, tiny bits of hair spitting off into the surrounding turmoil, the girls all nervous until they see he really is the shit and then they're immediately chirping "me, next" "do me" which is too easy to remark upon, so instead Lude I remark upon something else which this time round is all about some insane adventure I supposedly had when I was a Pit Boxer. Mind you I'd never heard that term before nor had Lude. Lude just made it up and I went with it.

"Aw come on, they don't want to hear about that," I said with about as much reluctance as I could reasonably feign.

"No Hoss, you're wrong," Lude insisted. "You must."

"Very well," I said, starting then to recall for everyone how at the lonely age of nineteen I had climbed off a barge in Galveston.

[13] "A Horny Duo" by David Liddel, Utne Reader , July/August 1993, p. 78.

[14] Ascencion Gerson's "The Vanity of Self-Loathing" in Collected Essays on Self-Portraiture ed. Haldor Nervene (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p. 58.

[15] Since the revelation, there has been a proliferation of material on the subject. Chapter XIX deals exclusively with the subject. See also Chris Ho's "What's in a name?" Afterimage, v. 31, December, 1993; Dennis Stake's DeliaI (Indianapolis: Bedeutungswande! Press, 1995); Jennifer Caps' Delial, Beatrice, and Dulcinea (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Thumos Inc., 1996); Lester Breman's "Tis but a Name" in Ebony, no. 6, May 1994, p. 76; and Tab Fulrest's Ancient Devotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.

As a counselor once told me—a Counselor For Disaffected Youth, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either. Seems pretty dead on and probably has everything to do with the fact that when I was ten my father died and almost nine years later my crazy Shakespearean mother followed him, a story I've already lived and really don't need to retell here.

Still for whatever reason, and this my Counselor For Disaffected Youth could never explain, accepting his analysis hardly altered the way I felt.

I just glanced over at the trunk. The first time I saw it, I mean when I discovered what was inside, it appalled me. Like I was staring at the old guy's corpse. Now it's just a trunk. Of course, I also remember thinking I was going to toss it by the end of the week. That was before I started reading. Long before I began putting it all together.

You know this is still the simple answer.

I guess the complicated one I don't feel like getting into.

²⁶ RegrettabIy, Pollit's proclivity to pun and write jokes frequently detracts from his otherwise lucid analysis. The Incident (Chicago: Adlai Publishing, 1995), p. 108, is a remarkable example of brilliant scholarship and exemplary synthesis of research and thought. There are also some pretty good illustrations. Unfortunately almost everything he concludes is wrong.

^[15] Michelle Nadine Goetz recalls how on one occasion Navidson's father climbed onto the hood of the family's recently purchased car, used a thermos to crack up the windshield, then marched back into the kitchen, picked up a pan full of sizzling pork chops and threw it against the wall. (See the Goetz interview published in The Denver Post, May 14, 1986, B-4). Terry Borowska, who used to babysit both brothers, remembers how every so often Navidson's father would vanish, sometimes for up to five weeks at a time, without telling his family where he was going or when he might return. Inevitably when he did come back—typically after midnight, or early in the morning, sitting in his truck, waiting for them to wake up since he had either left his key or lost it—there would be a few days of warmth and reconciliation. Eventually though, Tony Navidson would return to his own moods and his own needs, forcing Will and Tom to realize they were better off just trying to keep clear of their father. (See Borowska's interview published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 1992, D-3, column one.)

[16] A selection of personal interviews with Adam Zobol, Anthony Freed and Anastasia Cullman. September 8-11,1994.

[17] Rita Mistopolis M.D., in her book Black Heart, Blue Heart (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1984), p. 245, describes the seriousness of emotional deprivation:

It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care if their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.

[18] Keillor Ross in his article "Legal Zoning" for Atlantic Monthly, v. 278, September 1996, p. 43, does not wish to discount the possibility of irony: "After all Navidson has just moved from the extremely populated confines of New York City and is now only poking fun at the relative wilderness of this suburb." Ross makes a good point, except for the fact that Navidson is a man who understands the meaning of outpost and his tone seems too straight forward to imply any kind of jest.

[19] Zampan6. This chapter first appeared as "The Matter Of Why" in LA Weekly, May 19, 1994.

[20] In Appendix II-A, Mr. Truant provides a sketch of this floor plan on the back of an envelope. — Ed.

[21] Easily that whole bit from "coffee arcing tragically" down to "the mourning paper" could have been cut. You wouldn't of noticed the absence. I probably wouldn't of either. But that doesn't change the fact that I can't do it. Get rid of it, I mean. What's gained in economy doesn't really seem to make up for what you lose of Zampand, the old man himself, coming a little more into focus, especially where digressions like these are concerned.

I can't tell you why exactly but more and more these days I'm struck by the fact that everything Zampand had is really gone, including the bowl of betel nuts left on his mantle or the battered shotgun bearing the initials RLB under his bed—Flaze appropriated that goody; the shotgun, not the bed—or even the curiously preserved bud of a white rose hidden in the drawer of his nightstand. By now his apartment has been scrubbed with Clorox, repainted, probably rented out to someone else. His body's either molding in the ground or reduced to ash. Nothing else remains of him but this.

So you see from my perspective, having to decide between old man Z and his story is an artificial, maybe even dangerous choice, and one I'm obviously not comfortable making. The way I figure it, if there's something you find irksome—go ahead and skip it. I couldn't care less how you read any of this. His wandering passages are staying, along with all his oddly canted phrases and even some warped bits in the plot. There's just too much at stake. It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.

Zampand himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

[22] Look at David Conte's "All Thing Being Equal" in Maclean's , v. 107, n. 14, 1994, p. 102. Also see Martin Gardner's "The Vanishing Area Paradox" which appeared in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific America, May 1961.

[23] Edith Skourja's "Riddles Without" in Riddles Within , ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago: Sphinx Press, 1994), p. 17-57.

Link Leo Tolstoy, 1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885.

[25] Know what, Latin's way out of my league. I can find people who speak Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian and even German but the Roman tongue's not exactly thriving in the streets of LA.

Link threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.

And so only now, days later, as I give these moments shape here, do I re-encounter what my high briefly withheld; the covering memory permanently hitched to everything preceding it and so prohibiting all of it, those memories, the good ones, no matter how different, how blissful, eclipsed by the jack-knifed trailer across the highway, the tractor truck lodged in the stony ditch off the shoulder, oily smoke billowing up into the night, and hardly deterred by the pin prick drizzle, the fire itself crawling up from the punctured fuel tanks, stripping the paint, melting the tires and blackening the shattered glass, the windshield struck from within, each jagged line telling the story of a broken heart which no ten year old boy should ever have to recollect let alone see, even if it is only in half-tone, the ink, all of it, over and over again, finally gathered on his delicate finger tips, as if by tracing the picture printed in the newspaper, he could in some way retract the details of death, smooth away the cab where the man he saw and loved like a god, agonized and died with no word of his own, illegible or otherwise, no god at all, and so by dissolving the black sky bring back the blue. But he never did. He only wore through one newspaper after another which was when the officials responsible for the custody of parentless children decided something was gravely wrong with him and sent him away, making sure he had no more clippings and all the ink, all that remained of his father, was washed from my hands. ⁴² In an effort to keep the translations as literal as possible, both Latin phrases read as follows: Then in fact all of Troy seemed to me to sink into flames" (Aeneid II, 624) and "Carthage must be destroyed." — Ed.

⁴³ Nag and Nagaina were the names of the two cobras in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Eventually both were defeated by the mongoose Rikki- Tikki-Tavi.

Link "^Fred de Stabenrath purportedly exclaimed this right before he was ki [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpart missingxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] ⁴⁵

[28] David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one. Of course, the implication that the current categories of myth and science ignore the reverberation of knowledge itself is not true. Katz's treatment of repetition, however, is still highly rewarding. His list of examples in Table iii are particularly impressive. See The Third Beside You: An Analysis of the Epistemological Echo by David Eric Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). © Adonta ta . . . = "Her still singing limbs." ⁴⁷

[29] Ivan Largo Stilets, Greek Mythology Again (Boston: Biloquist Press, 1995), p. 343-497; as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses , III. 356-410.

[30] John Milton's Paradise Lost, IX, 653-54.

^[30] Hanson Edwin Rose, Creationist Myths (Detroit, Michigan: Pneuma Publications, 1989), p. 219.

[31] These lines have a familiar ring though I've no clue why or where I've heard them before. ⁵⁸

[32] William Wordsworth, The Poems Of William Wordsworth, ed. Nowell Charles Smith, M.A. vol. I. (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), p. 395. Also of some interest is Alice May Williams letter to the observers at Mount Wilson (CAT. #0005) in which she writes: "I beleive that sky opens closes on certain periods. When you see all that cloud covering the sky right up, over. Those clouds are called. Blinds, shutters, verandahs. Somtimes that sky opens underneath." See No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935, edited and transcribed by Sarah Simons (West Covina, California: Society For the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993), p. 11.

Link ^a, See D. R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (1986).

[34] King Lear, IV. vi, 147.

[35] Further 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. Unfortunately, one could write several lengthy books on sound alone in The Navidson Record. Oddly enough, with the sole exception of Kellog Pequity's article on acoustic impedance in Navidson's house (Science, April 1995, p. 43), nothing else has been rendered on this particularly resonant topic. On the subject of acoustic coefficience, however, see Ned Noi's "Echo's Verse" in Science News, v. 143, February 6, 1993, p. 85.

Link ^Parallel surfaces will create a flutter echo, though frequently a splay of as little as 16mm (5/8 inch) can prevent the multiple repetitions.

[37] Yesterday I managed to get Maus Fife-Harris on the phone. She's a UC Irvine PhD candidate in Comp Lit who apparently always objected to the large chunks of narrative Zampano kept asking her to write down. "I told him all those passages were inappropriate for a critical work, and if he were in my class I'd mark him down for it. But he'd just chuckle and continue. It bothered me a little but the guy wasn't my student and he was blind and old, so why should I care? Still, I did care, so I'd always protest when he asked me to write down a new bit of narrative. 'Why won't you listen to me?' I demanded one time. 'You're writing like a freshman.' And he replied—I remember this very distinctly: 'We always look for doctors but sometimes we're lucky to find a frosh.' And then he chuckled again and pressed on." Not a bad way to respond to this whole fucking book, if you ask me.

[38] There's a problem here concerning the location of "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway." 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. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe there's some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.

^[38] Fortunately a few years before The Navidson Record was made Karen took part in a study which promised to evaluate and possibly treat her fear. After the film became something of a phenomenon, those results surfaced and were eventually published in a number of periodicals. The Anomic Mag based out of Berkeley (v. 87, n. 7, April, 1995) offered the most comprehensive account of that study as it pertained to Karen Green:

. . . Subject #0027-00-8785 (Karen Green) suffers severe panic attacks when confronting dark, enclosed spaces, usually windowless and unknown (e.g. a dark room in an unfamiliar building). 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. See DSM-IV "Criteria for Panic Attack." . . . Diagnosis—subject suffers from Specific Phobia (formally known as Simple Phobia); Situational type. See DSM-IV "Diagnostic criteria for 300.29 Specific Phobia." ... Because behavioral-cognitive techniques have thus far failed to modify perspectives on anxiety-provoking stimuli, subject was considered ideal for current pharmacotherapy study . . . Initially subject received between 100-200 mg/ day of Tofranil (Imipramine) but with no improvement switched early on to a B-adrenergic blocker (Propranolol). An increase in vivid nightmares caused her to switch again to the MAOI (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor) Tranylcypromine. Still dissatisfied with the results, subject switched to the SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) Fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac. Subject responded well and soon showed increased tolerance when intentionally exposed to enclosed, dark spaces. Unfortunately moderate weight gain and orgasmic dysfunction caused the subject to drop out of the study . . . Subject apparently relies now on her own phobia avoidance mechanisms, choosing to stay clear of enclosed, unknown spaces (i.e. elevators, basements, unfamiliar closets etc., etc.), though occasionally when attacks become "more frequent" ... she returns to Prozac for short periods of time . . . See David Kahn's article "Simple Phobias: The Failure of Pharmacological Intervention"; also see subject's results on Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as Sheehan Phobia Scale. ⁷⁰

While the report seems fairly comprehensive, there is admittedly one point which remains utterly perplexing. Other publications repeat verbatim the ambiguous phrasing but still fail to shed light on the exact meaning of those six words: "occasionally when attacks become 'more frequent.' " At least the implication seems clear, vicissitudes in Karen's life, whatever those may be, affect her sensitivity to space. In her article "Significant (OT)Her" published in The Psychology Quarterly (v. 142, n. 17, December 1995, p. 453) Celine Berezin, M.D. observes that "Karen's attacks, which I suspect stem from early adolescent betrayal, increase proportionally with the level of intimacy—or even the threat of potential intimacy—she experiences whether with Will Navidson or even her children."

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. Devans and Company, 1978).

[39] Bazine Naodook's The Bad Bodhi Wall (Marina Del Rey: Bix Oikofoe Publishing House, 1995), p. 91.

^[39] See Lewis Marsano's "Tom's 1865 Shelter" in This Old House, September/October 1995, p. 87. ' 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 (DK Publishing, 1992), X.Y.'s Broken Daisy-Chains (Seattle: Town Over All Press, 1989), Chris Allen's 1001 Sex Secrets Every Man Should Know (New York: Avon Books, 1995) as well as Chris Allen's 1001 Sex Secrets Every Woman Should Know (New York: Avon Books, 1995).

[40] Zampano provided the blanks but never filled them in.

[41] Bernard Porch's All In All (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 1,302.

[42] Mary Widmunt's "The Echo of Dark" in Gotta Go (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), p. 59.

[43] Strange how Zampano also fails to comment on the inability of animals to wander those corridors. I believe there's a great deal of significance in this discovery. Unfortunately, Zampano never returns to the matter and while I would like to offer you my own interpretation I am a little high and alot drunk, trying to determine what set me off in the first place on this private little home-bound binge.

For one thing, Thumper came into the Shop today.

Ever since I fell down the stairs, things have changed there. My boss kind of tiptoes around me, playing all low key and far off, his demeanor probably matching his old junkie days. Even his friends keep their distance, everyone for the most part just leaving me alone to sketch and solder, though I'm sketching far less these days, I mean, with all this writing. Anyway, Thumper's actually been by a few times but my incomprehensible shyness persists, forbidding me to ever summon up more than an occasional intelligible sentence. Recently though I did get this crazy idea: I decided to go out on a limb and show her that sappy little bit I wrote about her—you know with all that coastal norths and August-sun scent-of-pine-trees stuff, even the Lucy part. I just put it in an envelope and carried it around with me until she dropped by and then handed it to her without a word.

I don't know what I expected, but she opened it right on the spot and read it and then laughed and then my boss grabbed it and he sort of winced—"Now look who's the dumb mutant" he shuddered—and that was that. Thumper handed me her flip flops and Adidas sweat pants and stretched out on the chair. I felt like such an idiot. Lude had warned me I'd be certifiable if I showed it to her. Maybe I am. I actually believed it would touch her in some absurd way. But to hear her laugh like that really fucked me up. I should of stayed away from such flights of fancy, stuck to my regular made-up stories.

I did my best to hide in the back, though I was too scared to go too far back because of the storeroom.

Then right before she left, Thumper came over and handed me her

card.

"Call me some time," she said with a wink. "You're cute."

My life instantly changed.

I thought.

I told Lude. He told me to call her at once.

I waited.

Then I re-considered, then I postponed.

Finally, at exactly twenty-two past three in the morning, I dialed. It was a beeper. I punched in my number.

[44] See Aramis Garcia Pineda's "More Than Meets The Eye" in Field and Stream, v. 100, January 1996, d . 39-47.

[45] Leezei Brant's "Billy Reston's Friends For Life" in Backpacker, v. 23, February 1995, p. 7.

[46] See Exhibit Four for the complete transcript of The Reston Interview.

^Gabriel Reller in his book Beyond The Grasp of Commercial Media (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University

Press, 1995) suggests that the appearance of the first short entitled "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway"

originated here: "Holloway probably copied the tape, gave it to a couple of friends, who in turn passed it

along to others. Eventually it found its way to the academic set" (p. 252).

[47] See also Susan Wright's "Leeder of the Pack" in Outdoor Life, v. 195, June 1995, p. 28.

[48] Bentley Harper's "Hook, Line and Sinker" in Sierra, v. 81, July/August 1996, p. 42.

[49] See Newt Kuellster's 'The Five and a Half Minute Holloway" in The Holloway Question (San Francisco: Metalambino Inc., 1996), p. 532; as well as Tiffany Baiter's "Gone Away" in People, v. 43, May 15, 1995, p. 89.

[50] See Chapter XIII.

Link ^'Refer to footnotes 19 and 20 concerning Karen's infidelities. Perhaps it also should be noted here that for all his wanderings Navidson was pointedly not promiscuous. Good looks, intelligence, and fame did not combine to create an adulterous lifestyle. Iona Panofsky in "Saints, Sinners, and Photojournalists" Fortune, v. Ill, March 18, 1985, p. 20, attributes Navidson's genius to his "monk-like existence." However, Australian native, Ryan Murray in his book Wilder Ways (Sydney: Outback Works, 1996) calls Navidson's monastic habits "a sure sign of unresolved oedipal anxieties, repressed homosexuality, and a disturbed sense of self. Considering the time he spent away from home coupled with the kind of offers he got from the most exotic and tantalizing women (not even including those from his numerous female assistants), his refusal proves a nauseating absence of character. Make no mistake about it: over here his kind enter a bar with a smile and leave with a barstool for a hat." An odd thing to say considering Navidson drank freely in every Australian bar he ever visited and on the one occasion when he was attacked by two drunks, purportedly angry over all the attention the waitresses were lavishing on him, both inebriates left bruised and bleeding. ( The Wall Street Journal. March 29, 1985, p. 31, column 3.)

[52] Consider Bingham Arzumanian's "Stranger in a Hall" Journal of Psychoanalysis, v.14 April 12, 1996, p. 142; Yvonne Hunsucker's "Counseling, Relief, and Introjection" Medicine, v.2 July 18, 1996, p. 56; Curtis Melchor's "The Surgical Hand" Internal Medicine, v.8 September 30, 1996, p. 93; and Elfor O'Halloran's "Invasive Cures" Homeopathic Alternatives, October 31, 1996, p. 28.

[53] See Jeffrey Neblett's "The Illusion of Intimacy and Depth" Ladies' Home Journal, v. Ill, January 1994, p. 90-93.

[54] Fannie Lamkins' "Eleven Minute Shrink," KLAT, Buffalo, New York, June 24, 1994.

[55] Planet Earth: Underground Worlds by Donald Dale Jackson and The Editors of Time-Life Books (Alexandra, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1982), p. 149.

[56] Both Bingham Arzumanian and Curtis Melchor's pieces have offered valuable insight into the nature of Tom's alignment with Karen. Also see Chapter XI.

Link Holloway's assertion that the camera is impotent within the house "helps establish him—at least for a little while—as the tribe's head."

[58] No idea. Actually, Lude had a German friend named Kyrie, a tall blonde haired beauty who spoke Chinese, Japanese and French, drank beer by the quart, trained for triathlons when she wasn't playing competitive squash, made six figures a year as a corporate consultant and loved to fuck. Lude took heed when I told him I needed a German translation and introduced us.

As it turned out, I'd met her before, about five or so months ago. It had actually been a little tricky. I was leering about, pretty obliterated in the arms of drink, hours of drink actually, feeling like days of drink, when this monstrous guy loomed up in front of me, grumbling insensibly about bad behavior, something concerning too much talk with too much gesture, gestures towards her, that much of the grumble, the "her" bit, I understood. He meant Kyrie of course who even back then was a blonde haired beauty, writing my name in Japanese and assigning all sorts of portentous things to it, things I was hoping to lead or was it follow? elsewhere, when this prehistoric shithead, reeking of money and ignorance, interposed himself, cursing, spitting and threatening, in fact so loud mean Kyrie had to interpose herself, which only made matters worse. He reached over her and hit me in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Not hard, more like a shove, but a strong enough shove to push me back a few feet.

"Well look at that," I remember hollering. "He has an opposable thumb."

The monster wasn't amused. It didn't matter. The alcohol in me had already quickened and fled. I stood there tingling all over, a dangerous clarity returning to me, ancient bloodlines colluding under what I imagine now must of been the very aegis of Mars, my fingers itching to weld into themselves, while directly beneath my sternum a hammer struck the timeless bell of war, a call to arms, though all of it still held back by what? words I guess, or rather a voice, though whose I have no clue.

He was twice my size, bigger and stronger. That should of mattered. For some reason it didn't. Odds were he'd rip me to pieces, probably even try to stomp me, and yet part of me still wanted to find out for sure. Luckily, the alcohol returned. I got wobbly and then I got scared.

Lude was yelling at me.

"You got a death wish Truant?"

Which was the thing that scared me.

'Cause maybe I did.

[59] Rosemary Park considers Karen's dilemma highly emblematic of the absence of cultural polarities: "In this case, Karen's inability to determine a direction is not a fault but a challenge, requiring tools more capable than compasses and reference points more accurate than magnetic fields." See "Impossible Directions" in Inside Out (San Francisco: Urban B-light, 1995), p. 91.

[60] Devon Lettau wrote an amusing if ultimately pointless essay on the compass' behavior. He asserted that the minute fluctuations of the needle proved the house was nothing less than a vestibule for pure energy which if harnessed correctly could supply the world with unlimited power. See The Faraday Conclusion (Boston: Maxwell Press, 1996). Rosie O'Donnell, however, offered a different perspective when she wryly remarked on Entertainment Tonight: "The fact that Holloway waited that long to use a compass only goes to show how men—even explorers—still refuse to ask for directions."

[61] Neekisha Dedic's "The Study: Tom's Place" Diss. Boston University, 1996, examines the meaning of "study" when juxtaposed with the ritual of territory, sleep, and memory.

^[61] Leon Robbins' Operation #4: The Art of Internal Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 479.

[62] Gavin Young, Shots In The Dark (Stanford: University of California Press, 1995), p. 151.

[63] Again Florencia Calzatti's The Fraying of the American Family proves full of valuable insight. In particular see "Chapter Seven: The Last Straw" where she decries the absolute absurdity of end-series items: "There is no such thing as the last straw. There is only hay."

[64] See Exhibit Four for the complete transcript of The Last Interview.

Link ""There's something weird going on here, as if Zampano can't quite make up his mind whether this is all an exploration (i.e. 'Base Camp') or a war (i.e. 'Command Post')?

Link "'Frizell Clary's Tick-Tock-Fade: The Representation of Time in Film Narrative (Delaware: Tame An Essay Publications, 1996), p. 64.

[67] Naguib Paredes' Cinematic Projections (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 84.

Link of shells, the maze like way equipment and furniture are arranged, all reveal how the everyday can contain objects emblematic of what's lyrical and what's epic in our lives. Navidson shows us how a sudden sense of the world, of who or where we are or even what we do not have can be found in even the most ordinary things."

[69] See Corning Qureshy's essay "D D, Myst, and Other Future Paths" in MIND GAMES ed. Mario Aceytuno (Rapid City, South Dakota: Fortson Press, 1996); M. Slade's "Pawns, Bishops Castles" http://cdip.ucsd.edu/; as well as Lucy T. Wickramasinghe's "Apple of Knowledge vs. Windows of Light: The Macintosh-Microsoft Debate" in Gestures, v.2, November 1996, p. 164-171.

[70] Janice Whitman's Red Cross Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 235.

[71] Though this chapter was originally typed, there were also a number of handwritten corrections, "make love" wasn't crossed out but

"FUCK" was still scratched in above it. As I've been doing my best to incorporate most of these amendments, I didn't think it fair to

suddenly exclude this one even if it did mean a pretty radical shift in tone.

By now you've probably noticed that except when safely contained by quotes, Zampand always steers clear of such questionable four-letter language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool

[72] Gerard Eysenck's "Break Through (not a) Breakthrough: Heuristic Hallways In The Holloway Venture."

Link Proceedings from The Navidson Record Semiotic Conference Tentatively Entitled Three Blind Mice and the Rest As Well. American Federation of Architects. June 8, 1993. Reprinted in Fisker and Weinberg, 1996.

[74] See Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art (1771) (New York: Collier, 1961).

[75] Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect," in French Literary Theory Today ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11-17.

^[75] Sonny Beauregard's "Worst of Times" The San Francisco Chronicle , July 4,1995. C-7, column 2. Difficult to ignore here is the matter of that recent and most disturbing piece of work La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau

Chien. As many already know, the film portrayed the murder of a little girl in such comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Buiiuel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it was discovered that there really was such a little Lithuanian girl and she really was murdered and by none other than the wealthy filmmaker himself. It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick. Emir Kusturica's Underground finally replaced Nicoise as the winner of the Cannes Palm d'Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully Active. About Yugoslavia.

The Navidson Record looks like a gritty, shoestring documentary. La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien looks like a lushly executed piece of cinema. Both pieces are similar in one way: what one could believe one doubts, Nicoise because one depends upon the moral sense of the filmmaker, The Navidson Record because one depends upon the moral sense of the world. Both are assumptions neither film deserves. As Murphy Gruner might have observed: "Rumpled vs. Slick. Your choice."

[76] The records were made public in the Phillip Newharte article "The House The I.R.S. Didn't Build" published in Seattle Photo Zine v. 12, 118, p.92-156.

The locks may have held, the chain too, but my room still stinks of gore, a flood of entrails spread from wall to wall, the hacked remains of hooves and hands, matted hair and bone, used to paint the ceiling, drench the floor. The chopping must have gone on for days to leave only this. Not even the flies settle for long. Connaught B. N. S. Cape has been murdered along with his donkeys but nobody knows by whom. For as we know, there cannot be an escape. I'm too far from here to know anything or anyone anymore. I don't even know myself.

[77] Despite claiming in Chapter One that 'the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film,* Zampan6 has still wandered into his own discussion of "the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank" within The Navidson Record. ¹⁹⁶ I have no idea whether it's on purpose or not. Sometimes I'm certain it is. Other times I'm sure it's just one big fucking train wreck.

^1% 195 (cont.) Which, in case you didn't realize, has everything to do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air . . . for as we know there can only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that's it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr. Cape really did come across four donkeys winnowing the air with their hooves . . .

Thoughts blazing through my mind while I was walking the aisles at the Virgin Megastore, trying to remember a tune to some words, changing my mind to open the door instead, some door, I don't know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was when I found Hailey, disturbed face, incredible body, only eighteen, smoking like a steel mill, breath like the homeless but eyes bright and pure and she had an incredible body and I said hello and on a whim invited her over to my place to listen to some of the CD's I'd just bought, convinced she'd decline, surprised when she accepted, so over she came, and we put on the music and smoked a bowl and called Pink Dot though they didn't arrive with our sandwiches and beer until we were already out of our clothes and under the covers and coming like judgment day (i.e. for the second time) and then we ate and drank and Hailey smiled and her face seemed less disturbed and her smile was naked and gentle and peaceful and as I felt myself drift off next to her, I wanted her to fall asleep next to me, but Hailey didn't understand and for some reason when I woke up a little later, she was already gone, leaving neither a note nor a number.

A few days later, I heard her on KROQ's Love Line, this time drenched in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla how I—'this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere, everywhere! and weird drawings all over his walls too, all in black. I couldn't understand any of it.'—had dozed off only to start screaming and yelling terrible things in his sleep, about blood and mutilations and other crazy which had scared her and had it been wrong of her to

Link I98ipyp _0- should read 'for*.

(No punctuation point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg's The Labyrinth (New York: Harper Brothers, 1960)/

¹ "See chapter ten of Denise Lowery's Sketches: The Process of Entry (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).

[79] Chris Thayil's "Travel's Legacy" in National Geographic, v. 189, May 1996, p. 36-53.

[80] Missing. — Ed.

[81] lbid. Curiously Dahl fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

[82] See also Dr. Helen Hodge's American Psychology: The Ownership Of Self (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 297 where she writes:

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson's corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any A /yjt-like discoveries [ see Chad; p. 99.] thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That permanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

See also Otto Fenichel's 1934 essay "The Psychology of Boredom" in which he describes boredom as "an unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse." Kierkegaard goes a little further, remarking that "Boredom, extinction, is precisely a continuity of nothingness." While William Wordsworth in his preface for Lyrical Ballads (1802) writes:

The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability . .. [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

See Sean Healy's Boredom, Self and Culture (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks' Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and finally Celine Arlesey's Perversity In Dullness . . . and Vice-Versa (Denver: Blederbiss Press, 1968).

[83] Giinter Nitschke's "Anatomie der gelebten Umwelt" ( Bauen + Wohnen , September 1968). ²⁰⁶

[84] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space Architecture, p. 13.

[85] Michael Leonard's "Humanizing Space," Progressive Architecture, April 1969.

[86] Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1960), p. 4.

[87] J. Piaget and B. Inhelder's The Child's Conception of Geometry (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 6.

Link ²¹ 'no doubt about that. My fear 's gotten worse. Hearing Hailey describing my screams on the radio like that has really upset me. I no longer wake up tired. I wake up tired and afraid. I wonder if the morning rasp in my voice is just from sleep or rather some inarticulate attempt to name my horror. I'm suspicious of the dreams I cannot remember, the words only others can hear. I've also noticed the inside of my cheeks are now all mutilated, lumps of pink flesh dangling in the wet dark, probably from grinding, gritting and so much pointless chewing. My teeth ache. My head aches. My stomach's a mess.

I went to see a Dr. Ogelmeyer a few days ago and told him everything I could think of about my attacks and the awful anxiety that haunts my every hour. He made an appointment for me with another doctor and then prescribed some medication. The whole thing lasted less than half an hour and including the prescription cost close to a hundred and seventy-five dollars.

I tore up the appointment card and when I got back to my studio I grabbed my radio/ CD player and put it out on the street with a For Sale sign on it. An hour later, some guy driving an Infiniti pulled over and bought it for forty-five dollars. Next, I took all my CDs to Aaron's on Highland and got almost a hundred dollars.

I had no choice. I need the money. I also need the quiet.

As of now, I still haven't taken the medicine. It's a low-grade sedative of some kind. Ten flakes of chalk-blue. I hate them. Perhaps when night comes I'll change my mind. I arrange them in a tidy line on the kitchen counter. But night finally does come and even though my fear ratchets towards the more severe, I fear those pills even more.

Ever since leaving the labyrinth, having had to endure all those convolutions, those incomplete suggestions, the maddening departures and inconclusive nature of the whole fucking chapter, I've craved space, light and some kind of clarity. Any kind of clarity. I just don't know how to find it, though staring over at those awful tablets only amps my resolve to do something, anything.

Funny as it sounds—especially considering the amounts of drugs I've been proud to consume—those pills, like dots, raised particular, look more and more like some kind of secret Braille spelling out the end of my life.

Perhaps if I had insurance; if one hundred and seventy-five dollars meant I was twenty-five over my deductible, I'd think differently. But it's not and so I don't.

As far as I can see, there's no place for me in this country's system of health, and even if there were I'm not sure it would make a difference. Something I considered over and over again while I was sitting in that stark office, barely looking at the National Geographic or People magazines, just waiting on the bustle of procedure and paper work, until the time came, quite a bit of time too, when I had to answer a call, a call made by a nurse, who led me down a hall and then another hall and still another hall, until I found myself alone in a cramped sour smelling room, where I waited again, this time on a slightly

[89] See Gaston Bachelard's La Poetique de L'Espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p. 78, where he observes:

Frangoise Minkowska a exposd une collection particuliferement emou- vante de dessins d'enfants polonais ou juifs qui ont subi les sevices de l'occupation allcmande pendant la demifere guerre. Telle enfant qui a vdcu cache, a la moindre alerte, dans une armoire, dessine longtemps aprfes les heures maudites, des maisons 6troites, froides et fermees. Et c'est ainsi que Fran9oise Minkowska parle de "maisons immobiles," de maisons immobilises dans leur raideur: "Cette raideur et cette immobility se retrouvent aussi bien la Jumfe que dans les rideaux des fenetres. Les arbres autour d'elle sont droits, ont Pair de la garder."...

A un detail, la grande psychologue qu'etait Fran^oise Minkowska re- connaissait le mouvement de la maison. Dans la maison dessinSe par un enfant de huit ans, Fran;oise Minkowska note qu'a la porte, il y a "une poi- gnee; on y entre, on y habite." Ce n'est pas simplement une maison- construction, "c'est une maison-habitation." La poign£e de la porte designe dvidemment une fonctionnalit6. La kinesthesie est marquee par ce signe, si souvent oublie dans les dessins des enfants "rigides."

Remarquons bien que la "poignde" de la porte ne pourrait guere etre dessinee a 1'^chelle de la maison. C'est sa fonction qui prime tout souci de

[90] Though still see Danton Blake's Violent Verses: Cinema's Treatment of Death (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

[91] Typo. "T" should read "t" with a period following "with."

[92] i.e. Demerol.

[93] A bit of dialogue which of course only makes sense when Navidson's history is taken into account. ²¹⁹

[94] Something about the terror of the staircase. ²²¹

[95] Anne Kligman's "The Short List" in Paris Review, spring, 1995, p. 43-44.

[96] "[They] shall be separated." — Ed.

[97] Eta Ruccalla's exemplary Not True, Man: Mi Ata Beni? (Portland: Hineini Press, May 1995), p. 97. It probably should be noted that while Ruccalla equates Jacob with Navidson,

[98] What follows here is hopelessly incomplete. Denise Neiman who is now married and lives in Tel Aviv claims to have worked on this section when it was intact.

"The whole thing was really quite brilliant," she told me over the phone. "I helped him a little with the Hebrew but he really didn't need my assistance, except to write down what he said, this incredible analysis about parental blessings, sibling rivalry, birthright, and all the time quoting from memory entire passages from the most obscure books. He possessed a pretty uncanny ability to recite verbatim almost anything he'd read, and let me tell you, he'd read alot. Incredible character.

"It took us about two weeks to write everything he had to say about Esau and Jacob. Then I read it back to him. He made corrections, and we eventually got around to a second draft which I felt was pretty polished." She took a deep breath. I could hear a baby crying in the background.

"Then one day I arrived at his place and the pages had vanished. Also all his fingers were bandaged. He mumbled something about falling, scraping up his hands. At first, he ignored me when I asked him about our work, but when I persisted he muttered something like 'What difference does it make? They're dead

[99] Tobias Chalmer's J's Ironic Postures (London University Press, 1954), p. 92. Chalmer, however, fails to take into account Genesis 25:25-26.

[100] Norman J. Cohen's Self, Struggle Change: Family Conflict Stories in Genesis and Their Healing Insights for Our Lives (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1995), p. 98.

[101] Robert Davidson's Genesis 12-50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 122.

[102] Freed Kashon's Esau (Birmingham, Ala

Link bama: Maavar Yabbok Press, 1996), p. 159.

[104] Personal interviews with Damion Searle, Annabelle Whitten and Isaac Hodge. February 5-23, 1995.

[105] Lost.

[106] From the Robert Davidson commentary: "Jacob wrestled with an unidentified 'man' who turned out to be God, wrestled and lived to tell the tale. Gathered into the story are so many curious elements that we can only assume that here is a story which has taken many centuries to reach its present form, and which has assimilated material, some of it very primitive, which goes back long before the time of Jacob. It is like an old house which has had additions built on to it, and has been restored and renovated more than once during the passing years." p. 184.

[107] Lost.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid.

[110] See Genesis 27:24 ²⁴³

[111] Gershom Scholem's The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 133. In taking the time to consider Frank's work, Scholem does not fail to also point out Frank's questionable character: "Jacob Frank (1726-91) will always be remembered as one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole Jewish history: a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested motives or otherwise, was in all his actions a truly corrupt and degenerate individual." p. 126.

[112] Lost.

^[112] Taking into account Chapter Six, only Tom's creatures, born out of the absence of light, shaped with his bare hands, seem able to exist in that place, though all of them are as mutable as letters, as permanent as fame, a strange little bestiary lamenting nothing, instructing no one, revealing the outline of lives really only visible to the imagination.

And tonight as I copied this scene down, I began to feel very bad. Maybe because Tom's antics only temporarily transform that place into something other than itself, though even that transformation is not without its own peculiar horror; for no matter how many creatures he flings on the wall of his tent, no matter how large or how real they may appear, they still all perish in a flood of darkness. No Noah's ark. Nothing safe. No way to survive. Which may have had something to do with my outburst at the Shop today.

I was in some weird kind of jittery daze. Everyone was there, Thumper, my boss, the usual visitants, along with some depraved biker who was in the middle of getting an octopus carved into his deltoid. He kept blathering on about the permanence of ink which I guess really got to me because I started howling, and loud too—real loud—spit sputtering off my lips, snot shooting out of my nose.

"Permanent?" I shouted. "Are you fucking loopy, man?"

Everyone was shocked. The biker could have taught me a thing or two about the impermanence or at least the destructibility of flesh—in this case my flesh—but he was also shocked. Thumper came to my rescue, quickly escorting me outside and ordering me to take the day off: "I don't know what you're getting messed up in Johnny but it's fucking you up bad." Then she touched my arm and I immediately wanted to tell her everything. Right then and there. I needed to tell her everything. Unfortunately, there was no question in my mind that she would think I was certifiable if I started rattling on about animals and Hand shadows, mutable as letters, as permanent as fame, a strange be— aww fuck, the hell with the rest. I choked down the words. Maybe I am certifiable. I came here instead. Which in an odd and round about way brings me to the Pekinese, the dog story I mentioned a ways back but didn't want to

[113] Breaks at 6,000 to 7,000 pounds. — Ed.

Link ²⁵ 'if Dft=16t ² where time is calculated in seconds, the quarter would have to have fallen 27,273 miles exceeding even the earth's circumference at the equator by 2,371 miles. Calculating at 32 ft/sec ² the number climbs even higher to 54,545 miles. An "impossible distance" indeed. ²⁵²

[115] "Not worth a rat's ass." — Ed.

[116] Teppet C. Brookes' The Places I've Seen as told to Emily Lucy Gates (San Francisco: Russian Hill Press, 1996), p. 37-69.

[117] Ibid., p. 38. ²⁵⁸

[118] Teppet C. Brookes' The Places I've Seen , p. 142.

^[118] Gail Kalt's "The Loss of Faith-(Thank God!)" Grand Street, v. 54, fall 1195, p. 118.

[119] Helen Agallway's "The Process of Leaving" Diss. Indiana University, 1995, p. 241.

[120] Many have complained that The Holloway Tape as well as the two untitled sequences frequently

identified as "The Wait" and "The Evacuation" are incomprehensible. Poor resolution, focus, and sound

(with the exception of the interviews shot afterward in 16mm) further exacerbate the difficulties posed by so

many jarring cuts and a general chronological jumble. That said, it is crucial to recognize how poor quality

and general incoherence is not a reflection of the creator's state of mind. Quite the contrary, Navidson

brilliantly used these stylistic discrepancies to further drive home the overwhelming horror and dislocation

experienced by his family during "llie Evacuation." For other books devoted specifically to reconstructing

the narrative see The Navidson Record: The Novelization (Los Angeles: Goal Gothum Publication, 1994); Thorton J. Cannon Jr.'s The Navidson Record: Action and Chronologies (Portland: Penny Brook Press, 1996): and Esther Hartline's Thru Lines (New York: Dutton, 1995).

[121] See U.S. News World Report, v. 121, December 30, 1996, p. 84; Premiere, v. 6, May 1993, p. 68- 70; Life, v. 17, July 1994, p. 26-32; Climbing, November 1, 1995, p. 44; Details, December 1995, p. 118.

[122] Nor is that the first time the word "grave" appears in reference to the house in The Navidson Record. When Reston suggests Navidson use the Leica distance meter, he adds, "That should put this ghost in the grave fast." Holloway in Exploration #3 mutters: "Cold as a grave." Also in the same segment Wax grunts a variation, "I feel like I'm in a coffin." In one of her Hi 8 journal entries, Karen tries to make light of her situation when she remarks: "It's like having a giant catacomb for a family room." Tom in Tom's Story tells the "grave-maker" joke, while Reston, during the rescue attempt, admits to Navidson: "You know, I feel like I'm in a grave." To which Navidson responds, "Makes you wonder what gets buried here." "Well judging by the size," Reston replies. "It must be the giant from Jack and the fucking Beanstalk." Giant indeed. ²⁶⁸

[123] See Harmon FrischV'Not Even Bill's Acquaintance" Twenty Years In The Program ed. Cynthia Huxley (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1996), p. 143-179.

[124] Karen's emotional response is not limited to longing. Earlier that evening she retreated to the bathroom, ran the water in the sink, and recorded this somewhat accusatory Hi 8 journal entry: "Damn you for going, Navy. Damn you. [Starting to cry] This house, this home, was supposed to help us get closer. It was supposed to be better and stronger than some stupid marriage vow. It was supposed to make us a family. [Sobbing] But, oh my god, look what's happened."

[125] Anita Massine's Dialects of Divorce In American Film In The Twentieth Century (Oxford, Ohio: Miami University Press, 1995), p. 228.

[126] Garegin Thorndike Taylor's "The Ballast of Self" Modern Psyche, v. 18, 1996, p. 74. Also refer back to Chapter II and V.

[127] Professor Lyle Macdonough's "Dissolution of Love in The Navidson Record," Crafton Lecture Series, Chatfield College in St. Martin Ohio, February 9, 1996.

Link That was pretty odd to come across something, let alone anything, in that place. But what made finding that stuff particularly strange was how much I'd been thinking of Holloway at the time. I kept expecting him to jump around some comer and shoot me.

"After that, I was a little spooked and made sure to chuck the ammo down into that pit off to my right. Over and over, I kept wondering what happened to his body. It was making me crazy. So I tried fixing my mind on other things.

"I remember thinking then that one of the toenails on my right foot, the big toenail, had torn loose and started to bleed. That's when De— ... Delia! came into my head which was awful.

"Finally though, I began concentrating on Karen. On Chad and Daisy. On Tom and Billy. I thought about every time we'd gone to a movie together or a game or whatever, ten years ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. I remembered when I first met Karen. The way she moved. These perfect angles she'd make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers. I remembered when Chad was bom. All that kind of stuff, trying to recall those moments as vividly as possible. In as much detail. Eventually I went into this daze and the hours began to melt away. Felt like minutes.

"On the third night I tried to take another step and found there wasn't one. I was in the Great Hall again. Oddly enough though, as I soon found out, I was still a good ways from home. For some reason everything had stretched there too. Now all of a sudden, there were a lot of new dead ends. It took me another day and night to get back to the living room, and to tell you the truth I was never sure I was going to make it until I finally did."

[129] Some kind of ash landed on the following pages, in some places burning away small holes, in other places eradicating large chunks of text. Rather than try to reconstruct what was destroyed I decided to just bracket the gaps—[].

Unfortunately I have no idea what stuff did the actual charring. It's way too copious for cigarette tappings, and anyway Zampano didn't smoke. Another small mystery to muse over, if you like, or just forget, which I recommend. Though even I'm unable to follow my own advice, imagining instead gray ash floating down like snow everywhere, after the blast but still hours before that fabled avalanche of heat, the pyroclastic roar that will incinerate everything, even if for the time being—and there still is time . . . —it's just small flakes leisurely kissing away tiny bits of meaning, while high above, the eruption continues to black out the sun.

There's only one choice and the brave make it.

Fly from the path.

Lude dropped by a few nights ago. It's mid-September but I hadn't seen him since June. News that I'd been fired from the Shop apparently pissed him off, though why he should care I've no idea. Like my boss, he also assumed I was on smack. More than a little freaked too when he finally saw for himself how bad off I was, real gaunt and withdrawn and not without a certain odor either. But Lude's no idiot. One glance at my room and he knew junk was not the problem. All those books, sketches, collages, reams and reams of paper, measuring tapes nailed from corner to floor, and of course that big black trunk right there in

[130] Jeremy Flint's Violent Seeds: The Holloway Roberts Myst [ ] (Los[]Angel[ ]: 2.13.61, 1996), p. 48.

[131] These Xs indicate text was inked out—not burned.

[132] Flint, p. 53.

Link ²⁸ 'Refer back to Chapter 5: footnote 67. — Ed.

[134] Flint, p. 61.

[135] IbXXXXXXXXSuiXXXXXXXXXXX [ ] xxxxxxxx ²⁸⁴

[136] Ned H. Cassem, "The Person Confronting Death" in The Ne [ ]Harvard Guide to Psychiatry ed. Armand M. Nicholi, jr[ ] M.D. (C[ ]brid[]e: Harvard University Press, 1 [188), p. 743. '

[137] 1 ]id., [] 744.

[138] Rosemary End[ ]art's How Have You Who Loved Ever Loved A Next Time? (New York: Times Books, 19[ ] p. 1432-1436).

[139] Le reveur, dans son coin, a raye le monde en une reverie minutieuse qui detruit un a un tous les ohjets du monde.

Link ]endlessly[] in an ever unfolding []nd yet never opening sequence, [ ] lost on stone trails [

[141] I've no decent explanation why Zampand calls this section "The Escape" when in footnote 265 he refers to it as "The Evacuation." All I can say is that this error strikes me as similar to his earlier waffling over whether to call the living room a "base camp" or "command post."

[142] Cassady Roulet's Theater In Film (Burlington: Barstow Press, 1994), p. 56. Roulet also states in his preface: "My friend Diana Neetz at The World of Interiors likes to imagine that the stage is set for Lear, especially with that October storm continuing to boom outside the Navidson's home."

[143] Martin Quoirez on The L. Patrick Morning Show, KRAD, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1996.

[144] Tony K. Rich's "Tip The Porter" The Washington Post , v. 119, December 28, 1995, p. C-l, column 4.

[145] Due to the darkness and insufferable limitations of the Hi 8s, the chaotic bits of tape representing these events must be supplemented with Billy's narration. Navidson, however, does not discuss any of these horrific moments in The Last Interview. Instead he makes Reston the sequence's sole authority. This is odd, especially since Reston saw none of it. He is only recounting what Navidson told him himself. The general consensus has always been that the memory is simply too painful for Navidson to revisit. But there is another possibility: Navidson refuses to abandon the more perspicacious portion of his audience. By relying on Reston as the sole narrative voice, he subtly draws attention once again to the question of inadequacies in representation, no matter the medium, no matter how flawless. Here in particular, he mockingly emphasizes the fallen nature of any history by purposefully concocting an absurd number

of generations. Consider: 1. Tom's broken hands ------------------ 2. Navidson's perception of Tom's hurt

3. Navidson's description of Tom's hurt to Reston ------------------------ 4. Reston's re-telling of

Navidson's description based on Navidson's recollection and perception of Tom's actual hurt. A pointed reminder that representation does not replace. It only offers distance and in rare cases perspective.

^[145] Audrie McCullogh interviewed by Liza Richardson on "Bare Facts," KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16, 1993.

[146] Karen had told Fowler she was married. She even wore one of her mother's old wedding bands to prove it. (See New York, v. 27, October 31, 1994, p. 92-93).

[147] 7Vi? Star, January 24, 1995, p. 18.

[148] Cahill Jones' "Night Life," KPRO, Riverside, September 11, 1995.

[149] Audrie McCullogh. KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16, 1993.

Link locket, dangling from her neck. Sometimes it made me hurt. Often it made me angry.

She once told me it was valuable. That thought never crossed my mind. Even today I won't consider its monetary worth. I'm living off of tuna, rice and water, losing pounds faster than Lloyd's of London, but I'd sell body parts before I'd consider taking cash for this relic.

When my mother died the locket was the only thing she left me. There's an engraving on the back. It's from my father ³¹⁹ : "My heart for you, my love—March 5, 1966"—practically prophetic. For a long time, I didn't flip the latch. I'm not sure why. Maybe I was afraid what I'd find inside. I think I expected it to be empty. It wasn't. When I finally did crack the hinge, I discovered the carefully folded love letter disguised as a thank you letter, scrawled in the hand of an eleven year old boy.

It's a letter I wrote.

The very first one my mother ever received from the son she left when he was only seven. It's also the only one she saved. ³¹⁹ Mr. Truant is referring here to his biological father not Raymond, his foster father. — Ed.

³²⁰ Covered in greater detail in Chapters XVII and XIX.

[151] "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe"—which he quoted in full to his wife, as well as alluded to in chapter Six of The Interpretation of Dreams and in a letter to Jung dated February 25, 1908. ³²³

[152] Melissa Schemell in her book Absent Identification (London: Emunah Publishing Group, 1995), p. 52. discusses sexual modes of recognition:

The house as vagina: The adolescent boy's primary identification lies with the mother. The subsequent realization that he is unlike her (he has a penis; she doesn't; he is different) results in an intense feeling of displacement and loss. The boy must seek out a new identity (the father) . . . Navidson explores that loss, that which he first identified with: the vagina, the womb, the mother.

Eric Keplard's Maternal Intrusions (Portland: Nescience Press, 1995), p. 139, also speaks of that place as something motherly, only his reading is far more historical than Schemel's: "Navidson's house is an incarnation of his own mother. In other words: absent. It represents the unresolved Oedipal drama which continually intrudes on his relationship with Karen." That said it would be unfair not to mention Tad Exler's book Our Father (Iowa City: Pavernockumest Press. 1996) which rejects "the over-enthusiastic parallels with motherdom" in favor of "narcissism's paternal darkness."

Link account her daisy sunglasses, her tattoos, the dollars and fives she culls while draped around some silver pole hidden in some dark room in the shadow of the airport. A place I had still not dared to visit. I had never even asked her the name of her three year old. I had never even asked her for her real name—not Thumper, not Thumper at all, but something entirely else—which I suddenly resolved to find out, to ask both questions right then and there, to start finding out who she really was, see if it was possible to mean something to her, see if it was possible she could mean something to me, a whole slew of question marks I was prepared to follow through on, which was exactly when the phone went dead.

She hadn't hung up nor had I. The phone company had just caught up with their oversight and finally disconnected my line.

No more Thumper. No more dial tone. Not even a domed ceiling to carry a word.

Link Just silence and all its consequences. ³³² "Not overly polished or artificial." — Ed.

³³³ See Erik Von Jamlow's Summer's Salt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 593.

[155] According to Melanie Proft Knightley in War's Children (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 110, a weak heart prevented Tom from getting drafted. Navidson had gone ahead and enlisted.

[156] This is clearly based on Kevin Carter's 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a vulture preying on a tiny Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center. Carter enjoyed many accolades for the shot but was also accused of gross insensitivity. The Florida St. Petersburg Times wrote: The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Regrettably constant exposure to violence and deprivation, coupled with an increased dependency on drugs exacted a high price. On July 27, 1994 Carter killed himself. — Ed.

[157] The actual sum is never made clear in the film. Tena Leeson estimates Navidson's contributions were anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. "The High Cost of Dating" by Tena Leeson. Radiogram, v. 13, n. 4, October 1994, p. 142.

[158] See Exhibit Three for all test results, including rubidium-87/strontium-87, potassium-40/argon-40, samarium- 147/neodymium-143 dating, as well as a complete set of reports on uranium-235 and -238 contents in lead isotopes. ³⁵⁴

Link I guess I'm hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control, especially if I sense the dullness inside me get too heavy and thick, warning me that something is again approaching, creeping slowly towards my room, no figment of my imagination either but as tangible as you I, never ceasing to scratch, fume and snort in awful rage, though still pausing outside my door, waiting, perhaps for a word or an order or some other kind of sign to at last initiate this violent and by now inevitable confrontation—always as full of wrath as I am full of fear. So far nothing, though I still take the Taurus and the Heckler Koch out of the trunk, load them, and just hang on the trigger. Sometimes for a few minutes. Sometimes for hours. Aiming at the door or the window or a ceiling corner cast in shadow. I even lie with them in bed, hiding under my sky blue sheets. Trying to sleep. Trying to dream if only so I can remember my dreams. At least I'm not defenseless now. At least I have that. A gun in each hand. Not afraid to shoot. Safety off.

³⁵⁵ See Noda Vennard's "Frame Detail" delivered for The Symposium on The Cultural Effects of Nuclear Weaponry in the Twenty-First Century held at The Technical University of Denmark on October 19, 1996. Also see Matthew Coolidge's The Nevada Test Site:A Guide to America's Nuclear Proving Ground (Culver City, CA: The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996) as well as Matthew Coolidge's Nuclear Proving Grounds of the World , ed. Sarah Simons (Culver City, CA: The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1998).

[160] "Whoever you are, go out into the evening,/ leaving your room, of which you know each bit;/ your house is the last before the infinite,/ whoever you are." As translated by C. F. Maclntyre. Rilke: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940), p. 21. — Ed.

[161] While bits and pieces of these readings still circulate, they have yet to appear anywhere in their entirety. Purportedly Random House intends to publish a complete volume, though the scheduled release is not until the fall of 2001.

^[161] Norman Paarlberg, "The Explorer's Responsibility," National Geographic, v. 187. January 1995, p. 120-138.

^[161] Quoted in Wilfred Bluffton's article "Hollow Dark" in The New York Times, December 16, 1907, p. 5:5. Also consider Esther Harlan James' "Crave The Cave: The Color of Obsession," Diss. Trinity College, 1996, p. 669, in which she describes her own addiction to The Navidson Record: "I never shook the feeling that the film, while visceral and involving, must pale in comparison to an actual, personal exploration of the house. Still, just as Navidson needed more and more of that endless dark, I too found myself feeling the same way about The Navidson Record. In fact as I write this now, I've already seen the film thirty-eight times and have no reason to believe I will stop going to see it."

[162] Lazlo Ferma's "See No Evil" in Film Comment, v. 29, September/ October 1993, p. 58.

[163] A. Ballard "The Apophatic Science Of Recollection (Following Nuance)" Ancient Greek, v. cvii, April

1995, p. 85.

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

[165] Sorry. No clue. ³⁶⁶

[166] 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.

[167] Billy Reston interviewed by Anthony Sitney on "Evening Murmurs," KTWL, Boulder, Colorado, January 4, 1996.

[168] Personal interview with Purdham Huckler, February 17, 1995.

[169] Personal interview with Lindsay Gerknard, February 24, 1995.

Link ³⁷ 'Hector Llosa speaking at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics on March 14, 1996.

[171] See Tokiko Dudek's "Harbingers of Hell and/or Hope" in Authentes 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."

[172] Caroline Fillopino's "Sex Equations" Granta, fall 1995. p. 45.

[173] 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."

[174] Sandy Beale's "No Horizon" in The New Criticism, v. 13, November 3, 1993. p. 49.

[175] 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."

[176] Interview with Billy Reston. KTWL, Boulder, Colorado, January 4, 1996.

[177] See pages 22-23.

[178] A s such a great variety of written material outside of The Haven-Slocum Theory has been produced on the subject of Navidson's dreams, it seems imprudent not to at least mention here a few of the more popular ones: Calvin Yudofsky's "D-Sleep/S-Sleep Trauma: Differentiating Between Sleep Terror Disorder and Nightmare Disorder" in (N) REM (Bethel, Ohio: Besinnung Books, 1995); Ernest Y. Hartmann's Terrible Thoughts: The Psychology and Biology of Navidson's Nightmares (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1996); Susan Beck's "Imposition On The Hollow" published in the T.S. Eliot Journal v. 32, November 1994; chapter four in Oona Fanihdjarte's The Constancy of Carl Jung (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Gordon Kearns, L. Kajita, and M.K. Totsuka's Ultrapure Water, the Super- Kamiokande Detector and Cherenkov Light (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1997); also see www-sk.icrr .u-tokyo.ac.jp/doc/sk/; and of course Tom Curie's essay "Thou Talk'st of nothing. True, I talk of dreams" (Mab Weekly, Celtic Publications, September 1993).

Link ³⁸ 'See Edouard Monod-Herzen's Principes de morphologie generate, vol. I (Paris: Gauthier-Villars. 1927), p. 119.

[180] For example, even today the Kitawans of the South Pacific view the spiral of the Nautilus Pompilius as the ultimate symbol of perfection.

[181] The original text:

Comment le petit escargot dans sa prison de pierre peut-il grandir? Voila une question naturelle , une question qui se pose naturellement. Nous n'aimons pas la faire, car elle nous renvoie nos questions d'enfant. Cette question reste sans riponse pour I'abbe de Vallemont qui ajoute: "Dans la Nature on est rarement en pays de connaissance. II y a a chaque pas de quoi humilier et mortifier les Esprits superbes." Autrement dit, la coquille de l'escargot, la maison qui grandit la mesure de son hote est une merveille de 1'Univers. Et d'une maniere gdn^rale, conclut l'abb£ de Vallemont ([Abbe de Vallemont's Curiosites de la nature et de I'art sur la vegetation ou I'agriculture et le jardinage dans leur perfection, Paris, 1709, I ^re Partie], p. 255), les coquillages sont "de sublimes sujets de contemplation pour l'esprit."

For a more modem treatment of shell growth see Geerat J. Vermeij's A Natural History of Shells (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Chapter 3 "The Economics of Construction and Maintenance" deals directly with matters of calcification and the problems of dissolution, while chapter 1 "Shells and the Questions of Biology" considers the sense of the shell in a way that differs slightly from Vallemont's: "We can think of shells as houses. Construction, repair, and maintenance by the builder require energy and time, the same currencies used for such other life functions as feeding, locomotion, and reproduction. The energy and time invested in shells depend on the supply of raw materials, the labor costs of transforming these resources into a serviceable structure, and the functional demands placed on the shell ... The words "economics" and "ecology" are especially apt in this context, for both are derived from the Greek oikos, meaning house. In short, the questions of biology can be phrased in terms of supply and demand, benefits and costs, and innovation and regulation, all set against a backdrop of environment and history."

[182] I haven't corrected this typo because it seems to me less like an error of transcription and more like a revealing slip on Zampano's part, where a "parenthetical" mention of youth suddenly becomes a "parent- ethical" question about how to relate to youth.

[183] Rene Rouquier's La boule de verre (Paris: Seghers), p. 12. ³⁸⁸

Link _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ 390

[185] Johanne Scefing's The Navidson Record, trans. Gertrude Rebsamen (Oslo Press, May 1996), p. 52.

[186] 0f course as Patricia B. Nesselroade, M.D. noted in her widely regarded self-help book Tamper With This (Baltimore: Williams Wilkins, 1994), p. 687: "If one invests some interest in, for example, a tree and begins to form some thoughts about this tree and then writes these thoughts down, further examining the meanings that surface, allowing for unconscious associations to take place, writing all this down as well, until the subject of the tree branches off into the subject of the self, that person will enjoy immense psychological benefits."

[187] See L. B. Taylor, Jr.'s The Ghosts of Virginia (Progress Printing Co., Inc., 1993) For a more international look at hauntings consider E. T. Bennett's Apparitions Haunted Houses: A Survey of Evidence (London: Faber Faber, 1939); Commander R. T. Gould, R. N.'s Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (1928); Walter F. Prince's The Psychic in the House (Boston: Boston Society for Psychical Research, 1926); and Suzy Smith's Haunted Houses for the Million (Bell Publishing Co., 1967).

^[187] Consider the interesting mention in Rupert L. Everett's Gallantrie and Hardship in the Newfoundland

Link (London: Samson Sons Publishing Company, Inc., 1673), where a colonist remarked how "Warr in Fray sure was all tabled Balls, full with much Delight and of course strange Veering Spirit." 396 Virginia State Park Report (Virginia State Press, v. 12, April 1975), p. 1,173.

[189] Personal interview with Laurence Tack, May 4, 1996.

[190] This sporadic "f" for "s" stuff mystifies me, ³⁹⁹ but I don't care anymore. I'm getting the fuck out of here. Good thing too, fince I'm also being evicted from my apartment for failure to pay. It took them all of January, February and moft of March to do it but here it is the end of March and if I'm not out by tomorrow, people will come for me. My plan's to leave tonight and take a southern route all the way to Virginia, where I hope to find that place, or at the very least find some piece of reality that's at the root of that place, which might in turn—I hope; I do, do hope—help me addrefs some of the awful havoc always tearing through me.

[191] The exact location of the house has been subject to a great deal of speculation. Many feel it belongs somewhere in the environs of Richmond. However Ray X. Lawlor, English professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, places Ash Tree Lane "closer to California Crossroads. Certainly not far from

Link Colonial Williamsburg and the original Jamestown colony. South of Lake Powell but most assuredly northwest of Bacons Castle." See Lawlor's "Which Side of the James?" in Zyzzyva, fall 1996, p. 187. ^Lucinda S. Hausmaninger's "Oh Say Can You See" in The Richmond Lag Zine, v. 119, April 1995, p. 33.

[193] Lucinda S. Hausmaninger's "The Navy Navel" in San Clemente Prang Vibe, v. 4, winter 1996, p. vii.

Link ^Ibid., p. viii.

[195] See Appendix C. — Ed.

Link ^Cora Minehart's Recovery: Methods and Manner with an introduction by Patricia B. Nesselroade (New York: AMACOM Books, 1994), p. 11.

[197] See Darren Meen's Gathered God (New York: Hyperion, 1995) and Lynn Rembold's Stations of Eleven (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

[198] LesterT. Ochs' Smile (Middletown, CT: University Press of New England/ Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 87-91.

[199] The Reston Interview.

Link ⁴ "Personal interview with Timothy K. Thuan, August 29, 1996.

[201] See Cassandra Rissman LaRue's The Architecture of Art (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1971), p. 139 where she defines her frequently touted "seven stages to accomplishment":

[202] Rouhollah W. Leffler's "Art Times" in Sight and Sound, November 1996, p. 39.

[203] Susan Sontag's On Photography: The Revised Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p. 394.

[204] Ignis fatuus? ["Foolish Fire. Will of the wisp [1608]." — Ed.]*

[205] Hanan Jabara's "Hearing Things." Acoustic Lens , v. xxxii, n. 8, 1994. p. 78-84.

[206] Carlos Ellsberg's "The Solipsistic Seance." Ouija, v. ix, n. 4, December, 1996. p. 45.

[207] Though it may be obvious, recent studies carried out by Merlecker and Finch finally confirmed the "high

probability" that the "star" Navidson caught on film was none other than Karen's halogen. See Bob

Merlecker and Bob Finch's "Starlight, Starbright, First Flashlight I See Tonight." Byte, v. 20, August,

1995. p. 34.

[208] Donna Tartt's "Please, Please, Please Me." Spin, December 1996, p. 137.

[209] Guyon Keller's "The Importance of Seeing Clearly" in Cineaste, v. xxii, n. 1, p. 36-37.

^[209] Missing. — Ed.

[210] Massel Laughton's "Comb and Brush" in Z, v. xiii, n. 4, 1994, p. 501. ^A Daphne Kaplan's The Courage to Withstand (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996), p. iii.

[211] Missing. — Ed.

[212] Missing. — Ed.

Link ⁴³ 'See Appendix II-C. — Ed.

[214] Presumably "Original" indicates an entry written in Zampano's own hand, while "A" "B" "C" etc., etc. indicate entries written by someone else. — Ed.

[215] "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." — Ed.

[216] "Through all windows, I see only infinity." — Ed.

[217] "A book is a vast cemetery where for the most part one can no longer read the faded names on the tombstones." — Ed.

[218] "We must speak also of the labyrinths, the most astonishing work of human riches, but not, as one might think, fictitious." — Ed.

[219] "By as much as our might may diminish, we will harden our minds, fill our hearts, and increase our courage." — Ed.

Link ^M9 "Love is not consolation, it is light." — Ed.

[221] "Whoever has no house now, will never have one." — Ed.