Q: You knew he was there?
Karen: No, but that's what I was thinking. And then he was there, right at my feet, no clothes on and all curled up. His hand was white as ice. [She holds back the tears.] When I saw him like that it didn't matter anymore where I was. I'd never felt that, well, free before.
[Long pause]
Q: What happened then?
Karen: I held him. He was alive. He made a sound when I cradled his head in my arms. I couldn't understand what he was saying at first but then I realized the flashlight was hurting his eyes. So I turned it off and held him in the darkness.
[Another long pause]
Q: How did you get him out of the house?
Karen: It just dissolved.
Q: Dissolved? What do you mean?
Karen: Like a bad dream. We were in pitch blackness and then I saw, no . . . actually my eyes were closed. I felt this warm, sweet air on my face, and then I opened my eyes and I could see trees and grass. I thought to myself, "We've died. We've died and this is where you go after you die." But it turned out to be just our front yard.
Q: You're saying the house dissolved?
Karen: [No response]
Q: How's that possible? It's still there, isn't it? END OF INTERVIEW426
"Surviving House, Kalapana, Hawaii, 1993" — Diane Cook
In Passion For Pity and Other Recipes For Disaster (London: Greenhill Books, 1996) Helmut Muir cried: "They both live. They even get married. It's a happy ending."
Which is true. Both Karen and Will Navidson survive their ordeal and they do exchange conjugal vows in Vermont. Of course, is it really possible to look at Navidson's ravaged face, the patch covering his left eye, the absence of a hand, the crutch wedged under his armpit, and call it a "happy" ending? Even putting aside the physical cost, what about the unseen emotional trauma which Muir so casually dismisses?
The Navidsons may have left the house, they may have even left Virginia, but they will never be able to leave the memory of that place.
"It is late October," Navidson tells us in the closing sequence to The Navidson Record. Almost a year and a half has passed since he emerged from the house. He is still recovering but making progress, pouring his life into finishing this project. "At least one good thing to come out of all this," he says with a smile. "The skin condition plaguing my feet for all these years has completely vanished."
The children seem to approve of Vermont. Daisy adamantly believes faeries inhabit the countryside and spirits possess her collection of stuffed animals and dolls, in particular a red and gold one. Chad on the other hand has become obsessed with Lego, spending countless hours with pounds and pounds of their arrangement. When questioned about this newfound interest, he only says that someday he wants to become an architect.
Karen struggles every day to keep up with everyone's energies. Only recently she was diagnosed with malignant breast cancer. The mastectomy was considered "successful" and subsequent chemotherapy
declared "very effective." Nevertheless hair loss and severe stomach ulceration have left Karen gaunt and grey. She has lost too much weight and constantly needs to sit down to catch her breath. Still, as Navidson tenderly shows us, her will-o'-the-wisp smiles seem impervious to the ravaging effects of disease and whenever she laughs the notes sing a call to Victory.
Navidson captures all this in simple, warmly lit shots: simmering milk, roasted walnuts and against a backdrop of black ash and pine, Karen's graceful fingers braiding her daughter's long auburn hair. Despite Karen's infrequently removed woolen hat, she and Daisy still both share a remarkable radiance. What Massel Laughton once described as "a kind of beautiful mischief."[210]
Nor is this the only shot of mother and child. Hundreds of photographs hang on the walls of their home. Every room, stairway, and corridor supports pictures of Karen, Daisy, Chad, and Navidson as well as Tom, Reston, Karen's mother, their friends, distant relatives, ancient relatives, even Mallory and Hillary.
Though this collage is immensely appealing, Navidson is wise enough to know he cannot close on such images. They may be heart warming but what they imply rings false. As Navidson says himself: "I kept looking for assurances, for that gentle ending, but I never found it. Maybe because I know that place is still there. And it always will be there."
Navidson has never stopped wrestling with the meaning of his experience. And even though it has literally crippled him, he somehow manages to remain passionate about his work. Mercifully, in her captivating book on art, culture, and politics, in which she includes The Navidson Record in the spire of her analysis, Daphne Kaplan reminds the reader what it means to be passionate:
Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. A
Navidson suffers the responsibilities of his art and consequently must turn from the blind comfort found in those neatly framed photographs filling his home to follow his costume clad children out into the New England streets, their hearts set on sacks of candy, their paths hidden beneath cold coloured leaves.
In those final shots, Navidson gives a wink to the genre his work will always resist but invariably join. Halloween. Jack O'lanterns. Vampires, witches, and politicians. A whole slew of eight year old ghouls haunting the streets of Dorset, plundering its homes for apples and MilkyWays, all while tossing up high-pitched screams into the sparkling blackness forever closing in above them.
Tongues of grey ice cover the roads, candles flicker unevenly, and grownups gulp hot cider from styrofoam cups, always keeping watch over their sheep in wolves' clothing lest something disturb their pantomime. Each squeal and cry arrests a sip of warmth as parents everywhere
immediately seek out these tiny forms wending their way from porch to porch across great lakes of shadow.
Navidson does not close with the caramel covered face of a Casper the friendly ghost. He ends instead on what he knows is true and always will be true. Letting the parade pass from sight, he focuses on the empty road beyond, a pale curve vanishing into the woods where nothing moves and a street lamp flickers on and off until at last it flickers out and darkness sweeps in like a hand.
— December 25, 1996
EXHIBITS
Though never completed, Zampano left the following instructions for a series of plates he planned to include at the end of The Navidson Record. — JT.
ONE
Instructions:
§ Provide pictorial examples of architecture ranging from early Egyptian, Mycenaean, Greek, and Roman to Gothic, early Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, and the present.
§ Emphasize floor plans, doorways, pediments, gables, columns, capitals, entablatures, and windows.
§ Also create a timeline indicating general dates of origin for developing styles.
§ For references see bibliography in Chapter IX.
TWO
Instructions:
§ Provide examples of hand shadows ranging from crabs, snails, rabbits, and turtles to dragons, panthers, tigers, and kangaroos. Also include hippos, frogs, elephants, birds of paradise, dogs, cockatoos, and dolphins.
§ Supply diagrams detailing light and display requirements.
§ See Phila H. Webb and Jane Corby's The Little Book of Hand Shadows (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1990) as well as Sati Achath and Bala Chandran's Fun With Hand Shadows: Step-By-Step Instructions for More Than 70 Shadows—From Cud-Chewing Cows and Dancing Elephants to Margaret Thatcher and Michael Jackson (NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1996).
three
Instructions:
§ Illustrate date determination techniques utilizing potassium-40/argon- 40, rubidium-87/strontium-87, and samarium- 147/neodymium-143.
§ Provide table for uranium-235 and -238 found in lead isotopes.
§ Include all data in Zero Folder.[211]
four
Instructions
:
§ Reproduce all facsimiles of The Reston Interview and The Last Interview.[212]
five
Instructions:
§ Duplicate page 2-33 in Air Force Manual 64-5 (15 August 1969):
six
Instructions:
§ Reproduce Karen's completed Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as her Marks and Mathews Phobia Scale.[213]
§ Highlight the following information: Project ID: 87852341. Date of Birth: July 24th. Patient ID: 002700
§ For interpretation and examples see Isaac M. Marks' Living with Fear (McGraw-Hill, 1978); Isaac M. Marks' Fears, Phobias, and Rituals: Panic, Anxiety, and Their Disorders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears, and Anxieties by Ronald M. Doctor, Ada P. Kahn, Ronald D. Doctor and Isaac M. Marks (New York: Facts on File, 1989).
Appendix
Zampano produced a great deal of material outside of The Navidson Record. Here's a selection of journal entries, poems and even a letter to the editor, all of which I think sheds a little more light on his work as well as his personality. — JT.
A.
Outlines Chapter Titles
The Navidson Record
Intro
1/4"
Tom
The Five and a Half Minute Hallway Exploration A (Navidson's Visit)
Exploration #1 (Across the Anteroom) Exploration #2 (To the Great Hall) Exploration #3 (Seven hours down the Spiral Staircase) Exploration #4 SOS
Into The Maze Rescue
(Tom's Story) The Falling Quarter The Holloway Tape Evacuation
"What Some Have Thought"*
"A Brief History Of How [ sic ] I Love"
The Reston Interview
The Last Interview
Exploration #5
The End
*Not included in final release.
Release History
1990 — "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway"
(VHS Short)
1991 - "Exploration #4"
(VHS Short) 1993 — The Navidson Record
Possible Chapter Titles
Chapter I........................................................................................................... The Film
Chapter II..................................................................................................................... 1/4"
Chapter III......................................................................................................... Outpost
Chapter IV....................................................................................................... Navidson
Chapter V................................................................................................................... Echo
Chapter VI......................................................................................................... Animals
Chapter VII..................................................................................................... Holloway
Chapter VIII................................................................................................................ SOS
Chapter IX............................................................................................. The Labyrinth
Chapter X.............................................................................. The Rescue (Part One)
Chapter XI............................................................................................... Tom's Story
Chapter XII........................................................................... The Rescue (Part Two)
Chapter XIII............................................................................................ The Minotaur
Chapter XTV.................................................................................................... Infidelity
Chapter XV............................................................................................................ Karen
Chapter XVI....................................................................................................... Science
Chapter XVII.................................................................................................... Reasons
Chapter XVIII____ Ftaires! or De la Warr or The History of Ash Tree Lane
Chapter XIX.......................................................................................................... Delial
Chapter XX................................................................................................... The Return
Chapter XXI................................................................................................ Nightmares
Chapter XXII.......................................................................................................... Faith
Chapter XXIII.................................................................................................... Passion
B.
Bits
[Original ][214]January 18, 1955
I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.
[Original ] April 17, 1955
Then are we inhabited by history?
[Original ] September 4, 1955
Light dawns and marble heads. What the hell does this mean?
[Original ] June 3, 1959
This terror that hunts.
[Typed ]
August 29, 1960 Captain Kittinger, you brought us an early fall this year.
[Typed ]
October 31, 1968
I have no words. The finest cenotaph.
[Typed]
November 1, 1968
(e) (»)
A sen to read the dark.
[Typed ]
November 2, 1968
Tirer comme des lapins.m
[Original] December 8, 1968
God grant me distraction.
[B]
March 14, 1969
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the comer of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
EC]
September 10, 1970
Nothing to share with.
[Typed]
September 21, 1970
Perhaps in the margins of darkness, I could create a son who is not missing; who lives beyond even my own imagination and invention; whose lusts, stupidities, and strengths carry him farther than even he or I can anticipate; who sees the world for what it is; and consequently bears the burden of everyone's tomorrow with unprecedented wisdom and honor because he is one of the very few who has successfully interrogated his own nature. His shields are instantly available though seldom used. And those who value him shall prosper while those who would destroy him shall perish. He will fulfill a promise I made years ago but failed to keep.
Mark Z Danielewski Page 44
