quote
See, the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction. Zampanò knew from the get go that what’s real or isn’t real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same.
I can suddenly imagine the cracked voice I never heard. Lips barely creasing into a smile. Eyes pinned on darkness:
“Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”
It’s not surprising then that when it came to undermining his own work, the old man was superbly capable. False quotes or invented sources, however, all pale in comparison to his biggest joke.
Zampanò writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and what in turn we can’t see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering Zampanò’s piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.
Odd, to say the least.
At first I figured Zampanò was just a bleak old dude, the kind who makes Itchy and Scratchy look like Calvin and Hobbes. His apartment, however, didn’t come close to anything envisioned by Joel-Peter Witkin or what’s routinely revealed on the news. Sure his place was eclectic but hardly grotesque or even that far out of the ordinary, until of course you took a more careful look and realized—hey why are all these candles unused? Why no clocks, none on the walls, not even on the corner of a dresser? And what’s with these strange, pale books or the fact that there’s hardly a goddamn bulb in the whole apartment, not even one in the refrigerator? Well that, of course, was Zampanò’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid-fifties.
He was blind as a bat.
I can suddenly imagine the cracked voice I never heard. Lips barely creasing into a smile. Eyes pinned on darkness:
“Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”
It’s not surprising then that when it came to undermining his own work, the old man was superbly capable. False quotes or invented sources, however, all pale in comparison to his biggest joke.
Zampanò writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and what in turn we can’t see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering Zampanò’s piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.
Odd, to say the least.
At first I figured Zampanò was just a bleak old dude, the kind who makes Itchy and Scratchy look like Calvin and Hobbes. His apartment, however, didn’t come close to anything envisioned by Joel-Peter Witkin or what’s routinely revealed on the news. Sure his place was eclectic but hardly grotesque or even that far out of the ordinary, until of course you took a more careful look and realized—hey why are all these candles unused? Why no clocks, none on the walls, not even on the corner of a dresser? And what’s with these strange, pale books or the fact that there’s hardly a goddamn bulb in the whole apartment, not even one in the refrigerator? Well that, of course, was Zampanò’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid-fifties.
He was blind as a bat.
—
Mark Z. Danielewski, “House of Leaves”
pp. xx-xxi
