Everything Connects to Everything

I promise, this is my last House of Leaves specific post. I hope.

Last night, driving in the car after finally making it to the Appendices (I read straight through the narrative portion without skipping ahead to any referenced appendices, and last night I finally finished the narrative chapter style portion), I had a playlist on my iPod made of my normal assortment of music mixed with the Poe I recently downloaded. These are the order the first several songs popped up in:

Amazed -- Poe

They're Coming to Take Me Away --Dr. Demento

Feel -- Matchbox Twenty

Inside Out -- Eve 6

For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Apocalyptica

I don't list these just to show off my excellent taste in music (I'd recommend every song up there). It was the eerie connection each song had to inner feeling or madness that struck me (For Whom the Bell Tolls almost didn't make the list, it was the transition back to normalcy) and made me think of House of Leaves. I had this eerie feeling that I've felt a lot these past couple weeks while reading this book that to comprehend it you have to understand everything you perceive in a whole new light. This is because I strongly feel trying to write about the entirety of House of Leaves is like our discussion about trying to write a complete scientific report (earlier in the semester). No matter what the original experiment being reported on was, the report, to be fully complete, should include every constant of the known universe, because every constant hinges on every other constant in a complex web of interconnectedness. I really believe it is so with House of Leaves as well -- in order to write an analysis touching on every aspect of this book (at the end of the day for my own sanity I have to believe it is a book) you would have to write an analysis of the entire interconnected mess that is the universe as we perceive it. And even that statement is flawed, because I perceive the universe differently than every one of you. We agree on enough constants of how it works to refer to each of our perceptions as humanity's perception of the universe, but could mine really be different on a fundamental level from yours? I've been taught purple looks like what I call purple because humanity feels the need to be a cohesive whole, rather than individuals wandering about perceiving their own way (how would we be able to interact if we couldn't agree on the base similarities of our perceptions?). What if we were marooned as infants, and grew up separate not only from human culture but from any culture (by which I mean to say that I am not referring to Romulus and Remus, nor Tarzan)? Would we define the universe for ourselves, or fall back to the shared constants modern humanity uses to describe the universe's workings because we can't bear to think we are utterly and completely alone?

I had been debating whether or not that list of songs would really constitute a good post when I got on an internet tangent today through a fantasy jewelry website, which led me to a blog about divinatory Elder Futhark runes and then to a dictionary.com definition of first "mana" and then "manna" (I became curious about the etymological differences). Under the second definition of "manna", this is listed:

" 4. a sweet substance obtained from various plants, esp from an ash tree, Fraxinus ornus (manna or flowering ash)."

Ash trees of course being mentioned many times in House of Leaves, and the house itself being on Ash Tree Lane.

The fact that I can make it from HoL to music to Facebook to jewelry to runes to mana to manna to ash and back to HoL[i]

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[i] I interrupt to provide a visual hyperlinked tracing of this tangent:

House of Leaves --> music --> Facebook --> jewelry --> runes --> mana --> manna --> ash --> House of Leaves

is pretty freaky to me, I won't lie. I think it also supports my idea of the book being parallel with a scientific experiment, in that it can't be truly analyzed without including every truth we understand about the universe. We can only write more and more lab reports, more and more assumptions that have to go unfounded because it would take lifetimes to add in the explanations for every accepted constant. (I certainly don't mean to say writing about House of Leaves is an impossibility, I just think the difficulty inherent in writing an all-inclusive analysis should be acknowledged. If it didn't take multiple lifetimes, I think it would certainly take a whole one. Not to mention that House of Leaves is just an analysis of "The Navidson Record" anyway, and admits that it is not even an all-inclusive analysis of that. Perhaps my idea here is actually that in order to write an all-inclusive analysis of any work, you would have to include the entirety of human universal perception and the explanations that we've come up with to suit that perception.)

Which makes sitting down to finish this paper feel like an even more daunting task than it originally was (in case you were wondering, I'm writing about Mao II).

I wish good luck and sanity to any of you choosing to write a paper on House of Leaves, and I welcome your comments if you don't believe it as difficult/impossible a task as I do.

Chelsea