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Anne Dalke's picture

"Knowledge is hot water on wool"

I'm lost right now in a wierd strange novel, Mark Danielewski's 2000 House of Leaves. The owners first realize that the inside dimensions of their house exceed the outside ones; then they begin discovering new closets, new rooms, new halls, new staircases...that @ first seem limitless, but later seem to be changing size unpredictably. Or perhaps predictably, in response to their expectations. 

 From meta-commentary on the action, pp. 165-167:
...some critics believe the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it...that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data...the house [is] 'a solipsistic heightener....the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self-collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual'....The epistemology of the house remains entirely commensurate with its size...Knowledge of the terrain on a second visit dramatically contracts this sense of distance...knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space. (Admittedly there is the matter where boredom, due to repetition, stretches time and space....)

 

So: the big strangeness of the universe might also be said to be responsive to our expectations of what it is/isn't. It may alter (certainly our perception of it alters) in response to what we want and fear. And it may actually shrink, in response to our experience.

It may also alter the way we write about our experiences, as Danielewski allows it to do (these are images of two of his pages )

--and as I keep suggesting we might: creating products less constrained by print conventions than academic essays have been in the past....

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