This is the second part of Tresa’s story.

[continued from The Houses of Women, part 2a: Tresa]

***

Today and despite her daughter’s struggles, Tresa would be appalled. Since her death, the #ghostedhouse has been left neglected and abandoned. Because it is boarded up, on the corner and a little gothic in style, it is easy to understand why it illicits comparisons to Grey Gardens or to Disney’s Haunted Mansion from the folk to whom I have shown Tresa’s house. In fact, it came to be boarded up after an organized group of thieves repeatedly moved through the neighborhood removing the antique stained and leaded glass windows from houses left unattended. Sarah, who lives next door to Linda’s house (the house that, as of today, is most likely to become my actual place of #inhabitation), told me about the vandal crew’s 18-month rampage. The worst blow was the last: the removal of the huge stained glass Tiffany swan.

My gut hollows thinking of this, but for “R”, who lives next door to Tresa’s house, it is understandably unbearable.

And relief was so very very very close. While making one of my hours-long drives around Pittsburgh trying to put the feel of the city in my body, I stumbled upon Tresa’s house. This was six or seven months prior to “R’s” craigslist ad. Every time I drove by, I reenacted the same conversation with myself, “how could that happen to that house?” I photographed the house from a respectful distance beyond the cast iron fence. The magnitude of the house and its unfathomable neglect countered its pull, which  I have discovered (to my own labyrinthine peril) emanates most grippingly from its interior because like Danielewski’s house on Ash Tree Lane in House of Leaves the #ghostedhouse grows larger on the inside with exploration.

But in March, a notice was posted on the door of the #ghostedhouse just as I made and later rescinded my dispassionate offer on a house a block away. Tresa’s house was scheduled for Sheriff Sale, along with 349 other abandoned, foreclosing, and/or back-tax owing properties, on April 6. Every moment leading up to that Monday in April sludged by. But I must save the details for another day because those days are not filled with Tresa’s story but rather with her daughter’s.

To my shock and horror, at the April 6 sale, a postponement was requested. Who knew such a thing could happen? I cannot state how ridiculously ignorant I was of all that was happening in the court house in which I sat that Monday morning. In any event, the sale would now take place one month later on May 4. And again I must demur, a nicer word than withhold: the details of our story between April 6 and May 4 belong to Tresa’s daughter. But I will offer one poignant moment, as I already alluded to “R’s” and my simpatico and shared affect in our relationship to the #ghostedhouse.

Just before the May sale date and after a devastating phone call to the attorney representing a lien-holder of the #ghostedhouse, I drove to the house to share the news with “R.” She sobbed. I left. Later that evening, in a seres of email, “R” sent me pictures of the #ghostedhouse which showed the decade of neglect but also showed Tresa’s house before the vandalizing thefts. She sent the following words, meant to encourage me, to keep me on plan:

“I think you were meant to have this house… I hope you will.
And it’s not about my property value…  it’s about me being totally in love with that house.

I can’t tell you how many days & nights I’ve spend obsessing about this house

…worrying about it, trying to protect it, watching over it

… trying not to give up on it year after year, feeling more and more helpless, silently crying

….being mad at it, hating it, and at the same time trying not to lose hope and wishing it life again.

Hope you can do it.”

I hoped so too. I still do. I didn’t need to be encouraged, though I have deeply appreciated “R’s” efforts, camaraderie, and perhaps most acutely, our shared irrationality about this pile of deteriorating albeit lovely bricks. I keep trying to figure out why this house has such insane gravitational pull.

That’s a lie. I know why. I already said as much. As if the ordinary beauty was not sufficient, it holds and perhaps now withholds so much more inside. I can’t say too much at this point but let me go ahead and share one relentless detail. The #ghostedhouse was left exactly as it was on the last day that it was lived in: food in the fridge, dishes in the sink, hand-washed undies draped on the edge of the tub, and the family pictures on the mantel. That was at least 9 years ago. No one returns to the #ghostedhouse or to what it holds. It sits captured in itself, perched at the moment when life last coursed through its halls, waiting to speak of those who lived and died in its rooms. Waiting to speak of its abandonment.

I suppose it has been inaccurate to speak of Tresa’s house or even of John’s house for that matter because the house held them. The #ghostedhouse still holds them and all that happened and all that was lost. Tresa was the last, and given her life’s work, it seems only fair to give the possessive to her: Tresa’s house.

But still, I wonder whether Tresa put her mind back together in the period between John’s death in 1992 and her own death in 2000. Or at least until her daughter devotedly began to care for her somewhere around 1998. Her daughter removed her from John’s house for obvious reasons, though we will have to wait until later for Tresa’s daughter’s story.

One thing seems patently evident despite passionate protestations to the contrary from her own mouth, Tresa’s daughter feels the house belongs to her father.

She cannot enter it.

I hate that am going to have to make it all up. Yes, there are bits and pieces of evidence and record-keeping that I found online in ten sleepless nights in March, and lord knows, there are many neighborhood witnesses, the best of whom is Gretchen, whose German accent and German Shepherd Dogs, Leopold and Fraulein, reinforce the emphatic tenor of her account.

But for now, all testimonials will be set aside. Here is an inferential account based on my own research.

F in Stone

Tresa must’ve lost her mind, but not like Gwen or Jane did. And it cannot be blamed on the vicissitudes of age or those faced by an old woman living alone. No, Tresa must’ve lost her mind when she was young and living with family. The question remains, which family? Did it begin with her own mother and father? Or did it happen upon the crossing of the nuptial bower?

The latter might intimate that on Christmas Eve of 1992, Tresa regained herself, but there is no evidence that her husband’s death occasioned a return of her mind. What was Christmas day like? Her first day solo after at least 42 years with John. Did she call him John? Johnny? J.W.? Did she call him other names? Did she call him at all?

It must’ve been more than 42 years. This arbitrary number comes from a public record that began with one bureaucrat’s love for the number 5: the record keeping began on 5/5/1950. John’s death in 1992 minus the date of 5′s gives us the 42 year span. But it was definitely longer than that. Another record shows John living in the #ghostedhouse all the way back to 1930, when he was 14 years old. Given his age, we might safely assume that he lived in this 8 bedroom house with his first family. The #ghostedhouse was built only 5 years before John was born. And while it is not clear whether John’s family built this beautiful house in the Hampton Place Plan in 1911 or not, it is definitely another three-generations-old house, like Tillie’s house, built 5 years before the #ghostedhouse. John’s mother and father, like Tillie’s, died in the homes in which they lived their lives.

Tresa died in John’s family house. OK, this is not a strictly true statement. Records show that Tresa lived somewhere in Pittsburgh before she married John. Of course she did. She did not grow up in her husband’s family home and then marry him. The social rule of exogamy is supposed to prohibit such behavior in Pennsylvania. No, strictly speaking Tresa had an address for birth, for life, and for death. I am not sure whether she lost her mind at her birth address or her life address.

There is so much I would love to ask Tresa about, particularly regarding her daughter. But I really like her anyway. She perfected a sense of beauty and elegance. Gwen might’ve been rather awed by Tresa in this regard, but despite their similarity in age, I don’t think they would’ve understood one another or respected each other’s sense of the beautiful.

The Beauty of Hair (thanks to Dr. Feel on Flickr)

Tresa’s command over the translation of conceptual beauty to a fully lived aesthetic produced an exquisite and taste-filled house. Gwen’s creativity with a weekly hair-do would not have registered for Tresa. Gwen’s work put her in the world. She touched people’s bodies: heads and faces and shoulders. She washed, combed, colored, set, curled and sprayed while chatting and listening, laughing and tsk-tsking, gossiping and commiserating. Gwen’s pursuit of beauty was affective and social labor. Gwen’s artistry was meant to be worn and seen by others in public.

Tresa’s work was intensely private. She did not leave the house as the house was her work. Tresa filled the rooms of her house with rugs, couches, pianos, art, appointments. The placement of a delicately carved side table next to a heavy, handmade couch with lush but correct upholstery must’ve required weeks of thought and adjustment. Color, texture, line, flow, shape, coherence, style, light, architecture and that undefinable kineasthetic sensation and affect of moving perfectly through a room, of sitting undisturbed to read a book, and of taking tea alone in such untrammeled peace: these things do not happen without vigilant planning, consideration, execution, and care.

Tresa did not work to make her house a home nor did she meticulously attend her rooms in order to throw open the front doors of a show palace. Tresa masterfully directed the sets of her tragi-comic life to allow for an otherwise banal series of life’s moments to aggregate and to ascend to scenes of living that would harmonize in perfect minor-key complement with the Edwardian architecture.

And this would be no small task, for the house in itself is powerful, almost overbearing in its demand for appreciation and care, calling to those who hear its voice,

“I am a dream.

Live (in) me.”

Tresa…to be continued later this week in:

The Houses of Women, part 2b: Tresa

In the #inhabitation inventory of women, some are old or dead, some sick and some simply fled. But at one time, each of these women owned a house in which they lived alone and eventually left abandoned. Gwen, Viv, Tillie, Tresa, Joan, Linda, and Jane.

***

Gwen, whose full name was Gertrude Gwendolyn, grew old and died. She did not die in her house. She died in a nursing home. It strikes me as odd that nursing homes are called homes and not nursing houses. I’ve spent time in several and with few exceptions, the inhabitants of nursing homes rarely feel at home. I prefer graveyards. Maybe this is just my own fear of witnessing age and infirmity, but even so.

Gwen lived a rather spicy life for a poor farm girl from Missouri. She was a warm and loving albeit vain woman.

She worked as a hairstylist, though I think she would have preferred beautician or some other more profound title. Back when she shared her house with her second husband, Bill, they converted the garage of their home into a beauty parlor. I love this phrase, beauty parlor, with its aesthetic embodied elegance and promise of architectures of the sublime. Gwen’s beauty parlor was found in the one-car garage of a 1950′s ranch-style house, but the appointments made the fantasy work. Globe lights framing two huge mirrors reflected the full-sized, floor-mounted chairs complete with hair-drying hoods. Cut, color, set and dry…a week’s worth of beauty made in an hour of cushioned comfort by a hair artiste.

Gwen’s first husband, Tony, with whom she bore two sons, Dan and Frank, never provided. This accounts for Gwen having any profession at all. Gwen made number eleven of thirteen Missour’a children who grew up in poverty and needed to find their own provision in the middle of their teens. Some of her siblings did stay on to work the farm, but Gwen craved glamour and urbanity. She might have worked as a maid or farmhand, but she reached for beauty, the beauty available to young women in the mid-1930′s.

Okay, so unfortunately I do have to guess in places because the story gets a little fuzzy during and after the Tony period and where the few stories have been told, the details were thin to non-existent.

Gwen went to Chicago or Chicago came to Gwen as Tony, husband number one. This marriage and Tony, whose Italianate name always raised eyebrows in the few mentions I witnessed, failed. Gwen was left on her own with two small boys and a grasping attractor to beauty. She could not have been in calm or safe straits.

Like haunted houses, old women who live alone have a scary reputation. Young, divorced women in the 1940′s also had reputations… of a different tenor. Young, divorced women living alone had seductively bad reputations.  So all tolled, Gwen had two reputations, one for youth and one for age.

At some point in the duree that constituted bad reputation #1, Gwen met her second husband, Bill, another man from Chicago with a criminal reputation, whose alleged vocation was selling Hoovers door-to-door. Gwen was Bill’s third or fourth wife. Given his history, which included bootlegging in Chicago, questions about Bill’s youth rarely got asked. Gwen and Bill produced two children of their own, Colleen (pronounce cO’–lean) and Steven William, whose middle name apparently continued a nominal male legacy, a respectable family lineage, a masculine perpetuity, or a tracing return to William the Conqueror, perhaps. Bill’s youngest son, Steven William, gave the family ‘William’ to his sons, Bretland William and Adam William Henry, and Steven’s oldest son, Bretland, the only of his three offspring to procreate, gave the ‘William’ to his only son, Zachary William.

Between the births of Colleen and Steven William, Bill and Gwen pulled up stakes in the midwest and headed for the true west, a farm in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which for posterity would be referred to as “the ranch,” despite its rather limited geographic scope. Unlike Gwen and despite becoming a terrific fisherman and outdoorsman, Bill did not grow up farming or ranching, so while Colleen and Steven William, and Gwen’s sons, Frank and Dan, enjoyed a period of childhood bucolic bliss that rural Colorado Springs offered in the 1950′s, the family moved to Denver. Here Gwen’s beauty parlor would be founded, a mythic image of the early 1960′s stretching to a cracked fantasy through the 1970′s. As a child, I patronized the salon during its latter period and therefore have the benefit of keeping both the mythic and the phantasm together.

Bill died in the late 1970′s. Gwen must’ve known this would happen. He was 22 years older than she was. I’ve wondered if the age gap was the price she paid to get a second husband given her reputation. They loved each other when I knew them, so perhaps my surmise smacks of an ugly bit of feminist cynicism. At Bill’s funeral, Steven William sobbed violently. I had seen many of the violences by which Steven William could become possessed, but this was a first for crying.

At some point in the next few years, Gwen moved back to the midwest to Peoria, Illinois, where several of her sisters and brothers and her daughter, Colleen, then lived. She never left Peoria and never remarried. She lived in several houses. The last time I saw Gwen, she lived in a comfortable sterile duplex condominium. She was all done-up, as to be expected, but she fumbled for words. In fact, she viewed me rather distantly though she had known me since I was born. She called me Colleen many times, even with Colleen standing right next to me in the room. This was 1990, a stop on my drive, my big move from California to the glamour and urbanity of New York City. But the visit was not pleasant.

No visit to Peoria had ever been pleasant after a drunk driver plowed head-on into the Volkswagen Bug driven by the mother of a friend of Colleen’s two daughters, Julie and Jill. Julie and Jill, the mother and the daughter, were in the Bug, driving on an Illinois highway to or from something girl children do. The mother survived the crash with a broken leg. Julie, six-months my junior, spent two years in a hospital but to this day has never really recovered. The daughter and Jill died. They were 10 years old.

A couple of years after the accident and just before Gwen’s words and world started to jumble, Colleen’s husband and Julie and Jill’s father, Jim, the man for whom Colleen converted to Catholicism in order to be married, left her. Colleen found herself, like her mother, divorced and alone with two kids, Julie and William (of course), though he has always been called Billy. Another woman of reputation, though in the 1980′s I imagine that this stigma was more of an auto-affliction than a social one. To support herself and her children, Colleen worked for the Red Cross, as she had for some time. This past winter she retired, and after decades of raising some of her children and caring for her mother, Gwen, until death, she left Peoria to live in Wisconsin with a friend from High School, Ryder High in Denver. I wonder if Colleen’s friend remembers the beauty parlor in Colleen’s garage?

About a year ago, Colleen called me. After weeks of phone tag, I spoke to her for the first time since my visit in 1990. She was high-pitched, in many ways, and spun a bit unevenly. She told me of her impending departure from Peoria, from her long-inhabited home. She was packing and found herself incredibly burdened with too many boxes holding Gwen’s remains, the stuff of life. She could not take them to the small house she would share with her friend (“And no, despite what everybody thinks, I’m not a lesbian,” hmmm…. “Be happy, Colleen,” I offered), and she could not just throw her mother away. Did I want these things? “Some of it is just junk, you could throw it away.” Of course I wanted these signs of life, the affectively charged remains, traces, remnants, and tracks of inhabitation, the matter of the ephemera of Gwen. I offered to pay for the shipping.

Weeks and then months went by and nothing arrived. I stopped expecting Gwen to arrive in boxes delivered by UPS. Several days after the #ghostedhouse found and captured me, I arrived back at my house in Pittsburgh to find a single small box wedged between the door and the screen, return post marked “Colleen.” Inside on the top of barely wrapped objects lay a letter folded in half. Colleen’s words and world, jumbled, including a list of items that I should but would not find in the box. The haphazardly packed box was filled with shattered, broken and cracked china plates, teacups and teapots. Surviving the tempests of transfer were a blue teapot and cup and a little box, rattling with its contents. An odd assortment of real and costume jewelry.

I love the thought of Gwen ‘all done up’ wearing the paste diamonds or perhaps presenting herself respectably in her authentic plastic-coating-on-plastic pearls and their counterparts, the opal and gold ring or the tin and red plastic stone ring. The cufflinks summon Bill but could just as easily have been Jim’s. While my research is not precise, the pin, with its white cross insignia, initialed BLCC and underscored by the words “President’s Club” traces back to the Red Cross, Colleen’s life-long employer. Had Colleen forgotten what she was packing in the box? Had the traces of her and her mother’s life gotten jumbled together?

Nearly ten years after Gwen’s death, sending this box could not have been easy. Far more, caring for Gwen until death could not have been easy. The jumbling of Gwen’s words and world that I witnessed in 1990 signaled early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Gwen and Colleen both suffered different aspects of this illness for nearly ten years as the stricken and their caretakers do. Perhaps because of Jill’s death and the ongoing habits of caring for her broken, living children, Julie and Billy, Colleen ferociously tried to care for Gwen on her own. Only in the last couple of years did Gwen live in a nursing home specializing in assisted living. Like the questionable use of home in nursing home, the use of living in assisted living professes far more than it provides.

Gwen forgot everything. She forgot her grandchildren and her children long before she died. She forgot Tony and Bill. She forgot Peoria, her condo, the ranch-style home in Denver, the beauty parlor, the “ranch” in Colorado Springs, Chicago, and the farm she grew up on in Missour’a. And she forgot her own name, Gertrude Gwendolyn. She forgot she was dying.

I did not attend Gwen’s funeral because I did not learn of her death until weeks after it had happened, but I don’t trust my own memory here. This was nearly 10 years ago.

Gwen had a will, and I learned from Steven William that she had bequested to me a diamond ring given to her by her husband Bill–at least this is how it was supposedly described in the legal record. So much hearsay, filtered through the children, filtered through the pain of loss, and the staking of claims on the remnants of Gwen and of Gwen and Bill. Colleen reported that to her knowledge no such ring existed. She had yet to sort through all of Gwen’s lived belongings, material traces, and personal things, but she seemed certain the ring did not exist. Steven Wiliam suspected otherwise, but the guilt or perhaps the willing price paid for leaving the burden of his mother’s care entirely to his sister produced an unwillingness to contest Colleen’s assertion. I agreed.

A couple of years later, before my box arrived in the mail this past winter and after a failed experiment in which Steven William took in Colleen’s adult, substance-addicted son Billy, gave him work, and tried to ‘straighten him out,’ Steven William and his third wife, Cindy, traveled to Peoria to see a big motorcycle race and to visit Colleen. Colleen gave her little brother, Steven William, a small box offered with bits of flaked off and jumbled words intimating the box’s recent re-discovery. When I finally saw Steven Wiliam nearly a year later, he passed it on to me. Gwen’s diamond ring, given to her by Bill. I had forgotten, and the resurrection of this bit of metal and rock worn for years on Gwen’s living finger made me furious and sad and left me with a jagged mix of elation and burden.

I closed the box but was urged to ‘try it on’ by Steven William. I obeyed. Gwen’s fingers had been much rounder than mine. Despite many other resemblances, I did not inherit my grandmother’s fingers.

***

Gwen was the first, grew old, now dead. Jane is the last, grown sick and fled. Jane has Alzheimer’s too. She has disappeared. Perhaps Jane is cared for by a high school friend, or perhaps, without remembering, she walked out of her now abandoned house into the wilderness that surrounds it.

I want to go back to Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn of last week. To Tillie’s house right after signing the papers at the closing table. From signing with pencil to unlocking with key–these are fellow travelers. I wrote myself into Tillie’s house.

Key in hand, trying to open the four front door locks set in a double set of doors, I realized that the house had been meticulously sealed up by the octogenarian brother since the walk-through with the real estate agent the day before, just as he had done after the two previous visits I had made when looking at the house, as I am sure he had done after any of the showings by the real estate agent, Ross. Ross sold his first house to me; I bought my first house through Ross. Ross was young, still in college, and did not yet have his real estate license. He was attending Brooklyn College where I taught for several years during graduate school.

For his first go, Ross’ company assigned him the listing of Tillie’s house because it was too far north of the south Brooklyn, 18th Avenue range covered by the agency. The agency specialized in Italian clientele, and while north Bushwick and Ridgewood had once housed such a community, that time in New York’s history receded from the architecture and lived lives of inhabitants into the living memories of people who participated in this battle. Rudy Guiliani celebrated his victory; Tillie’s brother did not. Not all of the old ‘family’ neighborhoods receded, and Ross’ Italian mother and uncle inhabited such a continuation in 18th Avenue but they also actively remembered the transcoding of Italianate Bushwick and Ridgewood. Ross’ uncle gave him the job at the real estate agency that he owned, the agency that represented Tillie’s house, because despite Ross’ father’s ‘heritage’, Ross was family. Tillie’s brother sought out and entrusted this agency  because he knew that they understood family. This was a poor financial choice. Tillie’s octogenarian brother made this choice in pursuit of a lived and living memory of neighborhood ethnic politics, in pursuit of long gone and long dead family.

House for sale

Agencies from Williamsburgh had just ‘discovered’ “East Williamsburgh”–the name given to the northern and western portions of Bushwick–and any of these Billyburg agencies specializing in the ‘up-and-coming’ would have marketed the house quite differently. ‘Up-and-coming’ always carries ‘down-and-going’–even when the ‘going’ cash out. But Tillie’s brother, despite fulfilling his duties as executor of Tillie’s estate, put off cashing out for two years. Tillie had no children. The neighborhood that was ‘down-and-going’ was his, was him.  He put his own living remains on the market.

The harbingers of the ‘up-and-coming’ could’ve easily marketed to me. My ex-husband’s Italian last name would’ve mattered little to them whereas other statistical bodies through which I live would’ve been appealing. Of course, my improper proper name did matter. Had Tillie’s brother not turned to 18th Avenue and had Ross’s uncle not handed the out-of-bounds listing to young nephew Ross, the house would not have been priced ‘below market value.’ It was not just that the octogenarian brother felt comfortable with my last name as I mentioned in my first post, an entire network of ‘family’ politics laboriously converged and circulated such that I might find myself at the top of the stoop of Tillie’s house unlocking her doors.

When I managed to get the first two locks and first door open, I stood in the tiny entry facing the second front door. I was in. It was mine. I thought about the address, my mail, the post office, and the change-of-address form in my backpack that I could now send. I could walk across the street to the corner where the entry to the Catholic Charities Retirement Home opened and place my official change-of-address form in the blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox, while all of the inhabitants of the Home watched, as they always watch everything from out of their windows or from their seats on the brick ledge lining the front of the builiding.

I knew they were watching now as I opened the front door. I turned to catch them looking, witnessing me. As I turned to the right to look back out the first set of doors to the street and my witnessing neighbors, I caught something that I had missed when I came to look at Tillie’s house each of the three previous visits.

Embedded in the wall between the doors were two mailboxes, the kind that sit flush to the wall and that the postal carrier uses a key to open. When the key is turned, the mailboxes drop open from the top and the mail is placed in the appropriate box. These are usually found in big apartment buildings. I had seen the slot in the outermost door for mail to be shoved inside and it was evidently in use–the ground was littered with ads for car services and Chinese food take-out restaurants. Somehow, the inset mailboxes kept themselves secret.

The names on each of the mailboxes popped out. Analog recording devices could be so exquisitely tactile. Shaped like a gun with a heavy duty but thin roll of plastic tape fed into the the typeset hammer, the user would have set each letter and then pulled the finger trigger with equivalent force to pop the hammer through the set. No leveraging the effort. Each letter of a proper name shot into plastic, adhesive tape, raising it from the strip and lightening the color of the plastic through the stretching of the medium. A labelling gun, writing the inhabitants into the house, a convergence of proper name and property.

I never removed the raised names from the boxes. The writing and the house remain, the Forlenza’s and the Petrullo’s are gone and dead. My arrival made it so.

Front door

But let me be clear: there is no such thing as a haunting house. Despite my first post describing my students’ real fear that Danielewski’s house would escape its leaves and swallow them up in their beds, let me repeat that haunted, possessed, evil, animated and homicidal houses don’t exist. The book does. And it is a daemon of affect. But Danielewski’s house on Ash Tree Lane is also particular because the house itself–and not ghosts or undead human inhabitants–commits all manner of creepy and hostile actions upon the living humans that breach its threshold.

Another unique twist: the house sucks humans into its expanding insides and these insides contain only the barest architectural content…there is no people stuff inside the expansive house. The living move their stuff in when they arrive but when the house infolds, its spaces are minimalist. When the living go into these infolds, they haul in stuff, particularly recording media.

The house and its inhabitants compete over enframing. The actual story of the novel presents a series of embedded protagonists that struggle to document (read capture in a given medium) the power of intensive expansion exercised by the house and by humans with mediation. They fight to determine if ‘what’ captures ‘who’ or if ‘who’ captures ‘what’?

[The academic in me demands some airtime.]

Derrida wrote nicely of this organic and non-organic battle over the capture or “conjuring” of powers:

…the medium of the media themselves … is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires … to save time and space rather than just to make up a word,  hauntology.

(Specters of Marx, Routledge, 63)

In this sense, nearly every moment of life in media thick culture is spectralizing and we labor constantly to elaborate collective and distributed hauntologies. The failure of my video, “House,” was a hauntological failure, but let us come back to the “House” later.

Popularly, a haunted house refers to a house in which vindictive or trapped dead folk refuse to or cannot leave after shuffling off their mortal coils. These ghosts or undead inhabitants provoke horror because they breach established human understandings of the material world, in many cases summoning religion, magic,  sacralization, or, in the case of fraudulent (read NOT otherworldly) horror, technology as a narrative bridge, demonstrating the very confusion of “religion from demonic sacralization” (Derrida on Patocka, The Gift of Death, Chicago, 1-2) in the first instance and spectralization by medial capture in the fraudulent second. The affect of horror constricts around the intension and closure of life flowing out to the extension and aperture of death and worse, the reverse.

Regardless the horror provoked by the witnesses and victims of their actions, horrible things have happened to the undead and to ghosts. As haints, they continue to suffer from their mortal life-abuse in an Oedipal narrative tracing that of the adult abuser as a victim of child abuse. The cycle continues. If only the pain and suffering of the early life spent dwelling in violence, fear and abjection could be recognized, confronted, and either resolved or purged….

Instead of simply crossing the threshold of the temporality of generations, the victimized/er ghost or undead crosses the thresholds time/space and matter/energy. How do you fight that with a camcorder? Haunted houses only become de-haunted by sealing up the thresholds, which always threaten a future breach (“This history will never come to a close,” (Derrida, Death 7)), or by overflowing the thresholds, creating a haunted world (“incorporation” or “repression” of the “mysterium tremendum” (ibid)). And in both cases, the discovery of the great mystery must be counter-balanced by a reinstatement of its secrecy.

Haunting and haunted houses belong not only to the resonance of living death but to our collective hauntological practices mixed up with secret childhood wounds and woes surviving generational spans. These houses are homes, for better or worse. And unlike Danielewski’s haunting house of leaves, haunted houses usually offer an excess of architectural content and are crammed full of people stuff.

The material body of the haunted house opens up like a wunderkammer of loved and despised belongings, thick with the oils, slough, care and use of human handling. Particularly wonder-filled are the hauntologies made by previous inhabitants: family photos, needle-work, and distributions of furniture, clothing, and food left in the places where they were touched for the last time. These are material clues, traces of the secrecy that closes over life after death, memento mori but also memento viveri that while reaching for that which is beyond the actualizing world, surf a fulcrum. And these mementi, these are the real ghosts just as the body of architecture and auratic wear and tear upon its walls and floors are the real #ghostedhouse.

A #ghostedhouse is an empty house, perhaps an abandoned house. But it bears secret histories of life, not otherworldly, but of other times of life, of affections persisting in the stone, wood, and glass and in the minutiae of furniture, clothing, toys… the proper and personal belongings and lived and touched objects that continue to inhabit a #ghostedhouse. When a house remains full of the dusty stuff and moldy belongings of people after the people have gone, the house and these things resonate with abandonment. They plaintively call for #inhabitation.

Fear is a provocative affection and one that I thought might be captured through video. Creative criticism works well when its affects unfold with its analytics, when the making and doing unfold with experience and thought. So I sat down to try to put together a piece that would not reference the narrative or characters but would set off a generalized fear of a house. As scratch footage, I shot myself late at night, fortuitously wearing black and looking exhausted. The camera caught me alternately concentrated, tired, annoyed, and sad. This was not a good time in my life and it showed. Behind me in the room is a yellowish-gold wall upon which I had strung a row of hanging found objects. Because of the blue and yellow tungsten lights above my head, this strange collection appeared to float in space in the room. I looped and chopped up four of the odd sequences of gestures from this scratch and added in some dirty images from the novel’s text and cover art. I laid down a soundtrack that consisted of the repetition of the word “house” softly uttered in a flat, calm register and mixed in sampled bits of music from NiN and DevL. Simple stuff. One goal…create an eery, discomforting affect using some simple compositing techniques. After rendering, what I saw was sadness, not fear. Nothing eery, nothing architectural. And while the floating objects definitely tended toward what I was trying to do with the video, this was not a scary house.

The room in which I made this video is a dining room in an old steelworker’s rowhouse in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville. I had lived here for about 5 months. For the previous 18 years, I had lived in New York, mostly Brooklyn but with short stints in the East Village and the Hudson Valley. In fact, just two and half years earlier, I bought my first house in Bushwick, Brooklyn, right across the street from a Catholic Charities retirement home located in the old ‘family’ neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens. The house is a three-family brick townhouse that I purchased ‘cheaply’ in an estate sale at the height of the real estate boom.

The house stood empty for two years after its last owner, Tillie Petrullo, died in it. Tillie’s last living sibling, a mean, octogenarian brother, grudgingly sold the house to settle the estate. He lives three blocks away on the Queens side of the neighborhood and at the closing table for the sale, he repeatedly let me know that he would be “walking by” to check on “Tillie’s house.” At one point, he referenced my Italian surname as if it were the concession that made the sale possible. I did not tell him it was my ex-husband’s family name or that I kept the name for aesthetic reasons. I knew it would’ve been a deal-killer. He had loved his sister and repeatedly insisted on her kindness, care, and love for the house I was buying. The brother, Tillie, and a large number (never specified) of siblings grew up in this house… as had his father. I was buying a three generational family home. This sale was possible only by virtue of his last sibling’s, his much loved sister’s, death. This sale marked the end of the reality and the story of his childhood family. Filled with the terror of my first home purchase and debt that exceeded my capacity to think, I was not thinking of his family saga. Instead, I desperately chanted in my head, ‘you will finally have a house, a home of your own.’ ‘You will finally have a house, a home of your own.”You will finally have a house, a home of your own.’ So, I impatiently listened to Tillie’s brother’s cranky threats of stalking the house daily and his nostalgic mourning for a sweet and generous sister who, from his account, was a saint. And to be fair, it turns out Tillie had been a pretty terrific woman, and I came to know her quite well through the thick traces of her life in the house and the neighborhood. I’ll save those affections for later.

When I first looked at Tillie’s house with the real estate agent, I was underwhelmed. It “needed a lot of work”–a real estate mantra–coupled with, “it’s such a good deal in this market”–the other real estate mantra. The classic brick exterior lured me in, but once inside:

St. Nicholas...no presents

Yes, this was a particularly bad room, but it gives you a sense of what I felt when I first saw the house and when I was signing papers for an hour in order to buy the house. Fear. And I am not unskilled when it comes to building, making and fixing. Still, fear. I would have no choice but to live in it while I ‘renovated.’ Fear bridging over to horror. Was the fear of the Brooklyn house transcode-able to the fear provoked by Danielewski’s house? Could I use the stills and footage of the chaos and destruction of the Brooklyn house in my creative critical pedagogy video? ‘Yes, of course,’ I thought, right after I slipped a knob. Making the Brooklyn house habitable nearly killed me.”You will finally have a house, a home of your own.’ I was a year into my first tenure-track job, and after buying the house, I lived off of the few coins left to me by the bloated mortgage-bank in my purged piggy-bank. D.I.Y. has limitations.”You will finally have a house, a home of your own.’

So I began to import images and footage from the Brooklyn house ‘renovation’ and layer them over the Pittsburgh house footage with its perfect yellowish-gold-walled background and floating objects, but more intensely I edited filled with the pain and sadness of having worked so hard in Brooklyn that some things got lost. At the same time, the work paid off, and I left New York. ‘You will finally have a house –.’ Not the work on the house…though that did pay off in a different way. Two months after finishing the house in Brooklyn, I left for Pittsburgh and a terrific new tenure track job. I left the geography, the city that I believed would be my home until I died. Having never lived in any house for longer than 4 years, a house never felt like home but the city and Brooklyn did. The Pittsburgh footage exposed my sadness and loneliness, separation and disassociation. The Brooklyn footage revealed decay and age, damage and chaos. Overlaid, they were pretty scary. There was no  ‘how-to’ in the video except maybe a personal ‘how-to’ flow against turbulence. And this presented two problems. Pedagogy project: crash and burn…pick another subject. Easy enough. But I obsessed over this video for two months, which sucked like obvious teenaged poetry written in middle age. Worse (or better?), my obsession with the living traces left behind after death resurfaced. In Pittsburgh, I live next to a graveyard and turned that into a serial, found object project. I drove around Pittsburgh looking at people “living,” fixated on all the lost, little moments of getting into cars or eating a sandwich, looking at people interacting with the architectures of their homes. Upon arriving home, where you park a car or leave a bicycle structures the habits and movements of living profoundly. Signs of life, signs of inhabitation by the living and the dead…not morbid stuff but the affectively charged remains, traces, remnants, and tracks of inhabitation, the matter of the ephemera of living beings.

Early this spring, I realized that despite keeping my house in Brooklyn, I really did move to Pittsburgh. Since rents and mortgages run about the same in the ‘burgh, I would need to look for a house to buy here. ‘You will finally have a house, a home of your own?’ There was a brief moment when the mantra made its play, but Pittsburgh boasts some pretty fabulous late 19th and early 20thc architecture. Houses come in all states and conditions… and  I got caught up with looking at the houses as repositories or archives of their former inhabitants, of the local community and of the neighborhood, past and present. In some cases, abandoned houses sit with doors swinging wide open. Though I have a real estate agent who has shown me at least 50 houses, I hit the open houses on Sundays (even if I’d seen the house already) and drove around looking for abandoned houses or for houses with realtor’s signs that I could relay back to my agent. I ‘casually entered’ houses that made themselves available. Even after I made a dispassionate offer on a house in late March, I still obsessively drove around looking for more houses to add to my inhabitation inventory. The day the deal fell through on the dispassionate house, the starting flag fell again. I ran home to check Craigslist and the real estate websites for a new batch of houses.

That night on Craigslist I found an ad that changed everything. It wasn’t an ad placed by a real estate agent or by the owner. It was an ad placed by a neighbor pleading for someone to intervene, for someone to inhabit the #ghostedhouse.

straight from the lion's mouth

I began my intervention in late March. If I succeed, the #inhabitation will begin soon.