Houses of the Unholy: Blair, Skin, Leaves
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I recently had occasion to visit the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It is a totally stunning building: utterly immense; not in the artificial, cynical, often quite ugly manner of the modern highrise office building, but in such a way that you wonder if the thing was chiseled out of a single, gargantuan stone, wholecloth (or whole-stone). Gothic architecture is indeed inspired by gargantuan stones: their intricacy and fatality recall dramatic European cliff faces, wet and cold; their enormity and solidity recall stark mountaintops, dry and cold.
Modern highrises appear delicately, precariously, on the surface of the Earth. Like a fawn-faced teenager in an unfamiliar part of town, they wear their vulnerability in their faultless faces. They are sterile and clinical, foreign objects inserted into the Earth to deliver, or extract, a payload, and leave no scar as they are pulled away, as if by a giant, latex-gloved hand. But age affects them in a different way than it does the cathedral. Highrises seem to pull us upward into a gleaming, space-faring future—and when they collect dirt, when they break down, and especially when they fall, we witness the dirtying, breaking down, and collapse of that future. The cathedral also pulls us upward, yes, but it brings with it the weight and wisdom of ancients.
I wondered how similar I felt to the medievals lucky enough to see this cathedral. Well, not this Cathedral, which wasn’t finished until the nineteen-nineties and which features, somewhere tucked away on one of its more nondescript spires, a bust of Darth Vader. But the true, medieval European cathedrals.
On the one hand, such an imposing, dramatic, and colossal feature will always, I think, inspire some degree of awe, even for we secular, overstimulated moderns. Indeed, of all those things designed and wrought by human hands, the cathedral is most akin to abstract or impressionistic sculpture: Not primarily functional—how could it be, with so much extraneous?—and certainly not semantic. So it stands out against the backdrop of modern life differently than it would against medieval life.
Medievals lived in the domain of the body, the earth, the locality. For laypeople, life was almost totally physical: their labor was physical; their food, clothes, and tools were derived from imminent natural sources; their primary day-to-day concern was to prevent the imminent breakdown, through disease or starvation, of their physical bodies; they largely could not read and would not have access to books even if they could. The cathedral, then, forced them out of the physical, the imminent, and into the spiritual, the intellectual, and the historical.
We in the Information Age, on the other hand, live our lives in the representational, the symbolic, and the abstract. We pore over endlessly rearranged alphabets to render events from across the globe, ideas from others’ heads, imminent. We ponder not only physical happenings from elsewhere than we are, but also abstract patterns emerging therefrom: What will happen to democracy? Is fundamentalist religious nationalism a threat? What differentiates resistance from aggression?
Where the cathedral snapped the medieval mind away from low things to higher things, it snaps us from the endless play of symbol and sign, out of hyperreality, and into the physical. That this giant monument to human craftsmanship exists, here, next to me, is remarkable; certainly more so than a VR tour of the same space. We are reminded that physical presence, though it may be described, referenced, approximated by symbol, and though it may itself also be symbolic, is always also more than symbolic. It is imminent. Such an imposing presence doesn’t merely symboilze emotion; it causes it directly, physiologically.
Unlike laypeople, medieval clergy learned Latin, the language of holy things, of ordered things and rational things, of given things and God-given things. Early Christian philosophers commonly believed some types of knowledge, like that of mathematical and geometric truths, were the thoughts of God which mortals could, by His grace, perceive if they were trained in Reason.
But even those who didn’t speak the clergy’s language could see the clergy’s stories: they were projected, in what I eagerly propose was the medieval equivalent to immersive IMAX technology, across the tops of the great halls.
The stained glass in the National Cathedral is as stunning and complex as any I have seen, maybe because of its newness. It was also made remarkably vibrant by the blistering summer D.C. sun.
And so edifice of course represents a meeting point between the semantic, aesthetic, and functional—all abstract or conceptual categories—but also between the concrete or earthly on the one hand and the abstract, conceptual, or celestial on the other hand. Perhaps first and foremost buildings serve their functional end: protecting human bodies and the things they need to survive. But they do so in a way that both reflects and reinforces our values, even our metaphysics: thus the cathedral, by appearing ordered yet natural, reflects a belief in an ordered natural world; its adornment with images of our most important stories reflects our belief that stories occur coherently and, though they occur in the past or not at all, they influence the real present, can in some real sense be held near at hand; and all of this reflects our tacit, and vulnerable, belief that the universe's qualities are reducible and digestible by the mind.
Blair
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This, I think, does much to explain our cultural obsession with the haunted house. The typical house is a cathedral in miniature: ordered, protective, coherent, value-reinforcing. What rivets us to the haunted house, then, is that its degradation, hostility, and incoherence force us to confront the negation of those values. It doesn't critique our values so much force us to consider the possibility that we could wake up one day to their absence.
The Blair Witch Project’s final scene explores the inward-curling, soul-nullifying inversion of the cathedral. The cathedral, recall, draws one’s attention through the sheer weight of its being, promising wordlessly to vault pilgrims upward and outward from the terrestrial and animal to the celestial and cerebral, its pipe organ declaring god's glory and commanding visitors do the same. The Blair house, on the other hand, draws its visitors through pagan illogic, removing them from their critical faculties with delusion after frightening delusion. By the time The Blair Witch Project's protagonists reach it, they have long-since sacrificed any illusions about eternity, about Reason; they no longer question why they run this way as opposed to that, toward the house rather than away. In place of an organ, Heather screams Mike's name into a void countless times; with each scream, the name less and less means itself, more and more declares nothing but the animal pain of god's absence.
The mechanism behind the cathedral’s gravity is self-evident: “Big thing big. I go there.” The Blair house, on the other hand, exerts a force just as inevitable, but more secretive. It doesn't command its victims enter, nor entice them with false promises; it confuses, frustrates, and devolves until one forgets one's own free will. The characters—and the viewers—simply know they will enter. When you have been lost, hungry, and victimized by you-know-not-what for days, the choice is made.
You enter the house. The characters do not know it when they enter the forest, but when they see the house standing there, so incongruous but so inevitable, they remember the primordial fact: there is no documentary project. All this time—all their lives, maybe—they have been wandering—so many recursive miles of blank, swirling, East Coast oak and pine—under the house's dreamy, non-Newtonian orbit only so that they could, finally, enter.
And so the house assumes the air of a conclusion: the question mark punctuating the rambling, incoherent sentence of their lives. Thousands of silent, inhuman trees were, all along, signs pointing There. Why?
Because edifice speaks to us. A house in the middle of the forest says, Humans live here. We persist against chaos. We assign everything its right place; we possess a Reason more eternal, more universal than that which this strange planet in its juvenescence adopts. Soon this whole strange planet will be as this house; it will be our outpost against some greater, older chaos, as currently this house persists against this lesser chaos. A decrepit house in the middle of the forest renders the same statement in the naive, tragic past tense, but it nonetheless draws us in against the formless void surrounding, if only out of a feeling of common cause.
Voids, unlike homes, frighten us by their silence. In a home, we call the name of a loved one and expect an answer. We call to the universe, too, and information is the universe's answer—and, oh, how we hate to be ignored.
Endless miles of forest frighten us not only because we may not be able to find food or because we may cross paths with an angry bear or mountain lion; we fear them because semantically, they give us nothing. Trees, by growing in their particular way, do not mean anything; insects and reptiles, to the extent they can express, do so in an alien language. Even mammals and birds, our closer kin, maintain a degree of mystery and inscrutability. (More on animals and semantics in a later piece, I hope.) Great stretches of forest, vast expanses of blue ocean, the void of outer space—these spaces frighten us because they are information vacuums. They offer no hint of any ordering principle—or, worse yet, they hint at an order beyond our grasp.
The Blair house, then, frightens us because we are drawn to it, rising out of the primordially dark void of woods as it is; we are, despite the horror, the incoherence, compelled to enter. Its walls scrawled with bloody handprints, filth, and nonsense sever the connection between the home and the higher order it is meant to reflect—and the severed nerve, hanging by a thread, sends now only one impulse: Come. Whereas early hominids, perhaps, placed handprints on cave walls and saw for the first time the potential for symbol to connect us to something beyond, whoever in desperation placed handprints on the walls of the Blair house must have been struck by their startling insufficiency, their impotence to remove us from the animal suffering in which we are trapped.​