Twelve years after Poltergeist’s release, the Freelings’ doppelgänger house drew extensive damage in an earthquake; the garage ripped out of the ground, the driveway cracked, and surrounding walls collapsed. In the Google Maps view of the Poltergeist home (4267 Roxbury), the houses there now look like pyramids, overgrown shapes. Above the house, in the middle of so many massive houses, sits what appears to be a field of yellow sand — a blank space with odd lumps set in it, mounds. The browser will not allow the street view to touch down. All of these houses have a beginning point (their construction) and an end (their eventual dismantling), though the air they contain remains unique space. Bought and sold, hammered and burned, whatever building or hotel or nowhere becomes brought to stand around it, in walls and windows, tunnels, doorways — where — those specific nodes, short of eternal obliteration by some black hole explosion or angry god, will go on—within the hole where the earth was. They will be the meat they are from A to B and B to A, again, again, despite whichever kind of board or nail or glass pane, whoever makes the space their lair — their code names caught for now in glyphs and numbers, our makeshift location signifier, GPS (of latitude, and longitude, and altitude, and precise time) (of space, control, and user). In real estate, stigmatized properties—those altered in air by occurrences or aura-making such as the Poltergeist estate — must in some cases have their status disclosed to potential buyers; this can include both physical and emotional components, for which guidelines vary in negotiation between state lines, though there is so much that could never fit into a contract, could never be teased out of the frame.
“No dreamer ever remains indifferent for long to a picture of a house,” wrote Gaston Bachelard — as in every house is every person, structures like the body in the light, and hiding from each other underneath the houseflesh other bodies, so much nowhere. The wanting wells throughout the hours of the day, the structure of one’s home, and within that, one’s body, remaining under constant fuselage of other’s seeing, wanting, passing in the blank, even, as they see, in driving past the rows of homes in going for groceries, the peripheries projecting, combing through mental mud. Such is the wont of accidental witchcraft. Such is unconscious absorption, radiation, charm, which Bachelard eventually confronts via the body, among sleep: “The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.” Those who do not sleep, then, for longer and longer periods, in some informal affront against the dark, forced against the will to reckon with that which would have us be silent, open, in want of exit of the self. This residual, complex motion appealing to the body at such levels that it becomes difficult to speak or walk, shutting down in the face of such looming, of the space around the body beating body. “You don’t try to photograph the reality,” Jack Nicholson said, quoting Kubrick, in an interview years after the director died inside his sleep, “you try to photograph the photograph of the reality,” and somewhere in this, the replication forming its own version of the same — to want and want at and never enter.
Of course there are the countless houses in countless films, their innards reel-to-reel with captured air — homes in the backgrounds, homes in horizons, rooms in videotapes and snuff tapes and webcams — houses replicating their long walls around the air for every minute, on and on into the year; even when the house itself is torn down, its confines set in some way where we will breathe. “There is no trajectory on the screen that does not correspond to its double in reality,”156 and likewise, the double to its next double, on and on. All of these homes and houses must then be somehow connected in their ongoing, the flesh of one home reappeared in a third — the pattern on the floor from the poet’s bedroom in Orpheus—where death comes to stand over him in the night — is licked with the same pattern as the hallways in the apartment building of Eraserhead—both rooms with portals held within them that lead into the realm of death. Tunnels. Time effacement. Negotiating motion for replication in all time, pulled open in small places by the body, as a tool. “The film plays my parts for me,” the actor performing the title role of Orpheus, Jean Marais, is said to have said, as if in performance he had realized he was not the self himself, but was merely walking in the form of what the film, among all film, wished him to be.
“Some houses may have been moved,” writes Ben Marcus, “and may have contained the ancestors of other shelter tribes, others might have resisted sleep migration and collapsed.” Here not only are the sites of all the houses linked, but sites of prior demolition, evacuation, a whir of coordinates in which the self some years might hide. Marcus goes on: “Archaeologists divide the time of this culture into the house maker and the house destroyer periods; in the latter period, participants turned increasingly to nonuseful and abstract houses, eventually constructing the penetrating gevorts box, of which one thousand wooden units were made during the Texas-Ohio sleep collaboration, 1987. Gevortsing has subsequently become known as any act, intention, or technique that uses negative house imagery during the dream experience as a device to instruct inhabitants to sleep-kill or otherwise destroy themselves, their walls, windows, doors, or roofs upon waking, until a chosen version of the culture has been sufficiently driven from their home.” At last, in Marcus’s projected future, in an act of revolt against some seeming ever-present oppressor (which is so ever-present as to infect our dreams, to take on forms they cannot read, but must assume are there), humans at last lash back against the air of other bodies and years accrued around them — via such things as photographs, films, codes, flesh, language, machines — they become aware of where they’ve been (surrounded) and realize their own bodies as unconsciously possessed by what they remember and do not remember, own and do not own — their sleeping minds invoke their expected waking into a want to claim the house for what it should be — ours — no longer plagued with culture’s malfunctional gloss.
The revolt, though, rather than against some figurehead of history or politics, must be here against the self — to dismantle not the product of the place and aim of being, but the site of it: the body and the home, eater and container of all air. These people, in Marcus’s programmatic language, read less like actual humans (narrative characters) and more like relics, photographs of selves of us in rooms we already do not remember — though the blood of such want and supplication are all over our (the reader’s) hands: we in the many shifting nightly versions of ourselves inside of sleep each day, upon waking, seem in the same way so far apart, like we’d been acting, or summoned into a game — this gevortsing is all the actions we’ve been taking without taking, wearing ourselves down in every instance by the doing and not doing, no matter to what extent we feel we have or have not failed — our eternal want for the thing we cannot have, to be the place we cannot be, to stay alive though we will die, to live in one house with all our love forever and to be alone, to sing in silence, to be free the way we feel when we’re asleep.