(I'm reading HoL out loud and recording it for a few friends. Partly to share, and partly to reflect on it as I do. Another way in, another lens.)
holy fucking hell, it took me listening to myself read House of Leaves out loud while editing to FINALLY catch something I've been wondering about for years: what the fuck is purple / violet for?
IN the intro, Johnny says, "I wanted a closed, inviolate, immutable space."
that's the impossible!
but of Mark's many tools, rhyme and word-bending are important moves. I had long associated purple text with "an intrusion," another of his recurring concepts. The man with violet lashes in t50ys, one "intrusion" on the text. Violent lashes. The sword-maker. Purple, a bruise: viole(n)t.
but what IS violence? what's an intrusion? in most cases: it is change, unwanted, unexpected, often resented, sometimes necessary. If we want a better world, it will be different, and that difference will be a mutating violence upon the present.
What's the opposite of mutation? The immutable.
To want a closed, immutable space... to have control. To "know the truth" and to trust in it. Something Mark asserts, correctly, again and again because it is of deep personal, social, and cosmic significance even as it is a truism:
Nothing lasts. Change is coming! It's happening now!
To pretend otherwise; to cling; to drag yourself and others backwards is a fundamental (h)arm of human (opposition to) nature.
What else does Johnny call it? Inviolate. Without violation. Without intrusion.
In-violet. In-trued. Disruption.
Purple is, at least in part, the violence of change.
Struck through "what I'm remembering now" in purple because it isn't exactly right; something other than memory is occurring, though that's more than I can get into.
THE CREEP's ongoing party, his invitation to bind Sam & Hailey with the [Noose], a violation of their never-being-HERE. Complex.
Anyway. "Inviolate" just finally clicked for me in a way it never had managed to before.
THIS is part of why I'm reading it out loud.
COOL