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Dmitri and Kallima butterflies...
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Dear Dmitri (and List),
I fear I'm unable to figure out the additional "crawling roots and Kallima" question. Do snakes eat butterflies?
What I saw was simply the mistery of mimetism as we find it in your father's wonder about how perfectly a butterfly-wing imitated a drop of dew cum refraction of the light. Its predator would not be such a demanding artist to stimulate such a creation...
For me the dead-leaf Kallima and roots might and mimesis raises questions concerning "what force, gravitational or not, creates the pythagorian (or Platonic?) music of the spheres and what are the eyes and ears that can hear and see those..." Human eyes have certainly admired the butterfly dew-drop ( your father's, but he only recreated them in his writing , he could not paint it on its wings ) - but I have no news of who heard the dancing spheres nor of who saw what arose from a glass, darkly.
``S'i' credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
sanza tema d'infamia ti rispondo . . . .''
. Jansy
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I fear I'm unable to figure out the additional "crawling roots and Kallima" question. Do snakes eat butterflies?
What I saw was simply the mistery of mimetism as we find it in your father's wonder about how perfectly a butterfly-wing imitated a drop of dew cum refraction of the light. Its predator would not be such a demanding artist to stimulate such a creation...
For me the dead-leaf Kallima and roots might and mimesis raises questions concerning "what force, gravitational or not, creates the pythagorian (or Platonic?) music of the spheres and what are the eyes and ears that can hear and see those..." Human eyes have certainly admired the butterfly dew-drop ( your father's, but he only recreated them in his writing , he could not paint it on its wings ) - but I have no news of who heard the dancing spheres nor of who saw what arose from a glass, darkly.
``S'i' credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
sanza tema d'infamia ti rispondo . . . .''
. Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm