Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0011603, Fri, 8 Jul 2005 19:43:40 -0700

Subject
Fw: Fwd: [Tomasz] hypothesis about pale fire J-2
Date
Body
Dear List,



Trying to find still another example to add to George´s, while I was
researching in "ADA" for what I vaguely remembered as a dream send by dead
Lucette ("now a mermaid") to Ada, I came across a very illuminating
sequence of lines.

In the first place, I found that the mermaid´s message was not sent in a
dream ( it is pointedly stated that it was Van who slept ).

Next, the physicality advocated by Ada under "property" is undone by Van´s
splitting away "siamese space and false future" to deal with time´s "veily
substance" and performing a cyclic passage from the concrete and physical to
the "bland abstraction".

Ada continues to be...well, adamant when asking if these queries about Time
would be worth "the stained glass", thus coming closer to Pascal´s thoughts
on time and eternity and further from Van´s.


Here we are ( Ada 4, last paragraphs)


"with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:

'Did you really think I had gone?'

'Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,' Van kept repeating with the
fervor and gloat of blissful satiety,

'I told him to turn,' she said, 'somewhere near Morzhey ('morses' or
'walruses,' a Russian pun on 'Morges' - maybe a mermaid's message), And you
slept, you could sleep!'

'I worked,' he replied, 'my first draft is done,'

She confessed that on coming back in the middle of the night she had taken
to her room from the hotel bookcase (the night porter, an avid reader, had
the key) the British Encyclopedia volume, here it was, with this article on
Space-time: '"Space" (it says here, rather suggestively) "denotes the
property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid
bodies can occupy different positions" Nice? Nice.'

'Don't laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose,' remonstrated her lover.
'All that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting
off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of
novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation
of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing,
very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present,
blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies
and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.'

'I wonder,' said Ada, 'I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is
worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can
never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is
like -'





----- Original Message -----
From: "Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello" <jansy@aetern.us>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: [Tomasz] hypothesis about pale fire


> I want to extract observations sent to us by Sandy Klein from a text by
> Charles Mudede on " The Valley of Death" and try to connect it with the
> observations sent by Tomasz, George and Carolyn:
>
> 1. " In the movies, when a man is shot "dead between the eyes," he
> falls,eyes wide open, stiffly backward, like a logged tree. The victim
goes
> from life to death so suddenly that we imagine he has no idea that he is
> dead. He continues doing in the negative world (walking down the street,
> tying a shoelace, eating a spaghetti supper) exactly what he was doing in
> the positive world at the very instant the bullet tore through his brain.
> Indeed, the victim of a head shot is much like Vladimir Nabokov's bird in
> _Pale Fire_, which is "slain/by the false azure in the windowpane" but
> continues to "[live] on, [fly] on, in
> the reflected sky." A person who is shot in the chest knows he is dying,
he
> can see the bloody hole from which life is escaping like air from a
balloon.
> A victim with a chest wound eventually expires."
> Here, curiously, the author draws a parallel between a murdered man who
is
> shot in the head and Nabokov´s BIRD in Pale Fire, and not with John Shade,
> who was shot in through the heart.
>
>
> 2. Carolyn wrote: "I checked the Boyd biography for "J W Dunne" and there
> it was - - the experiment Don referred to. But it had nothing to do with
the
> dead communicating with the living as I expected. VN wanted to test
Dunne's
> theory that time moves backwards and forwards & in dreams we sometimes see
> the future.What has this to do with my query regarding the dead "sending
> dreams" to the living?
>
> 3. Tomasz inquired: "For example and first: "Pale fire" is about life
after
> death, about world beyond and some things
> like that (...) Zembla is this afterworld and Kinbote is a God.
> (...) You know maybe are more afterworlds ... (places where
consciousnes
> go after death) some Shade-like afterworlds ("no free man needs a god")
some
> like Kinbote-like afterworld (with God)... You know what consciousnes is?
> Consciousness is all what you see, this transparent ball you were in (...)
> Your consciousness can go also (...) You can Wake Up still to some
> higher amount of consciousnes (maybe even more glorious than our
glorious
> one).
>
> In the first reference we understand that Shade has expired ( no roaming
> after-effects of living for him, no phantom existence ). Aunt Maud or
Hazel
> might have become phantoms, who knows? In that case they would be
candidates
> for the role of "sending dreams to the living". In the second reference,
> Carolyn questions J.W. Dunne´s theories of premonitory dreams and about
> human time as moving backwards and forwards ( such as in remembering or
> dreaming, I suppose ). Tomasz advances towards the theories about various
> stages of consciousness.
>
> Might not VN have been playing tricks when he openly suggested a belief in
> "after-life" when dealing with his characters and making the dead send
> dreams to the living, while still implying another kind of eternity?
> Human existence is brief when compared to humanity´s historical past and,
> hopefully, with its future. The concept of "eternity" brings its very
> transient glimmer even closer to what VN expressed with the "sliver of
> light" image in his opening sentence in "Speak Memory".
> Why then press the point of humanity´s corporeality so much by imagining
> that VN was speaking of his particular belief concerning messages from the
> dead to the living? When Tomasz entered into his complicated mathematical
> "gradations" to illustrate different degrees of awareness, why then link
> "awareness" to human time, human physicality? If awareness does not need
to
> be "embodied", why does a person have to die ( shot through the heart or
> between the eyes, or from old age or in a terrorist attack ) to be able to
> attain Tomasz´s "higher awareness"? What is the purpose of a physical
clumsy
> Hazel in sending dreams to her puzzled, sad almost rejecting physical
> father?
> Could not VN be a prankster - like the Joker Kinbote that he also was -
and
> mislead certain readers into believing that he was admitting, outside the
> realm of his fiction, that the dead can send dreams to the living ( that
> would be the point of reasearching into spiritualistic or Dunne´s theories
> to find some kind of historical fact or backing for what was presented as
> fiction)? Might he not have believed in something quite different, and
even
> sent hints about his personal faith or hopes of an "eternal level of
> awareness" that could be attainable at various points in his life? There
is
> a particular truth in fiction that has nothing to do with biological
time...
> Jansy
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 12:08 PM
> Subject: Fwd: [Tomasz] hypothesis about pale fire
>
>
> >
> >
> > ----- Forwarded message from profesor_kinbote@poczta.onet.pl -----
> > Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2005 14:25:25 +0200
> > From: profesor_kinbote@poczta.onet.pl
> > Reply-To: profesor_kinbote@poczta.onet.pl
> > Subject: [Tomasz] hipotesis about pale fire
> > To:
> >
> > Very sorry for my very weak English.
> >
> > (I had put my name in title of post because I think it is
> > convenient)
> >
> > I had some hipotesis about "Pale Fire" which were, as I know,
not
> >
> > mentioned (but maybe does, it does not matter). For example and
> > first: "Pale fire" is about life after death, about world beyond and
some
> things
> > like that. (See for example this tunnel like in "near death
experiences"
> or
> > poltergeist or Sherlock Holmes - all this you find probably in any
popular
> book
> > about spiritualism). So - Zembla is this afterworld and Kinbote
is
> a God.
> >
> > (God-Kinbote is also a Nabokov OLD SCUFFER). Saying more about
it,
> > Kinbote is a God-Joker (but I can't explain why I think so)
> >
> > Kinbote - God Joker
> >
> > Shade - God Creator
> >
> > Gradus - Destructor (blockhead)
> >
> > Goldsworth - God as a Judge conception
> >
> > Balthazar - God Nature
> >
> > Shade can be treated also as a God creator, God Poet - I find
this
> > word "shade" "nuance" nice, like a rainbow, like a deepness
> > where "gray" is bad and gray. But I think Kinbote is supreme
> > and I think God-Joker beats even a God-Creator and Poet
> > (he is more cleaver). You know maybe are more afterworlds:
> >
> > A B C ... Z
> >
> > (places where consciousnes go after death)some Shade-like
> afterworlds ("no free
> > man needs a god") some like Kinbote-like afterworld (with God). Maybe I
> say yet
> > a little about Gradus, Gradation.
> >
> > And things I was thinking about where I read "Pale Fire" You
know
> what
> > consciousnes is? Consciousness is all what you see, this
> transparent ball you
> > were in. So for example human has a more consciousness than a mouse -
so
> you
> > can see some gradation in this things. In some Eastern religion thay say
> that
> > Your consciousness can Jump to frog, for example consciousness (1)->
> (1/2) it
> > is strange a little. But your consciousness can go also to some
> higher state
> > (1) -> (2) So I think this case about Gradus
> > (possibly Nabokov thinking about this things, and for sure my own
> thinking
> > about this today) is this that this Gradation never reach a Zero 1/2 ->
> 1/3 ->
> > 1/10 ... but never zero. And if even Zero, You can Wake Up still
to
> some
> > higher amount of consciousnes (maybe even more glorious than our
> glorious one)
> > Zero is only one number but there ale also other 1/2, 7 etc. . And
> possibly
> > gradation is gradation to Higher 1->2->3 etc.
> >
> > Tomasz
> >
> > ----- End forwarded message -----
> >
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
> ----
>
>
> Very sorry for my very weak english.
>
>
>
> (I had put my name in title of post because I think it is convenient)
>
>
>
> I had some hipotesis about "Pale Fire" which were, as I know, not
>
> mentioned (but maybe does, it does not matter). For example and first:
"Pale
> fire" is
>
> about life after death, about world beyond and some things like that. (See
> for
>
> example this tunel like in "near death experiences" or poltergeist
>
> or Sherlock Holmes - all this you find probably in any popular book
>
> about spiritualism). So - Zembla is this afterworld and Kinbote is a God.
>
> (God-Kinbote is also a Nabokov OLD SCUFFER). Sayin more about it, Kinbote
is
>
> a God-Joker (but I cant explain why I think so)
>
>
>
> Kinbote - God Joker
>
> Shade - God Creator
>
> Gradus - Destructor (blockhead)
>
>
>
> Goldsworth - God as a Judge conception
>
> Balthazar - God Nature
>
>
>
> Shade can be treated also as a God creator, God Poet - I find this
>
> word "shade" "nuance" nice, like a rainbow, like a deepnes
>
> where "gray" is bad and gray. But I think Kinbote is supreme
>
> and I think God-Joker beats even a God-Creator and Poet
>
> (he is more cleaver). You know maybe are more afrerworlds:
>
>
>
> A B C ... Z
>
> (places where consciousnes go after death)
>
>
>
> some Shade-like afterworlds ("no free man needs a god") some
>
> like Kinbote-like afterworld (with God)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Maybe I say yet a little about Gradus, Gradation.
>
> And things I was thinking about where I read "Pale Fire"
>
> You know what consciousnes is? Consciousness is all what you see, this
>
> transparent ball you were in. So for example human has a more
consciousness
>
> than a mouse - so you can see some gradation in this things. In some East
>
> religion thay say that Your conscousness can Jump to for example frog
>
> consciousness (1)-> (1/2) it is strange a little. But your consciousness
> can go also
>
> to some higher state (1) -> (2) So I think this case about Gradus
(possibly
> Nabokov
>
> thinking about this things, and for sure my own thinking about this today)
> is this that
>
> this Gradation never reach a Zero 1/2 -> 1/3 -> 1/10 ... but never zero
>
> And if even Zero, You can Wake Up still to some higher amount of
> consciousnes
>
> (maybe even more glorious than our glorious one) Zero is only one number
>
> but there ale also other 1/2, 7 etc. . And possibly gradation is gradation
>
> to Higher 1->2->3 etc.
>
>
>
> Tomasz
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

----- End forwarded message -----