Hafid
Bouazza: Reading Paul Verlaine's poem 'Aspiration', which
begins thus: Cette vallée est triste et grise: un froid brouillard/Pèse sur
elle..., I was struck by the following lines, in which the poet long
for ces pleines...dont l'echo lointain, de mon coeur palpitant/ Trouble la
fibre...I immediately recalled the following and well-known passage from
Invitation To A Beaheading:There, tam, là-bas, the gaze of men glows with
inimitable understanding [...]...There, there are the originals of those
gardens where we used to roam and hide in this world; there everything
strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good;
there everything pleases one's soul, everything is filled with the kind of
fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a
chance reflection here... (Chapter 8, p. 94, Firts Vintage Internatonal Edition,
1989)...Verlaine's poem is undoubtedly inspired by Charles Baudelaire's
L'invitation au Voyage, but being aware of Nabokov's love for Verlaine's poetry,
I wond whether this is a deliberate hommage or 'just' an
allusion."
JM:
After Rimbaud...Verlaine to carry us towards Nabokov's oft
forgotten French poets, with occult "invitations" to
"Arcady." Great link, Hafid.
Another kind of emotional
outpour (here, here) carried me back to the English, through a
tragi-comedy which details the death a young lady, the incestuous
Ariadne, who immitated Sylvia Plath while borrowing some of her lines
rather freely. Were it not for Ariadne I
wouldn't have dreamt of returning to suicidal
Plath.
The two poems
(1961/62) which inspired Ariadne are "The Moon and the Yew Tree" and "Lady
Lazarus". The lines were:
(a)
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary/ The trees of the
mind are black. The light is blue./.../ The moon is no door. It is a face
in its own right,/.../ It drags the sea after it like a dark
crime.../.../ And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and
silence.
(b) I have done it again./ One year in every
ten// The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?/ Soon, soon the
flesh/ The grave cave ate will be/ At home on me/...What a trash/ To
annihilate each decade./ What a million filaments./...These are my hands/ My
knees./ I may be skin and bone,/...The first time it happened I was ten./... The
second time I meant/ To last it out and not come back at all./.../
Dying/ Is an art, like everything else,/ I do it exceptionally
well....
These poems establish an eerie
atmosphere of bodily dissolution, near-death and fits, plus the art of
dying, which have faint echoes in "Pale Fire."*
Kinote's notes to Lines 39-40 offer variant readings of
Shakespeare and a sequence of misunderstandings and bunglings. Kinbote states
that "Having no library in the desolate log cabin where
I live...I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate
this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon
which, I hope, sufficiently approximates the text, or is at least faithful
to its spirit: "The sun is a thief: she lures the sea/ and robs it. The
moon is a thief:/ he steals his silvery light from the sun./ The sea is a
thief: it dissolves the moon," which he
relates to Shade's
"indoor scene, hickory
leaves...Was printed on
my eyelids’ nether side/.../And while this lasted all I had to do/ Was close my eyes to reproduce the
leaves/ Or indoor scene, or trophies of the
eaves," with its curious echo of a palpebral paired "indoor
scene," which will be described in an autobiographical paragraph in Strong
Opinions and, much later, gain a particular significance in TOoL's "Dying is
Fun," through Wild's self-effacement procedures.
.................................................................................................
* - faint echoes sometimes work wonders, even though proven wrong -
as it happened with the cunicular rabbitts and Aqua's doctors
which I tried to link with "dracunculi" - only to discover that
such "little dragons" and serpents referred to "rankling" festering wounds
and ressentment.(heraldic dracuncles [like Rukka], in a novel with
double uncles and their mirrorlike siblings?)