JM [to Matt's " Who knows? At
what point should we stop imagining possibilities?"].I'm all in favor of irradiating
words, endless imaginative possibilities...Could a. good soul help me to find "rain-sparkling crystograms" in Russian
...
JM (monologue?) I only found one
indication about "rain-sparkling crystograms" ( I'd been informed this image
is recurrently used by Nabokov! Is it a mistaken lead?).
From Nabokov's preface to "The Eye": "A serious psychologist, on the other hand, may distinguish through
my rain-sparkling crystograms a world of soul dissolution where poor Smurov only
exists as he is reflected in other brains, which in their turn are placed in the
same strange, specular predicament as his."
A writer and a reader in fact inhabit a world of mutually
reflecting surfaces, unstable like colored glass-shards in a caleidoscope
or fixed by a shared point of reference or a metaphor. I hope to learn
what words Nabokov has employed for this conception in Russian, one which
he might have left behind him or transformed into Shade's plexed web.
Such a lot depends on how we understand the meaning of what's
a "metaphor." Some consider it as being synonimous to "simile" ( and heaven
knows often analogies are used in poetical equations and correlations). I
have the impression that Matt values the metaphorical promise that lies in
etymology and in a word's ever-expanded meanings (even if not applying the
theory about words as 'signifiers').
Sometimes I set my heart on Nabokov's intention of having a
metaphor create a third, ineffable, meaning which is only possible if it
flies independently of the its two sustaining images, as in Emily Dickinson's
verses.*
I'm almost sure Nabokov has read Samuel Beckett's
fascinating study of "Proust," where metaphors suceed each other like the
iridal foam crowning the waves (very unfashionable Kitsch to
modern ears!).
........................................................................................
* - Faith -- is the Pierless Bridge/ Supporting what We see/
Unto the Scene that We do not --/ Too slender for the eye//It bears the Soul as
bold/As it were rocked in Steel/With Arms of Steel at either side
--/