Matt Roth: In Canto Two, Shade
describes his "little scissors" (183) as a "synthesis of sun and star." I
have never understood this image. I've looked at my own nail scissors in an
attempt to see what Shade was seeing, alas to no avail. Help!
It seems that Matt's query of several years ago
was never answered. Meanwhile, the answer is simple. Any Russian
child knows the riddle: Dva kontsa, dva kol'tsa, poseredine gvozdik
("Two ends, two rings, a tack in the middle"). What that is? A pair of
scissors. Shade seems to compare the scissors's gvozdik
(the small nail, or "tack") to a star and one of the two handle rings
to the sun (the other handle ring would be then a parhelion). At least, I
am at loss to see how a pair of scissors could incorporate the sun and a
star in any other way.*
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Don Johnson comment: Aleksei's observation is astute but would seem
to imply that Shade knows Russian,
no?