Although this connection was always ready on the tip of my memory, I needed
to find this quote from Speak, Memory in another setting [“I confess I do not believe in time,” ... "I
like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one
part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment
of timelessness in a landscape selected at random — is when I stand among rare
butterflies and their food, plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is
something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into
which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of
gratitude to whom it may concern — to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or
to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."]* to consciously relate
Nabokov's magic carpet in SM to Van Veen's magicarpet described in his
"Family Chronicle."
I still seem unable to fit this carpet into Van's memoirs: is
flying a 'jikker' a reference to timelessness, to
writing down recollections, to conquer a particular "nether
world" by juggling metaphors, to gliding over the "subtle bridges"
traversed by the senses, to embibing a story or....?
A selection of quotes: "Van had resolved to
study some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant
ascendancy. Accordingly, after a conference with Demon, King Wing, the latter’s
wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands by means of a
special play of the shoulder muscles[ ] The pleasure of suddenly
discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was rather like learning
to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders
called Magicarpets (or ‘jikkers’) that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday
[ ] and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became
airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn,
a barn..."
"Neither could establish in
retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he
actually ‘de-flowered’ her[ ]Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that
day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on
the roof, or on a secluded balcony, or in the bathroom, or (not very
comfortably) on the Magic Carpet? We do not know and do not
care"
"For the sake of the scholars who will read this
forbidden memoir with a secret tingle (they are human) in the secret chasms of
libraries [ ] its author must add in the margin of galley proofs
which a bedridden old man heroically corrects (for those slippery long snakes
add the last touch to a writer’s woes) a few more [the end of the sentence
cannot be deciphered but fortunately the next paragraph is scrawled on a
separate writing-pad page. Editor’s Note]...about the rapture of her identity.
The asses who might really think that in the starlight of eternity, my, Van
Veen’s, and her, Ada Veen’s, conjunction, somewhere in North America, in the
nineteenth century represented but one trillionth of a trillionth part of a
pinpoint planet’s significance can bray ailleurs, ailleurs, ailleurs (the
English word would not supply the onomatopoeic element; old Veen is kind),
because the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality
(which is the only reality) shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which
the senses traverse — laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air — between
membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the
moment of its perception. I am weak. I write badly. I may die tonight. My magic
carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and gaping nestlings, and her rarest
orchids. Insert.".
"Ardis Hall — the Ardors
and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and
delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America —
for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles,
indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? [ ] Nothing in
world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure
joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book [
]
In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds
at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the
new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled
us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also
been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake."
..........................................................................