Iph
Was a larvorium and a violet:
A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret.
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leaves on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.
They took fluid from my spine when I was nine months old. My fever had climbed and polka-dotted my skin– and even though I’d been tugged at by playful death since I was born with fluid in my lungs (see note to line 140), this time they dashed me through the ICU. My family wore hazmat suits, and I sat naked on the floor (most artistically caged!). My mom, the dancer, signed the slip which said she understood I might be paralyzed or dead. I imagine that she watched my reflection doubled in the clean linoleum: the baby who’d live and the one who’s blood-black nothingness would begin to spin// A system of cells interlinked within// Cells interlinked within cells interlinked// within one stem (see note to lines 703-706). And when the spinal culture grew, unsteady and opaque, the doctors realized they’d misinterpreted (made a mistake); although the torquated breathing had slowed oxygen to my brain, it wasn’t meningitis, so we went back home. But that alternate reflection lived on too, in the way my mom averts her fierce face when I cough, or step out in the cold (see note to line 588). She lives, in Clarissa’s words, “laid out like a mist between the people she knew;” or in Borges’, “within my dark body as an invisible, intangible swarming.”
It's clear that Nabokov is interested in this kind of living duplication; the whole structure of Pale Fire is built around that fun-house-mirror-thwarted image made by misinterpretations. John Shade’s poem belongs to Kimbote –and to us– only insofar as we insert ourselves into it. Aunt Maud haunts the novel as a fictionalized Maud Bodkin, who was a real-life Jungian literary critic. She’s the ghost of a psychological way of (mis)interpreting writing; her style is best described in the image of convex glass (analysis) enclosing a lagoon (see note to lines 92-92). Hazel becomes a Dark Vanessa only in memory, and Shade resolves that Man’s life is commentary to (some) abstruse Unfinished poem (see note to lines 939-940).
In this section of Canto three alone, their are at least four palimpsests– images like pale fires, or ghosts left when something fades away: there's the claret taillight of Venus, the gesture of dismay after the last cigarette fire fades, the trail of silver slime left by a snail. Even the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, an absurd pun (the highest form of misinterpretation) on the hemorrhoid medication “Preparation H” leaves foul piles… of diarrhea. Each image exists in what Borges calls the “penumbra,” or “the active, warm secret;” they are “dreamt with minute integrity and inserted into reality.” But what is that drop which forms an ampersand? That bobolink which allows writing to continue the same way the dead live in memory? The so-called ‘question period’ at the end which makes poetry meaningful to us (see note to lines 683-687)? What sits at the splintering of Borges’ “diverse futures, which themselves also proliferate and fork?” The answer? A series of misunderstandings.
In sixth grade, my two best friends and I sat around my 1960s red-and-white fold-out creaky kitchen table picking wax off of the cold menorah. It was Mr. Feigelson’s Catcher in the Rye book club, and we were getting it all wrong. Where did the ducks go in the wintertime, I remember thinking. Who would be there to catch us if we fell? What I didn’t realize then was that Holden’s whole golden idea of being a “catcher in the rye” was based on a misremembering. The poem doesn’t go “if a body catch a body coming through the rye;” It’s “if a body meet a body…” So I was misinterpreting him and he was misremembering someone else, and we were all “phonies,” but in the pale reflection of my kitchen table, I can still see all that combinational delight… (see note to line 974) and I hold it in strongholds through the years.