"Last Post"

This might not actually be my last post.
I hope to read more Nabokov over the holidays, and though fewer people may read my posts, I may still continue to blog as I go.
It will certainly prove more difficult, however, as I won't have the benefit of our community of blogs to spark ideas and assist my discoveries. I must say that I have truly benefited and reveled in the community we have formed. It seems that whenever I read a classmate's blog post, I am able to complete a dangling particle of thought that has been hanging in my mind. Even if it doesn't (in the technical sense) provide an answer, it bounces me to a new haze of understanding.

I absolutely enjoyed James' final words, and in the same spirit (though much less adeptly) I post a poem:

In the haze
Of the maze
Of the circuit board,
The bobolink trills its wild array,
And winds
Through the maze
Of the snake green ways
To pour
In us a daze,
A waver up our spine.

Updated Paper - Pallid Oval Above Darkening Roam

November 28, 2009

EDGAR ALLAN POE & VLADIMIR NABOKOV
PALLID OVAL ABOVE & DARKENING ROAM

Vladimir Nabokov and Edgar Allan Poe share a deep dark obsession. One might easily dismiss this obsession as dirty and macabre, a fixation on death, but it is far more intricate than that, for both authors are awed and overwhelmingly overcome by the strangely amorphous nuances of being and “reality”—the blurry line that wavers between those beings who reside in the world of the living, those residing in the land of the dead, and even those residing in an in-between dream world. Nabokov and Poe dispose of the traditional oppositions that divide these states of existence and smudge them together. Through hazy tales of ghosts and persons, both Nabokov and Poe mesmerize the reader.

Nabokov straightaway launches the idea of overlapping worlds with the beginning lines of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll 1-4)

Nabokov shows the being of the waxwing on two different levels of existence: the living waxwing approaching the windowpane and the smudge left behind by the waxwing’s body that flies on in the windowpane’s reflected sky. Nabokov further describes the windowpane’s reflection as “A dull dark white against the day’s pale white,” (l 15). With these words, he writes the two worlds of life and death into coexistence, dual existence, a dull dark replica of the pale white world. He enthralls the reader with wonderful words and allows him too to see the reflected world in his own window just at the point when the sun and the moon cross paths at sunset.

Poe similarly wastes no time piercing the air with notions of dual, concurrent worlds in his opening to his “Sonnet—Silence:”

There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade. (Poems and Prose 69)

Poe asserts that beings, when they die, do not simply pass out of existence, but are re-embodied in a twin existence. Describing this re-embodied stage as solid, he dismisses a conventional assumption that death deletes a person and makes it clear that this darker mirror of existence is every bit as “real” as the daylight of life and, in fact, coincides with life. Presenting the notion of the darker existence of the dead among the living, Poe captivates the reader’s curiosity and enlivens his imagination in his own present tense world.

In Pale Fire, Nabokov explores the darker existence by introducing communication between the living and the dead. Hazel makes notes of her interaction with the ghost in Paul Hentzner’s barn. Nabokov details Hazel’s notes: “If asked something that it found deliciously silly (‘Are you a will-o-the-wisp?’) it would dash to and fro in ecstatic negation, and when it wanted to give a grave answer to a grave question (‘Are you dead?’) would slowly ascend with an air of gathering altitude for a weighty affirmative drop,” (188). The connection that Hazel establishes between herself and the ghost shows the onset of Hazel’s blurred existence. Her communication with the world beyond foreshadows that she soon will fold seamlessly into that realm.

In Transparent Things, Nabokov delves deeply into the throes of the three tenses—past, present, and future. Using Baron R who is, on one hand, a dark omniscient narrative specter, and on the other, an active present tense character in the story, Nabokov successfully provides a literal folding of life upon death. He muddles the tenses of past and present pushing and tangling them into each other. Toward the end of the novel, Baron R narrates, “The room was exactly as he wanted it or had wanted it (tangled tenses again!) for her visit,” (559). Nabokov uses present tense, then awkwardly and self-consciously metamorphoses into past tense, purposefully highlighting their congruent existence. He uses this tangle to communicate between the worlds of life and death. The narrator says to Hugh, “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son,” (562). Baron R speaks encouragingly to Person as he makes this so-called “mental maneuver” between past and present, between life and death.

By terming the transition between life and death as a “mysterious mental maneuver”, Nabokov implies that it might not only be a one-way street. While he himself does not bring characters back from the dead, Poe does explore the transition between life and death in both directions. In his Ligeia, he writes, “The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead once again stirred,” (The Complete Stories 363). Poe brings Lady Ligeia back to life not only once, but several times, thereby fiercely blurring the conventionally steadfast one-way street between life and death. He horrifies the reader, incites their deepest fears, beckons them to see the thin haze that subtly hangs above life, contouring and transforming itself to allow shadows of people who once were to fly on in a replicated aether.

In The Premature Burial, Poe explicitly insists, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” (The Complete Stories 712). Poe draws no solid conclusion. The hazy dull dark white of death sits and settles in the pale white world of life with no determinate edge. Its subtle smoke pervades the white of life and passes in and between the filaments and fibers of our supposed being.

Nabokov similarly suggests that the spectral world resides in the walls, the lightbulbs, the permanent fixtures that surround us. He writes:

The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide . . .
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights . . .
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine. (Pale Fire l92)

Nabokov’s oh so soft and gentle voice prompts the reader to find the prospect of ghostlike existence in his or her surroundings somewhat desirable or even nostalgic. His dreamlike voice paints the warmly pleasant image of Shakespeare living on through the flood of bright shining lights in a town. If remnants of Shakespeare’s used-to-be mind and/or being can live on in our physical world, what, then, is our present tense “reality”? Or is our reality all just a dream?

In his poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” Poe writes, “You are not wrong who deem / That my days have been a dream,” (Poems and Prose 60). Poe admits that his life’s perception of reality has been but a dream. Even he has no hold upon it, no firm belief in its verifiable truth. He ends his poem with the question, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (Poems and Prose). He realizes that he can neither verify nor refute reality.

Reality exists in the individual mind. And yet, one bases every ounce of one’s being on one’s believed reality. The sheer possibility that one’s perception of the “real” may not, in itself, be “real” further blurs the various levels of existence. Nabokov writes:

Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that “reality” may be only a “dream.” How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! (Transparent Things 553)

Nabokov further problematizes the impossibility of understanding the idea of existence in a “real” sense. If one is not effectually real, how can one decide that one exists in an alive state? If one’s present tense self is a hallucination housed within another hallucination, one is only as real as, or possibly even less real than, the hazy ghosts that inhabit the tungsten filaments. Both Nabokov and Poe strive to blur these preconceived notions of life and death into one fluid existence; life and death must naturally be fluid if indeed life is only a hallucination of death.

In Berenice, Poe suggests this fluid existence of the soul. He writes:

But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before ¬– that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? – let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms . . . a memory like a shadow – vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist,” (The Complete Stories 130).

The vague memory of existing before lingers amorphously in the mind like a dream one cannot quite clearly recall, again implying fluidity of existence.

The world of dreams houses yet another vague and hazy state of existence that seems to lie someplace between life and death. One can enter a dreamlike state of being both in sleep and in one’s imagination. In Pale Fire, Kinbote’s radically detailed account of his fantastical version of reality acts as the primary plot of the novel. By placing it at the forefront, Nabokov sets up the reader to mistake Kinbote’s fictitious version of reality as real. Without careful attention to detail, the reader easily finds himself lost. Nabokov illustrates the operation of Kinbote’s imagination alongside of the “real” world by writing Jack Grey into several states of existence throughout Pale Fire. Jack Grey re-embodies in the shade of Jacques D’Argus, and gradually in the degree of Gradus. Kinbote’s imagination provides a dreamland in which his reality operates alongside of those who are more mentally grounded.

Poe’s “Dream-Land” operates in the realm of sleep rather than in that of the imagination. Detailing the journey of a dream traveler in his poem “Dream-Land,” Poe writes:

There the traveler meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven. (Poems and Prose 58)

Again Poe explores the interaction between states of existence, the dreamer meeting shadows of death along his way through a dreamland. Taking the perspective of the dreamer, Poe delves into an ostensible bridge between life and death. After all, the origin of both Poe and Nabokov’s obsession with life and death seems to have originated from the dream as well as from dream-like states of mind (i.e. epilepsy, hypnosis, insanity.)

Nabokov himself vigorously dislikes the prospects of falling asleep. In Speak, Memory, he admits that he must sleep to maintain a spry brain, but that he “simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” He elaborates, “No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus [the Roman god of sleep,] that black-masked headsman binding me to the block.” Referring to his childhood, he goes on to say that a “vertical line of lambency [seen from an adjacent bedroom] (which a child’s tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle,” (108-9). Nabokov absolutely hated and feared any sort of loss of or separation from his consciousness. Calling sleep the death struggle, he reveals his opinion that sleep is the halfway stage of death. He was revolted by the prospect of going into a death-like state, parting with the unstable reality over which he obsessed.

Similarly, Poe too seems to have loathed falling asleep. Though the source is unclear, Poe is credited to have written, “Sleep, those little slivers of death; Oh! how I loathe them.” In The Premature Burial, he writes on a similar subject, “Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank, little by little, into a condition of semi-syncope, or half swoon . . . Then, for weeks, all was void, and black, and silent, and Nothing became the universe . . . Just as the day dawns . . – just so tardily – just so wearily – just so cheerily came back the light of the Soul to me,” (The Complete Stories 719). Poe goes on to explain that although the swoon itself is painless and he eventually does awake, it causes terrible mental distress. Certainly sleep and lack of consciousness seem to bring one’s physical body closest to the verge of death.

In Mesmeric Revelation, Mr. Vankirk dies upon being woken from hypnosis. Poe writes, “I observed on [Vankirk’s] countenance a singular expression, which somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired,” (The Complete Stories 711). The irridule smile that strangely overcomes Vankirk’s face seems extraordinarily light and angelic for a moment of death. He seems to pass away into the realm of the angels of which he was discussing during his hypnosis. Poe uses the in-between world of dream as a bridge through which to pass into the realm of the dead.
Both Poe and Nabokov seem to build off of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the question of being. Hamlet speaks:

To be, or not to be,—that is the question; . . .
To die;—to sleep;—
To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. (Shakespeare ll 56, 64-68)

Hamlet here addresses the three states of being which so greatly puzzle and transfix Poe and Nabokov. Being. Death. Dreams. Hamlet also mentions “the dread of something after death . . . [the] conscience does make cowards of us all, (ll 78, 83). Hamlet faces the same dilemma that Poe and Nabokov constantly attempt to uncover in their writing. The elusive notion of being tickles the senses with a semblance of understanding but refuses to solidify itself in a concrete form.

As if suggesting some sort of solution to this mess of a conundrum, Nabokov proposes a note from a philosophical patient in one of Person’s mental hospitals. He writes, “It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being,” (Transparent Things 554).

The riddle of Being surely became an unhealthy obsession for both Poe and Nabokov. This intense fixation, however, brought life to mesmeric stories and concepts that enamor, enchant, and hypnotize. Nabokov enchants with his language that travels between the tenses of life, death, and dream. Poe charms with his sometimes horrific but insightful tales. Both authors live in a maddening world of literary lunacy, seeking to solve the smudges of existence and being.



Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak Memory. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: The Library of America, 1996.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poe: Poems and Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Philadelphia: Horace Howard Furness, 1905.

PALLID OVAL ABOVE & DARKENING ROAM

EDGAR ALLAN POE & VLADIMIR NABOKOV
PALLID OVAL ABOVE & DARKENING ROAM

Vladimir Nabokov and Edgar Allan Poe share a deep dark obsession. One might easily dismiss this obsession as dirty and macabre, a fixation on death, but it is far more intricate than that, for both authors are awed and overwhelmingly overcome by the strangely amorphous nuances of being and “reality”—the blurry line that wavers between those beings who reside in the world of the living, those residing in the land of the dead, and even those residing in an in-between dream world. Nabokov and Poe dispose of the traditional oppositions that divide these states of existence and smudge them together. Through hazy tales of ghosts and persons, both Nabokov and Poe mesmerize the reader.

Nabokov straightaway launches the idea of overlapping worlds with the beginning lines of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll 1-4)

Nabokov shows the being of the waxwing on two different levels of existence: the living waxwing approaching the windowpane and the smudge left behind by the waxwing’s body that flies on in the windowpane’s reflected sky. Nabokov further describes the windowpane’s reflection as “A dull dark white against the day’s pale white,” (l 15). With these words, he writes the two worlds of life and death into coexistence, dual existence, a dull dark replica of the pale white world. He enthralls the reader with wonderful words and allows him too to see the reflected world in his own window just the point when the sun and the moon cross paths at sunset.

Poe similarly wastes no time piercing the air with notions of dual, concurrent worlds in his opening to his “Sonnet—Silence:”

There are some qualities—some incorporate things,

That have a double life, which thus is made

A type of twin entity which springs

From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade. (Poems and Prose 69)

Poe asserts that beings, when they die, do not simply pass out of existence, but are re-embodied in a twin existence. Describing this re-embodied stage as solid, he dismisses a conventional assumption that death deletes a person and makes it clear that this darker mirror of existence is every bit as “real” as the daylight of life and, in fact, coincides with life. Presenting the notion of the darker existence of the dead among the living, Poe captivates the reader’s curiosity and enlivens his imagination in his own present tense world.

In Pale Fire, Nabokov explores the darker existence by introducing communication between the living and the dead. Hazel makes notes of her interaction with the ghost in Paul Hentzner’s barn. Nabokov details Hazel’s notes: “If asked something that it found deliciously silly (“Are you a will-o-the-wisp?”) it would dash to and fro in ecstatic negation, and when it wanted to give a grave answer to a grave question (“Are you dead?”) would slowly ascend with an air of gathering altitude for a weighty affirmative drop,” (Nabokov, Pale Fire 188). The connection that Hazel establishes between herself and the ghost shows the onset of Hazel’s blurred existence. Her communication with the world beyond foreshadows that she soon will fold seamlessly into that realm.

In Transparent Things, Nabokov delves deeply into the throes of the three tenses—past, present, and future. Using Baron R who is, on one hand, a dark omniscient narrative specter, and on the other, an active present tense character in the story, Nabokov successfully provides a literal folding of life upon death. He muddles the tenses of past and present bringing them into one another. Toward the end of the novel, Baron R narrates, “The room was exactly as he wanted it or had wanted it (tangled tenses again!) for her visit,” (559). Nabokov uses present tense then awkwardly reverts to past tense, purposefully highlighting their congruent existence. Nabokov ends the novel with a communication between worlds. The narrator says to Hugh, “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son,” (562). In these last words, Baron R speaks encouragingly to Person as he makes this so-called “mental maneuver” between life and death.

By terming the transition between life and death as a “mysterious mental maneuver”, Nabokov implies that it might not only be a one-way street. While Nabokov, himself, does not bring characters back from the dead, Poe explores the transition between life and death in both directions. In his Ligeia, he writes, “The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead once again stirred,” (The Complete Stories 363). Poe brings Lady Ligeia back to life not only once, but several times, thereby fiercely blurring the conventionally steadfast one-way street between life and death. Like Ligeia, many of Poe’s stories horrify the reader, incite fears, beckon them to see the thin haze that subtly hangs above life, contouring and transforming itself to allow shadows of people who once were to fly on in a replicated aether.

In The Premature Burial, Poe explicitly insists, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” (The Complete Stories 712). For Poe, there is no solid conclusion. The hazy dull dark white that sits and settles in the pale white world of life has no determinate edge, but rather, pervades the white of the world with subtle smoke that passes in and between the filaments and fibers of our supposed being.

Nabokov suggests similarly that the spectral world resides in the walls, the lightbulbs, the permanent fixtures that surround us. He writes:

The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—

In tungsten filaments abide . . .

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole

Town with innumerable lights . . .

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe

Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine

(So brightly beaming through a tree

So green) is an old friend of mine. (Pale Fire l92)

Nabokov speaks softly of the dead. Regarding them as gentle, he prompts the reader to find the prospect of ghostlike existence in one’s surroundings somewhat desirable or even nostalgic. The dreamlike image Nabokov provides of Shakespeare living on through the flood of bright shining lights in a town strike one as warmly pleasant. This warm pleasance and dreamy quality, however, prompts the reader to scrutinize reality.

If ghosts and spirits pervade the lights and streetlamps, wherein does one’s own perception of “reality” lie? In his poem “A Dream Within a Dream” Poe writes, “You are not wrong who deem / That my days have been a dream,” (Poems and Prose 60). Poe admits that his life’s perception of reality has been but a dream. Even he has no hold upon it or firm belief in its verifiable truth. Poe ends the poem with the question, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (Poems and Prose). Admitting here that he cannot verify reality, Poe also realizes that he cannot refute it.

Reality exists in the individual mind. And yet, one bases every ounce of one’s being on his or her believed reality. The sheer possibility that one’s perception of the “real” may not, in itself, be “real” further blurs the various levels of existence. Nabokov writes:

Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that “reality” may be only a “dream.” How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! (Transparent Things 553)

Nabokov further problematizes the impossibility of understanding the idea of existence in a “real” sense. If one is not effectually real, how can one decide that one exists in an alive state? If one’s present tense self is a hallucination housed within another hallucination, one is only as real as, or possibly even less real than, the hazy ghosts that inhabit the tungsten filaments. Both Nabokov and Poe strive to blur these preconceived notions of life and death into one fluid existence; life and death must naturally be fluid if indeed life is only a hallucination of death.

In Berenice, Poe also suggests this fluid existence of the soul. He writes:

But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before ­– that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? – let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms . . . a memory like a shadow – vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist,” (The Complete Stories 130).

The vague memory of existing before lingers amorphously in the mind like a dream one cannot quite clearly recall, again implying fluidity of existence.

The world of dreams houses yet another vague and hazy state of existence. One can enter a dreamlike state of being both in sleep and in one’s imagination. In Pale Fire, Kinbote’s radically detailed account of his fantastical version of reality acts as the primary plot of the novel. By placing it at the forefront, Nabokov sets up the reader to mistake Kinbote’s fictitious version of reality as real. Without careful attention to detail, the reader easily finds himself lost. Nabokov illustrates the operation of Kinbote’s imagination alongside of the “real” world by writing Jack Grey into several states of existence throughout Pale Fire. Jack Grey re-embodies in the shade of Jacques D’Argus, and gradually in the degree of Gradus. Kinbote’s imagination provides a dreamland in which his reality operates alongside of those who are more mentally grounded.

Poe’s “Dream-Land” operates in the realm of sleep rather than in that of the imagination. Detailing the journey of a dream traveler in his poem “Dream-Land,” Poe writes:

There the traveler meets, aghast,

Sheeted Memories of the Past—

Shrouded forms that start and sigh

As they pass the wanderer by—

White-robed forms of friends long given,

In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven. (Poems and Prose 58)

Again Poe explores the interaction between states of existence, the dreamer meeting shadows of death along his way through a dreamland. Taking the perspective of the dreamer, Poe delves into an ostensible bridge between life and death. After all, the origin of both Poe and Nabokov’s obsession with life and death seems to have originated from the dream as well as from dream-like states of mind (i.e. epilepsy, hypnosis, insanity.)
Nabokov himself vigorously dislikes the prospects of falling asleep. In Speak, Memory, he admits that he must sleep to maintain a spry brain, but that he “simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” He elaborates, “No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus [the Roman god of sleep,] that black-masked headsman binding me to the block.” Referring to his childhood, he goes on to say that a “vertical line of lambency [seen from an adjacent bedroom] (which a child’s tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle,” (108-9). Nabokov absolutely hated and feared any sort of loss of or separation from his consciousness. Calling sleep the death struggle, he reveals his opinion that sleep is the halfway stage of death. He was revolted by the prospect of going into a death-like state, parting with the unstable reality over which he obsessed.

Similarly, Poe too seems to have loathed falling asleep. Though the source is unclear, Poe is credited to have written, “Sleep, those little slivers of death; Oh! how I loathe them.” In The Premature Burial, he writes on a similar subject, “Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank, little by little, into a condition of semi-syncope, or half swoon . . . Then, for weeks, all was void, and black, and silent, and Nothing became the universe . . . Just as the day dawns . . – just so tardily – just so wearily – just so cheerily came back the light of the Soul to me,” (The Complete Stories 719). Poe goes on to explain that although the swoon itself is painless and he eventually does awake, it causes terrible mental distress. Certainly sleep and lack of consciousness seem to bring one’s physical body closest to the verge of death.

In Mesmeric Revelation, Mr. Vankirk dies upon being woken from hypnosis. Poe writes, “I observed on [Vankirk’s] countenance a singular expression, which somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired,” (The Complete Stories 711). The irridule smile that strangely overcomes Vankirk’s face seems extraordinarily light and angelic for a moment of death. He seems to pass away into the realm of the angels of which he was discussing during his hypnosis. Poe uses the in-between world of dream as a bridge through which to pass into the realm of the dead.

Both Poe and Nabokov seem to build off of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the question of being. Hamlet speaks:

To be, or not to be,—that is the question; . . .

To die;—to sleep;—

To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. (Shakespeare ll 56, 64-68)

Hamlet here addresses the three states of being which so greatly puzzle and transfix Poe and Nabokov. Being. Death. Dreams. Hamlet also mentions “the dread of something after death . . . [the] conscience does make cowards of us all, (ll 78, 83). Hamlet faces the same dilemma that Poe and Nabokov constantly attempt to uncover in their writing. The elusive concept of being tickles the senses with a semblance of understanding but refuses to solidify itself in a concrete form.

As if suggesting some sort of solution to this mess of a conundrum, Nabokov proposes a note from a philosophical patient in one of Person’s mental hospitals. He writes, “It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being,” (Transparent Things 554).

The riddle of Being surely became an unhealthy obsession for both Poe and Nabokov. This intense fixation, however, brought life to mesmeric stories and concepts that enamor, enchant, and hypnotize readers to this day. Nabokov enchants readers with this language that travels between the tenses of life, death, and dream. Poe charms readers with his sometimes horrific but insightful tales. The world of these authors’ literature forms a game in which the reader must search for his or her own “reality” within their work.

Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: The Library of America, 1996.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poe: Poems and Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Philadelphia: Horace Howard Furness, 1905.

The Tralatitious Hand

I believe the narrator in chapter twenty-four to be a ghost. After Sam's blog cued me into the definition of tralatitious, I realized that the narrator in this particular chapter must not be in the human form.
He writes, "Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links . . ." (553).
As Sam found, tralatitious means figurative or metaphorical, not literal, implying a hand that is not in the flesh.

Julia Moore, Giulia Romeo

Moore is Romeo in an anagram.
Giulia Romeo is Julia Moore.

Julia is also referred to as Juliet (553).
Romeo and Juliet.
Mr. Romeo (Hugh) kills Juliet (Julia, Armande?)

You

I feel that Nabokov is talking to me, ever since he introduced Armand's inabilty to pronounce H. In her world, Hugh becomes you. So then, when I read with Armand's accent, it sounds as though Nabokov is saying "You, person," and I feel like he's directly addressing me, talking to me.

Nacre

I'm reading the Bolt from the Blue article, and Mary McCarthy points out that the anagram of Cedarn is nacred. I noticed nacre in Lolita (simply because I had to look it up in the dictionary,) and now here it is hidden in Pale Fire. It is also explicitly in Pale Fire (the poem, I believe.)

Yes, Nabokov writes:

I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (line 634ish)

---------
Nacreous gleams. mother of pearl. irridule. irridescent.
GHOSTS.

Supposedly, Poe is also the Tahitian word for pearl, so I googled "Edgar Allen Poe Nacre" and I actually found Brittini's blog site from American Literature in 2005. Funny!

Daniel Zalewski for NY Times Books

Book Review on Brian Boyd's Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery.
I really enjoy the way this review summarizes Boyd's opinion that Pale Fire is a ghost story. Zalewski's review is extremely interesting for anyone interested in Nabokov's obsession with the afterlife.

Zalewski writes, "Vera Nabokov went so far as to declare the afterlife to be her husband's 'main theme.'"

Boyd makes the interesting argument that Hazel becomes the Vanessa Atalanta butterfly after her death. He thinks that her pada ata message is the clue to the reader that this is the case. Boyd also thinks that this is the reason for the explicit focus of the admiral butterfly on John Shade's sleeve directly before his death. I think I'd like to re-read Pale Fire looking for remnants of Hazel as a ghost in the story. (Possibly a new term paper idea . . . better than the last.)

Atalanta Atalanta

Today our group met in the library, and we all realized that we still didn't really know what the message was that Hazel leaves us with.

pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told

I think the solution that Chris blogged from David Galef's Letter to the Editor (found on the Zembla site or NY Times Books) is really interesting, but it still confused me, so I created another possible solution. It's an anagram, rather than done using homophones.

Atalanta Atalanta.
Golden apple.
Far her tal tale told.
Down art ardor fount.

Still somewhat confusing, but I like it.

Shakespeare cont. & Term Paper Ideas

Regarding Shakespeare, I also wanted to give you the following passage from Romeo and Juliet:

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death: O, how may I
Call this a lightning?--O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there." (5.3.88-96)

All I can say is (Picnic, Lighting.) A merry time before death.
-------------------

Regarding my final paper, I think would like to investigate the sixth episode of Joyce's Ulysses in relation to Pale Fire.

I suppose the title could be, "The Man With the Trilby."
The thesis I have not decided yet, as I have not yet read Episode 6.

OR I might instead write my paper solely on lilac lane and lightning death.
A reading of "Madame Margot: A Grotesque Legend of Old Charleston" by John Bennett would be in order for this paper.
My thesis will investigate why death comes with lightning and lilac lanes.

Shakespeare

Last night when I was going to sleep, I was thinking about the four sisters I took care of when I was living in Los Angeles two years ago. Sophia, Lilliya, Violet, and Lola (the latter two being twins.)

I was closest with Lilliya (who was seven at the time) and she painted me this painting:


One day I helped Lilliya memorize some Shakespeare for a day-program she was in that summer. Her piece was that of the Fairy from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I actually have the recording of her final performance somewhere at home. I should dig it out; it's absolutely Beautiful!

So anyhow I was thinking about her last night and I started saying her little monologue in my head. I realized that Nabokov stole from this too for his "pale fire."

It goes:

Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through flood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:
Our queen and all our elves come here anon. (2.1.2-17)
--------
To me, this is about the little fairy who flies everywhere and even between the two worlds of shade and sun. She flies "swifter than the moon's sphere." She paints the dewdrops in the cowslips and the spots in the gold coats of the flower. She leaves these "fairy favours" from the world of the shade for the world of the sun to discover the next morning. She is the relayer of messages between the worlds.




The other day when Dr. Minton introduced Shakespeare into our pale fire world, I realized how incredibly vast Nabokov is just in general. He expertly jumps around from Joyce to Shakespeare, from Poe to Pope. Dr. Minton noted Kinbote's commentary to lines 671-672 on page 240. Kinbote writes, "Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick."

Now after rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream last night in my mind, I realize that Nabokov's casual brush off of these two works was on purpose. I believe that the fairy's monologue above is the passage he wants you to find in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that the following passage below is that which he desires you to find in Romeo and Juliet.

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!--
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she." (2.2.2-6)

In this passage, the moon is the pale fire of Juliet, the sun. interesting?
I'm not sure how exactly this all ties in with Hazel, the shades, pale fires, pale light flitting around the walls in the barn, the message, the communication between the world of the living and the dead, the world of the shades and the world of the sun. Sun is growth and vibrance. Shade is the absence of sun. And the moon is the pale reflection of the fire of the sun (sometimes put into shade by the meddling shadow of the earth.)

Also, Kinbote mentions in the same note on 240, "perhaps, the Sonnets." I googled and found a sonnet from As You Like It. I am not familiar with this particular work of Shakespeare's, but I have before heard the sonnet. Here it is:

"Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love;
And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I'll character;
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness'd every where.
Run, run, Orlando: carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she." (3.2.1-10)

Again the pale sphere of the moon.

Is pale fire just love? Or is it a love that can never be fully realized? Is it a pale fire of the love between two that was possible?
Like I said I'm not as familiar with As You Like It, but Romeo and Juliet's love was only pale and never full or entirely fulfilled except in their deaths. Is John Shade's love also a pale fire as he never got to love his daughter through the fullness of her childhood? Is it the love that hangs between worlds, the residue of love that hangs behind? Maybe I've taken this too far.

John Shade (not fat enough)

Shade = Hades

I find it very interesting to note that if one removes the S in Shade and tacks it on to the end of the name, one ends up with Hades.

Hades, Grecian god and king of the underworld.

In the image below, Hades abducts Demeter's daughter Persephone.
Sculpture by Bernini. I believe the sculpture is called "The Rape of Proserpina" as Bernini was Italian.

6 Reasons I Deplore Charles Kinbote

1. He misspells and misquotes.
2. He speaks of himself in both first and third person.
3. He stalks and spies.
4. He dislikes cats.
5. He breaks Disa's heart.
6. He lives vicariously through John Shade.

Bombycilla cedrorum

I didn't notice the masked eyes painted on the waxwing's face until Dr. Sexton mentioned it in class last week. Rather, I was primarily taken by the waxwing's crown as well as it's tail as it appears to have been dipped in a bucket of yellow paint. They also appear to absolutely love berries.

My Favorite Short Paper by Emma Sily

Because I could not set one above the other, and because I have been requested to select only one short paper, I must inform you that my favorite from the selection of pieces that I read was written by the wise young author in our class Emma Sily. She wrote her paper on waterproof mirrors.
I like her paper because glass and mirrors operate like the reflecting reflections in the waters of Hourglass Lake while the word Waterproof echoes in your mind. The lake is the mirror.
On a more serious and coherent note, I love that Waterproof implies "something airtight and sealed." Mirrors create a double. These two things compose the heart of the story of Lolita because the mystery is impeccably woven and reversed in words and allusions in a way that only the most careful reader can solve.

The Blue Hotel (short paper)

While I did see the streaks of red riddled through Lolita, I saw equal streaks of blue. Typically I might consider themes of color in literature as semi-interesting or semi-significant. However, in dealing with Nabokov and his gift of a disease, I consider color highly important and the ultimate opposite of an accident. In Lolita, red alludes to everything Quilty, everything unhappy; blue to everything happy, everything Lolita.
Humbert Humbert’s first spotting of Lolita sends a thrill of blue through his body. He explains, “ . . . and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (39). There she was. Lolita. The blue sea-wave knocks his heart so far off balance that the only words Humbert Humbert manages to sputter are: “Yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (40). He is talking about lilies, and yet he is talking about Lo. He is beyond elated and on the near brink of speechlessness. His heart is washed over by blue, and Humbert Humbert is happy.
Lolita wears blue jeans often. I realize that jeans are common casual wear and that they are normally blue in color, but Humbert Humbert assigns Lolita’s jeans a blue with a very different feeling. He writes about the time when “she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened,” (92). In this scene, the blue smells sweet and worldly, of a land he has invented. Again, Humbert Humbert is happy.
When on the brink of finally seducing his sweet Lo, Humbert Humbert brandishes his purpills (Papa’s Purple Pills.) Nabokov creates a great alliteration with purple, but then goes on to show their blue side as well. Upon acquiring the pills, Humbert Humbert says, “Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green,” (95). Later in the story when Lolita eyes the pills, she exclaims, “Blue! Violet blue. What are they made of?” Humbert Humbert replies, “Summer skies and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors,” (122). Such a beautiful pill! When the world is blue for Humbert Humbert, all is well.
After the acquisition of the purpills, Humbert Humbert and Lo finally reach the Enchanted Hunters Hotel and come upon a cocker spaniel. When Lolita sinks down to pet the dog, it becomes “a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet,” (117). Humbert Humbert writes in beautiful blue language whenever Lolita is near and safe. Conversely, when he has lost his “Lo! Lola! Lolita!,” he comes upon her playing with Quilty’s cocker spaniel. Describing what he sees, Humbert Humbert writes, “There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball,” (236). The red language of the ball is fierce and dry, unhappy when juxtaposed with the smooth floaty blue language.
In his French ballad for Rita, Humbert Humbert sings of the Enchanted Hunters as “the blue hotel.” Rita asks him, “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” (263). It is blue because the first wave that Lolita swells in Humbert Humbert's heart is blue; it is blue because Humbert Humbert’s heart is a “blue block of ice” without Lolita (268). Everything Lolita is blue.

Names

Anna
Annabel
Annalee
Annabel Leigh
Anna Liffey
Anna Livia
Anna Livia Plurabelle
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
Humphrey
Humbert
Humbert Humbert
Humbly Dumbly
Dumbly Dolly
Dolly
Dolores
Lolita
Lo
LoLeeTa
LOLITA

My Discovery

I do not profess to have read the whole of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. However, I have been lightly paging through it and, in this manner, happened upon my discovery.

On pages 226 and 227 of Finnegans Wake, I found the following:

"...she'll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee's clothes so you can't see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve's now wearing she'll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline's to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble."

Though I cannot directly relate the above to a passage in Lolita, I feel that this may be where Nabokov found interest in the word and concept of Dolly. Clare. Rue rue rue (cue cue cue.)

Further down the page:

"So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may, for they are an angel's garland."

"Catchmire stockings, libertyed garters, shoddyshoes, quicked out with selver . . . And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they lookk so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious light. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout."

"Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they're all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I' th' view o' th'avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly."

"He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don't know whose hue."

I noticed the RAYNBOW and thought of the day in Lolita when HH and Lo attended a summer theatre production in Wace where the gauze-draped pubescent girls danced as a rainbow. I reread Nabokov's scene finding it to entirely echo Joyce's.

Here is Nabokov's scene found on pages 220 and 221 of Lolita:

"I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed--seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that . . . were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely--Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector."

Oddly enough, it took me several readings of this short passage to notice the fact that Nabokov entirely admits lifting this passage from James Joyce via his anagrammatical name Vivian Darkbloom.
Bloomdark.
Bloodmark.

Also on page 227 of Finnegans Wake:

"He dove his head into Wat Murrey, gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus, wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gillie Beg, wiped all his sinses, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome, excremuncted as freely as any frothblower into MacIsaac, had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing and, childhood's age being aya the shameleast . . ."

The only reason I note this passage is Joyce's invention of MacFearsome, dreadfully similar to McFate.

Christopher Kane

Every now and then I peruse Style.com. I found it comical that the very first featured article tonight began, "Pretty yet perverted, innocent yet disturbing..." I was stunned. I thought of Lolita, and Lo and behold, it was. Unfortunately, Kane sites the movie (rather than the novel) as his inspiration.
If your curious, check out Kane's interpretation of Lolita in fashion.

Christopher Kane Review
Complete Collection
Details

Humbert Humbert

Curious to know the exact definition of the brown color that Nabokov assigns to Humbert's name, I looked up umber in the dictionary. The first entry reads, "a natural pigment resembling but darker than ocher, normally dark yellowish-brown in color (raw umber) or dark brown when roasted (burnt umber). The second entry reads, "a brownish-gray moth with coloring that resembles tree bark." Lepidoptera. I only should have expected this.

H=drab shoelace brown.
UMBER=moth.
T=pistachio green.
Umber sandwiched by the colors of birth and death.

So here is the Umber Moth (a drab shoelace brown).


And here is the Umber Moth caterpillar (arching it's back in search of prey on a pistachio green leaf).

To Amanda:

I found an interesting abstract for an article on Nabokov suggesting strong evidence that he, himself, was molested at a young age by his uncle. The abstract also mentions that, in later years, Nabokov may have become a pedophile who unleashed his thoughts onto the page. The writer of the abstract sites pedophilia as a behavioral defense to oedipal anxiety. (Unfortunately I cannot access the entire article, but follow the link below to read the very brief abstract.)

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=paq.064.0203b

sorry it's not a hyperlink. i can't get the hyperlink to work.

My Family Photo

Whitefish Lake Family Photograph

Though I painted a sadly superficial smile on my face for the black point-and-shoot Olympus camera timer as my dad jogged down the dock to join my mom, Heather, my sister, Lauren, and I, I was unbelievably upset to be required in this photograph. Having had a terrible morning, I just wanted to mope around in the moist grass and read my mystery novel. I had checked out ten mystery novels from the Livingston Library for each of the ten days my family was lake lounging up in the northern part of Montana. I remember that the librarian behind the desk with her short gray bob had laughed lightly. I remember my obsession with this woman's hair. I cannot remember what the pin on her blouse said under the all-caps LIBRARIAN, or what I called her, but I used to visit her every two weeks when my books were due. While she would scan the barcodes of my newly selected books with her red-light pen, I watched the perfection of the silver strings that hung around her face reflecting sunlight, and I felt obligated to count every single strand.

Back to the photograph...
My dad, just barely crouched down behind me in time for the flash flash flash of the camera warning the onset of the shutter, is smiling, pleased to have wrangled me down to the end of the dock to appease my mom's desire for a family photograph. My sister holds her chin in her palm in almost the same manner as me. Hers however displays her face a bit more. I remember attempting to cover my face to mask my displeasure. Later my dad apologized to me for forcing me to be in the photograph.

You may have noticed my sister's shortly cropped hair and her lack of a top or female bathing suit for that matter. Lauren spent several years of her childhood in this manner until she couldn't get away with it anymore. She was the most radical tomboy I knew. She howled at dresses and relished romping with boys. On the day that we were flower girls for a wedding she kindly informed my mom that she would not wear a dress again until the day she was married.

My swimsuit in the photo is, however, a full one-piece. The material had the pattern of red, orange, pink, and purple flames. The fabric of the red flames were more dense than that of the orange flames, the orange fabric more dense than the pink, the pink more than the purple. The varying densities of the fabrics caused exciting tan lines on my torso. I loved being painted by flames every summer. I hated the day that I no longer fit into that swimsuit.

My mom bought her black two-piece swimsuit at Bob Wards before they moved out to 19th. She was self conscious of her body, worried about how her stomach hung out over the bottoms (comical to me now, knowing that she had been a professional ballerina at the Portland Ballet Company for eight years). She is quite thin in the photo.

My dad still owns the black trunks he is sporting in the photo. I believe he purchased both his necklace and sunglasses while on a trip to Colorado with his buddies. He has one arm on each of us. His left arm rests on Lauren, the younger by two years.

Note the tilt of the horizon. The water is not completely calm. The sun is high, and the towels are from New Mexico. My hair is likely more than ten times as long as Lauren's.

Commonplace Book of Claws (Speak, Memory)

"Legend and logic, a rare but strong partnership." (62)

"My mother was at her bedside, and Aunt Pasha's last words were: 'That's interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo-voda.'" (68)

"I remember him as a slender, neat little man with a dusky complexion, gray-green eyes flecked with rust, a dark, bushy mustache, and a mobile Adam's apple bobbing conspicuously above the opal and gold snake ring that held the knot of his tie. He also wore opals on his fingers and in his cuff links. A gold chainlet encircled his frail hairy wrist, and there was usually a carnation in the buttonhole of his dove-gray, mouse-gray or silver-gray summer suit." (69)

"That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." (77)

"My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar -Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts-'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan,' 'Sam is in bed,' and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ-for the initial lessions, at least- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician's chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me." (79-80)

". . . words are meant to mean what they mean." (81)

My weekend in details

This weekend I attended 4 weddings. I spent 9 hours in the car. I spent 25.5 hours with my face smashed into the back of my camera.

The brides' names were Catherine, Cali, Stephanie, and Angie (in that order). Their maiden names were Lemoine, Frankovic, Johnson, and Quesenberry respectively. Currently their names are Catherine Luth, Cali Sparing, Stephanie Turner, and Angela Conlan. CLCSSTAC.

Catherine was a blonde lawyer from Nebraska with an accent. Cali was a beautiful, red-headed Wyoming girl. Stephanie was the long-legged brunette who towered at least six inches over her husband (without pumps). Angela was the Nabokovian bride.

My first memory

I had been in my car-seat for hours and hours that dragged on to the kindly rhythmic noises of our old Scout on the highway. My mom sat directly in front of me in the passenger seat; I remember watching her curls move as we grumbled along. My dad drove. I'm not sure exactly how old I was, but definitely somewhere between the ages of 1 and 2. The reason I know at least this is that my sister was in mom's tummy at the time. We, my sister and I, are a week and a half apart - both pisces.

The sky outside my window consumed us in blackness and yet I watched and waited. I don't remember seeing any stars, just one solitary porch light as the Scout finally came to a stop outside my grandma's house in the City of Fountains. I remember feeling heavy in my car-seat, my face pressed against the strangely comfortable blue fabric whose nap ran determinately in one direction. My dad opened his door to hop out and the sticky air seeped into my lungs. I drifted deeper into my car-seat and fell asleep.

That's all I can remember. Though I don't know why, this has always been a very vivid memory for me. I do question it's actuality when I consider that we aren't supposed to be able to form long term memories until the age of 5 or 6. It seems too real to have been pieced together, but memory is strange like this.

If you imagine yourself to be swimming, close your eyes and imagine the activity in your mind, your brain reacts exactly as if you were truly swimming. Having such strength, our imaginations and experiences really paint our memories as we wish them to be painted. I find it wild to consider this and reality.

I found a blog posting entitled "A part(ment)" by Stephen Dinehart regarding reality that is really interesting:

"What is reality but a series of unfolding narratives occurring in a polyrythmic order over time? An infinite amount of stories exist at any given moment, some are starting, ending, just reaching climax, others still not even a dream. What if you were to take reality and cut a cross section of it? What would it look like?

I believe our present perception of being is actually a wave moving up the hyperstring which is our four-dimensional being. We live in a brane world, as in a membrane moving through the bulk of time.

A part(ment) is a exploration into the moment. The positions of various membranes frozen in the bulk of time will be examined."