Come, let's fall down the rabbit hole.

My longest most inter-related blog post yet.

OK.

This afternoon at approximately two o'clock I started my exploration on page 40 of Lolita. My attention was caught by a particular sentence near the bottom of the page.

“May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas.”

The proceeding paragraphs are a parody by Nabokov on the literary devise of a diary, or introverted method of writing, which Alfred Appel points out in the annotations. (see page 356 for quotes from speak, memory about Nabokov's thoughts on “self-analysis” and “carefully created 'honesty'”) The sentence I noted above is another addition to the parody of this devise. Humbert Humbert tries to gain a certain amount of “authenticity” by recalling to his memory the smallest of details as they were in his little black book. He fails at this(produced by the “Blank Blank Co. Blankton, Mass.”), but continues with his mask of “honesty.” Humbert acts as if he even remembers the holidays, as if they had been printed in his black diary.

Of course, the reader will not be too surprised to find that this holiday is reported inaccurately. Humbert Humbert's memory is not what he thinks it is. BUT WAIT! Did Nabokov pick this holiday out on purpose? Possibly.

Fast Day in New Hampshire has had an interesting history. Basically, the president of the council for the Province of New Hampshire fell ill. It was thought by the council that the illness of their president and a recent sighting of a comet were signs of “divine displeasure” and they decided to enact a day of prayer and fasting, to apparently regain the pleasure of the divine and save their leader. Their plan failed. A month later in 1681, John Cutt died, but the holiday lived on. As time progressed, the holiday of public prayer and fasting lost its meaning to the colonists and began to be abolished by the individual state governments. In 1894 Massachusetts changed the holiday to Patriot's Day. Maine did the same. There was a push by the current governor of New Hampshire to abolish Fast Day as well, however the legislature thought differently and made it an official holiday in 1899. The exact day was to be determined each year by the governor, though it was customary for it to occur on the last Thursday of April. (full history HERE )

Does anyone want to guess the name of the governor who pushed to abolish this law that surely Humbert the Sinful needs more than anyone? Anyone? It was George A. Ramsdell. Hmm... interesting.

Of course I had to look that up. It was just so close to the imaginary town Ramsdale that is located somewhere in New England. Is was not surprising to find that the surnames Ramsdell and Ramsdale were closely related. The come from the same origin which just so happened to be Hampshire, England. There was actually a town in Hampshire that went (in the late 1800s) by two names both Ramsdale and, of course, Ramsdell.

I went to Wikipedia for a bit more info on Hampshire. What did I find in the second paragraph? It just so happens that two famous writers are from Hampshire. Who could they be? They are, of course, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

It also just so happens that these were the two authors that Nabokov lectured on in his 'European Fiction' class at Cornell. These were the authors that his friend Edmund Wilson suggested after Nabokov requested his opinion. That info found Here. Have we made a circle yet? Are we done? Hardly. The bit about the Carolinas has yet to be explored. Could the answer be found in the locations which Humbert and Lolita visit in the Carolinas during their road trip? Go HERE to explore that option. But there are thousands of other trails that lead to thousands of other connections.

Obviously, the web of connections never ends, and the more you look for the end, the farther the horizon appears, and the crazier you probably get. I only stopped my searching for a quick dinner, then it was on again. I have felt, for the better part of the day, as if lost in a web. I have been following a white rabbit down the hole, spending hours falling. It has been wonderful, yet at the same time maddening. Coincidence. I must confess I don't believe in coincidence.

Here are the sources of great information that I have used in this post, and that I ran across and just found interesting, if not entirely related to my search.

Lectures on Literature By: Vladimir Nabokov, Fredson Bowers, John Updike (page xxi) link to google.books

Lots of interesting Nabokov and Lolita insights here: http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/index.htm

Great essay on Nabokov and place names: http://ejas.revues.org/document7550.html

Info on Fast Day in NH: http://www.nh.gov/nhinfo/fast.html

Stuff about the Ramsdale / Ramsdell connection: http://www.ramsdale.org/hamlet.htm#T4

and of course the wonderful time-stealer: http://www.wikipedia.org

The Vacuum of a Soul.

Here is a beautiful connection I stumbled upon this afternoon. I was in my side yard, hugged by a white long sleeve that was once too big for me, holding in one hand a mug of black coffee, and in the other Speak, Memory. I was reading, again, my favorite passage which comes from the end of chapter six, the 'butterfly' chapter. And, again, I was lost in the words of Nabokov:

"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." p. 139 speak, memory.

Reading this passage invoked a memory response in me that took my mind (for the third time) to the back porch of "that Haze woman's" home. Humbert Humbert had his mind set on catching the next train out of Ramsdale until he saw what was about to change his life. It was, of course, his Lolita. And trembling as he was, Humbert was in absolute bliss:

"In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectables - the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride." p. 39 Lolita.

Nabokov seeks to describe Humbert's desire for Lolita in the most capturing way he knows how. Just as Nabokov slips into a medium of ecstatic timelessness when in the presence of his butterflies, in the same way the vacuum of Humbert's soul is completely engrossed in lapping up all the details of his powerful desire.

Time does not exist, and again I trip.







This is a picture from this last weekend, taken in the Gallatin Canyon. I am on lead, and my soul is sucking in the views, my heartbeats, the texture of the rope, smooth metal cams and rough granite. Here, there is no time. I can't explain it.

Discovery.

How slowly do the pages turn while reading Lolita for the second time! I now understand how someone can so easily slide into the enchanting abyss that Nabokov weaves for the reader.

As for a discovery? There are many, too many for the meager hours and days of this semester, so many that I must fight the fading line between interest and obsession. Oh well, I guess I won't fight it. Vladimir: the great Hunter, the great Enchanter. See what I mean? You can't escape it.


So, on page 10, in the same sentence, even, as the great aside (picnic, lightning) is another great one. I almost past it on the second reading like I had on the first. It is the next aside that caught my attention this time. The sentence now:

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: ..."

Here is a great example of a Nabokoffian aside. Which is to say that though we have been trained to disregard information within parentheses, the readers' ears, mind, and memory should perk up at the sight of them. When H.H. says "if you can still stand my style" I now get the feeling as if that is a remark to the psychiatrists that are watching him. Remember on page 308 when Humbert says that he started the memoir 56 days ago under "observation" in the psychopathic ward.

In the second page of the novel, Humbert tells the reader that he is in some type of captivity while writing the story. And... under 'observation'... Humbert must be going crazy. This is of course what happens, but this first clue is written in a way (the "if you can still stand my style" to the doctors observing him, and the aside "I am writing under observation" back to the reader of the story) which a casual read doesn't quite reveal.

In the same sentence on page 308 Humbert claims that he is writing these "notes" for use at his trial, "to save not my head, of course, but my soul." Whoa. Quite the heavy purpose, writing to save the soul? And of course, Humbert immortalizes himself not in the words, but in the imaginations of his readers. There is much much more on this that will have to wait for another blog.

Lesson: close watch on those parentheses.

Nabokov and Dodgson.

Nabokov and Dodgson. Vladimir Sirin and Lewis Carroll. Lolita and Wonderland? Or is it: Humbert and Carroll?

Nabokov said, "I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert." (p. 381 in annotations)

Nabokov obviously makes countless references to other writers and their works, Poe being one of the most dominating. But have you noticed all of the similarities, or allusions to Alice in Wonderland, or Carroll? This interested greatly as I read through Lolita the first time, now on the second pass I will be hyper aware of these references, especially after reading that Nabokov even called Carroll a type of Humbert.

Why is this? Readers familiar with the life of Charles Dodgson will know that he was extremely interested in photography, one of his subjects being children, often in the nude. Was Dodgson a pervert? Nabokov seems to think so. But it also seems that Nabokov has found a source of inspiration through this stuttering author, mathematician and logician.

Yes, Carroll was a logician. However, he loved coincidences and the type of wordplay that supposedly "logicians loathe and poets love." (See the last poem of "Through the Looking Glass" that is a not so hidden acrostic of his inspiration ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL)

The top picture is Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the bottom is his close girl-child friend Alice Liddell.


There will be much more on Carroll and Wonderland as it is related to Nabokov and Lolita in the near future.

the creek.

This photo, one of the earliest on my computer, was taken during Spring break in 2007. We are halfway through our seven day stay in Indian Creek, Utah, a climbing mecca just south of Canyon Lands National Park. Various pieces of climbing gear, both ours and borrowed (thanks Ryan), lay scattered in the shade of the huge slanting slab of red sandstone behind me. The white book with a blue spine, solitary picture on the cover and large red block letters for the title was a gift to me from my friend and neighbor at the time, William. I read it constantly during that trip, while on the road, or watching someone else climb. It still remains one of my favorite novels of all time. It is The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. The brown pullover I am wearing was soft and comfortable and from J.C. Penny in Billings. Unfortunately, I would mysteriously lose it sometime in late summer 2009. The Chacos I am wearing are still around, though they are much farther from the end of their life than at the present, though I still wear them regularly.

My cousin Zach stands opposite me preparing to climb a wide hands crack called Mud Slide (5.11). Little does he know that the three Black Diamond #3 Camalots on his right side are not going to be enough, he will end up running it out near the top. Another thing that Zach doesn't know at the point this picture was taken is that he will take a long fall near the top of the climb, causing him to hit the big slab behind me, and be caught by a poorly placed, over-cammed Rock Empire; being the largest piece, it was employed for a crack wider than its proper range.

Inside my stomach a battle is raging between the green pepper refried beans I had just eaten on a large 10” tortilla and my natural digestive process. I was given (every morning around 8:15, and always much too far from the fixed Forest Service type bathroom) good reason to believe that my stomach and subsequent parts were tired of the food and physical stress I continually put on it throughout the trip.

Other interesting things to note: the open sore on the back of my left hand (a byproduct of crack climbing), Zach's red rope bag (which his mother hand made for him, quite the bit of handiwork!), the Black BD wired Hex named Michael, and Zach's figure of 9 knot (at the point where he is tied in), which I just found out two days ago that he has always used this knot to tie in with.

Everything in this photo still exists, except for a little piece of Zach's confidence that was undoubtedly left in the dusty crevasse as he free-fell only to be saved by a magical piece of protection, our 10.2mm Beal rope, and my alert belaying.

Magic.

As Professor Sexson mentioned in class, Nabokov is a very quotable author. Speak, Memory is littered with sentences and phrases worthy of reproduction, though probably not found on a “Random Quote of the Day Generator” widget on even the best blogs. One of these I particularly like is on page 125. Talking about his studies of butterflies he says, “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

I love the exploration and breaking down of demarcations between nature and art. Here Nabokov says straight away that he was intrigued by the blurring of those lines as well. Not only is it beautiful or wondrous or mind boggling, but it is MAGIC. Nature is Magic and art is Magic and the game that they play is not simple, it is not singular, but rather “intricate” - a spell put on us to enchant and deceive.

I am curious if Nabokov would include memory in this form of magic. Though he, quite passionately, argues that memory, and specifically the action of “probing” childhood memories, is of utmost importance and quite opposite of “nonutilitarian”, I would surely describe his musings of memory as intricately enchanting.

The beauty of memory is astonishing. But that is at its least! Memory is not just beautiful, or intriguing, or valuable, or wondrous, or even enchanting, … it is nothing less than true MAGIC. A portal to the soul.

My First Memory.

I have an advantage in recalling childhood memories. This is the major event of my family's moving from Colton Blvd. to Burlington Ave, a demarcation in my mind that separates the very early memories from the later ones. We moved in the summer that I turned five, which means that my first memory is probably in the range of 3 to 4 years old. As I think back, most all of my memories contain clues about location, which quickly categorize my early memories. As I said, this is quite helpful.

It was morning. It wasn't a hot morning or a cold morning, but a morning full of a humidity that would occur more often in western Oregon than Billings Montana. All of the plants were a fantastic green that basked in the dew that made my yellow and red Nikes wet as I crossed the lawn from my house. I had heard and felt the low rumble just moments before and now I was headed outside for my weekly ritual. The anticipation gripped me as I climbed the rough wooden jungle gym to the top perch. I peered over the edge of my landing, and over the out of bloom lilac bush, and into the alleyway. There sat, grumbling and heaving in a rough idle, two monstrous garbage trucks. What they were doing I could only surmise - I believed them to be taking an early morning coffee break. I would watch them, silently, until they left - full of curiosity about their magnificently green trucks, about their consistent weekly ritual.