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.