Subject
Magicarpets and memory
From
Date
Body
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."
..........................................................................
* - Why's everyone so down on the memoir? "Critics take grim satisfaction in tearing the genre to pieces. How quickly they forget Nabokov and Karr and Wolff"
J. NICOLE JONES, LA REVIEW OF BOOKS/ MONDAY, JAN 14, 2013 http://www.salon.com/topic/vladimir_nabokov/
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
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."
..........................................................................
* - Why's everyone so down on the memoir? "Critics take grim satisfaction in tearing the genre to pieces. How quickly they forget Nabokov and Karr and Wolff"
J. NICOLE JONES, LA REVIEW OF BOOKS/ MONDAY, JAN 14, 2013 http://www.salon.com/topic/vladimir_nabokov/
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/