Describing his love-makings with Ada in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the ogon’, the agony of supreme ‘reality:’
Amorously, now, in her otherwise dolorous and irresolute adolescence, Ada was even more aggressive and responsive than in her abnormally passionate childhood. A diligent student of case histories, Dr Van Veen never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent, non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal English child in his files, although many similar little girls had bloomed — and run to seed — in the old châteaux of France and Estotiland as portrayed in extravagant romances and senile memoirs. His own passion for her Van found even harder to study and analyze. When he recollected caress by caress his Venus Villa sessions, or earlier visits to the riverhouses of Ranta or Livida, he satisfied himself that his reactions to Ada remained beyond all that, since the merest touch of her finger or mouth following a swollen vein produced not only a more potent but essentially different delicia than the slowest ‘winslow’ of the most sophisticated young harlot. What, then, was it that raised the animal act to a level higher than even that of the most exact arts or the wildest flights of pure science? It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada he discovered the pang, the ogon’, the agony of supreme ‘reality.’ Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws — in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness). For one spasm or two, he was safe. The new naked reality needed no tentacle or anchor; it lasted a moment, but could be repeated as often as he and she were physically able to make love. The color and fire of that instant reality depended solely on Ada’s identity as perceived by him. It had nothing to do with virtue or the vanity of virtue in a large sense — in fact it seemed to Van later that during the ardencies of that summer he knew all along that she had been, and still was, atrociously untrue to him — just as she knew long before he told her that he had used off and on, during their separation, the live mechanisms tense males could rent for a few minutes as described, with profuse woodcuts and photographs, in a three-volume History of Prostitution which she had read at the age of ten or eleven, between Hamlet and Captain Grant’s Microgalaxies. (1.35)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ogon’: Russ., fire.
Microgalaxies: known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne.
At the end of his Dream Upon The Universe (1824) Jean Paul Richter (a German writer who coined the term Weltschmerz) mentions the Supreme Reality:
'I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Kruger's upon the old vulgar error which regards the space from one earth or sun to another as empty. Our sun, together with all its planets, fills only the 31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the next solar body. Gracious heavens! thought I, in what unfathomable abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the abode of death and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous islands being nothing greater than snail shells, would be a far less error, in proportion to the compass of our planet, than that which attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces; and the error would be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on its journey two millions of years ago; and thus, by optical laws, it is possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights, and depths, and breadths must there be in this universe, in comparison of which the universe itself would be a nihility were it crossed, pierced, and belted about by an illimitable wilderness of nothing! But, is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with eternal surges of flux and reflux to make the very paths to those distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun or its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for the abode of a spiritual world as there is a dwelling place for thy own spirit in the substance of thy brain. To these, and similar reflections, succeeded the following dream: -
'Methought my body sunk down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out apparelled in light; and by my side there stood another form, which resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened unceasingly. "Two thoughts," said the form, "are the wings with which I move; the thought of here and the thought of there. And behold, I am yonder, pointing to a distant world. Come thou, and wait on me with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the universe under a veil." And I flew along with the form'. In a moment the earth fell back behind our consuming flight into an abyss of distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star, and soon there appeared, nothing visible of our system except a comet, which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks of solar bodies - flocks past counting except to their heavenly Shepherd - that scarcely could they expand themselves before us to the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind into pale nebular gleams, and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius, and all the brotherhood of our constellations, and the galaxy of our heavens stood far below our feet, as a little nebula amongst other yet more distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses; one heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and then rolled up behind us; galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long array through the fields of the infinite space, like triumphal gates through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress. Sometimes the Form that lightened would out-fly my weary thoughts; and then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation among the stars - till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of There, and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not emptier, neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns without intermission fell into the solar ocean, like waterspouts of a storm which fell into the ocean of waters; - then at length the human heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the universe. And I said to the Form at my side, "Oh, Spirit! has, then, this universe no end?" And the Form answered and said, "Lo, it has no beginning!"
'Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss - no gleam of light to break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us had all contracted into an obscure nebula; and at length that also had vanished. And I thought to myself, "At last the universe has ended:" and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of pure, pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation. I shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose un-fathomable zone of blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and buried for ever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form which still lightened on before, but left all around it unillumiaated. Then the Form said to me in my anguish, "Oh, creature of little faith, look up, the most ancient light is coming!" I looked, and in a moment came a twilight; in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy; and then with a choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been on its road to us; and at length, out of heights inaccessible to thought, it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless interval; and far longer it endured before the beams of a starry host again had reached us.
'As we thus advanced for ever through an interchange of nights and solar heavens, and as the interval grew ' longer and still longer before the last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point, and as once we issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora Borealis - the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived; the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving, rocking, yawning in convulsions; the subterraneous waters of the great deep were breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in length ran along from east to west - from Zenith to Nadir; and here and there, where a sun, should have been, we saw instead through the misty vapour a gloomy, ashy, leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in flames from a perishing world, but gave out neither light nor heat; and as I saw, through a vista that had no end, mountain towering above mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the conflict of solar and planetary bodies. Then my spirit bent under the load of the universe, and I said to the form, "Rest, rest, and lead me no further; I am too solitary in the creation itself, and in its deserts yet more so; the full world is great, but the empty world is greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."
'Then the form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness; above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness, and in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the unearthly. Now then, I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth and behold the images." Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and I saw as it were an interminable sea of light - sea immeasurable - sea unfathomable - sea without a shore. All spaces between the heavens were filled with the happiest light;-and there was a thundering of floods; and there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas; and I saw all the trackless regions that we had voyaged over; and my eye comprehended the farthest and the nearest; the darkness had become light, and the light darkness; for the deserts and the wastes of the creation were now filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the worlds, and death only in the worlds. "Upon all the suns there walked upright shadows in the form of men; but these were glorified when they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea of light; and the murky planets I perceived were but cradles for the infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation I saw - I heard - I felt, the glittering, the echoing, the breathing of life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web which composes the veil of Isis;*
* On this antique mode of symbolizing the mysterious Nature which is at the heart of all things, and connects all things into one which veil is hung over the whole creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And in sight of this immeasurability of life no sadness could endure; but only joy that knew no limit and happy prayers.
But in the midst of this great vision of the universe the form that lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home in the invisible world of spirits. I was left alone in the centre of a universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathising being. Suddenly from the starry deeps there came, floating through the ocean of light, a planetary body, and upon it there stood a woman, whose face was as the face of a Madonna, and by her side there stood a child, whose countenance varied not, neither was it magnified as he drew nearer. This child was a King, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head; but the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the planetary body was our unhappy earth. And as the earth drew near, this child, who had come forth out of the starry whole, possibly the reader may not feel unwilling to concur with Kant's remark, at p. 197 of his "Critik der Urtheilskraft:" - "Perhaps in all human composition there is no passage of greater sublimity, nor amongst all sublime thoughts one which has been more sublimely expressed, than that which occurs in the inscription upon the temple of Isis (the Great Mother - Nature): 'I am whatsoever is, whatsoever has been, whatsoever shall be; and the veil which is over my countenance no mortal hand has ever raised.'" deeps to comfort me, threw upon me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love; so that in my heart I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding, and I awoke in the tumult of my happiness.
'I awoke, but my happiness survived my dream. Oh, how beautiful is death, seeing that we die into a world of life and of creation without end! And I blessed God for my life upon earth; but much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor perishable hope can enter.' (London Magazine, vol. ix., March, 1824)
Captain Grant’s Microgalaxies combine the galaxies in the above fragment with Jean Paul Richter's mikrologiya dushevnoy zhizni (micrology of the soul life) mentioned by Florenski in his essay Antoniy romana i Antoniy predaniya (“Anthony of the Novel and Anthony of the Legend,” 1907):
Приняв это к сведению, мы должны рассмотреть «Искушение Святого Антония».
Идея только что названной поэмы пришла Флоберу в голову в 1844 г., когда он, после обнаружения падучей, путешествовал с отцом по Италии. Это было, именно, в Генуе, во дворце Дориа, перед картиной Теньера или Брегеля - подробность характерная: произведение, где вся суть - чисто-внутренние процессы души, Поэма, которая, по-видимому, занята самыми безобразными явлениями сознания, тончайшим психологическим анализом и «микрологией душевной жизни» (как сказал по другому, правда, поводу Жан Поль Рихтер), зачинается от взгляда на картину.
Однако было бы ошибкой видеть тут случайность. Способ зачатия виден в каждой детали плода его, Поэмы, потому что вся она - не что иное, как беспредельно развертывающееся полотно, цепь зрительных представлений и слуховых галлюцинаций. (II-III)
According to Florenski, the idea of La Tentation De Saint Antoine (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” 1874) first came to Flaubert in 1844, when, diagnosed with epilepsy, he was traveling with his father in Italy. It happened in Genoa, in Palazzo Doria, in front of a painting by Teniers or Bruegel.
The Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1501) is an oil painting on wood panels by Hieronymus Bosch. According to Van, he received the second letter from Ada (written after Van left Ardis forever) in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre:
He did not answer her letter, and a fortnight later John James, now got up as a German tourist, all pseudo-tweed checks, handed Van a second message, in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan thought it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!). There would be no answer — though answers were included, with the return ticket, in the price, as the honest messenger pointed out. (2.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bateau ivre: ‘sottish ship’, title of Rimbaud’s poem here used instead of ‘ship of fools’.
Van and Ada use Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ and Rimbaud’s poem ‘Mémoire’ for their coded messages:
In the second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered. Both Van and Ada still knew by heart the seventy-two lines of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and the forty lines of Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire.’ It was from those two texts that they chose the letters of the words they needed. For example, l2.11. l1.2.20. l2.8 meant ‘love,’ with ‘l’ and the number following it denoting the line in the Marvell poem, and the next number giving the position of the letter in that line, l2.11, meaning ‘eleventh letter in second line,’ I hold this to be pretty clear; and when, for the sake of misleading variety, the Rimbaud poem was used, the letter denoting the line would simply be capitalized. Again, this is a nuisance to explain, and the explanation is fun to read only for the purpose (thwarted, I am afraid) of looking for errors in the examples. Anyway, it soon proved to have defects even more serious than those of the first code. Security demanded they should not possess the poems in print or script for consultation and however marvelous their power of retention was, errors were bound to increase. (1.26)
The idea of La Tentation De Saint Antoine came to Flaubert in Genoa. Daniel Veen (Van’s and Ada’s Uncle Dan) received an aerocable from Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) telling him she would marry him upon his return to America in Genoa:
Poor Dan’s erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a cafe-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week's delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl's oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.
According to Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father), in his deathbed delirium Uncle Dan raved about Bosch (the author of The Garden of Earthly Delights):
According to Bess (which is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. On the other hand, had he attempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door.
‘I beg you, sir,’ said Van, ‘go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.’
‘Come, come,’ retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. ‘Cordula won’t mind.’
‘It’s another, much more impressionable girl’ — (yet another awful fumble!). ‘Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs Tobak.’
‘Oh, of course!’ cried Demon. ‘How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me — he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!’
‘I don’t care,’ said clenched Van, ‘if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must —’
‘Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.’
‘Father, I’m sorry — but I’m trying to tell you —’
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): c’est le mot: that’s the right word.
pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.
See also the updated version of my previous post, “dove hole marked RE AMOR & silver salver in Ada.”