Dear List,
We all know that to read Nabokov we
must either share information with specialists in various fields or be
another modern Leonardo.Google resources, Yahoo, Wikipedia might get
information for us when we need a quick comprehensive view.
Or else,
we might be Gilbert & Sullivan's "the very model of a modern major-general":
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;I know the scientific
names of beings animalculous:In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and
mineral,/I am the very model of a modern Major-General."...
Some conclusions in our discussion
may leave us a bit discomfited and, overdaring, we might play the fool (
fortunately a lot of us are not like the angels in Shade's
A.Pope... and run in with a contribution) .
I would like to bring up the
famous "leminscate" debate since, recently, someone described it as
something preposterous like "a fiber that connects our brain to the central
nervous system", amidst several technical informations about neurological
diseases, brain-obfuscations and Shade's fits.
I tried to obtain more
specific information ( since I remembered little of my adolescent biology)
and found several interesting things ( thanks to my friend LF
Gallego).
Following one text
about audition and prenatal disorders, I learned that there
are "electric potential waves which originate from the
cochlear nucleus, the the lateral lemniscus ".
An
old Atlas of Anatomy described: "the
internal lemniscus or Reil cluster ... ascends
as a direct extension of the stratum interolivare lemnisci..."
This is way too complicated to
understand VN's use of "lemniscate", but a regular dictionary of the Portuguese
Language may also inform that "lemniscus" ( not
a "lemniscate") applies to a bundle of fibers in the Central Nervous
System that extend themselves from the sensitive nuclei of the medulla to the
thalamus (
A.Houaiss).
It also applies to the ribbon
that hangs from the crowns, garlands and laurels of winners, or
the ribbon that adheres to diplomatic stamps. It is also a
conventional old sign of "division" (dot-dash-dot) in
mathematical notation.
Another dictionary (
Michaelis) informs that the "dot-dash-dot" lemniscus sign advises the
readers of a mistaken translation of the Sacred Texts (Scripture) and other
kinds of transpositions.
Other entries explain that, in
anatomy, it names a carthilagenous disk in the knee ( football players
know a lot about that!). In zoology it applies to the bags that hang at
both sides of the "acanthocephalus",etc. But... following these and
other dictionaries, the word "lemniscata" ( lemniscate) applies
only to the ribbonlike sign in the horizontal shape of eight (infinity),
although "Google" led me even
further to mecatronics, physics and maths - concerning "lemniscate
tracings" ...
Sometimes, like Carolyn Kunin's image
of rabbit-feet poplars swaying in the wind, the simplest explanation is closer
to the meaning we look for.
Sorry for my lemniscate way of
going about this subject ( or, more simply: "long-winding" or
"long-winded"?)
Jansy