Dear List,
Trying to puzzle out the mysteries of different
calendars and moveable feasts, and an approaching
important birthday, I encountered a reference to "solar
day" (average:24hours) and "sidereal day"
(23h56min).
Shade's lines [ the
little scissors I am / holding are/ A dazzling synthesis of / sun and
star] came to my mind because I had never
been satisfied by its peculiar distinction bt. "sun" and "star".
Would Shade, or VN, be indicating
any special reference for the establishment of hours,
dates...time?
For example, when the movements of
Gradus are almost synchronized with Shade's process of setting down
"Pale Fire": On July 5th, at noontime, in the other
hemisphere...Gradus... walked towards a Russian commercial plane bound for
Copenhagen, and this event synchronized with Shade's
starting in the early morning (Atlantic seaboard time) to
compose, or to set down after composing in bed, the opening lines of Canto
Two. When almost twenty-four hours later he got to line 230, Gradus, after
a refreshing night at the summer house of our consul in Copenhagen, an
important Shadow, had entered, with the Shadow, a clothes store in order to
conform to his description in later notes (to lines 286 and
408).
There are
various other instances. The position of the sun is detailed once according
to its daily and seasonal variations ( i.e; these might refer to
the "solar day" measurements): But perhaps the funniest note
concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in
different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the
upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and
seasonal, was given for the several windows... A footnote,
however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might
prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of
furniture.
We also find eavesdropping Kinbote, now coursing through Shade's
nocturnal lighted windows: "all the windows were dark for a
couple of hours; but then, at about 3 a.m., I saw from my upstairs bathroom
that the poet had gone back to his desk in the lilac light of his den, and
this nocturnal session brought the canto to line 230 (card 18). On another
trip to the bathroom an hour and a half later, at sunrise, I found the
light transferred to the bedroom, and smiled indulgently, for, according
to my deductions, only two nights had passed since the
three-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-ninth time - but no matter."
There is a (hallucinatory) correspondence between
Kinbote's telling about Zembla and Shade's poem, when Kinbote sees himself as a
moon circling around the sun ( lunar calendar?): ".the
sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent upon
the very process of the sustained creative effervescence that enabled Shade
to produce a 1000-line poem in three weeks. There is, moreover, a
symptomatic family resemblance in the coloration of both poem and
story. I have reread, not without pleasure, my comments to his lines, and
in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent
light from my poet's fiery orb"
Sunsets are important markers for Kinbote, there
are other "sunset glows":
(a) Where were the battlements of
my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the
Fair?
(b) note to line 61: The
setting sun that lights the tips/ Of TV's giant paperclips/Upon
the roof;/ The shadow of the doorknob that/
At sundown is a baseball bat/Upon the door;/ ( Shade? Kinbote?)
(c) The passage 797 (second part of
line)-809, on the poet's sixty-fifth card, was composed between
the sunset of July 18 and the dawn of
July 19. That morning I had prayed in two different churches (on
either side, as it were, of my Zemblan denomination, not represented in New
Wye) and had strolled home in an elevated state of
mind.
or indicators:
(a) The fleeting and
faint but thousands of times repeated action of the
same sun that was accused of sending messages
from the tower...
But also for
Shade:
(a) My picture
book was at an early age/ The painted parchment / papering our cage:/ Mauve
rings around the /moon; blood-orange sun;/
Twinned Iris; and that/ rare
phenomenon/ The iridule ...
( doesn't the rare
iridule appear only during sunset?)
(b) The abstract
battle is concretely fought./ The pen stops in mid-air, / then swoops to
bar/
A canceled sunset* or / restore a star,/ And thus it physically
/ guides the phrase / Toward faint daylight /through the inky
maze**.
(c) But it's not bedtime yet.
/ The sun attains/ Old Dr. Sutton's last two
/ windowpanes.
.........................................................................................
*a palette with the dregs of many sunsets;
(C.Kinbote)
** against the pale ink of the zenith (nightfall;afterglow????)
(C.Kinbote)
[btw:
how come a mention to "zenith" at nightfall? Could anyone explain this apparent
incongruence?]
Since I'm unable to solve any mystery that demands
a minimum of math or physics, I hope the quotations above might
stimulate further ideas, invite corrections or
offer illustrations concerning the possibility that VN might be
teasing the readers by shifting to different calenders, time measurements,
etc.
There is one more doubt that suddenly popped up and,
perhaps, it has already been explained in our List, but I couldn't find a
clear answer to it:
When Shade writes down "it's not bedtime yet..." (
& also when he is, apparently, writing his poem just before crossing over to
CK's house and getting killed) these lines suggest that Shade has been
composing during daylight. And yet Kinbote is very emphatic about the
poem's progress from sunset into dawn, or the difference bt. "composing at
night" and "setting the poem down on paper in the
morning."
Has K's consistence about that matter been
elaborated upon?
Has anyone bothered to plot, like
Kinbote at certain times, the "astronomical" course of Shade's
composing, drafting, correcting and writing of "Pale Fire"?