"...she [Aqua] saw giant flying sharks with lateral
eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an
entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or
Wark. (1.3)"
Jansy Mello: The flying sharks that carried pilgrims from
"dark to shining seas" reminded me of an Escher engraving that, unfortunately as
I came to discover, did not represent sharks, but some kind of fish*. My
search led me on to "tesselation," though, a word we also find in ADA,
associated to "granoblast." and to Dolly.** In "Lolita" it makes its
presence felt in the picturesque surname of a travelling "Quilty."
"Dolly, an only child, born in Bras, married in 1840,
at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of
Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories
(Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called
‘Russian’ Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with
‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but
Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and
Stripes."
While examining several distinct Escher engravings I realized that some
repeated patterns reminded me of fractals. Internet helped me to get to a
site named "hyperbolic Escher," where his initially bi-dimensional
flat surfaces were now transformed into what might have been Antiterran
geography.*** This would account for some of the problems Dieter Zimmer
described while trying to pinpoint Estoty and "Paradise" in a
terrestrial map. #
(Note that both Brian Boyd and Dieter Zimmer located Estoty in relation
to the Labrador peninsula while still working with the idea of
"paradise", whereas the ancient Zeno map represents "Estotiland" as
a phantasy island##.)
Nevertheless, I cannot see V.Nabokov dabling with hyperbolic spaces and
miniature copies of humans. Or did he, somehow?
Excerpts from an article published in 1959 in which "Escher expressed
...what it was that inspired him to depict infinity" (p.102,Bruno Ernst
ed.):
"We find it impossible to imagine that somewhere beyond
the furthest stars of the night sky there should come an end to space, a
frontier beyond which there is nothing more [ ]For this reason, for as
long as there have been men to lie and sit and stand upon this globe, or to
crawl and walk on it, to sail and fly across it (and fly off it), we have held
firmly to the notion of a hereafter, a purgatory, heaven, hell, rebirth, and
nirvana, all of which must continue to be everlasting in time and infinite in
space. [ ] And yet it can happen, so it seems, that someone who has
accumulated but little of exact knowledge or of the learning that previous
generations achieved through study - that this individual, filling up his days,
in the way that artists will, toying with more or less fantastic notions, feels
one day ripening in him a definite and conscious desire to approach infinity
through his art, as accurately and closely as he can.[ ] We are not blind,
deaf, or dumb; we consciously perceive the shapes that are all around us and
that, in their rich variety, speak to us in a clear and fascinating language.
And so the shapes we use to build up our surface-division are recognizable
tokens and clear symbols of the animate or inanimate material all around us
[ ]We are not simply playing a mental game; we are conscious of
living in a material, three-dimensional reality, and it is quite beyond the
bounds of possibility to fabricate a flat surface stretching endlessly and in
all directions. However...[ ...!]"
...................................................................................................
* - "Depth", The Magic Mirror of M.C.Escher, ed. Bruno Ernst,
Ballantine books, NY,1976.
From a wiki-related source: Escher can be regarded as the 'Father'
of modern tessellations so we've allocated several galleries to his art. He is
famous for his impossible depictions...During his life, he became obsessed with
filling surfaces with pictures that did not overlap or leave spaces. In 1925 he
produced what was really his first tessellation. It was a block print of 'lions'
in which the subject interlocked and covered the plane! ...In 1933 he visited
the Alhambra again with Jetta and both filled several notebooks with
drawings...deliberately, producing camel, squirrel, and bird tessellations, etc.
And:"A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a collection of plane figures
that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. One may also speak of
tessellations of the parts of the plane or of other surfaces. Generalizations to
higher dimensions are also possible. Tessellations frequently appeared in the
art of M. C. Escher. Tessellations are seen throughout art history, from ancient
architecture to modern art. In Latin, tessella was a small cubical piece of
clay, stone or glass used to make mosaics. The word "tessella" means "small
square" (from "tessera", square, which in its turn is from the Greek word for
"four"). It corresponds with the everyday term tiling which refers to
applications of tessellation, often made of glazed clay."
http://tessellation.askdefine.com/
** - Marble: Note how the interlocking calcite grains in this rock meet at
~120 degree triple junctions. This feature is characteristic of granoblastic
texture.Cf.leggeo.unc.edu
#-
"The reader is constantly tempted to match Antiterra's places to those on earth
and to equate both. For the correspondences and near agreements are so numerous
that the reader assumes what strictly speaking cannot be taken for granted at
all: that Antiterra and Terra will also be alike in their unmentioned and hence
invisible aspects. This is a deeply entrenched habit of thinking: if two things
are alike in thousands of explicit and countless implicit details, whether
natural ones or purely cultural ones like names and dates, everybody will
readily jump to the conclusion that the unmentioned and unknown rest will also
be more or less equal.
Nothing can be said about Antiterra's absolute size.
In his philosophical novel Letters from Terra, young terrapist Dr. Van Veen toys
with the idea that for Antiterrestrians people on earth are microscopically
small. This, however, cannot be more than rash speculation. If the years on
Antiterra are exactly of the same duration as those on Terra, the orbital period
must be the same. In this case both planets should be expected to have a sun of
equal size, the same distance from it and the same mass [ ] The name
of this northern region of America where mostly Russian is spoken is not Canada
or Canady but Estoty or Estotilandia. On earth, some old European maps applied
the name 'Estotiland' to the northeastern tip of America that was largely Terra
incognita. It was more or less synonym with 'Labrador' – not the present
Canadian province of Labrador and Newfoundland but the whole of the Labrador
peninsula, the great mass of "barren grounds" flanked by Hudson Bay, Labrador
Sea and St. Lawrence River./ In addition to this climatic difference,
geographical differences come into view as one zooms in on the region that is in
the focus of Van's writing. For him it is the region where Paradise was.
Paradise in Ada is nothing symbolic or metaphysical or religious. It is
physical.[ ]All of this can mean two things. The first is that whatever
the map of Antiterra may be like, we do have enough consistent information for
the big picture but are simply unable to draw a close map of East Estotiland and
New England―all the borders and all the distances may be different from those on
earth. The second is that Van may be fabricating his Antiterra ad hoc,
deliberately eschewing plausibility [ ]... when it comes to fitting
Ladore into the North American continent. The focal area on Antiterra remains a
blur and may well be meant to be one. Its very names make a blur in the mind:
Ladore, Lugano, Kaluga, Raduga, Radugalet, Ladoga, Laguna, Luga, Kalugano ...
There is no map for Paradise.
##- Zeno map (from wikipedia) was introduced in a former Nab-L
posting dated Jan 28,2014.
Additional information:The Geography of Antiterra (google images) Cf.
www.dezimmer.net - 1575 × 1259 - Map of
Estotilandia 1597. Corneille Wytfliet: Estotilandia Et Labratoris Terra (1597).
Source: Princeton University, Historical Maps Collection ... (thanks D.Zimmer
for the wonderful illustration made available online) .
