A first Equatorial indicator (google tool): ... “Terra Incognita” - a fetid, increasingly densifying tale of jungle exploration in some unheard of equatorial place. The prose, which begins as ornate, ends as hallucinatory and demented. The language is as exquisite and toxic as poisonous flowers. The darkness of the shadowy forest is “blinding.” The three explorers walk on “hissing and lip-smacking soil.” An orchid appears to be “smeared with egg yolk.” “Glossy birds flew through the haze of the marsh.” Nabokov writes, “and, as they settled, one turned into the wooden knob of a bedpost, another into a decanter.”http://www.garymichaeldault.com/book-blog/voyage-around-my-library-49-vladimir-nabokov-terra-incognita
Number two ( a curious reference to VN's "visual vocabulary"):
RIDING THE EQUATOR or THE STRANGENESS OF BEING IN VARIOUS PLACES
This exhibition (at the Momenta Gallery in Brooklyn NY in October of 2009) ... the work of Los Angeles-based photographer and critic George Porcari... remarkable body of work spans almost four decades. Born in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, he emigrated to Los Angeles at age 11 and began taking photographs ten years later to record his own sense of dislocation. In subsequent years, Porcari went on to document his observations of cities (New York, Chicago, Europe, Latin America) through occasional series of photographs... Describing himself as a ‘photo-journalist,’ Porcari’s visual vocabulary is equally informed by Bresson, Robert Frank, and Vladmir Nabokov. His images are bracingly realistic and incidentally lyrical. Writing about Porcari’s work, the novelist Veronica Gonzalez has noted “a sense of possibility mixed in with regret … for all these images exist in the present, the present of the work, a desire for cohesion, perhaps enacted here.” Produced by Chris Kraus for Semiotexte and Momenta, http://www.lightmonkey.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/G-PorcaribyChrisKraus.pdf
.........................................................
Number Three:
PILGRIMAGE, MEMORY AND DEATH IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S SHORT STORY "THE AURELIAN"* Maxim D. Shrayer, Boston College
The protagonist of "Pil'gram" ("The Aurelian," 1930), a German shopkeeper and entomologist, dies of a stroke at the threshold of his perfect dream. The fifty-year old owner of a butterfly store in Weimar Berlin, Pil'gram spends his entire adult life attempting to undertake a collecting trip to one of the regions renowned for its rich butterfly population. All of his attempts fail for various reasons... Finally, when Pil'gram has all but given up on his obsessive plan, good fortune brings him a rich collector, one Sommer, who buys from Pil'gram a major collection of lepidoptera. The sum would only allow Pil'gram several months of economical travel, but he embraces the salutory opportunity without hesitation. Leaving his pitiful wife Eleanor behind without a source of income, Pil'gram sets out to go to Spain. A fatal stroke (he had suffered one before) halts his journey. In the morning, Eleanor finds him dead sitting on the floor of his shop [ ] In the English, Nabokov decided to tone down the Russian version's deeply lyrical recollection of Pil'gram's childhood discovery of a caterpillar... In a sense Pil'grim longs to regain the lost Paradise of his childhood-a leitmotif of Nabokov's works from the earliest stories to the latest, from the novels Glory (1931-32) and The Gift (1937-38) to Lolita (1955) and Ada (1969). Pil'gram refers to the possibility of a real trip as nothing other than scast'e ("happiness"). Like Germann in Puskin's "Pikovaja dama" ("The Queen of Spades," 1833) whose inflamed mind endows surrounding objects with signs of "three, seven, ace," Pil'gram also sees everything in terms of the way it relates to his "phantom" of happiness [ ] In Speak, Memory, Nabokov also alludes to several butterfly collecting trips that illumine Pil'gram's plans in the story. "In the summer of 1929," Nabokov reminisces, "every time I walked through a village in the Eastern Pyrenees, and happened to look back, I would see in my wake the villagers frozen in the various attitudes my passage had caught them in, as if I were Sodom and they Lot's wife" (SM 131). In the Russian version of "The Aurelian," one finds a similar description of the locals' reaction ("udivlenie i strax aborigenov," literally: "the aborigines' surprise and fear") to the "strange people who have come from afar" (S 196). Nabokov's 1929 trip to the Eastern Pyrenees near the Spanish border is also important because several of Pil'gram's plans concern an expedition to Southern France and to Spain. ...Two more references to Nabokov's life may elucidate the poetics of "The Aurelian." One has to do with Nabokov's recurrent dream of undertaking a tropical expedition that he never realized, much like his privileged character Pil'gram. Nikolaj Raevskij, a writer who knew Nabokov in the 1920s in Prague and shared his professional interest in lepidoptera, recalled how an excited Nabokov told him about his dream of an expedition to New Guinea, French Equatorial Africa, and the Solomon Islands: "The climate there is wretched everywhere, but I am young, healthy, physically trained, so I would hope to survive and bring back remarkable collections." Raevskij also recalled warning Nabokov in the 1920s against undertaking a long expedition to exotic lands because "the writer Nabokov could die an untimely death" in a dangerous climate. Raevskij's memoir contains insightful remarks about the relationship between Pil'gram and his creator. Raevskij suggests that "The Aurelian" tells a story of Nabokov's own "unrealized entomological dream." Raevskij speaks of the strength and irresistibility of Pil'gram's (and Nabokov's) passion which preserved for life "the pure child's perception of nature."... Raevskij apparently did not know that coming to America gave Nabokov a chance to go on the kinds of collecting trips that he had dreamed about as an emigre in Europe-to the American West and Southwest,- during which Nabokov reexperienced the joys of his childhood.*
http://fmwww.bc.edu/sl-v/ShrayerPilgrimage2006.pdf
........................................................................................................................
*the substitution of "equatorial regions" for the "American West and Southwest" (contrasting with New England and Canada?), as it was pointed out by Maxim Shrayer, in VN's active pursuit of "happiness", reminded me of a line in "Pale Fire" with its "sublimated grouse finding your China right behind my house."
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter’s code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant’s feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Ada made it to Patagonia but Van, if I recollect it correctly, only dreamt of traveling to Africa and about traversing the equator (".It is not clear, when you are falling asleep, why all continents except you begin with an A.")- or mimicked navigator Vasco da Gama's exploration in reverse...