CK: Recently you brought up two
subjects that I happen to be interested in - - musical instruments and roses.
...you mentioned a mandorla...I came across the word again today, and it
turns out that it is related not to mandolins, but mandeln, almonds. The
mandorla turns out to be the almond shaped halo surrounding images of holy
personages in Christian iconography.../ ...as an amateur rosarian, I must
protest the equation of any circular shape with a rose - - or, as in your
Ada quote, an island - - unless of course you detect a reference to the
isle of Rhodes.
JM: The word VN created was
not "mandorla", but "amorandola".
There are all kinds of roses, sub-rosae, rosaries
and rose of the winds and, when I compared
Ada's "island of the bed" to a compass- rose, I was thinking of the
nautical instruments that carry indications about North/South,
Northeast/Southwest forming a cross (or an asterisk), encompassed by a
circumference.
Let's get to Nabokov, in "The Enchanter" and to
Dmitri's explanation.
(Picador- page 50, l.7): "But
when he rushed into the apartment he found her chatting with the charwoman amida
a compass rose of drafts."
(Picador - page 123: On a Book Entitled The
Enchanter, Dmitri Nabokov)
"Compass
rose": "The early Italian nautial compass card, more stylized than
today's, and indicating, as compass roses still do, the principal and subsidiary
compass points ( which also identified the directions from which winds blew) was
called rosa dei venti , "rose of the winds," because of its flowerlike
appearance and because wind directions were of paramount concern to navigators;
the Italian term survives to this day. A nice fillip is gained in
translation ( for a minority of readers perhaps - those who navigate and those
who know Italian), since the image refers to drafts coming from various
directions through windows opened by the charwoman."
Now, what remains absent here is
the reference that links these draughty rooms with another Russian
writer's description of a similar cross-shaped arrangement of
windows.
A change of subject: Recently
I brought up the index card with " a higher plane of
consciousness" ( in SO) and Pale Fire's line about a city (Yew), lying
"on a higher plane".
In "The Enchanter" there is
another, lecherous, meaning added to these words.
(Picador, page 22, l.20): " I now discard all that and
ascend to a higher plane.
'What if the way to true bliss
is indeed through a still delicate membrane, before it has had time to harden,
become overgrown, lose the fragrance and the shimmer through which one
penetrates to the throbbing star of that bliss?'."
The Jekyl&Hyde divided soul is already
present here. Only a set of lines, now: "Never before,
though, had the subordinate clause of his fearsome life been complemented by the
principal one, and he walked past with clenched teeth..." (Picador,
page 29, pg 6-9)