Dear List,
Arriving by chance
at one or two Nabokovian words, now isolated from their familiar
context, I'm sometimes struck by how they may thus acquire new
evolving shapes, like superclusters that serve as nurseries
for baby-stars. Today I passed from "rare shells" onto "stratagems
rosily visible" in Lolita...
Unable to imagine chess moves taking place "in a
square pool", even so I was spellbound by this poetic reference
to "stratagems" upon a "tesselated bottom". I could
discern something else, those very nabokovian "strata"
like the "tesselated" images in which one discerns various
archeological levels that reveal an unexpected
rosy gem...
VN's words irrupt almost silently like
underwater music and its bubbles are totally distinct from those
condensed effects as those created by Joyce's laughtears: I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my
chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with
rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth
tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.
Thinking about a hidden move in a chess-game,
instead of looking up ADA's tesselations, I decided to search
inside a pail of sea-shells and diamonds before I reached King
Alfin, in PALE FIRE: "How often is it that kings engage in some special research?
Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one
maimed hand."
Once again my original hypothesis drew a blank.
And yet my wonder lingers at VN's silent and invisible verbal
"stratagems" with day breaking out of its shell as in primeval tales
about created worlds ( Shade's lines, "Safe
in my bed as day its eggshell broke,/ And robins walked and
stopped...)
Failed finds and lost threads are also interesting to
report and share. So here they are. A good Sunday to all...