SB:I should
add that, while yours truly is biased towards admitting these kinds of
discussions, if they stray from engaging specific Nabokov texts or contexts,
they will become too abstract for most of our subscribers and our editorial
policy.
Sergei
Soloviev:.. this second law of
thermodynamics ...the problem with it is not the (quite convincing)
justification that in a closed macroscopic system the enthropy is not
decreasing, but in the fundamental question what systems are closed. (Are there
any?)...we consider some particles as indivisible,but in fact they have inner
structure...as far as I know nobody yet verified the effect on classical
calculations of enthropy of the recent discoveries like long-distance quantum
coupling (a particle depends on its "twin" at any distance - Bell'stheorem,
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and related experiments etc.) This is also a
major blow to the notion of closed system...
JM: Practically all compendia on
Physics and Math are totally incomprehensible to me. This is why S
K-B's paragraph came as a comfort: Do we need to analyze the above
statements, two teasing "narrative levels" removed from VN qua VN, as VN's own
deeply-held world-view as a _scientist_? We can _invent_ all kinds of
theories/speculations about the structure (or lack of) of space and time, but
there _is_ something uninvented to which these terms seriously (adultly!) apply
and amidst which we "move and have our being.".
Even if words cannot eff everything
related to chaos and cosmos because there is an externality that
evades their definition, I still harbored the impressions that
mathematicians assumed that Maths and number would provide the
ultimate answer, one exempt of any link-and-bobolink or
boomerangs of nonsense.
S K-B's words opened a closed box for me...not
Pandora's, I hope.
VN's quote he brought up ("The hardest knot
is but a meandering string; tough to the finger nails,but really a matter of
lazy and graceful loopings. The eye undoes it,while clumsy fingers bleed. He
(the dying man) was that knot, and he would be untied at once, if he could
manage to see and follow the thread." ) made me remember William Golding
in "Visible Darkness" ( I don't think VN ever mentioned his name),
connected to unravelling mortal coils and enthropy, but Golding was
not as optimistic as VN's "he would be untied at
once".
Curiosuly, untied is an anagram of united. As the Sphynx
and Oedipous in Cocteau's "La Machine Infernale", perhaps,
where coils and folds are part of the fabric that was pierced by a pin
only once but which, being opened, revealed time and even-spaced holes
along its extension.Instead of holes in a tapestry, Nabokov's metaphors suggest
overlapping patterns ( Ada, PF).
...................................................
(The paper-cut sent yesterday comes
from the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery)