Jansy Mello: Touching comments by Stan, highlighting
aspects that, perhaps, only mathematicians or "Quantum Mechanics out
there," might fully realize, concerning VN's poem "We so firmly
believed."
From my simple perspective any interpretation needs to be quite
limited.
Starting from what seem to be lines written at a critical phase
in VN's life (he must have been fortyish, still in Europe,
perhaps entangled in a distressing love-affair), he
describes a ruptute in his belief about "the linkage of life."*
At first, I thought these words indicated a transitory crisis, related to
Life itself, which we could witness as something later solved by the poet
John Shade, after his near-death experience [ "...And
blood-black nothingness began to spin/ A system of cells interlinked
within/ Cells interlinked within cells interlinked /Within one stem. And
dreadfully distinct/ Against the dark, a tall white fountain
played." ----- .."Not flimsy nonsense, but
a web of sense./ Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/Some kind of
link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the
game.../"]
Then, I realized (this seems to be both STan K-B and BB's opinion)
that the fissure relates to Vladimir Nabokov's sense of personal
history and, probably, his feeling of "identity..":As an adult
emigré he finds himself so disconnected from his childhood
environment, and also from his juvenile experiences, that his personal
construction about the person he has become now, doesn't correspond to his
feeling of a past "I," in the poetic register that his acute
sensibility allows him to formulate and share. Sad and poignant
and...universal?
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* "We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,/but
now I’ve looked back–and it is astonishing/to what a degree you, my youth,/seem
in tints not mine, in traits not real./If one probes it, it’s rather like a
wave’s haze/between me and you.../.../.../ You’ve long ceased to be I. You’re an
outline.../...yet how long/we believed/that there was no break in the
way.../.../" (quoted from B.Boyds article and links)