One of the three blind characters in VN's novel Ada (1969), Spencer Muldoon was born eyeless:
A teasy problem demanded Dr Veen’s presence in England.
Old Paar of Chose had written him that the ‘Clinic’ would like him to study a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case (such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for himself whether he thought it worth the trouble to fly the patient to Kingston for further observation. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish poetry.
His ability to break space into ranks and files of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ things in what seemed a wallpaper pattern remained a mystery until one evening, when a research student (R.S. — he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within Muldoon’s reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor Muldoon’s childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man’s eyebrows went up slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum, R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently — ‘red,’ ‘orange,’ ‘yellow,’ et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that they also felt different one from another.
In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of ‘stingles,’ special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects of one’s skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even ravines), and spoke eerily of the ‘strong’ green stingle of a piece of blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford’s perspiring nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced to assume that the man’s fingertips could convey to his brain ‘a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter’ as Paar put it in his detailed report to Van.
When the latter arrived, Muldoon had not quite come out of a state of stupor more protracted than any preceding one. Van, hoping to examine him on the morrow, spent a delightful day conferring with a bunch of eager psychologists and was interested to spot among the nurses the familiar squint of Elsie Langford, a gaunt girl with a feverish flush and protruding teeth, who had been obscurely involved in a ‘poltergeist’ affair at another medical institution. He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston, with Miss Langford, as soon as he was fit to travel. The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy. (3.4)
Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is a novel by Aldous Huxley (an English writer and philosopher, 1894-1963). Its title is taken from a phrase in John Milton's Samson Agonistes:
Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.
The title of the book, like Milton's poem, recalls the biblical story of Samson; he was captured by the Philistines, his eyes were burned out and he was taken to Gaza, where he was forced to work at grinding grain in a mill.
Eyeless in Gaza and Some Reflections on Time (1946), an essay by Aldous Huxley, bring to mind Van's essays Reflections in Sidra (written after Van's travels in the East) and The Texture of Time (Part Four of Ada). Sidra is Ardis in reverse. The name of Daniel Veen's family estate, Ardis hints at paradise. A tragic closet drama, Samson Agonistes appeared with the publication of Milton's Paradise Regained, a poem in four books (1871). The author of Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton (1608-74) was completely blind since 1652.
Van blinds Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis) for spying on him and Ada and attemting to blackmail Ada. Kim's surname seems to hint at Josephine Beauharnais (1763-1814), Napoleon's first wife. The dictum "To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs" is attributed to Aldous Huxley. Dog is God in reverse. In VN's story Udar kryla ("Wingstroke," 1923) Kern quotes Aldous Huxley's words "God is a gaseous vertebrate:"
- А в Бога вы верите? - спросил Монфиори с видом человека, который попадает на своего конька. - Ведь Бог-то есть. Керн фальшиво засмеялся.
- Библейский Бог. Газообразное позвоночное... Не верю.
- Это из Хукслея, - вкрадчиво заметил Монфиори. - А был библейский.
Бог... Дело в том, что Он не один; много их, библейских богов... Сонмище... Из них мой любимый... "От чихания его показывается свет; глаза у него, как ресницы зари". Вы понимаете, понимаете, что это значит? А? И дальше: "... мясистые части тела его сплочены между собою твердо, не дрогнут". Что? Что? Понимаете?
- Стойте, - крикнул Керн.
- Нет, вникайте, вникайте. "Он море претворяет в кипящую мазь; оставляет за собою светящуюся стезю: бездна кажется сединою!"
- Стойте же, наконец, - перебил Керн. - Я хочу вам сказать, что я решил покончить с собой...
"And do you believe in God?" asked Monfiori with the air of a man getting on his hobby horse. "There is God, after all."
Kern gave an artificial laugh.
"Biblical God. . . . Gaseous vertebrate. . . . I am not a believer."
"That's from Huxley," insinuatingly observed Monfiori. "There was a biblical God, though. . . . The point is that He is not alone; there are numerous biblical Gods. . . . A host. My favorite one is. . . 'He sneezes and there is light. He has eyes like the eyelashes of dawn. ' Do you understand what this means? Do you? And there is more: " . . the fleshy parts of his body are solidly interconnected, and they won't budge." Well? Well? Do you understand?" "Wait a minute," shouted Kern.
"No, no-- you must think about it. 'He transforms the sea into a seething ointment; he leaves behind a trail of radiance; the abyss is akin to a patch of gray hair! ' "
"Wait, will you," interrupted Kern. "I want to tell you that I have decided to kill myself. . . ." (2)
Monfiori tells Kern that there are numerous biblical Gods. According to Van, on Desdemonia (as Van calls Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) artists are the only gods:
That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor — in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus. (3.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Aleksey etc.: Vronski and his mistress.
In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (1932) the Controller mentions Desdemona (Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello):
"There's a great deal in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."
"What?" questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
"It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory."
"V.P.S.?"
"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. (Chapter 17)
In Brave New World, colors are used to signify social caste and status within the World State. Each caste wears a specific color: Alphas wear gray, Betas wear mulberry, Gammas wear green, Deltas wear khaki, and Epsilons wear black.
Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra, Van mentions the Amerussia of Abraham Milton:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
Faragod and Log (the Supreme Being on Antiterra) make one think of Ford, "Ford forbid," etc. in Huxley's dystopian novel. The Amerussia of Abraham Milton brings to mind Milton Abraham with whose invaluable help poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina) organized a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk (the Antiterran twin of Whitehorse, a city in NW Canada):
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played ‘golf’ on Sundays and belonged to ‘lodges.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
Old Paar of Chose brings to mind a pair of shoes mentioned by Huxley at the end of his Sonnet ("Were I to die"):
Were I to die, you’d break your heart, you say.
Well, if it do but bend, I’m satisfied —
Bend and rebound — for hearts are temper-tried,
Mild steel, not hardened, with the spring and play
Of excellent tough swords. It’s not that way
That you’ll be perishing. But when I’ve died,
When snap! my light goes out, what will betide
You, if the heart-breaks give you leave to stay?
What will be left, I wonder, if you lose
All that you gave me? “All? A year or so
Out of a life,” you say. But worlds, say I,
Of kisses timeless given in ecstasy
That gave me Real You. I die: you go
With me. What’s left? Limbs, clothes, a pair of shoes?...