Speak, Memory: on Nabokov, time, body, and musing.

The beginning bits of Nabokov's Speak, Memory captivate me, like voice and nostalgia captivate me. He writes:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between to eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated ... I rebel against this state of affairs ... "

Nabokov goes on to deconstruct contemporary assumptions about time-- says he won't take the bait-- that time is something he doesn't believe in. But he's dead. His memory isn't flashing flip-book faces any longer (except, perhaps, in text: call it a Grecian lark, but some part of me connects to that old mantra of immortality through fame--if only fame weren't fame at all, but a series of humble engravings whose etchings echo down the well of humanhood, that is, to say, if only fame were fame with a twist: with a writer's humility, which is, in fact, a writer's self-consciousnessness: a dancing meta). And sometimes I wonder if I could really do it: the writing thing. Not the teaching-writing thing. The writing-thing. Wonder if I could congeal all the octopi tentacles of thought smothering me and create something theoretical that isn't just a rouse and something like poetry, too. But then I wonder if that isn't just a bit escapist (or worse, a selfish attempt to dodge Nabokov's abyss, to appeal to some deconstruction of time). Yeah, then I wonder if I shouldn't just quietly dig my fingers in the dirt instead.

Folks always distinguish between the ethereal (spiritual) and the corporeal (bodily), but I think there is this other place of residence, too: the intellectual: not a person, but a place. And then I wonder if these boundaries between the three aren't as unreal as time to Nabokov.