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.

strangers to change/window-panes

something about doors and windows and openings and closings.
yeah something about that.
--
I got two and a half hours of sleep last night. (I'm tired) (but everyone's tired/but nobody's tired enough). And I had a strange dream, with dream-water again.
My thesis is 45 pages in, and for the first time in a long time, I can see forward and inward and in front of me.

also, Iron & Wine's Daytrotter sessions are really beautiful. I almost like them better than the album versions:

"I recall, the sun in our faces
Stuck and leaning on graces
And being strangers to change

The radio and the bones we found frozen
All the thorns and the roses
Beneath your window pane"

too-real, beautiful things.

Japanese Cherry Blossoms only bloom for a week or so, and they're lining Athens at the moment.
There's something heart-wrenching (and beautiful) about ethereality/temporariness.

on Libraries, Cayle Adams, and Neil Young.

One of These Days
from Neil Young's Harvest Moon.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
And I'm gonna try
And thank them all for the good times together.
Though so apart we've grown.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

And I'm gonna thank,
That old country fiddler
And all those rough boys
Who play that rock 'n' roll
I never tried to burn any bridges
Though I know I let some good things go.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known

One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

From down in L.A.
All the way to Nashville,
From New York City
To my Canadian prairie home
My friends are scattered
Like leaves from an old maple.
Some are weak, some are strong.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

And another thing.

"The poet and the dreamer are distinct. Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. One pours out a balm upon the world, the other vexes it."

FROM John Keats' "The Fall of Hyperion"

----

In his dream, the speaker visits Moneta, the goddess of memory. He swears he's a poet. Oh, and she swears he's wrong.

(I will never be a poet).

----

There are two kinds of chaos: commotion, yes, but also the void. Today concluded with a sinking feeling of the latter. And I know this sadness is temporary, but the realization doesn't seem to be helping, because it's temporary-ness that's making me sad in the first place.

How am I supposed to 'vex' it when my agency's conditional--out of (my) control?

suspended (in the visceral).

"In Speak, Memory, Mabokov makes the poetic, or the playful speculation that Russian children before the Revolution--and his exile--were blessed with a surfeit of sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to come. Of course, fate doesn't play such premonitory games, but memory can perform retrospective maneuvers to compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative" (emphasis mine).

FROM Lost In Translation: A life in a New Language (1989)

via: Hoffman, Eva. "The New Nomads." Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. ed. André Aciman. New York: The New Press, 1999.

music for the morning// paste it together.

music by Shelly Short. video from youtube.

my brain and my body//my body and my brain

are in two different places.
(pause and let it load first).

woods || 5D mkii test from Hello Tomorrow on Vimeo.