Obviously? None of it is obvious.

What is obvious about Pale Fire?

The commentator is obsessed with John Shade.

The commentator displays trollish qualities.

The commentator is religious. “I could distinguish the expression of passionate interest, rapture and reverence, with which he followed the images wording themselves in his mind, and I knew that whatever my agnostic friend might say in denial, at that moment Our Lord was with him” (89).

The commentator envies Shade’s relationship with his wife.

The commentator wishes Shade to incorporate “the Zemblan theme” into his work: “Not only did I understand then that Shade regularly read to Sybil cumulative parts of his poem but it also dawns upon me now that, just as regularly, she made him down or remove from his Fair Copy everything connected with the magnificent Zemblan theme with which I kept furnishing him and which, without knowing much about the growing work, I fondly believed would become the main rich thread in its weave.” (91)

The commentator does not seem to be fond of youthful characteristics?: “I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes.” (83) “All (the black cat) got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likeable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves…” (84)

Some not obvious things worth looking into: tessellations, mirrors, nymphs, Heliotropes and butterflies…hmmm.

Heterotopias?

“Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language…they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fibula; heterotopias…desiccate speech, stop words in the tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (Preface xviii)

I find this quote interesting.

I don’t understand it. But I did find an intriguing essay online that defines heterotopia as the space outside of the society that produced it that carries a relation to all other remaining “external” spaces. The difference between a utopia and a heterotopia is that the latter possess corporeal reality, material reality. If the reflection in the mirror is a utopia, then the mirror as a medium object is a heterotopia.

If you would like to read the rest of the essay: http://www.knutasdam.net/Texts/HeterotopiaKAsdam.pdf

Life-lies

Life-lie: saving lie. “That’s right, I said the life-lie. Because the life-lie is the vitalizing principle, you see” (275)

“What the devil does it mean, to be demonic? That was just some nonsense I thought up to let him go on living. If I hadn’t, the poor, harmless swine would have broken down in self-contempt and despair many years ago” (275). To be convinced of demonic nature as treatment…the doctor is in practice of telling people lies to fix them, to keep them content in living their life-lie. Is it better to live a life of truth? Or a less painful life of delusion? Only emotion we’re allowed to feel is fun….When confronted with the choice between a life of truth or illusion (or lies) I chose truth. I realize intellectually the futility of my overly simplistic conception of “truth”. I realize that this is an inaccessible concept based on my own illusions of what constitutes reality and experience. It is based in illusion, and so baseless. Non-existent, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can intellectually wonder if I have built my reality on lies, a non-existent foundation less substantial than air. But of course I don’t really believe what I’m typing here. I still believe in truth. I still believe that I can (mostly) trust my perceptions of the world, and can recognize and correct my viewpoint when life brings attention to an illusion I believed to be truth. I accept this because my sanity (or what I believe to be some semblance of sanity) requires it in order for me to exist functionally in reality (or what I judge to be functionally or perceive to be reality…but I’ll stop this. This cyclical state of constant doubt is exhausting to maintain).

This reminds me of conversations I’ve had with my friend Erin (the one adventuring with Shanely the rock in Ireland). I wonder if the only perception of ourselves is discovered through feedback with our environment—that we cannot truly perceive ourselves because we can never observe as an outsider. We are always already within. We rely on our environment to give feedback we can perceive as truth, but similar to the “forgotten” conversation we’ve had in class (you know everything already, you’ve just forgotten it) the outside stimuli is the “nudger” to access what was already within and knowable. The nudge is not truth. Your interpretation of the stimuli is the truth (to your perception). So when a friend has to sit you down and have a “tough talk”, you squirm and feel uncomfortable because a lot of the time the perceptions closest to the “truth” are the ones you knew, but had to be reminded that you knew, often to correct whatever path based in illusion you’ve been intent on blindly pursuing to reach a dream or unreachable ideal.

There’s a quote that states that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know, but never knew you knew. Perhaps it was stated more eloquently than that. Books and teachers …maybe the ones most important to us are the ones that hit closest to that internal blueprint that we all carry, the one that maps our dreams, fantasies and myths—the archetypes we discuss in class that Ibsen seems to be so fond of exploring. Are the archetypes truth in essence? Or are they an escape from truth/reality? How is the escape fulfilling to us? More so than actual reality? Reminds me of Sarah and Bizz’s blogs…

I agree with Sarah and Bizz—it is impossible to peel truth from lies. The two are too interwoven. Bizz’s idea about dreams functioning as lies in (dreams as the ideal) is really intriguing. She writes that perhaps reality only becomes real after we challenge and recreate it into fiction (lies). Is this process the sole form of ownership we maintain over “reality”? To order what is naturalistic for the purpose of mirroring that internal blueprint of our human instinct, the ingrained dreams we all share?

Once again, I’m reminded of our class discussion of the Master Builder. As the tower constructed of wooden blocks and Legos  got higher and higher and the material lessened, the tower became less substantial. In order to build the highest tower, there had to be increasing gaps in the corporeal material of which it was constructed and more air towards the top. But this was acceptable because of the firm foundation. And well...shoot. I'm not sure where I was going with this.

Rocks

Here are a few of the rocks in my life. The handsomely mustached rock (his name is Shanely) is currently traveling abroad with my friend in Europe. This picture shows him on a bridge in a national park in Ireland. I occasionally like to paint rocks and give them away or hide them (sometimes by grocery stores or parks, etc). If you think this sounds like an odd way to spend time, I would have to agree. But I would also encourage you to try it.

The second picture shows the two rocks on my window sill. I think the big orangish fellow might be from a bike trip I took with my family? But I don’t actually remember. He ended up coming with me to college by default as he happened to be sitting on my nightstand when I was packing. The second rock is another one I painted. The shadow in the picture almost hides it, but I also scrawled a little quote that seemed deep at the time.

I suppose I should relate all of this to what we’ve been reading.

I feel that I have made these (among other) rocks sacred by associating them with a particular memory, and/or bestowing a name. Actually, the most important and memorable rocks have all been “named” by either title (Shanely) or quote. Similar to Scholes Destry-Scholes’ marbles, I have conferred sacramental importance upon meaningless objects through words. Why would I do this? Why would Vera insist upon methodically associating an arbitrary word with its respective marble? She admits that “she had no hope of ever understanding the system. But by process of elimination, she wondered whether it would be possible to fix a name to each marble. She did believe each had had one name and one only” (203). Vera has no hope of understanding the system yet she retains faith that the system exists; that the system holds meaning and order and is not arbitrary. Vera’s passion to order words into names for the marbles holds meaning regardless of the words’ “correct” alignment with the original order. The system holds meaning because Vera has constructed her own order.

Why would I collect meaningless objects and paint and/or name them? Am I looking for an element of the sacred to enter my life? Do I have to enforce order on random nature to lend meaning to my existence?

Or do I just like painting mustaches?

Mosaics

Byatt opens the novel with this quote: “These similitudes are charming and entertaining, and who does not enjoy playing with analogies?” (Goethe).  Why play with analogy? Why not use a direct comparison to relate similarities? Would this not be the most efficient use of words and time? The answer seems to always be a variation of: because art can contain greater truth than reality alone. Somehow, out of a mishmash conglomerate of lies, distorted experience, stolen ideas and facts we can derive “greater truth” as well as that enigmatic “essence”. How is this possible?

After our last class discussion and reading Bizz’s blog, I went back to look at the passage about mosaics. Nanson writes that the great makers raided previous art for tesserae to rework into new images, to catch “different light at different angles” and make “transparent what had been a brilliant reflective surface”. Mosaics then are a collection of thoughts and perceptions (both the maker and past makers’) rearranged—ordered—in a way that allows what had previously been reflected through the transparent finished piece. In other words, mosaics crafters seem to be employing a forced order through the use of glue and a hammer—to create greater meaning from random shards of glass. This passage reminded me of our discussions about imposing rather than discovering. All writing is essentially about the writer’s experience, just as a reader (especially in the initial stages of reading) finds it is easier to see connections to his own life before delving into the actual essence of the work. Maybe works of art always are constantly in transition from mirror mosaics to transparency, to make what was previously impenetrable with the face of our own image clear. That somehow, through the raiding of the “great makers” thoughts and careful gathering of perceptions, we can force order upon this chaos of gathered experience and derive a greater truth. However, as the line referring to “rage” in Key West suggests, we compromise something in the end. We destroy for order. To fit a mosaic into a new image, we must pull shards out of their original context, take the hammer and damage glass.  

However, seeing as how all glass’s form and substance is originally inspired by Nature and crafted from bits of melted sand, it’s pretty miraculous that it exists at all.

Search for Meaning

“Maybe this so-dreadfully desired, so elaborate real self was an absence of self, a freely-moving, flickering flame of knowledge and language, which should not be forced, or frozen, into any of the gestures required by the social touches and approaches through which most people discover themselves through others?” (101).

Ibsen’s obsession with his real self is in stark contrast with Nanson’s frequent proclamations of disinterest in himself. In one of his brief reflections on childhood, Nanson states that he was almost put off from his vocation by the urging of teachers who “assured me I would ‘discover myself’ by reading, that I would ‘understand myself’ by ‘identifying’” (117).  Instead, Nanson insists that true literary fanatics are looking for “anything but a mirror—for an escape route, for an expanding horizon” (117). After describing literature’s more fantastical incarnations, he later regards the function of literature in the search for meaning almost as an afterthought. It’s strange that Nanson poses the functions in this order; escape before meaning, “unimaginable monstrosities” before comprehension and order.

Ibsen and Nanson seem to embody two opposing methods in a similar separate search for meaning. While Ibsen’s desire is to be (and by extension, understand?) himself, he seems only to gain understanding and control over the fictional characters he manipulates in plays. In contrast, Nanson claims disinterest in himself and desires escape through literature, yet he finishes his research on DS with a more complete knowledge of his own life. This pattern of attainment of knowledge through distance from what we desire to judge is reminiscent of the quote Sarah discussed: “the human being is in the spiritual sense a long sighted creature” (100).  

A Composite of Thoughts

“There are very few human truths and infinite variations on them…we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend—not infinitely, but violently, but giddily—the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover…we put a whole lifetime…to discovering what these things mean for us—dark, shadows” (274).

Nanson’s two lovers seem to embody the two (opposing?) forces he attempts to balance throughout the novel: robust Fulla with her knowledge of bee life representing the pursuits of science and the tangibility of “things” while Vera, isolated and obsessive, represents the arts in her attempts to capture the delicate and morbid “inner life” of humanity. But I’ve been imposing…Fulla is perhaps as isolated and obsessive as her darker counterpart. Perhaps these qualities were less apparent (to me) because I subscribe to the stereotype of the “haunted” artist in books…as well as life, and life reflected in art.

Byatt’s interesting play on words on page 205 (“a writer’s task is essentially to see, not to mirror”) brings to mind the double meaning of the word “mirror”—to mimic another or look at oneself. This double meaning seems to sum up the role of the writer/artist in this novel. Through mimicking DS in the role of the biographer, Nanson is able to look at or into himself; in writing and conducting research about another’s life, he is looking into his own in a way unparalleled by his days as a post-modernist scholar. “I am not very good at finding out who Scholes Destry-Scholes was because I am not very interested in finding out who I am” (pg 118). It is in the process of writing about another's life that his own experience becomes the focal point…however, Scholes Destry-Scholes cyclical and repetitive name in itself seems to serve as a metaphor for the futile search for an “end”: there is no end in the acquirement of knowledge, just as it is impossible to fully know and understand one’s true self (if there is such a thing).

On a side note, I’ve started counting the white Subaru Outbacks I encounter in Bozeman and am a little creeped out by how many “find” me when I start imposing.