Timelessness

For those who have ever been delightfully lost in looking, who have willingly drifted into a timeless place when surrounded by beauty, this excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov's riveting Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited will recapture that feeling:

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

-- Vladimir Nabokov

The photograph of the Renwal doll was taken at the pond at the top of my street this spring. Click on image to enlarge. The paragraph is from Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov, page 139, Vintage International, 1989. It was originally published, in different form, by Harper & Bros., New York , in 1951.

The World Wants To Tell Me Something

While thinking that lately so many coincidental things have happened, that so many shimmering details are coming together to form a larger, clearer picture, I came across a book by Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler. It was wedged in an odd place, half-hidden, waiting. I had bought this book years back, holding off reading it until I would have the necessary quiet, focus and time to savor its strangeness. (I have yet to let myself fall into its mystery. When the time is right, I will.) I opened the book (as with Hesse's Steppenwolf in the previous post) to see what message the pages might contain. I found these words quivering under my fingertips:

Leaning from the steep slope (the chapter title)

I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings.…

*

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external event of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

-- Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver

The quote was taken from pages 52-53 of If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, original copyright 1979, included in Everyman's Library in 1993. The photo was taken on 8/17/09, slightly uphill from my house. The tree is a black cherry, identified by the ever-helpful Michael Gambino, curator of Trailside Nature Museum at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY. Click on image to enlarge.

My Little Enigma

As I cruised down a rural road, this mind-catching sign leaped into my peripheral vision. I made a mental note to revisit it on my ride home, to stop and take a picture. Later, when I parked in the empty lot, I noticed a gigantic stuffed panda perched on the upstairs porch of the empty/haunted/work-in-progress restaurant. He had faded to a pale and mellow brown in the August sun. Slouched into his setting, he looked accepting of life’s surreal surprises. He seemed to take in the lush green landscape, to admire the Queen Anne’s lace waving far below, right next to the Enigma sign.

Today’s lesson: Always stop to revel in the little mysteries.

If this is a restaurant-to-be, I’m coming back for the grand opening. (Beautiful: The Grand Opening of the Enigma! Solutions to life’s riddles revealed with a meal …) I love the idea of opening that door, stepping over the threshold, and entering the Enigma, ready to savor a sip and a bite of magic and mystery.

Which carries me rocketing back in time to another odd sign in Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse’s unsettling and dream-swirled novel written in 1929. It’s a hallucinatory tale of many doors, mirrors and masks. (Hesse’s works were the perfect, mind-exploding material for college-age readers. As a young woman I read his books, one after another.) Due to discovering the Enigma sign, I wanted to find a particular, connected section in the book. Presto. I opened the book to the exact page. Of course, I’m sure the book tended to open to where it was frequently opened to in the past, to one of the many dog-eared pages. However, bear with me here, shrug off all doubt. It was so fitting, Steppenwolf opening like a door to the very words I was searching for!

Fellow enigma explorers, read them yourselves. (Forgive several brief omissions in the text.) Here are Herman Hesse’s words:

This time, too, the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. It looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed portal with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago onto a sleepy convent yard …. I paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing over, as the street between was so deep in mud and water. From the sidewalk where I stood and looked across, it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or something gaily colored, was festooned round the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written. I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more. So that’s it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared again for an instant; but they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly, and then abruptly vanished. … Why have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were:

MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain.

Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read:

FOR MADMEN ONLY!

…. I was freezing and walked on … longing too for that doorway to an enchanted theater, which was for madmen only. At every other step there were placards and posters with their various attractions …. But none of these was for me. They were for “everybody,” for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. In spite of that my sadness was a little lightened. I had had a greeting from another world, and a few dancing, colored letters had played upon my soul and sounded its secret strings. A glimmer of the golden track had been visible once again.

-- Herman Hesse

When my daughters were small, I referred to the airy passageway between two trees as a “magic door.” We always went through together. It felt like we were entering new woodland universes, being careful never to be separated, following the same path. For years we were in the same world at the same time. Of course, as they grew up, they entered their own kingdoms, kept opening new doors, which led in turn to separate places and whole other sets of beckoning doors.

Lately, after anticipating and attending a small high school reunion, I’ve been reliving the joys and pangs of the past. It’s jarring to look back and marvel at how life would have been so different based on seemingly insignificant choices, or a single locked or unlocked door. I was going to attend the reunion in my hometown with one of my oldest friends, but a death in her family prevented her from coming at all. The night of the party, I entered that shadowy time machine alone. After an initial wave of high school shyness, I was transported somewhere else, somewhere where old friends and acquaintances were all welcoming, with good stories to tell. Each person I saw, each story I heard, set my mind and heart off in another direction. The event summoned my own history with all of its own anecdotes, with its own collection of sweetness and grief. By this stage in our lives, I think we have all had enough life experiences to jettison the masks. I felt like a lot of straight and deep things were said. Delightfully humorous things, too.

Time got billowy there, and although I thought I would have time to connect with everyone, I didn’t. E-mail correspondence began or continued in earnest. People I didn’t know well in high school became new friends. Other people who didn’t/couldn’t attend the reunion made contact. Six of us – three who were at the reunion and three who weren’t – converged from all directions to meet again yesterday. We spent five hours talking. I’m proud of how they’ve all turned out and took great pleasure in their creativity, intelligence, humor, and compassion. Two of them are my oldest friends: one from third grade and one from way back in first. (She still remembers my first classroom entrance after moving to the area midyear. I was wearing red sneakers and crying!) How magical to be able to retrace my steps through so many passages and to still find new possibilities and doors revealed.

Phew. Okay. Let’s move out of range of this tsunami of nostalgia, and on to: THE ENIGMA PRIZE!!! Can anyone out there identify the location of the Enigma sign? I will send the first person to correctly uncover that mystery a FREE signed copy of my skinny chapbook, The Smaller, Paler Version of His Head. I’ll also enclose a miniature mystery. My contact information is in the sidebar of the blog.

Note: the condensed passage was from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, the 1963 revised edition from Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pages 31 - 33. The original translation was by Basil Creighton in 1929; the revised translation was by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz in 1963.

Already?

Really? I'm not ready. But here it was in unmistakable Technicolor, blazing right under my feet, right on my road, yesterday afternoon.

Click on image to enlarge.

Travel by Dragonfly

Late this warm August afternoon, dragonflies quivered in the breeze, clinging like iridescent pennants to tall stems. I actually thought the word pennants as I crouched at the edge of the field, watching them. If I was still enough, they let me get very close. Later this evening, I discovered that they really are called Halloween Pennants (Celithemis eponina).

Do you remember those trippy Jimi Hendrix lyrics from "Spanish Castle Magic?"

It's very far away
It takes about half a day
To get there, if we travel by my -- uh -- dragonfly ...

Whenever I hear that song, those lines make me laugh. A little bit of musical magic, a little bit of hallucinatory flight. Travel by dragonfly -- I guess that's what I was trying to do, getting so close I could see the patterns of veins on their diaphonous wings, looking deep into those gigantic mirrored eyes, imagining how the world looks reassembled into a mosaic. Maybe Jimi Hendrix had compound eyes.

Click on image to enlarge. Photo taken late this afternoon at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation.