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[NABOKOV-L] "On butterflies and Being"
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One more article sent by Jim Twiggs (http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/08/on-butterflies-and-being ), "On Butterflies And Being" by
David B. Hart (Aug 31, 2009)
Here is a wild compression: "(To) get to the story I want to tell-which does indeed involve a butterfly...The lepidopteron in question was...a Red Admiral or-a few last flourishes of Linnaean jargon-a Vanessa atalanta, a butterfly that does not really belong to the Admiral sub-family (Limenitidinae) of the Brushfoots (Nymphalidae) at all, but belongs instead to the True Brushfoot sub-family (the Nymphalinae)....I have seen it only once since arriving here. What made that lone sighting remarkable to me, though, was neither the butterfly's beauty nor its comparative rarity in these woods, but the eerily perfect timing of its appearance. I was sitting on my porch with two volumes I had recently acquired, both by Vladimir Nabokov: a first edition of Pale Fire in good condition, which is not very hard to find, and that Holy Grail of Nabokoviana, a first printing of the 1970 volume Poems and Problems ... And I had just flipped to that haunting passage in the former where John Shade is about to cross the road to his death and a "Red Admirable" (Nabokov preferred the older form of its common name) emerges suddenly from the junipers and shrubs and whirls around the poet "like a colored flame" ...then hastily disappears into the shadows of the trees, when a Red Admiral came coasting towards me, performed three elegantly gliding circumvolations of my head, briefly came to rest on the arm of my chair, and then flew off again and quickly disappeared in the shadows of a Chinese Tulip tree. The coincidence alone would have been enough to astonish me...Nabokov, as is well known, was a fairly firm believer in the immortality of the soul, as well as a believer in fate, and he tended to think that the patterns of our lives are in large part shaped and guided by the spiritual community of those who have gone before us. In the strange, often tragic, but also often beautiful symmetries of his own life he thought he could discern the clear workings of these benign presences...
There are any number of fascinating aspects to the curious interaction and equally curious demarcation that existed between Nabokov the lepidopterist and Nabokov the artist...But it is clear from his writings that his love of Lepidoptera was in part fired by the mysterious grandeur of a holometabolous species whose life cycle seems to encompass a magical passage from death to greater life-from the earthbound groping of the larva (in Latin, after all, a word for ghost or funerary mask), through the golden entombment of the chrysalis, to the winged liberty and polychromatic glory of the fully formed imago (the true "image"). An Atlas Moth breaking from its cocoon at the end of his early story "Christmas," for instance, clearly figures as an intimation of life beyond death. A more interesting feature of Nabokov's interest in butterflies for me, however, and of his entire career as a naturalist, was his intuition-at once metaphysical and aesthetic-that between nature and art there is no ultimate formal difference. Though not in any conventional sense a religious man...he was certain that the natural world exhibited innumerable signs of conscious and even somewhat whimsical artistry: morphological games, almost, patterns of mimicry and delightful complexity that exceeded any purely evolutionary warrant, and that spoke of a sort of creativity whose rationale was ultimately aesthetic...There was nothing in Nabokov's vision of reality that would have brought his thinking into the vicinity of the current Intelligent Design movement, with its logically and epistemologically unverifiable arguments regarding irreducible complexity and its crude mechanistic deism and its all-too-immanent god of the gaps. For Nabokov, nature's design was something he thought he perceived in the sheer surfeit of the beautiful over the needful, and in the specular play of formal likenesses and variations among species. It was an aesthetic judgment on the whole of the natural order, not an empirical claim about certain portions of its machinery...Whatever the case, his beliefs certainly endowed him with a limitless capacity for happiness...he was always able to find life to be a delightful "surprise" and for this reason he was always able to see something more shining through the veils of the ordinary...And it is this quality of surprise that lends depth and poignancy (and delight) to all of Nabokov's art. Whatever else one makes of his peculiar metaphysics... known to every reflective child, and forgotten only by adults who have coarsened their intellects...His was nothing other than the ancient Platonic and Aristotelian sense of thaumazein-of original rational wonder at existence-transcribed into a new key. As Wittgenstein said (a pronouncement the implications of which even some of his most avid admirers seem not to notice), it is not how things are, but that they are, that constitutes "the mystical." Where the Intelligent Design theorist wants us to ponder...(a) richer perspective enjoins us to feel awe before the sheer there-ness...This is a consciousness of things more aesthetic than empirical and more spiritual than aesthetic, but at every level it is an experience of beauty-which is to say, an experience of the utter non-necessity, the absolute fortuity, of being. Heidegger, in an infuriatingly terse paragraph in the "epilogue" of his "The Origin of the Work of Art," correctly rejects as inadequate those static understandings of beauty that say it resides simply in form and order and a certain splendor (quod visum placet), and insists on the ontological dimension of the beautiful. No object, however striking, is beautiful as a sheer sensuous effect (that is nothing but a neurological agitation), nor even as an object of intellectual comprehension; it is beautiful because, in addition to these things, there is the mysterious surprisingness of its existence, by which it discloses to us being in its advent, or being as event...It is an enigma written as plainly upon the surface of a twig or a brick as upon the wing of a butterfly...Even if my encounter with that Vanessa atalanta was nothing more than a wildly amusing coincidence...-every butterfly is a Papilio mysteriosus, an emblem and an emissary of being in its familiarity and infinite strangeness, and all things properly contemplated remind us that, of themselves, they cannot be. And yet they are."
In the overall mood of the article, dealing with "happiness and surprise" (Plato/Aristoteles "thaumazein," as the author informs us) I was reminded of a Nabokov BBC, 1969 interview, Iquite recently re-read (it's on-line and it can be equally found in SO). Somewhere else a commentator expressed his doubts concerning Nabokov's words.For him, VN's confession wasn't true to his experiences - and he described VN's various ordeals and losses. He forgot that item, VN's talent to "look at the Harlequins."
James Mossman: Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a "tartine de merde" which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?
Vladimir Nabokov: I've never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.
Nabokov certainly expected more surprises in the hereafter.
Thanks to internet( www.nytimes.com/.../boyd-pale.html -), here is the quote and Brian Boyd's words about it:
" But Shade contains no secrets, no surprises. No one will ever tell him he is insane. As "Pale Fire" shows us, he is stability itself, living all his life in his parents' home, in the same comfortable small academic town, marrying his childhood sweetheart and in forty years never wavering in his love. He records his undramatic surroundings, recounts his quiet life, and that is all. No wonder, especially after what we see (and before what we will see) of Kinbote, that Shade's world can seem insipid, especially when encased in a verse form that fell out of fashion in English almost two centuries ago./../ Yet as those opening lines suggest, he can make the ordinary extraordinary. If there are no surprises or secrets in him, he finds surprises in his world, in a waxwing's death, in a pheasant's tracks, in a newspaper clipping (Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 / On Chapman's Homer), in what he dubs an iridule, a rainbow reflected in a cloud from a thunderstorm in a distant valley: he wants us to see that "we are most artistically caged." Caged, all the same. Even more crucial to his life and his poem than the surprises of life are the far greater surprises he suspects around us. (As he will say to Kinbote in the Commentary: "Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one." [C.549, 225])
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