R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 67

Reading: This and That

Been jumping around a bit, but one constant has been rereading Nabokov: Speak Memory, Glory (first time and I got a bit bored), Sebastian Knight. 

In rereading Knight I thought how wonderfully Nabokov draws from (always tweaking) his own bio. I also (not totally out of the blue) thought of Khodasevich, who I hadn't read (I only know a few poems via Nabokov) or read about for some while. I scratched the itch (this morning) and long story short: I downloaded his Necropolis (prose, memoirs, The Symbolists) and am reading the first "essay" on Nina Petrovskaya:

Nina Petrovskaya was not attractive. But in 1903 she was young—and that makes quite a difference. She was “rather smart,” as Blok said, and she was “sensitive,” as they might have said if she had lived a century earlier. Most importantly, she was very good at “matching pitch.” She immediately became the object of a number of loves.

Oystercatchers @ White Point Beach

White Point Beach. Send in the clowns. It was a thrill to  cross the gap between mainland and "island" (my shoes usually got wet but I took that as a plus), nod to the sentinel gull (on a large rock overlooking the breakfast table), and watch the oystercatchers (blacks & hybrids) playing their breakfast game. I had so much fun I'll probably go back. Though hybrids are beautiful too, I'd love to see a true American oystercatcher drilling in the sand.:)

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Rock Wren @ White Point Beach

Rock Wren @ White Point Beach. Took me three walks (past the restroom and along a thin path -- like no path -- 'twixt cliff and rocky shore) to get a decent pic of this little guy, but yesterday it was as though he were waiting for me, sitting so quietly on a log. 

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Cooper's Hawk

 

Another Juvenile Cooper's Hawk. I was in Cerritos, on the west side of the San Gabriel River, and a man with his dog pointed him out to me. The beautiful teenager had settled on a chimney (#3 to #5). From there he "jumped" to the metal "helmet" of a cable junction (#1 and #2) near the same house. Keep 'em comin'.

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Long Beach Mitred Parakeets

Didn't do much in terms of "serious birding" today -- maybe tomorrow. Walked around the lagoon (balmy weather, next to zero birds), saw a bunch of starlings on a utility line and ran into a pair of the local mitred parakeets (twice and on the other side of the fence). 

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Grey Herons (Juveniles)

Oliver & Fred (Again) from Grey Heron Colony (Graureiherkolonie) in Bramfelder See, Hamburg.

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Hummingbird

 

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Tamara: Speak Memory

 I do remember, however, with heartbreaking vividness, a certain evening in the summer of 1917 when, after a winter of incomprehensible separation, I chanced to meet Tamara on a suburban train. For a few minutes between two stops, in the vestibule of a rocking and rasping car, we stood next to each other, I in a state of intense embarrassment, of crushing regret, she consuming a bar of chocolate, methodically breaking off small, hard bits of the stuff, and talking of the office where she worked. On one side of the tracks, above bluish bogs, the dark smoke of burning peat was mingling with the smoldering wreck of a huge, amber sunset. It can be proved, I think, by published records that Alexander Blok was even then noting in his diary the very peat smoke I saw, and the wrecked sky. There was later a period in my life when I might have found this relevant to my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into the jasmin-scented, cricket-mad dusk of a small station; but today no alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain.

From "Speak Memory"

Re Nabokov's boyhood (then manhood) wonder with butterflies and nature in general:

When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

Nabokov's "Speak Memory"

Reading Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" for the third time:

“Oh, yes,” she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. “Yes, I know all that,” and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the déjà vu. A streak of sectarianism ran through her direct ancestry. She went to church only at Lent and Easter. The schismatic mood revealed itself in her healthy distaste for the ritual of the Greek Catholic Church and for its priests. She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.