Spellbound

Today after an enchanting class on the act of storytelling, I found myself obsessing on the full range of any exploration of the act of storytelling and of the analysis of art. One of Vladimir Nabokov's major emphases was on the role of a good reader. I hope everyone remembers the quote James mentioned in class today. If not, it goes something like this: "The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed the book. [...]The admirable reader is not concerned with general ideas: he is interested in the particular vision". Here Nabokov seems to be saying that the specifics of character, time, and place are unimportant in themselves. It is the weaving together of these details in order that one may partake of a particular "vision" that makes them of vital importance to the reader. This is the act of storytelling and the role of the enchanter.

While listening to Dr. Sexson tell his story of the meeting with the "Scheherezade of the Skies," at one point I became distanced from myself and I realized.....I was spellbound. I was literally hanging on every word, and every pause was excrutiating. My thoughts were akin to "what comes next?!" "will he go on or leave us in this place of unknowing?" Even as we left the class and as all the elements of the story seemed to be revealed, I had my doubts. To be a good reader, one must never trust what one is told. I'm not exactly sure whether or not the woman did indeed have a "real" tattoo on her arm....just as I am not sure whether or not this encounter "really" took place. I find myself asking, does it even matter? Does the veritability of a given story change its impact? Why this obsessive need for "reality" when we have no proof that this physical reality exists at all? WHAT....IS....."REAL"?

This is the unanswerable question of our time. Yet this is also a question we must ask in order to ascertain whether or not we are "real". For this reason, we turn to stories. In stories we are immortal; we live on in the imaginings of others. Humbert Humbert states "Imagine me: I shall not exist if you do not imagine me". In this way, by examining art we are not solely attempting to become better readers. Rather, we are attempting to become better at reading ("living"?) our own lives. Here we find the reason for the obsessive list-making of seemingly mundane items. It is the taking of time to delve beneath the surface of an item that we are incapable of. "For most of us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time,/ The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight". Is it even possible to live in a manner where every object, every moment, every single word, has a tangible meaning in our conscious lives? In Finnegan's Wake, we see this concept is achievable in dreams, but how do we make sense of it all? Where do we make connections, and where do we let the torrent of words, of concepts, of syllables, wash over us like a river of stories, a river of dreams?

The truth is, every object or experience we may encounter does have meaning, but in order that we may stay sane, we must leave a fraction of that veil of illusion in place. Once we tear that final curtain and know ourselves for the first time, once we become the man behind the curtain, there is no going back. "Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is." As Plato demonstrates in his Allegory of the Cave, we cannot unsee that which we have seen, nor would we wish, at that point, to return to a state of ignorance. This tearing of the veil (see biblical reference in hyperlink) is, I propose, the goal of this class. The difference here, however, is that instead of the uninitiated being granted access to god himself, we, the self-same uninitiated, are granted access to our immortality.

Through our realization that time is a relative concept, we become aware of its amazing paradoxical quality. We are immortal in that art is immortal throughout the course of time, yet that immortality is fragile and subject to the whims of future generations. Time will destroy us in that we die, yet it also secures our immortality. "People change, and smile: but the agony abides./Time the destroyer is time the preserver." We are ignorant as to its true nature, yet we can witness its effect on our persons. We are taught to transcend time by stepping outside of its control through the realms of art or enlightenment. This, we are told, is immortality......a myriad of lifetimes in a single breath......and on and on and on.... Dolce domum.

>Sidebar: I found this quiz online about time and how we think of it. It takes literally seconds to take and I found it pretty interesting.

As a final note, at the end of our semester with Nabokov, Dr. Sexson proclaimed us all to be mad. But we cannot help it. Everywhere we go, we, the now initiated, will be looking for the enchanter's work, the man behind the curtain. In finding him, we will find ourselves, for he is but a mirror to our own nature, our frailty and immortality abiding nonsensically in the paradox of time.