Ghosts of Thought

I sat at my desk and thought about the future and the past in spectral shadow. A group of crows clustered together in a naked tree to share their warmth. Every few moments one lit off into the drab sky, and another glided in stealthily and settled into the vacant seat. Little bits of crumpled papers and unfinished thoughts lay strewn about, in the midst of which swam a pink conch shell, only partially visible. I found it on the bottom of the shallow azure ocean hugging an island which kissed the coast of Mexico. The currents had rocked me so gently in silence as I saw it lying half-buried in the pale sand, and dove down dreamily to tease it out, careful to not be bitten by any hostile residents.
I hold it now and see the rounded over spikes, battered with time, and ignore the little mollusk ghost peeking out at me. The snail may have seen a bigger, more agreeable shell and prudently abandoned this one. Or perhaps it was feeling vain, and spotted a more fashionable, well-shaped shell. We all know the color and pigment of a shell depends on the health, the diet, and also the emotional stability of the invertebrate that created it. An animal, like any artist, experiencing disturbing or stimulating feelings will create intriguing patterns in pigments and blends which can create an orgasm, if viewed correctly.
I saw a home on some strange island that was shaped like a conch shell—the house, I mean. The animal’s blood is rich in a very soluble form of calcium, and we see it secrete with care and precision (as a painter dapples his palette) its secret mix, which, with the beauty and mystery of deep earth geology, is crystallized into calcium carbonate and becomes part of its shell, or colored canvas. We see it patiently eat and look for more food to eat as a normal snail would, but we know its wants and needs—really just building up its blood with precious calcium so that it can paint, once again, its immortal canvas. In front of us faded calendars are fanned through as the shell grows with the animal. Etched into it is its story, with all the emotional ups and downs and the stresses of food and the encounter of hungry predators. Its memories are written as ghosts, and it carries them on its back like a stubborn hairy hermit running from time.

What was I saying? Ah, yes, hairy hermits and the whimsical business of Tense in Transparent Things. I apologize, I sometimes lose my train of thought…
We all know there exist to us thus far three Tenses. It could be argued for a fourth Tense, but we will not address that at the moment. The Three Tenses are concrete and explainable? Goodness no! The mere matter of time and all its enchantment muddles even the more addressable matter of the Present. Don’t think this bad. We do know, however, that Alice is a former love, Beata is his present mistress, and Claire is his future wife.
And have I yet brought up the matter of threes in the book? The number 3, three as a word, trio, thrice—any occurrence of these entities I have recorded: forty-two times it is drawn upon in this book. And what of the words few and several? It is quite know that they are defining signifiers for the magic number three—that Sweet, Sweet number!
Beg pardon? You disagree? Denotations of a small amount? Pish posh! Few and several were coined July 21st, 1933 by a prominent poet with a forgetful name. It is said he was visiting a distant northern land to write about some handsome king he tended to babble about when he was bombarded by numerous occurrences of threes: three turrets here, three white horses there, three pretty little maidens, all in a row. He soon grew weary of repeating in his verses the number three, and like any free-thinking genius, decided to create a more fluid vocabulary centered round this mystical number. Stale verses such as “The bursting of three festive little bombs filled the hall with smoke,” become alive with the man’s music: The bursting of a few festive little bombs filled the hall with bitter smoke.

Get out of my chair.
Beg pardon?
Get out of my chair. What are you doing? I told all of you to stay away from here.
I haven’t finished my thoughts, don’t pull me. “Few” occurs seventeen times and “several” occurs five times, and the sum of seventeen and five is twenty-two, which is a very significant num—
Get out.


For Hugh, time and memory, and even dreams become tangled and blended so that parts of one are stuck in another. Hugh is stuck in the past, reliving it, while being haunted by the ghosts of his many futures. Or is he haunted by his own spectral memories? In Our Person’s lonely world, reality becomes a dream, and dreams become reality. He sees and hears ghosts of his past while he walks around in the perceived present. Without the refuge of memory, of the past, life would be so enormous…Where was that paragraph…


I am the reflection of lavender-tipped flame,
licking like Humbert at one’s window pane.
I am the smudge of dead sooty lust
In a pile of ashes, in a promise of trust.

A thin veneer of Present reality spread
Upon everything perceived—a spider’s sticky web.
Quell curiosity, loiter not Past’s iron-wrought gates,
Please heed the tired call of Future’s fancy fate.

Transparent things, through which the past shines!
And opalescent future like a mewling bitch whines.
Stay Present. Stay Present! Dream phoenix flamed fast,
And rise like a Haze of frozen fog’s past.

Have I mentioned the fire, and the choking black smoke?
It reminded me of a beautiful red Zemblan Royal coat.
And total composure in the face of total death!
And Triple Totality realized, too late, one last breath.

If Charlotte lying dead on the peaceful green grass,
Were to jump with a twitch, and proclaim with a gasp:
“Oh Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?”
Pangs of mysterious mental maneuver—quite bold.

That evil little child, she led me astray,
To a sad frozen lake on a cold snowy day.
The risks scoundrels take when pontificating past,
Before you walked on water, now you sink so fast!

An alabaster fountain, with grace divinity flows.
A misprint on a mountain covered year round with snows.
I thought I saw it once in my crumbled dreams dark:
Seasons blown away, like trash in the park.

Vellum Time folded celestial origami crane.
Future blended past, mixed with memory—sprinkled pain.
Old Man of the Sea in a red flood of seals,
resembled Jared to me, Quilted prophesy he steals.

Retake! Retake! Fly again to Our Glass Lake,
Where we will make love, my Lolita, if only to remake
Under the moon, that dream that I lustily dreamed,
Of ampersands and flaming windows and other Great themes.

While the wind gently blew, and the waves simply crumbled,
In my dreams—even then I tripped and I stumbled.
Nipping at the heels of that trickster who could foretell,
Whether my spirit will fly, or swim lakes of hell.

I see him in shimmering coals, fire’s flinty red face.
I see him crusting icy apple, and like Eve, curiously taste.
I lick my memories like ice cream dripping in sun,
Tasting each flavor until I find the right one.

Without my memories, life would just—be so real.
My dreams would then be my soul’s only meal.
Or maybe a fairy-tale world I could create,
I could jump and dance with tights, graceful ballerinas’ gait.

The light of my life left me lonely for another man.
Her memories haunt me impishly whenever they can.
I strangled my wife, and I killed my lover,
I see in glimpsed lightning, the face of my mother.

And what if you are tossed into a boundless void dark?
An inadmissible abyss, and see shining like a spark
Beaconed grace calling, angels trumpeting sonorous sound!
And shining white light, lemniscates heaven’s doors wound.

Realizing, “I’ve been the most shackled, artistically bound.”
Infinite aftertime: memories loop recursively round.
“History repeats itself,” says the eye-browed scholar,
I blinked and stared, and pushed out my chair with a holler:

“The entire solar system is but a reflection in my eye,
You, sir, are fictional, and like Icarus fly,
With lust to the setting sun, trying in vain to understand
In a blinding white moment what generations won’t comprehend.”

He blinked and shifted the bulk of his weight,
Breathed a great sigh and grabbed pretzel from plate.
“Have you ever given thought to dreams when time slowly leaks,
In confused heaps and hollows, your mind a scared child shrieks?

Or gilded lakes crested in wakes of jeweled gold?
Or crumbling partitions, poisoned mushrooms of mold?”
He bit a pretzel and reminded me, twenty years back, when,
He prodded time’s golden hay, teased egg from mother hen,

“A roaring redness,” he said, “filled my vision and my head.
I quickly tucked it back, not enjoying being dead.
nor the feeling which purloined time’s jewels tease—
The sun with stolen ice, the moon with crisp leaves.

The sun’s a thief and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea, sparking infinite reaction.
But this transparent thingum does also suggest,
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Solus Rex.

You see it infects every part of me as a poet.
Fiery orb’s rays shine down only to clearly show it.
Even the glow-worm found as an incompetent liar,
And ‘gins to pale his unneffectual fire.

The matin is near, like winged Sirens we sing,
But falter with the fear avalanched nightmares can bring.
Who rides so late, is it the late March wind?
Is it father with child, or memory of sin?”

He smiled and reclined: legs crossed, boots mauve.
I asked, “what’s your name?” “Adam von Librikov,
Pleased to meet you,” said he, “just call me Mr. R,
And let us with haste taste the nectar of ‘yon bar.”

Our Person, our reader, did not entirely approve,
Of R.’s luxuriant lifestyle, and whimsical mood.
But what can I say? With death I melancholy sat,
While the cretin went about pretending chit-chat.

And pondering things no business of his.
Like if I would marry, and proceed to have kids.
Or whether my bride would be young and fair,
With soft supple breasts, and golden blond hair.

I asked him, “Are you, sir, but made of ghosts,
With your fancy speech and elaborate toasts?
Can I not be excused from your smell,
No difference, to me, between this place and Hell!”

“Easy, you know, does it, son,” he said with a drink.
Slammed it down, jumped up, and was gone with a wink.
The rogue left only splintery filaments of matter,
And heavily buttered vegetables, coagulating on a platter.

I realized with dread I was alone in my bed,
While visions and memories formed a halo round my head.
I shrieked, “Is is all there is, my world will not restore?”
A raven lit upon my window and croaked, “Nevermore.”

I ran outside and saw, nothing, and cried,
“Is that what you say, I already have died?
What happens now? Will I be able to fly—
Will I turn to a butterfly, and bumble up high?

A sweet peace surrounded my senses, my sight.
To live, to float on, in a soft reflected light.
And fly through my past, in a fluttering sky,
And drift on the wind, like a sun dot in the sky.

For some reason passages eluded me as I tried to capture them, bumbling like Lewis and Clark in the Corps of Discovery. A certain page kept turning up, and quickly became suspect in the plot to hide from me information: 542/543. Continually I would stumble onto a prophetic passage and fumble around for my pilfered pen, turning back to the book in my lap like a prince brandishing a bodkin—only to find the elusive passage had slipped away, leaving me only these unrevealing pages as a clue, which fittingly hold the sentence: “An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to violet through the half-drawn curtains and illumined the deadly white papers he had left on the table.”Over and over this happened, and I found myself blaming my slippery pen every time a passage was lost, every time the same two idiotic pages stared at me with feigned innocence. What was happening here? Every time I turned my head the page reappeared like a naughty little nymph, showering me with confusion. What can I expect? Life is but an illusion…

Part of a Poem

I am the reflection of lavender-tipped flame,
licking like humbert at one's window pane.
I am the smudge of dead sooty lust,
in a pile of ashes, in a whisper of trust.

A thin vener of Present reality spread
upon eveything percieved--a spider's sitcky web.
Quell curiosity, loiter not Past's iron-wrought gates,
Please heed the tired call of future's fancy fate.

Transparent things, through which the past shines,
and opalescent future like a mewling bitch whines.
Stay present. Stay Present! Dream phoenix flamed fast,
and rise like a Haze of frozen fog's past.

Have I mentioned the fire, and the choking black smoke?
It reminded me of a pretty red Zemblan Royal coat.
And total composure in the face of total death!
and Triple Totality realized, too late, one last breath.

If Charlotte lying dead on the peaceful green grass,
were to jump with a twitch, proclaim with a gasp--
"Oh Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?"
Pangs of mysterious mental maneuver--quite bold.

That evil little child, she led me astray,
to a sad frozen lake on a cold snowy day.
the risks scoundrels take when pontificating past,
before you walked on water, now you sink so fast!.....

Just a Thought

I was just pondering the mention of circling vegetables by the ghosts that haunt Hugh and play with his dreams. I think these ghosts may be his own memories. Anyways on page 553 the ghost narrators say (I coould quote the whole page, but will not):
"Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetables of our first picture book encircled a boy in his dream--green cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potatao pere, Potato fils, a girly asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning ronde going faster and faster and gradually forming a tarnsparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet."

i picture a person's memories spinning like a halo around their head, like remembered salvation. Dancing in a variety of forms around oneself, like always trying to find ourselves, or something? Or different years of a person's life?

Something about Sight

There is an issue of sight for Hugh Person in his quest (for the Present?) In veiwing the world around him he is more often than not seeing it through the eyes of his past. In this way he "behaves as a ghost," by continually breaking the tension film and falling through to the past. Person needs a phoropter, as pictured above, which measures A. Person's "refractive error."

pg. 543: "that he would have to consult an ophthalmologist sometime next mouth. He substituted an 'n' for the wrong letter and continued to scan the motely proof into which the blackness of closed vision was now turning." Ha! That little trickster!

Tangled Tenses

I was just reading Transparent things for the ninety-ninth time and I noticed that the fire scene is played out three times: Once when Armande wants to simulate an escape from the fire by crawling out the window, once in his dream when he kills Armande, and then, of course, at the end of the book when he perishes. The only question is, what tense is represented for the three respective fires? Hugh dies while being reminded of a memory from childhood, a memory of a story from a book. He dies not only in the past, but thinking of a fictional story--he dies in art. When Armande demands they rehearse an acrobatic escape, she is foretelling the future--Hugh fails the escape, just as he will fail it at his death. She ends up peacefully wrapped in a blanket of the third floor, which can be seen as the future. She is living most comfortably in the future. We are left with the Present. How does the fire in Hugh's dream represent the present? That would be saying that the most tangible reality of the fire is brought to life in a dream, which would be saying, it turn, that the most real perception of our lives takes part in our dreams. Interesting.

Proteus - The Old Man of the Sea

This is Proteus. Those fortunate students who attended class Tuesday before Thanksgiving and witnessed the miracle of the second group's presentation will know that I am reffering to Quilty when I speak of Proteus, and I speak of Jared (whom, with imagination, the above picture can be seen to represent) when I speak of Quilty. Proteus was, in Greek mythology, the herdsman of Posiedon's seals. He can foretell the future to someone who can catch him (the sly, elusive type) but will shape-shift into many different forms to avoid being captured. The challenge is in "pinning him down," to steal Dr. Sexson's words (we are all theives in the laquered night).
Quote Humbert: A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existnce of garages specializing in "stage-automoblie" operations, but I could never discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevorlet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Grey and Driftwood Grey. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; greys, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in van to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's French Gray..

Humbert is bumbling, trying to catch the elusive Proteus as he slips from one disguise to the other. So this is a warning: watch Jared, he is a shifty one. Catch him and he may be able to tell you how you will do in this class.

Charles the Second

Yes, I am still pondering Pale Fire. I am thinking about that competent King with supple lips and manly eyebrows. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigskins. He reigned with wisdom, and with consideration of all the young, handsome lads grazing the feilds of the palace grounds. Like a loving father he was to the boys, and in tights he paraded proudly about his kingdom like a pillar of fetching royalty. I'd see him sometimes walking the spring hills of Zembla, and he'd beckon me over with the flowery wave of a hand. We would hold hands and run through the tall grass, or skip along together and laugh like boys. Sometimes I would please him by pointing out a Red Admiral bobbing by, or by blowing the fertile fluff of a dandelion into his painful beard. He would lean down with mighty implication and pluck a weedy flower and brush it beneath his nose, and then reach tenderly to tuck it behind my ear. Alas! Now my Zemblan King gone, vanished, and I must move on to experience other Persons. I will never be happy, until I see once again the face of my dear King.

The Art of Folding

Won Park is a master of Oragami, specializing in the folding of one dollar bills into life-like forms. I recomend checking out his work on the web, which reminds me of the stories that Nabokav creates. He is, in a sense, a master folder. In reading his creations, we are brought into the many layered texture of the text, an intricate pattern in which every layer, every fold, adds to the beauty and coherence of the whole. In trying to figure out what is going on, or what fold leads where, we as the readers find ourselves in a crystal palace with an infinite amount of rooms. We stumble around utterly lost, only to find ourselves where we started. Once we step back, however, and walk to the crest of a distant hill, we can see the palace for its stunning aesthetic value. We see the sun leap from many facets of carved crystal in an intricate, divine pattern blending so naturally into the surrounding land. That a human can create something like this speaks volumes to the great depths of our souls.

Humbert the Spider

T.S. Eliot

White Widow

“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male”—from the first sentence, we as the befuddled reader are presented with an analogy—that of the web which is spun as we turn the pages and which we become entirely tangled in, seduced or enchanted even, just as Humbert seduces Lolita, or enchantment seduces them both; and that of the red shape of an hourglass located on the belly of a black widow spider. This naturally leads to Hourglass lake, where Humbert almost kills Charlotte, and also to the concept of time slipping away from Humbert (Humbert the Wounded Spider) as dear Lolita progresses through her nymphet years.
A major quality to this book is in the style of the prose—it creates a world, in some places, of aesthetic bliss. In places such as him describing in dreamy detail Lolita playing tennis, or, of course, the moment he first lays his slithery eyes upon her, the timelessness he desires comes to light, “A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day” (39). His passionate descriptions of Lolita are his attempt to twist the key, lock Lolita into his Never land of the eternal Nymphet, his enchanted fairy tale. He even admits at one point that his image of her is not what she really is; he has created it like an artist, and we are given it in his descriptions of her, which come to us in the form of frozen segments of remembered time. “I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition… All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and—
“That was my Lo,” she said, ‘and these are my lilies.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (39-40)
Nabokov the enchanter, the trickster, shows off his mastery of symmetry by opening the book with a reference to passing time—the hourglass—and ending it with the expression of failed immortality (I am restraining myself from filling this paper with Lolita quotes). Or perhaps it is realized immortality, for Humbert’s story, and Lolita, are brought back to life every time it is read.
Lakes are connected with time (Hourglass lake), with Lolita’s first sexual experience, with the fantasy of murdering Charlotte, with memory. Humbert thinks that, had he been a painter (ring any bells?), he may have thought up this: “There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower… There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” (134-135)
What we have is Lolita becoming a part of this painting, a part of his lake (Lake Climax?), a part of his frozen segment of remembered time, a part of his Zembla. Like a spider he weaves her into the web of his memory, his fantasy, his imagination. He is a spider, and we are lured by his poetic style into the web of his grotesquely beautiful mind, where we are stuck, and we will never be the same. He hides his true nature in the web of his deception, in the guise of his personality. A poetic white spider; a wolf in sheep’s skin. Perhaps the lofty goal of immortality has been achieved by being lodged forever in the mind of the reader.

Sound of the Police

I was flipping through Speak, Memory the other day and found myself reading about the writer who interested Nabokav the most, and who does not exist: Sirin. Just for fun I googled sirin and wikipedia informed me that a sirin is a mythological creature of Russian legend that has the head and chest of a beautiful women and the body of a bird, usually an owl. These cratures ae based on the Greek mythological creatures called sirens (see below). Sirins sang beautiful songs to the saints, but if men heard the songs, they would forget everything on earth and follow the sirins until they died. It seems Nabokav couldn't keep himself away from this subject.

In Greek mytholgy, the sirens are dangerous bird-women seductresses who lured sailors with their enchanting songs. The Russian mythological sirins (the fake writer whom Nabakov adores) are based on sirens

My Buddy Quilty

The part where H.H. kills Quilty reminds me of the movie Fight Club--more specifically, at the end when Norton kills Brad Pitt, or however it went; it's been a while since I've seen it. The idea is that Pitt is Norman's alter ego, his confident, risky, unrestrained side. Pitt liked fast cars, photography, pets; Norland kept his desires restrained, and wore the mask of a simple office worker.

"because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage...

Thats good, you know. That's damn good." (Quilty)

Quilty's flippant attitude even when a gun is pointed at him is just like Pitt's; infact, I loved the interaction between the two, I was wishing Nabokav would have given us more of it, prhaps drawn it out more. One sentence threw me off:

"He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it."

What is that all about? Cigarette tobacco is disgusting, I've tried it one time (though I cannot remember why) and it threw me immediatly into a fit of gagging and coughing and puking. Why is Quilty munching a cigarette?

"The rich joy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand."

Commonplace

Speak, Memory:

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. (125)

And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowers itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling. (96)

How small the cosmos (a kangeroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human conciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! (24)

So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.

...The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy's rearvision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. (99-100)

How readily Mr. Cummings would sit down on a stool, part behind with both hands his--what? was he wearing a frock coat? I see only the gesture--and proceed to open the black tin paintbox.

At the top of the stairs, one's feet would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of "Step", and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence. (84)

LOLITA:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymetrical position-a knight's move from the top-always strangely disturbed me.

Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch.

But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate's formal handshake (as reproduced be Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury-I wept.

Beauty and the Beast

Humbert is a connoisseur of beauty. He sees things as Nabokav would have a genius see them; he flutters and settles and samples, taking time to notice and apprieciate the flowers of life. The paradox is in the evil nature of Humbert and the way he puts his gifts of style and taste to use. He appreciates God's glory to the point of destoying it.

"The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail utterly to do so. Why?"

hippie braids

This picture was taken during our move from Hanover St; I was vexed we had to leave behind the cumquat bushes cutting the sidewalk from lawn in our late residence.The pouty girl holding up the magical box is my cousin Lisa, four years my senior who suffered slight brain damage from being dropped as a child. She may have been annoyed to discover i was hiding under the box all along; perhaps the look was fleeting, an instant of passing feeling caught like a crook on film, a secret of time shouted out for all to hear. The carved wooden bowls my mother aquired during her many rambles to the farmers market in the precious 1980's, the chips we ate organic and healthy. My mother's burdensome bag, located five-eighths up the right hand side, is flung upen from her last attempt to locate a pen, maybe, or a brush to comb her long flowing hair. The summer sun, i remember, shone strong that day; we retreated inside to escape the heat. The red and white object is a kazoo, shaped in the spirit of the times. Though i did not want to come out of my beautiful box, this was the dawning of a new era for me. Many adventures lie in wait, many a game to be played. Eventually the sun called to me; i emerged from my lair to see what it was there was to discover.

one nice memory

My pond
Memory is a funny thing for me. It is like a deep pool which I dive into—sometimes it is murky and cold, and I get out fast to dry myself in the sun. Other times it is crystal clear and tropical warm, gentle current rolling, twisting to settle quietly down in the depths. At these times I float on my back and stare up into the blue, or I swim down and sift through the different colored pebbles at the bottom. These are my memories, and I leisurely pick out a beautiful one and hold it in my hand.
The memory I hold now is of a reservoir. It is located on top a rise of land which is nestled between soft sloped mountains and sheltered by a line of tall redwoods running up along the valley. In the winter the fog hung like a curtain between the mountains, providing Ben and I with our own private world. The ferns dripped dew and the pond filled to the brim with murky water and plants grew healthy from the bottom. We crept through rotting leaves and hid behind bushes and went rigid still to listen. The frogs would start up again and the turtles poked their heads from the water. Huge water moccasins glided end to end in search of food. I can see the white light filtered through the rooftop of leaves which was darkly mirrored in the dirty pond. I can see the big lilies sway and the water skeeters skimming trails of passage like jets in the sky.
In that world we were hunters, our objective to trap rather than kill. We filled boxes of frogs and sacks of turtles, jars full of insects and cartons of snakes. It is the path every boy must walk during the magical childhood years. Time was non existential, the world folded in, packed together to become as small as our pond. We hid behind a large fern as a turtle ate a lilly, and Ben, fat and happy, whispered, “you see that”? “Yeah”, I said, “I see it.”
In the summer the reservoir dried up and plates of mud cracked apart like a desert. As I crunched the plates beneath my feet I was a turtle, and this was my home. For that amount of time I lived at the bottom of the pond, swimming under the lilies, ignorant of any world past the walls of tree trunks and the roof of leaves. The sunlight streamed through the water in dancing patterns and the algae lit up and the tadpoles darted here and there. Time was measured only in terms of day and night, winter and summer. I am buoyant; I am quite simply pulled back and forth in the restless water.
I see an ant working hard along the rough terrain of cracked mud and all at once I am with him, sharp, giant cliffs looming overhead, deep caverns slicing jagged along different plateaus like a violent maze. I grow tired of finding my way and become a massive giant, smashing mountains in my path. It is ridiculous how large I am. I pull a mountainous bluff of rocky mud from the very roots of the earth and hurtle it hundreds of miles away, my war cry bellowing, reaching to the ends of the universe. I see Ben—he is with me, and together we destroy everything in our path.
I am sitting now on a soft sandy shoal near the edge of my pond. Sunlight winks on from the surface and dances in the branches of the surrounding trees. I am rubbing my pebble; it is green and smooth, worn down by the passage of water and time. I know that it used to be jagged and sharp, and perhaps looked much different. Maybe it was more beautiful then. I ponder this, and finally decide that it is more beautiful now, and for one reason: not only can I hold it as it is now, I can also imagine it as it was then.