Prophecy is of course – not finding the word, it’s in somewhere with snake oil peddling and nineteenth century magicians. That is to say, it makes itself up.

What is it about common perception that the magical thing is dismissed as secondary to other features of any worldly phenomenon?  For example, a regular thinker might say that a palm tree doesn’t make sound. Because the palm tree is remembered static. So is it a bad habit of focusing on the static, the segregated, without regard to larger processes? We separate objects and incidents from time, and call them whole.  Would like to do study of the fallen angel story strictly along these lines. It’s one of those inquiries I would like to have the pleasure of reading and writing, but I probably won’t do it unless I can work it into a larger project. And rightly so, since the topics are situation and process. The project manifests as one of the myriad possibilities of itself.

Put me down, Goat, I already forgot my legs, roasting like hot dogs on a roller on the sunny ottoman. The myriad possibilities of itself. Seriously? Show me! And Nabokov does, and then I learn, voila, I have been taught. Is it the same as making pictures in the clouds? I didn’t come to get taught, I came to get clarification. That was my cover story anyway.

Do you not want to hear, goat, about the curry in the air, again the small motors, and people sounds like birds? You want me to recall that awesome Leviathan drawing?

Goat will settle for a discussion of Nabokov, who does not tarry long in the ethers, though obviously lives in them. I am thinking of the writing of two minds, as in the case of Kinbote and Shade. This book requires a tremendous reader, who knows that the whole of Pale Fire requires a story that the reader supplies. And I’m not talking about assessments of the actions and characters, but that the reader must decide the meaning of the writing. I feel sure his description of the jelly in the skulls of most everyone, from the doltish love of the young so far from Annabel and young Humbert’s, to Shade’s toadying milieu, is autobiography. Perhaps he was more practical than to write a path of crumbs.

I miss my paintings. It’s good for them to have the empty time. Stephen King never wrote anything as chilling as Kinbote. Pale Fire is a game, it’s an activity, it’s asking the reader to interact with the (unsavory word alert) meaning. What is it possible to see? What is seen? Line one of the poem. I imagine you could sink a bauxite tanker with papers written about Pale Fire. I wish I could be forced into writing one of them, but it would take a requirement, a goal. What would I do with an essay about Pale Fire? I would like to be an enlightened Nabokov scholar, that would be the beans. The bird crashes into the window (so says the already questionable Kinbote) misperceiving. I did not read the bird crashing, I read the behavior of the reflections. But I believe the bird is the better read.