TOM CLARK: Everything Confusing Must Make When Head Is Money Flower / Vladimir Nabokov: Literature, Invention, Memory / Stretching It

Untitled [Istanbul]: photo by Metin Ekin, 9 May 2017

Ynot Lot, Station North, MIdtown Baltimore: photo by Larry Cohen, 28 October 2017

7 November 2560. The project to raise money for the royal family ran into downtown Hat Yai. There were many people waiting who were encouraged to donate a lot. [Songkhla, Hat Yai, Thailand]: photo by Sakulchai Sikitikul, 7 November 2017

© Spiros Soueref, Lalibela, Ethiopia, 2016 www.instagram.com/spiros_soueref / www.spirossoueref.com | by Spiros Soueref

Lalibella, Ethiopia, 2016: photo by Spiros Soueref, 23 April 2016

Shenandoah, Pennsylvania: photo by Patrick, September 2016

Untitled: photo by ilan Ben yehuda, 7 November 2017

Shenandoah, Pennsylvania: photo by Patrick, September 2016

Sans titre: photo by Marco Giusfredi, 3 November 2017

Songkhla, Hat Yai, Thailand: photo by Sakulchai Sikitikul, 21 September 2017

Uzbekistan, 2017 [Samarkand]: photo by Davide Albani, 9 August 2017

Montecatini Terme, Italy - 2017: photo by Marcello Iannotta, 9 May 2017

Oktoberfesta #4 | by Riccardo Gerbi Cattaneo

Oktoberfesta #4: photo by Riccardo Cattaneo, 2 November 2017

Oktoberfesta #5 | by Riccardo Gerbi Cattaneo

Oktoberfesta #5: photo by Riccardo Cattaneo, 7 November 2017

Shenandoah, Pennsylvania: photo by Patrick, October 2017

Airport [Palermo]: photo by Giorgio S., 27 October 2017

Germantown, Conyngham, Pennsylvania: photo by Patrick, September 2016

Providence, Rhode Island: photo by André van Tonder, 4 November 2017

#21 [Dhaka]: photo by Md Enamul Kabir, 4 December 2015

Untitled [Biddle Street, Baltimore]: photo by Patrick, December 2016

Bilbao, 2017: photo by Jontxu Fernandez, 7 November 2017

_MG_2804s [St. Petersburg]: photo by Ilya Shtutsa, 22 October 2017

Jakarta, Indonesia: photo by Alex Newman, 2 September 2017

Gent, Belgium: photo by Davide Albani, 31 October 2016

Songkhla, Hat Yai, Thailand: photo by Sakulchai Sikitikul, 18 October 2017

TheFulcrum030617 [London]: photo by streetmax, 13 June 2017

Loy Krathong 2560. Group cruise along the Krathong to collect money. [Loykratong River, Songkhla, Hat Yai, Thailand]: photo by Sakulchai Sikitikul, 18 October 2017

Untitled: photo by Missy Prince, 5 September 2017

Postcard tourist [Hollywood Hills]: photo by Andrew Murr, 6 November 2017

© Spiros Soueref, Cape Coast, Ghana, 2017 www.instagram.com/spiros_soueref / www.spirossoueref.com | by Spiros Soueref

Cape Coast, Ghana, 2017: photo by Spiros Soueref, 28 August 2017

1923 [Athens]: photo by shoot_yossarian, 14 October 2017

Coming back better every time | by rickele

Coming back better every time [Sacramento]: photo by Rick Ele, 8 November 2017

Vladimir Nabokov: Keeper of a Secret

Mutu rounds the keeper (Brad Friedel): Tom Clark, 2003

Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two where he fell, his goal still intact.

But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalie's eccentric art. This at least was the explanation I dug up for not being oversuccessful on the playing fields of Cambridge. Oh, to be sure, I had my bright, bracing days -- the good smell of turf, that famous inter-Varsity forward, dribbling closer and closer to me with the new tawny ball at his twinkling toe, then the stinging shot, the lucky save, its protracted tingle... But there were other, more memorable, more esoteric days, under dismal skies, with the goal area a mass of black mud, the ball as greasy as a plum pudding, and my head racked with neuralgia after a sleepless night of verse-making. I would fumble badly -- and retrieve the ball from the net. Mercifully the game would swing to the opposite end of the sodden field. A weak, weary drizzle would start, hesitate, and go on again. With an almost cooing tenderness in their subdued croaking, dilapidated rooks would be flapping about a leafless elm. Now the game would be a vague bobbing of heads near the remote goal of St. John's or Christ, whatever college we were playing. The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as a fabulous exotic being in an English disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.

Rook (Corvus frugilegus), Siauliai, Lithuania: photo by Mindaugas Urbonas, 2007

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977): from Speak, Memory, 1951

Vladimir Nabokov: Mnemosyne

Bachalpsee in the morning, Bernese Alps: photo by ZachT, 2007

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.)

Forest area and prairie at Cooper Mountain Nature Park, Oregon: photo by Aboutmovies, 2009

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.

File:Moore Nature Reserve - geograph.org.uk - 48792.jpg

Moore Nature Reserve, England: photo by andy, 2005

Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Mai Po Nature Reserve (panorama view): photo by Baycrest, 2009

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Rozhdestveno, at Vyra, near Siverskaya, estate inherited by Vladimir Nabokov, 1916: photo by Alexey Lavrov, 2007

Speak, Memory, first UK edition cover, 1957: image by Graham Hardy, 2008

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977): from Speak, Memory, 1951

Vladimir Nabokov: Crying Wolf

Canis lupus, seen before hunt, Quebec: photo by Peupleloup, 2004

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Gray wolf (Canis lupus) laying in grass: photo by John and Karen Hollingsworth, 2002 (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles.

Canis lupus, walking in snow, Quebec: photo by Peupleloup, 2004

The writer of fiction follows Nature's lead.

Dolon: detail from Attic red-figured lekythos, c. 460 BC: photo by Jastrow, 2006 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadows of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story.

White female wold (Canis lupus) in the Atigun Valley, Alaska. This wolf dens in the riverbank of the Atigun inside the main valley about five miles south of Galbraith Camp. She roams at least twenty miles a day in search of food, from the main valley den into the gorge and then back to the valley proper: photo by Dennis Cowals (1945-) for the Environmental Protection Agency Project DOCUMERICA, August 1973 (US National Archives)

When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.

Silver-White Wolf in the Atigun Valley. Wolves Are Found in Isolated Areas Along the Entire Pipeline Route...08/1973 | by The U.S. National Archives

Silver-White Wolf in the Atigun Valley, along the Alaska Pipeline Route: photo by Dennis Cowals for the Environmental Protection Agency Project DOCUMERICA, August 1973 (US National Archives)

Stretching It

Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) stretching in his enclosure, Zurich Zoo: photo by Tamako the Tiger, 1 November 2013

When you are having a philosophical conversation with someone and they are not able to think outside the box... you'd like to encourage them to think about it.

He's rounding second. Time slows down. Everything seems so far away. The image on the screen is frozen.

"Stretch it out!"

"A face only covers a skull awhile, so stretch that skull cover and smile!"

"Get two!"

This is by some called, the ghost of wit, delighting to ambulate after the death of its body.

And to say the truth, there seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands, than that of discerning when to have done.

A stretch. That's what it was always going to be.

Arctic Fox (Vulpes lagopus) stretching, Cincinnati Zoo: photo by Mark Dumont, 27 December 2013

"It's only the sixth. Why are you standing up?"

"All those other guys are doing it."

There were no promises. Things would happen as they happened.

I never expected to get thrown out at third.

By the way, have I told you? I am trying an experiment very frequent among recent authors, which is to write upon nothing, and when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen, locked within the withered, knobbly digits, still move on, leaving its litter of semi-legible marks scattered across the virgin snows of the notebook page.

I didn't lie, either, I was only stretching the truth. I didn't know the guy had a gun for an arm.

Little Wolf: photo by Timoleon Vieta II, 22 February 2012

TOM CLARK

Friday, 10 November 2017

Everything Confusing Must Make When Head Is Money Flower / Vladimir Nabokov: Literature, Invention, Memory / Stretching It

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