`Imagining Prodigious Honesties'

Driving along a suburban street I saw in the distance a very unsuburban sight: Dense morning fog lingering over a distant valley. The fog was framed by the ridge of conifers behind it, creating the pleasing illusion of a bridge (green-black structure, white road passing beneath it). My brain registered bridge, finding a familiar pattern in an unfamiliar alignment of objects. Then, as in one of those perceptual tests – two faces or vase? elegant young woman or crone? -- the two realities seemed to ooze in and out of each other. Then the brain and its rage for order took over – Ordnung! – and I saw a conventional juxtaposition of fog and trees. The bridge had evaporated. Nabokov was the great contriver and savorer of such phenomena in prose and life. Do you remember this moment from Transparent Things?:

“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.”

Svelte Transparent Things (1972) after elephantine Ada (1969) is full of marvels. During a description of Hugh Person’s alpine hike, I came upon this rendering of the fog/forest combination:

“He almost reached timberline – but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.”

I’m surprised to learn my copy of Transparent Things is a first edition. I remember receiving it as a Christmas present from a former girlfriend in 1972, along with some Charles Mingus albums. The event is isolated in memory, suspended in temporal amber. Memory, too, creates diverting illusions. Can one see or remember an illusion clearly? I think we can but such things occupy a weird epistemological category. Consider the first stanza of Richard Wilbur’s “Clearness,” from Ceremony and Other Poems (1950):

“There is a poignancy in all things clear,
In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning.
Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water
We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.”

The last line is worth a lifetime’s contemplation: “imagining prodigious honesties.” Wilbur turned 87 earlier this year. He was born nine days before my father, who died more than three years ago – in my mind, as much a trompe-l'œil juxtaposition as the one I described above. And in the final stanza, Wilbur works in a fog reference and another to “Thule,” half the title of what was to have been Nabokov’s final Russian novel (Solus Rex), now a story -- “Ultima Thule”:

“But this was Thule of the mind’s worst vanity;
Nor could I tell the burden of those clear chimes;
And the fog fell, and the stainless voices faded;
I had not understood their lovely words.”