Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Nabokovian writing

In this room Schmar O. habitually sits. He would sit with pointed resignation falling upon his brow, squashing smile upon smiles of pliant pleasantness out of his warm slithery blackness. This day was his day of departure, his parting of ways with that horrid sense of dépaysé, Plauto and Scham, his forms and his flaws. But what fine flaws these are! Flaws, like parasites that find bright-eyed hosts in tropical weathers of bliss. No, for Schmärchen O. bliss was no mere climatic romp. His world was delicately titrated for his beloveds – his winged nymphs of glory, his kindred beings in this putrid, stricken mausoleum of a mortal abode.

An Ophion obscuratus had laid claim to one of his aspiring beauties, and with the torment of a man at once edified and at once perversely enthralled by the very act of knowing something exquisitely unspoiled, Schmar pondered this time, the pregnancy of this time he beheld within the small bloating larva. His mother had fretted over her son’s voyeurism (with the same consuming passion), but looking in books brought far too much strife, so Schmarius would be allowed to ease his gnostic palpitations twice a day after a full sitting of brot. Palpitate he did not today; the only quiver amiss a fine reedy stir in his lutulent past. Plautipus would be any minute now, calling in on Schmartipants quick and gently as any other solicitous stranger or reluctant relative.

In fact, P. Otzar progressed up the stairs with industrious (or for such a man, industrial) haste. “Schmar put something on, two gentlemen are waiting for us.” He held up an impervious brown coat remarkably similar to his own. “Must you tarry yet again? They give and have yet to receive. On account of our relations, I beg of you, oh spare me that look! We will have you yet!” Plautus steps into my oubliette. How swiftly I strike! He barely makes his way across. What a nippy blade! The ghost of his arc rushes forth to cling onto my heaving shoulders. Plaut, how urgent this proclivity of our corrupt spirit!

Squatting above this fine line of life, the Ophion obscuratus appeared content. A gauzy cloak of doxastic bliss settled upon the scene, the insects and the gasping man. As the clocks of the two gentlemen below tinkered, they stepped back into the car away from the mortality above them. S. turned away from the mortality before him, peered back at the peduncular body and indulged in the swelling pearl of his captive maiden.