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Thursday, July 19, 2018

More Oz Fritz on 'Pale Fire'


Sound engineer Oz Fritz in the recording studio. 

Oz Fritz posts part two of his blog article about Nabokov's Pale Fire. Oz shares my interest in coincidences and synchronicities:

Picking up Pale Fire, I was immediately reminded of the death of my father by the amusement park sounds mentioned on the first page.  The death of my father had an incredibly strong impact on me.  The reading of Pale Fire coincided with my body turning the exact age my father was when he died.   This brought the memory of his death into sharper focus to the point where I felt it in my body.  Like Nabokov, my father and I shared the same first and last names.

Nabakov valorizes coincidences in Pale Fire, I am valorizing them here.  The value of coincidences is that they can communicate information and instruction to your evolving self. Synchronicities and coincidences can be considered a pale fire for your spiritual growth.

More here. 

1 comment:

Branka Tesla said...

Tom, Thank you for posting/linking this.

Oz, You made my day by this profoundly and beautifully written sentence:

" The value of coincidences is that they can communicate information and instruction to your evolving self. Synchronicities and coincidences can be considered a pale fire for your spiritual growth. "

I think I can relate to a certain extent to  'the death of your father having an incredibly strong impact on you".  Most of us have probably by now lost someone very close to us, a loved one and how we deal with it seems very individual. From my own experience I can tell that it can definitely bring a new dimension in you, and the emotional tornado has a power to regroup you emotionally and mentally and allow you to see things from a different angle.

I often wonder how RAW dealt with Luna's loss and what impact it had on his life and work. Your sentence reminded me of RAW's writing:

"There is, ultimately, a pleasure in enduring poverty. It is like the pleasure of surviving through grief and mourning and loss; the Hemingway pleasure of standing firm and continuing to fire at a charging lion; the saint's pleasure in forgiving those who persecute her. It is not masochism but pride: I have been stronger than I thought I could be...... There is some kind of masochistic pleasure in continuing the analysis of a painful subject into every byway and intricacy of its labyrinthine torments." (Illuminati Papers, p. 29)