The Music Palace

                        Pale Fire- unfolds an obscure composition of thoughts and ideas into a perplexing novel.  It has also had the ability to invade my thoughts and awaken a memory of mine that parallels the relationship between Kinbote and Shade.  

Throughout the majority of my childhood my family has acquired a neighbor with frighteningly similar characteristics to Charles Kinbote or V. Botkin.  She has always been extremely friendly but has also suffered from dementia for many years that has been gradually deteriorating her cognitive mind.  My neighbor has had the overwhelming desire to be a member of our family and since the day I have met her she has insisted I refer to her as “Aunty C” and usually describes my family’s house as “our” house.  However, besides a few minor mishaps and annoyances she has never been unpleasant to be around.

            As Professor Sexson illustrated the correlation between the memory palace and Pale Fire in class a specific memory of Aunty C came to light out of the depths of my mind that I have not been capable of ignoring.  During one Christmas holiday, my family received a common phone call from our friendly neighbor Aunty C.  In this specific year Aunty C had the insisted that she was suffering from some incurable disease that she was on the verge of going paralyzed and ultimately this would be the last Christmas of her life.  For this reason, she asked our family if we would be so kind as to come over to her house immediately because she had something important to show us.  My family rushed next door to her chaotically organized house where she explained to us that she would like to show us her Christmas decorations.  We agreed and were swept off onto a two hour long tour of her various trinkets.  She did not have very many of these “treasures” but each one stimulated a mess of memories that she found necessary to share.  At the instant of this experience I was greatly irritated that I had to be objected to this reminiscent journey of Aunty C, now however I realize that this was her own personal memory palace.  Each jewel (a picture frame, a vase, a hairbrush) had a spatial orientation in the room and each object had a relationship with a memory that was interconnected to other memories.  This “method of loci” in latin was a gateway she wished to share of her being.  

            I believe that a similar analogy can be used to illustrate the poem of Pale Fire.  The poem is first and foremost the remembrance of the suicide of Shade’s daughter Hazel.  This memory however is rather than being intertwined with spatial connections is glued together through the continuity of music, Mnemosyne-the mother of the muses.  

And that odd muse of mine,

My versipel, is with me everywhere,

In carrel and in car, and in my chair

(Canto IV Line 946-949)

Music is the being that possesses the unmatchable power to resurrect old remembrances and through these reflections establish new ideas and beliefs.  Einstein for example once stated that music was the driving force behind his intuition and that musical perception was the source of all of his scientific discoveries.  

“If I were not a physicist," he once said, "I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.... I get most joy in life out of music" (Calaprice, 2000, 155). 

Music in Pale Fire moves with fluidity through the pages in a similar way. 

A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem

Canto III: Line 704

            "A stem" can be a reference to a root of a word, the main axis of a plant, but it can also be associated to a line in music notation that connects consecutive note heads.  The multiple definitions of the word “stem” I believe alludes to the arbitrary link connecting nature, art, and language and thus to our memories that can be identified on each page of Pale Fire.