Speak, Specimen

What's fixed and what flies

“I found it, and named it”—Nabokov’s specimen of the Karner blue in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Vladimir Nabokov was a passionate and formidable butterfly collector. For him, literature and lepidoptery were twinned, resonant pursuits—like two butterflies competing for attention, spiral upward in aerial combat, mirroring and mimicking one another but rarely coming into contact. For his part, Nabokov claimed that entomology was his chief ambition—and for many years it was his vocation, too; in the 1940s he took up a position as curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he collected and prepared specimens and made careful studies of the collection.

Ultimately, Nabokov would identify a new subspecies, a diminutive butterfly called the Karner blue, upon which he bestowed the name Plebejus melissa samuelis. In 1943, Nabokov published a poem in the New Yorker that expresses the sweetness of this discovery. “I found it and I named it,” he writes, “being versed / in taxonomic Latin; thus became / godfather to an insect and its first / describer — and I want no other fame (my emphasis).” To Nabokov, this mnemonic power of science outstrips even the promise of literary reknown: 

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, 

poems that take a thousand years to die

but ape the immortality of this

red label on a little butterfly.

Butterflies flash and dance in the pages of Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s memoir, where memories well up in ways that seem lepidopteran. “In probing my consciousness,” Nabokov observes, memories emerge “as a series of spaced flashes”—sort of like the stages of caterpillar life. For Nabokov, the “lobed sun flecks through patterns of greenery” metamorphose into a shining early memory of the discovery that his parents were older than himself. The stages of the larval memory coalesce as flashes, as afterimages, they are also tempered in, colored by, the summer sun. This coruscation offers Nabokov a forensic clue: he reckons that it was during a birthday party for his mother, celebrated in late summer, when he first reckoned the alienating calculus of parental age. Nabokov later emphasizes the forensic frameworks by which memory become mappable: “To fix correctly,” he writes, “I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga.” The way such meteoric phenomena leave streaks in the bubble chamber of memory—or, to reckon it the other way round, we become the memory of things in the world—is striking.

With age, Nabokov suggests, “bright blocks of perception are formed, offering memory a slippery hold.” This labile quality is crucial, rooted in the brain's architecture (neuroscientists are fond of the word labile with its liquid embouchure). Memories slip and pour, thicken, ferment, as they move from the hippocampus, where they're born in flash-like episodic raptures, to the neocortex, where they take on the structure and mythopoetic gravity of narrative memory. Nabokov’s imagination could dote on this slippery, spasmodic quality of nervous tissue—the soft dance of excitation welling up from lobes folded within lobes, so much like the fragile organs of the butterflies he flensed with his scalpel under the microscope. Recalling toddling along “from sun fleck to sun fleck” holding his parents’ hands, his calculus of time and welter of sensory input coalesce as understanding: Sunlight softens in the pink folds of his mother's skirts; it flashes and dances across the baubles collected on his father's Horse Guard uniform; and Nabokov imagines his younger self “plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time,” immersed like a swimmer “with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive.” The recapitulatory nature of memory, so beautifully doubled and redoubled here, has originary implications for Nabokov, who concludes that “the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.” 

Nabokov was a formidable scientific observer, and I would no more like to challenge him on entomological than literary grounds. But I want to say that for his cherished butterflies as much as smiling humankind, time is a sensible medium, and its perceiving filter is memory. Of course, no insect lives in such rich, laminar, ramified mnemonic mansions as the author of Speak, Memory. But in their way, a butterfly’s memories, too, wheel and dance in patterns of sunlight. On such a slender axis, whole migrations turn. Mnemnosyne, muse of memory, is a goddess for all creatures, and I have to believe her sojourns with the butterflies are especially sweet.

Back to those sunlit windows, retrieved across the gulf of time. “If my first glance of the morning was for the sun,” Nabokov continues, “my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.” Creatures of the sun, butterflies for Nabokov nearly seem made of light, as his description of the first one he remembers capturing makes clear: “a splendid, pale-yellow creature with black blotches, blue crenels, and a cinnabar eyespot above each chrome-ribbed black tail.” A servant captured the creature, a swallowtail, and trapped it in a wardrobe, where mothballs were expected to dispatch it overnight. The next morning, however, the great butterfly escaped “with a mighty rustle,” nonplussing the nurse and jetting out the window, whence a magical migration ensues:

(it) presently was but a golden fleck dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the fair island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson, and Southward along the Rocky Mountains—to be finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder.

It's striking how a fragile butterfly, for Nabokov, is able to slip through chinks in the walls of memory and slip over the waves of oblivion—a magical creature free from the disciplines of time lost and regained. The butterfly’s flight weaves a golden thread capable of linking legendary lands to the illimitable present—a living link, gossamer, vital.

Nabokov drank deeply his childhood reading in entomological journals, and his scientific prose was highly technical, striking for its rich specificity, its grammatical fluidity, and its quick deployment of similes and analogies rarely found elsewhere in lepidopteral literature. The anatomy of the butterfly, for Nabokov, was an abstract space for the expression of color and form in musically-precise fields of resonance and variation. I wonder if this might be the context in which he discounts the adaptive explanation for mimicry—shapes emerge out of the evolutionary murk, bubbling up as boxer's gloves here, flames and candles there—forms haunted by forms, like rhyming words lending pattern to the world, pattern that speaks meaning. Memories, like form, coalesce by way of affinity and harmony; perhaps by Nabokov’s reckoning, there are no false forms nor false memories.

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My own childhood entomology was never so sophisticated as Nabokov’s. I was in 4H, an organization conceived by the USDA to encourage rural kids to smuggle agricultural innovations—from scientific livestock management to chemically-leavened baking—onto family farms. The vehicle for this pedagogy of innovation was The Project: a course of self-study selected from a catalogue of agronomic, craft, and home-economic options. The farm kids raised calves and lambs, but I was a town kid, and so my projects usually were more clerical: journalism, business, and forestry, a project that was more about board-feet than living wood. Entomology promised closer contact with nature than such clerical projects—livestock management at minuscule scale. 

At the county fair at summer’s end, posters and paintings and reports would go on display, and you could browse the ranks of lopsided ceramics and portrait-photography collections with corn dog and lemon shake-up in hand. I envied the farm kids whose projects populated the fairground’s fragrant barns: shaggy hogs, bottle-fed lambs, flamboyantly-feathered fowl. There were buildings for the arts and crafts projects, too: long, low, prefab structures of rolled aluminum, lit with sodium lamps, around which moths would orbit, ricocheting among steel rafters.

Entomology required me to collect a cabinet of insects, pinned and labeled, for the cotton-candy-munching county crowds. Following instructions in the 4H pamphlet, I made a killing jar. I don't recall what I used for the asphyxiant, whether the traditional ethyl acetate with its sweet vaporous odor or something more prosaic, like rubbing alcohol. I do remember watching dragonflies subside in the jar, and wondering what it would be like to die in this way. Later, I accidentally inhaled a quantity of chlorine gas while experimenting with a chemistry set; as I clutched the sink and stared into the bathroom mirror, watching myself gasp for breath, it was the killing jar that came to mind. Entomology was safer than chemistry, and there was craft in it, too: the careful spreading and adjustment of wings, secured with thin strips of paper to keep them in place; the tiny writing on labels carefully affixed on the pin below each impaled creature; the orderly arrangement of the specimens in rank and file. The resulting array looked lapidary and authoritative to my eyes, and I carried it with great care, wing-windowpane shadows sun-dialing on the styrofoam sheet as I walked across the county fairgrounds to the barns. My specimens received a blue ribbon: first (and only) in class, entomology. 

A specimen is part of both collection and recollection. While it indexes an event—the instance of capture—it can no longer lay down memories of its own. Whether butterfly or bowhead whale, the specimen is suspended in time, and the capacity for memory-making and recollection has been taken from it. I think now that my horrible fascination with Grandpa's glass eye had to do with this specimen quality. We are used to looking into jars at specimens; this one looked back. And yet I think of it now with love, for the burden it relieved in Grandpa. It was, after all, the eye that had not seen those horrors in the Pacific. An eye which, though blind, gave him fresh aspect—an imago of an eye, which left the old caterpillar of trauma behind.

My own traumas, by comparison, were larval and minuscule. When I returned a few days later to reclaim my collection, the ribbon lay alone on the table. I found the box bent double and wedged into a steel barrel perched in long grass outside, butterflies and dragonflies scattered amidst a litter of lemonade cups and greasy napkins. Each one still neatly transected by its dark pin, they looked as if darted from the air by minuscule archers, their wings still fixed for gliding flight. 

I think of those discarded specimens now as I watch a migratory monarch gliding high above the trees of Boston, holding its wings with the same stiff repose, the deathly resolve, of those transfixed discards. Something in the planar attitude of those wings seems to carry my memories of entomology and oil, the drone of wasps, the mantis-bob of pumpjacks.

A heavy burden for such slight wings to bear to Mexico. I risk a muddled and dissolute universality: if everything is memory, all meaning may drain from the word. I think it’s the memory of memory that I am after: the many ways memory has been configured, treasured, propitiated, and practiced, in different times and places, in human and more-than-human ways. 

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In a project I’m working on for Arnoldia, we’re learning how plants teach that the opposite of “extinction” might not be “preservation” but “emergence.” So I was excited to see this New York Times piece telling how the flowering plants survived earth’s last mass-extinction event.

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