Essay on Openings

Climbing the steps to the library, 

your sleeve catches on the wrought iron railing. 

Small tear along the stitching that widens 

as the arm performs its folding motions:

lowering a text from its shelf, writing. 

“An open position.” “An open secret.” 

When lost in a dark wood, you advance through

foliage without its familiar 

attributes, grow nauseous before the dense 

brush before you yields suddenly  

to a clearing with the distinct waypoint 

you recognize.		 No longer directionless.

Another word for “opening” is “origin.”

Another word is “hole.” 

Would rather perch than tie knots, 

peer down as though from a hollow. 

“An open book.” “An open wound.” 

Nabokov parodies his antecedents 

in the first chapters of "Ada", anxious 

to acknowledge and assimilate the methodical 

unfolding of "Anna Karenina," and "Oedipus 

the King" with his strange birth, employing 

a volume of witticisms high 

even for Nabokov, whose humor is relentless, 

patronizing, when the occasion demands, that characteristic

protracted, Piterechc, Anglophone, histrionic, 

symphonic syntax marked by a circuitousness 

that resembles, at once, muscular effort 

and the loose curl the maiden spins 

around her finger as she waits for her brother 

to pass through the threshold and join her 

in the parlor for tea and cakes. His effect 

is one of antagonistic intoxication. The reader 

scans the page, feeling the thin stock for 

a parenthetical phrase where she might 

insert herself as Van does in his discursive 

flailing toward dominance over Ada, 

whom he cannot best or know like the coin 

cannot know its other face, or like the moon, 

its pathetic accessory orbit.

Like all his writing after 1945,

upon moving to the United States,

Nabokov wrote "Ada" in English.

Language is forever “opening,” even the word 

from the Old English “openung,” for “the act 

of making open (a door, a mouth)” or “disclosure,

manifestation,” and also the German “offen,”

from the root of the adverb “up.” Up. Roots.

“The open day.” “Out in the open.”

I would like to produce an essay 

on openings comprised of openings 

that begin like tears in fabric and grow

with movement. I believe the world 

is all material and all material is 

self-evident. I’ve never been one 

for arrivals. This manner is ideal. No 

disappointments. No sentiment. No soul

without end. No lyric revealing the latent 

truth that threatens to terrify and change.

:”Bust open.” “Open fire.”

It happens when consolidating my written

history. I hew the paper tower. Out slips

the printed image of a cave, an opening

in the earth as seen from the inside. Twin pillars 

mark the entrance to deeper chambers, and further,

the gap our subject had to pass through, crawling, some

unfamiliar posture, to witness the light,

at this angle, spilling forth from where one once was. 

An open invitation. An open question. 

Prise open. Open eyes. Heart. Mind. Mind as a

sentence. Note the passages behind our subject 

unrepresented in this image, the turning 

one must concede before descending into that 

frightful, warm, translucent—yes—open dark.