IRIDESCENT DETAILS

Due to my roommate's activities in the kitchen this morning, just before waking I dreamed of going to watch a large mansion burning down. It happened during the first year that we lived in Valkenswaard, and we weren't the only ones admiring the lovely flames. Seemingly half the town was there. Sad - it had been a beautiful building.

Where it stood they built a brand new post office a few years later. It was very modern and not nearly as beautiful; rebuilding that mansion and setting it on fire again would have been infinitely better.
Golden tongues flaring into a black-blue expanse, past dark dark trees.
Stark branches limned amidst trails of smoke.
Shifting patterns of light.

It wasn't that my roommate was burning anything, but the smell of cooking was the spark that set off an unconscious mind already primed by what I had eaten yesterday. Which caused gout and sleeping sweat.
I had feared that a bowl of 生滾及第粥 would do exactly that. Pork liver and other innards poached in scalding hot rice porridge. With densely delicious meatballs added.
As it turns out, there was just enough organ meat in that supper to inflame my evil joint as well as my head.
It has been a fiery night.


Readers familiar with Nabokov's Ada will remember a scene in which the entire household piles into carriages to go see a villa a few miles away burning in the middle of the night, leaving young Ada and V.V. alone.
V.V. stands for both Van Veen, the teenage protagonist, as well as Vladimir Vladimirovich, the name and patronymic of the author.
It is a lovely, albeit naughtily unsuitable scene.
As well as the start of something good.
Probably my favourite passage.
In a word: smoking.

I suspect two things:
One - Vladimir Vladimirovich himself conflated conflagrations;
And two - he quite possibly also had gout.
There may be something that he never tells us.
Though he mentions overmuch else.
His fevered memories.
Shimmering.



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