=========== Dark Ice ===========

Notes VIII

461-462	For readers whose Mirrorussian is rusty: BEWARE THE RETROGRADE, THE FALLING BLUR, NULL SWIRLS AROUND RETURN IN SHADOWPLAY	Titlepage Part I Notes I Part II Notes II Part III Notes III Part IV Notes IV Part V Notes V Part VI Notes VI Part VII Notes VII Part VIII Notes VIII Part IX Notes IX Part X Notes X Part XI Notes XI Part XII Notes XII ©, Acknowledgments The Author

475	frakturs Old German type resembling daggers and barbed wire, or beautiful gothic furniture, as in:

480-482	A gust...Twelve trees...in a row Mortar and apostles. See note to line 405.

491	instar From the Latin word for image; a stage of an insect or other arthropod between molts; an individual in such a stage. (The word also means to stud with stars.)

511-516	I moved into a rude square...Red's pawn structure Chess with human pieces. See note to line 727. In Karl Marx's only recorded game, he opened with the Muzio Gambit--daring, indifferent to loss of pieces, now seldom used. Russian champion Boris Spassky said this after his 1972 loss to American champion Bobby Fischer (as quoted in Brad Darrach, Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World, New York, Stein and Day, 1974): "I do not know which is more bad, the match or after the match. In a long match a player shall go very deep into himself, like a diver. Then very fast he comes up. Every time, win or lose, I am so depressed I want to die. I cannot get back in touch with other people. I want the other chess player. I miss him. "I have played many long match. But this is first for Bobby. It will be for him a hard time. Now he feels like a god. He thinks all problems are over--he will have many friends, people will love him, history will obey him. But is not so. In these high places is very cold, very lonely. Soon will come depression. I like him, and I am afraid what will happen to him now."

524	Quoins ratcheted. The chase of the lake locked up. Quoins are the metal mechanisms that, when inserted and turned with a key, lock up blocks of handset type in a chase, a rectangular steel frame that sits on the pressbed.

539-540	"Economics...life" Can materialists live by bread alone?

562	an ikon makes a handy pot-lid See the following passage from the famous 1847 letter of Vissarion Gregorievich Belinski (1811-1848) to Nicholas Vassilievich Gogol (1809-1852), the possession of a copy of which in Russia at that time was punishable by hard labor in Siberia: Isn't the priest in Russia the representative to all Russians of gluttony, miserliness, servility, shamelessness? And apparently you don't know all this? Strange! According to you the Russian folk is the most religious in the world--which is a lie! The basis of religion is piety, reverence, fear of God. But the Russian utters the name of God even as he scratches himself...he says of a holy image: If it works, pray before it; if it don't work, use it for a pot cover. (Translation by Bernard Gilbert Guerney.)

567	solitarium Any lonely room--especially a companionless bedroom furnished with an alonebed. More especially, late. Lying awake, I thought of many solitary configurations: the parked cars, locked on the street outside. Frost forming on the still bell atop a tower nearby--some time ago I had heard it toll a solitary hour: one. Dark blurs of furniture. Though in exile only for a night or two, I couldn't adapt to a borrowed room. A radio played in and out of hearing, tinnily, from someone's car or house far down the block. A window framed a section of lawn and street: no tracks crossed the thin layer of snow. The distant bell was still. Still. Had I imagined it? (Once I had dreamed of not being able to sleep, and awakened exhausted.) I missed hearing city traffic pass like surf, floating sleep. No radio. I listened to the sharpened tick of the clock. (See lines 317-326).

570	Cayuga or Ladoga? Cayuga Lake, named for one of the five Nations of the Iroquois, is the longest of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York; Cornell University is on its shore. Cayuga is 38 miles long and a mile to 3.5 miles wide. Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe (7,000 square miles), lies northeast of Petersburg. Both lakes freeze.

578	arbitrary If languages are "organic systems produced by the conscious and unconscious use of many people over long periods of time," and not "like philosophical systems, mere constructions"--then evolutionary concepts apply better than reductionist linguistics. According to a murky Xerox (the precise attribution has slanted off at the bottom, after first irrupting in a gray glow) "No organic system excludes the arbitrary, the sport, the chance mutation; in fact, it is upon precisely those things that evolution depends." (See note to line 960.)

617	Halations The glowing, blurring light seen around the edges of backlit things. A faulty streetlight shivered down the block (otherwise dark except the light that came from snow). The clock turned out to be a bathroom faucet, dripping wet seconds onto the pitted rim of a drain. I could not get comfortable. The sheets were rough with starch. The pain in my neck was equally hard to place and to avoid, the counterpane at once too heavy and too thin, and the pillows had mastered adversarial geometry. Petty things, caught in the lights of some inescapable mental state, can loom to the size of Abstractions and wail along the walls. Drip. Drip. Drip.


Notes VII	Notes IX