NPPF the Criminal Imagination (Anatomy Of Incestoly)

[s~Z]

Perhaps the incest and versipel imagery point to Nabokov's view that art is
breaking the taboos of commonsense culture which views inspiration as
madness. Aunt Maud's bizarre influence may be the influence of valuing
creativity vis a vis the worldview embodied by John Shade's scientific
parents. Creativity arises from the unlawful intercourse of magic/madness
and reason/craftsmanship. It is incestuous and shapeshifting.

The Russian language which otherwise is comparatively poor in abstract
terms, supplies definitions for two types of inspiration, 'vostorg' and
'vdokhnovenie,' which can be paraphrased as "rapture" and "recapture." the
difference between them is mainly of a climatic kind, the first being hot
and brief, the second cool and sustained. the kind alluded to up to now is
the pure flame of vorstog, initial rapture, which has no conscious purpose
in view but which is all-important in linking the breaking up of the old
world with the building up of the new one. When the time is ripe and the
writer settles down to the actual composing of his book, he will rely on the
second serene and steady kind of inspiration, vdokhnovenie, the trusted mate
who helps to recapture and reconstruct the world.
 AL&CS - pp. 378-9

In those
days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one,
who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my
inability  to  appropriate  the  magic  and  madness  offered  me;  and  her
apprentice, her palette girl  and  stand-in, a  little logician, who stuffed
the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers
which became more and more numerous  the  further  I  moved  away  from  the
initial,  evanescent, savage  perfection. The  treacherous music of  Russian
rhythms came to  my specious  rescue like those  demons who break the  black
silence of an artist's hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical
birds. Another and final  deception would come with the Fair  Copy in which,
for a short while, calligraphy,  vellum  paper,  and India ink beautified  a
dead doggerel. And  to think that  for almost five years  I kept trying  and
kept getting caught--until  I fired  that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable
little assistant!   LATH! - p.44