BLUE MORPHO

At one time I kept a specimen butterfly of the genus morpho in each of my

rooms, the better to study them. It was part of my obsession with blue,

with the comings and goings of that particular color. On the wings of the

blue morpho which I propped in its transparent case against the back-

drop of a window, I could trace the hour of the day from

dawn to noon to evening by the the angle of the daylight shining through the butterfly wing. The blue began

to fade at dawn, the wings growing more and more etched--

six eyes to each wing--the blue retreating like a shadow until

at noon only the tiniest portion of blue remained at the thorax of the butterfly

where the wings joined. This resembled the

pilot-flame of a gas-jet. And then from noon to evening,

the pattern would be incrementally erased as though through the

sifting of blue dust from the bottom of the wing on up, as

the wings were slowly replenished of their blueness.

Only at nightfall were the wings completely blue.

But perhaps it is better to say:this is a blue series in the key of

iridescence,for the morpho's blue is not one blue but

consists of many. The principal contrast is between

that blue which tilts towards green and that blue which tilts

to purple. The secondary colors duel over the primary.

I might describe at length the engraved images

of the blue morpho's underwing without doing them

justice; they would require as much pterolography--or

proper feather placement--as any

pheasant or owl. No trace of this brindled pattern can be seen at night.

Instead the

blue iridescence seems to happen on a ground of black;

now black lines unseen by day appear to be what separate the

duelling notes of blue. The secret of the iridescence, however,

lies in the fact that the scales of color happen in bands

from bottom to top/ also simultaneously

from side to side. We are scanning colors in layers

as it were from north to south and vice versa,

and simultaneously their radial counter- layers

ranging from east to west. The shimmering is due to the fact

that the human eye can not halt on one layer, but instead is in

a constant state of adjustment among many.

The Morpho butterfly family was Nabokov's favorite

of them all, and he was a lepidopterist;in a letter to his son,

Dimitri, who is to cross a part of the Orinoco river by small

'plane, he says to be alert for the migration of the blue morpho:

their wings will look like blue mirrors in flight.