144,000 Virgin Brides of Christ

            On Monday morning I had a touch of food poisoning and I think it was from the caramel peanut butter. I continued trying to figure out the chords for “Entre l'âme et l'amour” (Between Love and Spirit) by Serge Gainsbourg using the extract of the middle of the song that’s on Apple Music. Since I can’t play one section over and over it makes it very difficult for me to work out the chords. The third and fourth verses should have the same chords but I keep hearing them differently since I can’t repeat a given section to get it right. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the third of four sessions. I’ve started plugging the cable into the lower jack of my amp and it’s been sounding better. I didn’t get any static or sudden changes in volume this time. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked on my final essay: 

            “My Lord the Lamb, who knew my need / Took me in marriage graciously / Crowned me, that now my joys exceed / The sum of days that e'er shall be” (414-417).

            “Are you the queen of heaven blue / … We know in grace that Mary grew / … What maid could now her crown outdo /…?”

            Of Mary she says she is the “‘Gracious Queen,' that maiden prayed / With face upturned, and kneeling low / Matchless Mother and fairest Maid” (434-436). But then she adds, “The court of the kingdom of God alive / By nature holds one special thing / That all who may therein arrive / Of all that realm is queen or king” (446-449). In line 435 Pearl clearly puts herself beneath Mary while at the same time declaring both she and Mary are queens and that all souls who legitimately arrive in the kingdom of god are queens or kings. The word “queen” then becomes generic when applied to anyone in Heaven besides Mary. Everyone is a queen but do they perform the functions of a queen? If all they are required to do is orbit around the lamb of god then calling them queens is merely a title to indicate that they are equals at the height of human achievement. In Medieval times from our mortal perspective no woman could be higher than a queen and so to call all the members of god’s court queens and kings becomes just another word for “citizens”. They are only queens from a mortal perspective in that they are above mortal humans. 

            “For she is Queen of heavenly grace / 'By heavenly grace, so says Saint Paul / In Jesus Christ we all are one / … So every Christian soul withal / Lives as one part of God's own Son” (457-459, 462-463). If Mary is queen of Heavenly Grace and if that grace is how citizens of heaven are parts of the body of Christ, clearly Mary is above this union of Christ’s body parts as she is the cause of that union. No body part is equal to the whole and so to be queens and kings within god’s body with nothing below in rank but those who do not live in heaven, the titles of king and queen become irrelevant within that realm and are only a goal of mortals. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I didn’t wear a scarf this time but I was still a little too warm. I could have gone without my motorcycle jacket or with the jacket but with no hoody underneath. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos at 17:24. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:18. I worked on making notes on the Medieval poem “Pearl” until bedtime: 

            “You lived not two years in our land” (483). Pearl was a toddler when she died and yet is now a maiden and a bride of Christ. 

            “Set all of' them upon a row / And let them each their penny gain / … And then the first men did complain / And said that they had laboured sore / These worked but one hour; that is plain / We think we should be given more” (545-546, 549-552). The penny was the promised wage and it is an employers right to do what they want with their money after giving their employees what was promised. He could have just as easily given each man standing idle a penny as charity and the workers would have no legitimate complaint. Also in a sense they all worked equally for the money since standing around in the heat is often harder than being engaged in physical effort. This does not really work as an analogy to explain why everyone in heaven is a queen. A penny has value for each of the men in the vineyard story. Being a queen is meaningless in heaven except from the perspective of a mortal who wants to get to heaven to become a queen. But also more than her analogy her simple statement that, “Sufficient grace have the innocent” (601) explains her achieving rank in heaven ahead of others who became queens after much spiritual labour. 

            “Lo, centred on my breast it stood / … Forsake this mad world, as you should / And buy this pearl without a spot” (740, 743-744). She is telling him to now seek a higher form of pearl, which is what she represented while alive in her innocence. 

            “My peerless Lamb, amending all / Said she, 'designed what I should be” (757-758). She explains how she could have died as a two year old girl and exist in Heaven as a young woman. “Wives of the Lamb in joy we're made / One hundred and forty-four thousand strong” (785-786). But in lines 448-449 she says, “That all who may therein arrive / Of all that realm is queen or king”. Either not every queen is a bride of Christ or St. John did not expect more than 144,000 females to make it into Heaven. If there were only a thousand Christians in John’s lifetime then 144,000 female Christians would perhaps have seemed astronomical. But then she says, “And every soul without a stain / Is to that Lamb a wife by right” (845-846). She had previously said there are kings and queens among the souls that arrive and yet now she declares that all of those souls are the wives of the Lamb. This must mean that all genders are brides of Christ. Then again, “The Lamb most noble at the head / Of full one hundred thousand maids / With four and forty thousand spread” (868-870). These wives appear to be all maidens after all. Are the kings made female?

April 16, 1994: I rehearsed my songs with Tom

Thirty years ago today 

            On Saturday I didn’t pick up my daughter because starting on April 20 I would have her with me for a few weeks while Nancy went on vacation. Tom Smarda came over and we rehearsed some of my songs.

Lost Pearl Found But Out of Reach

            On Sunday morning I memorized the eleventh verse of “Les frères” by Boris Vian. There are four verses to go. 

            I continued working out the chords for “Entre l'âme et l'amour” (Between Love and Spirit) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’m used to starting at the beginning of a song and working out the chords in sequence as I listen to it. I’m usually able to stop and go back and then replay a section over and over until I’ve figured out the chords. But since the only player for this song is an extract player on Apple Music there is no way to go back and so I have to work out a chord for part of a line, then move on to another part of another line and so it’s very patchy. It might take me another day or two to figure out the music for this song. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second session of four. I cranked it up even a little louder than yesterday to take advantage of the fact that there’s no one living above me right now. Just after I finished I could hear my landlord upstairs clearing out Caesar’s apartment. I’ll bet he’ll be able to jack up the rent to more than twice what Caesar paid. Caesar was there for at least thirty years. Yesterday or the day before I texted my neighbour David to let him know Caesar died. It’s hilarious how people change how they think of someone after they’ve died. David texted me that Caesar was “a gentleman”. All the time we talked about Caesar when he was alive David never once referred to him in that way. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos before breakfast. I continued to make notes on the Medieval poem “Pearl”:

           

            “I stood stock still and dared not call” (183). “And yet I feared what might befall / That she might stop ere I drew near / And might escape me after all” (187-189). Is he actually afraid that she might run away from him? Or is it that he thinks that if she is a ghost then there might be something fleeting about her manifestation and if he were to disturb the balance in this strange place by calling out to her it might cause her to disappear? 

            “A precious maid in pearls bedight” (193). When he begins to describe her as being adorned with pearls he no longer refers to her as a pearl personified. Perhaps he is still uncertain of who she is.

            “The fairest words she did release / Bowed low as e'er she did of yore / Removed her crown of richest store / And hailed me with a sweet delight” (236-239). He waits for her to initiate the exchange and she greets him elegantly. She bows and shows the respect that apparently she showed him before she died. She removes her crown perhaps because it puts her above him and so removing it is a gesture of respect that goes along with bowing. 

            “Are you my pearl for whom I cried / For whom I grieved alone at night?” (243-244). He seems unsure and yet she does not need to confirm who she is before he accepts her identity. 

            “Much longing I for you have sighed / Since into grass you left my sight / Sorrow and grief with me reside / While you remain in true delight” (245-248). Seeing his daughter alive and happy is a shock because up until now he thought that she was gone forever. He’s been grieving while she’s been happy. He is stricken by the contrast. Perhaps he wishes that she had somehow communicated her happy afterlife in order to save him from grieving. 

            “And donned her crown, of jewels made / And gravely then I heard her say / 'Sir, your conclusion is mislaid / To say your pearl has fled away / That is in such a casket laid / As in this gracious garden gay / To dwell in joy in endless day / Never can loss or grief come near / ''Twould seem, for any jeweller.” She puts her crown back on to establish that she is now of a higher position of authority than him. From this standpoint she begins to rebuke the one who mourns her death in an echo of poem 31 by of the voice Paulinas of Nola when he rebuked the parents of the boy Celsus for mourning the loss of that child. 

            I got sleepy and decided to have lunch half an hour early. I weighed 87.7 kilos before lunch, which is the most I’ve weight at midday since April 3. I had toasted seven grain bread with caramel peanut butter that I got from the food bank a few years ago with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. The peanut butter was disgusting so I threw the whole jar in the garbage.

            I took a siesta half an hour early but stayed in bed for an extra ten minutes. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and back. I wore one scarf but no gloves. The scarf felt a little too warm sometimes. I had to pee before I got to Yonge and Bloor and planned on stopping at the McDonald’s just north of College but I forgot. I didn’t have to go as bad as I’d thought. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:30. 

            I’ve decided to not watch any shows in the evening until after my essay is handed in because there are only five days left until the deadline. This is what I got done while making notes on the Medieval poem “Pearl”: 

            The girl he meets in his dream makes it clear that she is his pearl and that his pearl is now dwelling in eternal ecstasy, but she separates herself from that previous identity as well by not saying “I” in relation to that acknowledgment. Indeed she speaks of her past life as his daughter in the third person, “She was a rose which could not choose / But bloom and fade by laws austere / The casket naturally endues / The pearl it holds with worth most clear / And yet you call your fate severe / When much from naught was offered there / The cure you curse lay always near / You most unnatural jeweller” (270-277). She explains that his daughter was bound by the laws of mortal nature. The fine casket she was placed in enhanced her value. He did not realize her value even in that context. She would have needed to have been baptized in order to have a Christian burial and so the coffin served to transport her towards her higher destiny in the kingdom of god. She accuses him of having been an unkind jeweller for not realizing her value in that context.

            “I thought my pearl far out of reach / Now I have found it, great my glee / … / And if yon bank I now could reach / ' I'd be a joyful jeweller” (283-284, 288-289). He made it clear before he knew that his Pearl was in this realm that he wanted to cross the stream and was trying to find a way to do so. Now that he sees that his Pearl is on the other side he feels further motivation and perhaps a certain familial right to be on the opposite bank. She has established a foothold and by association with her he should be able to dwell there as well. 

            “You think to dwell here, if you can / First you must needs ask if you may / … First, you must sink into the clay / In Eden, man dared disobey / Because he lacked humility / Now man through death must make his way” (316-317, 321-324). He needs permission to enter heaven and he also needs to die first. 

            “Gain that brings tears is mere deceit” (332). To show him paradise and yet deny him access is a deceptive tease. 

            “He who concerns himself with less / Must thoughts of greater loss forgo” (340-341). It is petty for him to merely want his Pearl back and to have physical access to paradise. He is still concerned with mortal joys and so he misses the larger picture of the spiritual growth that is necessary for him to access the kingdom of heaven.

April 15, 1994: The art teacher gave me $5 for lunch

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday I posed for Danya’s class at West Toronto Secondary school. When she heard that I didn’t have any money for lunch she gave me $5.

Raquel Welch

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “Entre l'âme et l'amour” (Between Love and Spirit) by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords out of habit but didn’t really expect anyone to have posted them. The only music sample I have of the song is an extract from the middle on Apple Music. That should be enough to figure the whole song out but the extract player doesn’t allow moving back. One has to listen to the whole sample and then listen to it again and so I can’t work out the chords in sequence. I have to do it in patches jumping through different parts of the song until I get it all. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions. I played a little louder than usual because now that my upstairs neighbour is dead there’s nobody to complain. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since last Saturday. 

            In the late morning I went down to No Frills where I bought five bags of red grapes, a pack of raspberries, bananas, a pack of chicken legs, a loaf of Rudolph’s seven grain bread, two artisan naan, a pack of ground beef, sliced dill pickles, a jug of orange juice, and two containers of skyr. I forgot to buy potato chips. There was a really bad smell where one puts one’s items on the checkout belt. I think it was coming from one of the cart-baskets. 

            I spent about half an hour trying to organize the poem “Pearl” to line the translated lines up with the original Middle English but I’m only up to line 156 in a 1200 line poem. I have to stop trying to make the lines look neat because it’s too time consuming. My final paper is due in six days. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. I had a slice of seven grain sandwich bread with the last of the pumpkin butter, five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I only wore one scarf and used my spring gloves. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:00. 

            I lined up another 100 lines of Pearl and made some notes: 

            In this dreamscape even with the display of a multitude of pearls on which the mourner walks he is not reminded consciously of his lost Pearl. Indeed, after line 58 when he falls asleep distraught, he is experiencing so much joy in this fantasy realm that he does not think of his dead daughter at all for 107 lines of bliss until the transformed version of her appears before him and he recognizes her. At that point he is suddenly reminded of his grief. She is not even his reason for wanting to cross the river, as that desire manifests itself almost as soon as he sees the beautiful stream. 

            The lining up of the poem is time consuming but it’s important to have the right line numbers. Hopefully I’ll make better headway tomorrow because the deadline is getting closer and I have a lot of writing to do. 

            I made four ground beef patties and grilled them in the oven. I put one between two halves of a naan with chili sauce, Dijon and three slices o dill pickle. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episode 8 of Bewitched.

            In this story Darrin’s boss Larry is going to Paris on business and taking his wife Louise along. Before he leaves he unloads all of his work on Darrin and so Darrin is so busy that Samantha hardly sees him at all. Samantha is bored and playing solitaire when her mother pops in. Samantha is very glad to see her and suggests they go for lunch. Endora seduces Samantha into having lunch in Paris. They do so and then Samantha thinks it’s time to go home, but Endora tempts her into going to a fashion show. But at the show Samantha is spotted by Larry Tate who is there with Louise and insists on them coming to dinner with them. From the restaurant Larry calls Darrin at the office to surprise him with the fact that he’s run into Samantha in Paris. That’s obviously a shock to Darrin. Samantha comes home to find Darrin drunk and feeling sorry for himself. He thinks that Samantha has become bored with their marriage and is living the high life that he can’t provide. Samantha is mad at him for not trusting her and so she goes back to Paris. Larry Tate returns from Paris and tells Darrin he left Louise there, who is hanging out with Samantha. He says Samantha is only pretending to have a good time and is clearly miserable. This makes Darrin happy because now he knows that Samantha is not bored with him. He decides to fly to Paris, but after he leaves, Samantha comes to the office looking for Darrin. When she learns Darrin has taken a flight to Paris she goes looking for him on all the planes heading east. She looks into each plane through the windows from outside and causes one woman to faint. Finally she sees Darrin and taps on the window to wake him. He sees her and shouts in surprise causing the flight attendant to come to calm him down. We only see her from the side and the back and she’s not really recognizable but apparently the flight attendant is played by Raquel Welch a year or so before becoming a star and one of the greatest sex symbols of all time because of her role while wearing an animal skin bikini in the movie One Million Years B.C. 

            Raquel Welch won several beauty contests in her teens. While in college she became a TV weather girl. She modeled and then got her first screen exposure on television, mostly as eye candy. Her debut film was a small part in A House is Not a Home. Her first starring role was in One Million Years B.C. in 1966. She co-starred in Fantastic Voyage, Bedazzled, Fathom, 100 Rifles, Myra Breckinridge, The Wild Part, The Three Musketeers (1974), The Four Musketeers, Blue Beard, The Prince and the Pauper, Animals, Shoot Louder I Don’t Understand, Sex Quartet, The Oldest Profession, The Biggest Bundle of Them All, Bandolero, The Lady in Cement, Fuzz, and Mother Juggs and Speed. She starred in Kansas City Bomber, The Legend of Walks Far Woman, Right to Die, Hannie Caulder, and Flareup. In 1970 she starred in the hit TV special Raquel. She co-starred in the TV series American Family and Date My Dad. She’s apparently the 21st Great Granddaughter of King Edward I.

April 14, 1994: I worked a shortened day at Central Tech

Thirty years ago today

            On Thursday I posed at Central Technical School until 13:00. A normal day there wouldn’t have ended then and lunch would usually have started earlier so it must have been one of those shortened early release days because of an assembly or whatever. Anyway, I would have gotten paid for a full day.

Marion Lorne

           On Friday morning I wasn’t quite able to finish memorizing “Entre l'âme et l'amour” (Between Love and Spirit) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’m confident that I’ll have it done tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. On Saturday I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric guitar. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            From about 9:00 to noon the wifi was down at the Shambala restaurant below me. I finished making notes on the novel Pearl and fortunately didn’t need to research anything online. I cried a bit during the first reading of the book but the second time I bawled my head off. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a siesta but only slept for about an hour and not the usual ninety minutes. I took an early bike ride but because of the rain I didn’t go all the way downtown. I turned south at Bloor and Shaw. When I came back my neighbour Benji informed me that our upstairs neighbour Caesar died about five days ago. I was thinking that he might have died or gone into the hospital because I hadn’t heard any noise above me for several days. Caesar was here through three landlords. His first landlord here was the father of Henry Pomer, who took over when his dad died and rented my place to me in 1997. With Caesar gone I’m now the longest standing tenant in the building. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 16:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since last Friday. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:20. 

            I started making notes on the 14th Century poem "Pearl" for my final paper: 

            While the "Pearl" mourner’s first descriptions of this dream environment are of scenes splendid and glorious beyond compare they do not describe the unknown but rather the enhanced familiar. However when the tree trunks are blue and the leaves are silver he has ventured into the world of the fantastic. The story becomes fantasy from that point on as Tolkien would say. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching season 1, episode 7 of Bewitched.

            Samantha is having her friends Bertha and Mary for tea. Her third guest is her Aunt Clara who is late because she is old and her powers don’t work the way they used to. She had meant to appear in Samantha’s living room but materialized instead in the middle of the freeway. Halloween is approaching and they discuss the horrible way that witches are portrayed in masks and in artwork as ugly old crones with green faces, long noses, large warts and missing teeth. Samantha has the idea to ask Darrin for ideas on how to improve the image of witches. 

            But at that very moment Darrin is at work hearing Mr. Brinkman, the owner of the Brinkman candy company, telling him that he wants ads with ugly witches to advertize his candy. Later when Samantha sees Darrin’s drawings of ugly witches, she is upset. She tells him it is bigotry against a minority. He gets her point and tears up his drawings. 

            But the next day when Darrin shows Brinkman pictures of beautiful witches, Brinkman says it’s not what he wants. He especially thinks Darrin is weird when he suggests that there might really be witches. When Darrin refuses to do what the client wants he is fired. 

            That night Samantha leaves Darrin in bed and summons Bertha, Mary, and Clara. They decide to stage a witches’ protest in Brinkman’s bedroom. He tries to call the police but Samantha turns his phone into a snake. Then he thinks he’s dreaming because of French cuisine so Samantha puts him in front of a French Foreign Legion firing squad. When they fire he says he believes in witches. Then they give him a green face, a long nose, warts and blackened teeth. They change him back after he has promised to change his ad campaign. 

            This whole time Clara has been more interested in his doorknobs, because she is an obsessive collector of doorknobs. After the witches leave, all his doorknobs are gone. The next day Brinkman agrees to Darrin’s campaign of using beautiful witches. Then he says he has to go to the police because someone stole 105 doorknobs from his house. 

            Later we learn that it’s fathers who buy Halloween candy and so the gorgeous witch on the billboard has increased Brinkman’s sales by 27%. 

            Clara was played by Marion Lorne, who graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1904. Most of her career was spent in theatre, in particular, on Broadway beginning in 1905 and on the London stage. She owned her own theatre in London called The Whitehall where she starred in plays written by her husband, Walter C Hackett, and none of them ran for less than 125 nights. She was sixty-eight when she made her film debut in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. She only appeared in four movies in her acting career. She co-starred in the sitcom Sally. She made 147 appearances in comedy sketches on the Garry Moore Show. She won an Emmy in 1968 for her role as Aunt Clara but she died before the ceremony. Elizabeth Montgomery accepted the award on her behalf and gave a moving tribute. The writers made Aunt Clara a collector of doorknobs because so was Marion Lorne and she often used samples from her own collection on the show.