Psychodrama

            On Monday morning I finished memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson”. It only took about two hours. That’s a big difference from the previous song, which resisted being brain contained for at least fifteen hours over two weeks.

            Putting on all of my layers to ride to class is very time consuming. It takes more than half an hour to get ready.

            Most of the snowbsticles had been cleared away since the storm on Sunday. There was only one other cyclist on Bloor Street and he passed me easily until the beginning of the Bloor bike lane. He chose to eschew the path and to ride along Bloor but I took the lane and got ahead of him. In some spots there was more snow and also there were cars sometimes parked halfway onto the lane, perhaps because through the snow they could not see the paint lines that indicate where the lane begins.

            My class had already gone into the room by the time I arrived and Professor Weisman was there early. I only had time to set up one table for myself and Gabriel joined me.

            I’ve noticed that Gabriel only makes his notes in pencil and I asked him about it. He says that he only uses a pencil in this class because he has to erase a lot and he finds the professor talks very fast.

            I told Professor Weisman that I’d been looking into what the Greeks believed about the liver. Plato said that it’s the seat of dark emotions such as hatred and so if the eagle comes every day to eat Prometheus’s liver then it is effectively removing his hatred. Also the ancient Greeks used sheep’s livers for divination and so there might be a tie-in with Prometheus having the power of foresight. She said some interesting theories could be built around those facts.

            She began the lecture by saying that the moment when Prometheus declares that he no longer hates, it is one of the climaxes of the play. There are several climaxes that can be read in non-linear time, layered on top of one another and seen as one climax.

            Prometheus declares “Misery made me wise” and this can be seen as a reflection of Wordsworth’s “A deep distress hath humanized my soul.”

            If Prometheus Unbound is a psychodrama then all of the characters are projections of the mind of Prometheus.

            Shelley occupies a conventional worldview in which revenge has no place.

            In line 21: “black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, insect or beast or shape or sound of life”, these are descriptions of negation.

            During the class I was dismayed to see that it was beginning to snow and blow outside. The forecast had said the storm would start during the evening commute, so I felt ripped off.

            Nature cannot give Prometheus back his words.

            Maybe only the image of hateful Jupiter can repeat the curse.

            There is a paradox in that the hateful words of the curse are preserved as a spell by those that Jupiter oppresses.

            Prometheus no longer has a forum in which to hate in his consciousness. What does it mean to have believed something that you now discount to the point of not remembering it? It’s a particular kind of alienation known as self-alienation.

            Who I am is a continuity over time as in Tintern Abbey. Shelley is using Prometheus to communicate his own self-continuity.

            In line 192 Shelley makes up a myth about Zoroaster meeting his own image.

            During the playback Prometheus is being cursed by his own curse. He sees himself in the phantasm of Jupiter.

            Shelley incorporates in Jupiter the Judeo-Christian god.

            The image of Jupiter is saying that there will come a time when the outside and the inside match. It is an empty shell saying this because nothing is internal to a phantasm.

            The Earth worries that Prometheus is capitulating in the withdrawal of his curse but that is not the case.

            She asked us to articulate the paradoxes of this curse by the phantasm as it recalls Prometheus to an aspect of himself.

            I said that the Earth’s speech is interesting. She and nature cannot repeat the curse although they know the words and believe them to be just. She says, “We meditate in secret joy and hope” that the curse is fulfilled but she and nature cannot speak the curse because it requires hatred, of which they have none. She lists for Prometheus those beings that can utter the words: the gods, demigorgon and three phantoms. These can speak the words of hatred because they have hatred. Nature requires of Prometheus that he embody the curse.

            Prometheus is suffering from a discontinuity within himself because he cannot remember. So not only does he suffer from Jupiter’s punishment but from an inability to remember. Remembering or hearing the curse would reconnect him with essential selfhood.

            Prometheus has mastered himself.

            The Spirits are the images of comfort and the opposite of the Furies.

            Later he reunites with Asia.

            We finished with Shelley and ended the class with a little bit of Keats.

            Keats died of consumption at the age of 25.

            He was a working class cockney who invested in high lyric form to the annoyance of many readers who thought that he was getting better than himself.

            Clare was a peasant and deliberately wrote like a peasant. Keats did not have a working class poetic presence.

            Keats was the least dogmatic of the Romantics. He was always between possibilities of belief. He was not illogical but distrusted simple logic. He could think himself into others and objects. He could throw himself into a belief or a conviction but was willing to give it up.

            She had me read “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and that was the end of the class.

            The idea of psychodrama had reminded me of the film “Being John Malkovich”. I asked Professor Weisman if she’d ever seen it. She said she’d seen the trailer and loves John Malkovich but had never seen the film. “Is it good?” “Oh yeah!” I told her that the scene in which Malkovich goes inside of his own mind reminded me of psychodrama. He finds a world populated entirely by John Malkovitch, including the women and the only language is the word “Malkovitch”. I said that part of the film was so funny that I collapsed laughing on the theatre floor. She said, “That’s a good recommendation!”

            I went to the Admissions office to enquire about my Noah Meltz Grant having not arrived yet. The woman I spoke with said she would arrange for a counsellor to contact me. I guess I should have just called in the first place but usually they are helpful there.

            I rode very carefully down St George with the snow blowing into my face. I had to ride in front of the cars down Bedford to avoid getting gunked up in slippery snow. On Queen Street I had to thread my bike along a narrow space between the snow beside the parked cars and the streetcar track.

            I stopped at Loblaws to buy some grapes.

            The trip home was intense because I had to concentrate to keep myself slowly and delicately free of the slippery patches.

            I opened a carton of tomato and roasted red pepper soup and heated it up to have with some potato chips for lunch.

            I worked toward getting caught up on my journal.

            I had a piece of pork and a potato with gravy for dinner and watched one episode of Peter Gunn.

            This story was somewhat predictable as I think I’d seen a similar plot twist in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. A ventriloquist named the Marvelous Marvon is murdered and Gunn is hired by a man named Marcel who had planned on killing Marvon to find the real killer so he won’t be blamed. Marcel is blamed anyway and hangs himself in jail. Gunn goes to Rinaldo’s apartment where he finds a medicine and he calls the doctor that prescribed it, who said that he’d given Marvon an unsuccessful throat operation and so he was no longer able to speak. This was strange because he was still performing right up to the night he was murdered in his dressing room. Gunn hides in Marvon’s apartment and the killer comes in. It turns out that the murderer is Rinaldo, a little man who pretended to be Marvon’s dummy and who was a master ventriloquist who’d provided Marvon with his own voice after the failed operation. Rinaldo killed Marvon because he’d only paid him less than a tenth of his income even though he did all the work and had laughed in his face when he’d asked for more.

            Rinaldo was played by Dick Beals, who was the original voice of Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Gumby and Davey from Davey and Goliath. When producer’s found out that he could do the voice of a child they were glad to not have to deal with the nutty parents of child actors.