Tor Johnson

            On Wednesday morning during guitar practice a tall, slim young man in a baseball cap crossed Queen Street and waved at me. When he had my attention he stood under my window and motioned me forward. He said that he lives in the building next door and suddenly I recognized him as the one that was with his girlfriend and looking at me funny the night before. He said that I sing too loud and I wake up him and his girlfriend at 5:00 every day. First of all I don't even start until 6:00. I’ve been singing at the top of my lungs for an hour and a half every morning for at least nine years and this was the first complaint I’d ever received. No one in my own building has even complained let alone someone on the other side of a wall, a stairwell and another wall in another building. The consistency and longevity of my daily singing and playing makes it part of the culture of Parkdale. I’d been worried that I wasn't singing loud enough but it's gratifying to know that my voice penetrates. He asked if I could sing at 8:00 or 9:00 and so obviously he thinks I don’t have anything else going on in my life. He asked if I could go and sing in another room. I shook my head. He asked if I could sing lower and I nodded but I have no intention of changing. When I move into a neighbourhood I don't try to control my neighbours or gentrify their behaviour. If someone moves next door to you then you’re within your rights but if you move in and complain to someone who’s lived here a long time you’re out of line. They come here from Burlington or some Toronto suburb and move into an apartment above a restaurant facing a fire and streetcar route in a neighbourhood where people are shouting under their window all night long and they try to control their neighbour’s singing.

            It was raining on the remains of the storm and some extra snow that fell earlier and so it was extremely slushy on my ride to school. My Kodiaks have shown themselves to be waterproof but water got down inside this time. I was glad for the rain though because it softened up the snow and ice and so I was able to ride as fast as I wanted without any special manoeuvring to avoid wiping out.

            There seem to be a lot less posts along the bike lane to divide it from Bloor Street. I wonder if they've been deliberately removed or if it's just that the snow ploughs have knocked them over.

            I chatted with the instructor for the Biology class that precedes our Romantic Literature class. She’s a pretty blonde woman in her 30s or 40s. She commented on noticing that the tables keep getting moved back into seminar mode after our class and we wondered who’s been moving them.

            I just had time to arrange about five tables into positions facing the podium.

            One member of our class announced an upcoming Shakespeare conference in which there would be discussions about Shakespeare and zombies and Shakespeare and vampires. I asked if Shakespeare would be there. She said, “If you want him to be.”

            Professor Weisman asked, “Is it hot in here?”

            Gabriel answered, “It’s room temperature.”

            I said, “The temperature of a room in Hell!”

            We began our study of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which the professor said is one of the great achievements of civilization.

            It's a closet drama like Byron's Manfred. A closet drama follows theatrical conventions and it's a kind of mental theatre that exercises the reader's imagination in profound ways, but it is not intended for the stage.

            Shelley was a left-wing Romantic engaging with corruption and received orthodoxies of understanding, identity and spirituality. He resists these inherited forms with an unblinking regard for the world. He longs for transcendence but does not produce images of retreat. His consolations do not affirm the status quo. He is a revolutionary through and through. He struggles with not just political but also existential issues and theological revolutionary principles. The spiritual struggle of living in a world with no guides to definitive meaning.

            Prometheus was a Titan and the Titans fought a war with the Olympians. He was traditionally a trickster and known for having given fire and metallurgical skills to humanity. Jupiter punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle come every day to eat his liver, which would regenerate each time.

The livers of sheep and other animals were used for divination. Plato said that the liver was the seat of the darkest emotions, which drive men to action like wrath, jealousy and greed.

The name Prometheus means “forethought”. He had the power of prophecy and knew that the progeny of Zeus would overthrow him. Zeus kept torturing him to find out which of his sons would defeat him but Prometheus would not spill the beans.

Zeus is said by some to be the privative or negative mode of Prometheus. Prometheus must defeat an aspect of his own self in his mind for self-mastery. The abstract structures in the poem ate emanations from his mind.

Prometheus Bound was traditionally attributed to Aeschylus.  There is evidence that it was a trilogy but Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire Bringer survive only in fragments.

Prometheus wants to hear the curse that he had uttered to Zeus. He wants to retract it and to take the high ground to sustain his own internal sense. The ghost of Zeus comes to curse Prometheus with his own words. Zeus is later overthrown.

Prometheus’s consort is Asia. Asia’s sister Panthea, in Act II predicts the rejuvenation of the world. They are called down to the realm of Demigorgon, whom Asia questions about the destiny of things and the meaning of life. Shelley is Demigorgon.

Prometheus Unbound is not historically specific but there are allusions to Paradise Lost and contemporary fiascos like the French Revolution.

There have been attempts to stage closet dramas but the professor doesn’t think any of them have worked. She said that there is a necessary vagueness for appreciating a closet drama.

Shelley refers to real political problems in his writing while Wordsworth and Coleridge tend not to. Like them, Shelley strives for a regeneration of internal processes but he’s more politically specific.

Asia is the affective emotional side of Prometheus. Some see Prometheus Unbound as a psychodrama in which all of the action takes place in the protagonist’s mind. Closet dramas work well for psychodrama.

Zeus is the god figure gone awry. He is the tormenter of humankind. He is the primary deity that never sleeps, binding human beings to tyrannical projections of themselves. Religious institutions lead to self-tyranny. Zeus would have been almighty if Prometheus had given up.

In line 57 Prometheus declares, “I hate no more.”

I offered the theory that if Prometheus still hated then he would have remembered the curse.

If Zeus is a negative part of Prometheus then in forgetting the curse Prometheus has already partially defeated Zeus.

            I chatted with the professor about Prometheus as Jesus and Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. I’d thought that Shelley had said that Prometheus was the fallen angel of Paradise Lost but the professor said no. Other writers have made the comparison though.

            I rode down to Staples to buy some rechargeable AA batteries and got a pack of four for $22.60 after tax.

            When I got home I went out and bought a can of Creemore.

            I worked on my review of Shab-e She’r.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner and watched two episodes of Peter Gunn.

            In the first one, Al Brenners has just been sentenced to 40 or 50 years in prison but as he is being escorted through the courthouse the elevator operator pulls a gun and helps him escape. Gunn’s blind friend Cliffie asks him for protection because he knows Al is out to kill him, which he does. Gunn knows that Al is never far away from another hood named Vic Stringer. He goes to an acting coach named Igor who is coaching two female wrestlers, Prudence and Daphne to improve their performance. Igor tells him he can find Stringer at a certain hotel. At the hotel he sees Stringer make a phone call and then leave. Gunn follows him in his car out to the country barely escapes an ambush. He remembers that Stringer used three coins at the phone booth and so it must have been a toll call but the operator won’t give him the number except by court order and so he gets Lieutenant Jacoby to arrange it. The number is from a sanatorium outside of town but when Gunn goes there he is captured and tossed into a padded cell where later the door opens and a giant and murderously psychotic mental patient is let in. There’s a battle but the giant gains the upper hand and he is about to crush Gunn when Jacoby arrives to shoot him.

            The giant was played by Swedish born actor Tor Johnson, who started out as a wrestler but appeared in several movies, including Plan 9 from Outer Space and two other Ed Wood films.

            The second story begins with Gunn convicted of bank robbery and murder and sentenced to death. He didn’t do it and so he escapes to find who set him up. He goes to see the bank teller and a cab driver that swore under oath that Peter Gunn was the person they saw. They continued to do so under Gunn’s threats. Gunn goes to see a reformed safecracker turned locksmith and asks him if there’s anybody around spending money like they’ve knocked over a bank for $400,000. He says there's one bank robber who's got an actor named Rinehart working for him. Gunn discovers that Rinehart impersonated him for a crime boss named Rizzo to rob the bank and commit the murder. Rizzo arrives while Gunn is confronting the actor but Lieutenant Jacoby shows up not long after and there’s a short gunfight. Of course Gunn is cleared.