On Wednesday morning I put on a pair of the new underwear. They’re a little too roomy for my taste. I like them snug. I’m pretty sure last time I bought the large size and they weren’t as big.
I memorized the twelfth verse of “Les frères” by Boris Vian. There are three verses to go.
I published “Between Love and Spirit”, my translation of “Entre l'âme et l'amour” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog.
I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions.
I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast.
I worked on my final essay:
The Jeweller and Marianne have each lost a loved one. The Jeweller is an adult whose child has died, while Marianne begins her story as a child whose mother has disappeared. The Jeweller while grieving over his dead daughter Pearl falls asleep on her grave and has a dream that leads to finding not only his lost Pearl but also to witnessing manifestations of religious ideals for which the pearl gemstone stands as metaphor. Metaphor according to Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger is the means by which mysticism manifests itself in language. The language of the poem “Pearl” The Jeweller then has a mystical experience that serves to console him in his mourning process by displacing his deceased Pearl with transcendent ideals that are also represented in metaphor by the pearl gemstone.
I weighed 87.3 kilos before lunch. I had toasted seven grain sandwich bread with peanut butter that I got from the food bank a few years ago and five-year-old cheddar. Later I had a headache that I assume was caused by the peanut butter so I threw it out.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride but it was misting outside and very windy. The wind made the mist very cold and it was coming down just hard enough for me to only go as far as Bloor and Ossington before heading home.
I weighed 87 kilos at 16:45, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since April 3.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:00.
I worked on my essay and made some progress. I have a rough two and a half pages towards a paper that needs to be at least eight pages long. But I also have fifty pages of notes to draw from:
While grieving over his dead daughter Pearl, the Jeweller falls asleep on her grave and has a dream that leads to finding not only his lost Pearl but also to witnessing manifestations of religious ideals for which the pearl gemstone serves as a metaphor. Metaphor according to Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger is the means by which mysticism manifests itself in language. It serves as a tool to express the connectedness of opposites such as singularity and multiplicity; and materiality and spirituality. The metaphor-wealthy language of the poem “Pearl” uses carefully placed repetitions of words that have different meanings in other contexts. The poetic dance of the contrasting nuances of these paronomasia bring together and thereby create tensions that turn over the engine of paradox between connotations both familiar and mysterious. These in a sense cancel each other out but leave behind the same word, now charged with the Unknown. This serves to disorient readers and put them off their guard to be more open to deeper levels of meaning, such as the suggestion of the existence of a world beyond space and time.
In addition to creating this sense of the otherworldly, the “Pearl Poet” also binds these groupings of words together in a system of poetic concatenation that forms a web running through the poem, weaving all of the meanings into an overall sense of “the connectedness of all things”.
The primary connector in “Pearl” is the word “pearl” itself, which is used as a type of stairway of metaphors leading to the infinite. The pearl is introduced as the rare gemstone that has been lost; then the lost pearl is revealed to be the narrator’s dead daughter; then in the dream pearls are first presented as the common strewn gravel foundation of a higher world; then pearls serve as the organized adornment of the speaker’s found but now heavenly daughter; then the pearl is shown to be that essence of human life and consciousness that many call the “soul”; and finally at the top of the ladder of pearl symbolism is the City of God Jerusalem, which is also a pearl decorated with pearls. This higher metaphor represented by the word “pearl” that the Jeweller retrieves from his mystical experience ultimately serves to console him in his mourning process. It displaces his deceased Pearl with the transcendent ideal of achieving the City of God that is also represented in metaphor by the pearl gemstone, and which is ruled by Christ.
“Pearl” is certainly a Christian poem, while the novel Pearl makes very little reference to Christianity and touches more often on elements that would be considered Pagan in origin. Marianne’s lost mother Margaret was at least unconsciously Pagan and her mourning daughter connects with her through the memory of Margaret’s animistic interactions with nature and her love of ancient folk songs and stories. The mourned mother in the novel Pearl comes to represent Marianne’s spiritual ideals just as the grieved-after child in the poem “Pearl” is elevated to becoming a religious icon for the Jeweller.
In each case the lost loved one communicates the mourner in a vision or dream but the two encounters are very different in character. At the end of the novel Marianne’s experience of connection with her mother is one of closeness, warm affection and care. By contrast, in the poem the Pearl child is distant, formal and critical of the Jeweller. In both cases consolation is offered, but again the solaces given in each instance are of much different natures. In words the mother tells Marianne, “There is nothing the matter with your heart” but her embrace tells her that everything is okay. That is her consolation.
But Marianne’s consolation does not arrive until she is an adult. She spends her childhood looking to be consoled. Her mother left behind a copy of the poem “Pearl” and Marianne finds the word “Consolatio” in the margin. She thinks that if she can finish reading the poem she will be consoled. We do not learn until later that the real parallel between the novel and the poem is that Margaret, like the Jeweller, was also mourning a lost child.
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