Crows Are Smarter Than Dogs and Cats

            Although I was still miserable on Monday morning from my cold, it felt like I might have just gone over the hump. My singing voice, though still limited was not confined to talking the words like the day before.

            Once I was on my bike and riding to class I felt even better and I was a lot more hopeful of being up for what was going to be a busy day on Tuesday.

            When I got to the classroom there was one other student in the room. It was a young woman who always sits in the same place and wears a black hijab. I said “Hi” and she returned the greeting, asking how I was.

            I got Professor Weisman’s table, chair and lectern into position and rolled up the projector screen. I noticed that the one tiny piece of chalk we’d had was gone and so I went on a mission to find some. I checked another classroom but there was none on the blackboard ledge. I found an office near the elevators and asked where classrooms get their chalk. Two people said, “That’s a good question!" Finally someone suggested that I go to the concourse level. I went down there and found an office with a sign saying “Operations”. The woman behind the counter said, “Good question!” They don’t supply chalk to the rooms but she remembered that they had some chalk lying around. She had one box with some coloured chalk and another with white. I took about five pieces of the white chalk. I placed them on our ledge.

On a trip to the washroom I saw Gabriel in the lounge and he walked with me to the classroom. I found out that he drives in from Stony Creek for class. He said he couldn’t afford to live in Toronto with his two boys. He showed their picture on his phone. The oldest just turned six. I asked if they had been born in Nigeria because I’d been under the impression that he just came here to go to school. It turns out that he’s been in Canada for sixteen years and works for the government as a corrections officer at the Toronto South Detention Centre.

He says weekend prisoners are the worst because they don't want to follow the rules. They just want to sleep through the weekend.

I told him about when I was 18 and a cop planted drugs on me.  I had to lie and plead guilty to avoid jail. He said the cops can be pretty horrible. I said they're even worse in the States and I gave the example of a video that I saw of a cop gunning a guy down for not understanding his instructions about where to put his hands when he was on his knees. Professor Weisman came in at that time and overheard me. She named a specific case and wondered if that had been what I was talking about but she was talking about something recent.

She noticed that there was now chalk. I wouldn’t normally have told her that I did it but it was such an adventure that I recounted my journey through the building of a few minutes earlier. She appreciated it. She said she’s a very low-tech professor and doesn’t use any power point or slides. I suggested though that slides would be nice when we are looking at the poetry and etchings of William Blake. She agreed.

We looked at the conversation poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The loco-descriptive style was popular in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries and was for describing mental processes. For the Romantics the description of the landscape was secondary to the mental process. For earlier poets it was the scene that gave significance to the mind but in Romanticism the mind gives significance to the outer scene.

The sense of the mind’s engagement with nature was not the same for Coleridge as it was for Wordsworth. Coleridge was worried that nature would not meet him halfway. In these types of poems someone is usually addressed. The effect of the poems is to break off a fragment of experience and to make of it an aesthetic whole. The resolution to the problem is achieved at the end.

The first part of the presentation is called the strophe.

The counterpoint is the antistrophe.

The resolution is the epode.

Sara Coleridge goes from being Coleridge’s scolder in The Eolian Harp to his scalder in This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. She "accidentally” poured hot milk on his foot.

The professor says she would like to teach Coleridge in a lime tree bower.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth tells how it has been with him in memory. An internalized scene.

Coleridge begins by representing what he has lost in a whining tone. He is representing a stark failure of the imagination. He is representing his utter alienation from nature and so this part of the poem is not pastoral because he is stuck there.

There is phallic imagery in his imagined description of the nature that his friends must be enjoying while he is laid up with his injury. At first his friends, though more free than he is, are enclosed in a dell.

Coleridge imagines that his friend Charles Lamb, who spends his life cooped up in London must be particularly enjoying this walk. But Charles Lamb actually hated nature and preferred life in the city. Coleridge refers to a calamitous event that has befallen Lamb. This was the stabbing murder by his mentally ill sister of their mother.

Coleridge is extending his sympathetic imagination. This is a crisis poem. What is physically lost is found in imagination and the landscape becomes spiritualized as he transforms the lime tree bower. In the transfiguration process it becomes a pastoral bower. This is the self-reflexive aspect of Romanticism. He has escaped from his sense of loss.

The rook is traditionally associated with death but at the end of the poem even the rook is transformed. Professor Weinstein talked of rooks as an ugly, noisy and annoying bird. She said if you ever had a rook’s nest near your bedroom window you would know. I mentioned that they are incredibly smart. I didn’t mention how smart but they can learn to use sticks as levers and bend wires into hooks. She said that rooks are crows. They are a type of crow but even in Europe the carrion crow is distinct from the rook. I've never heard anyone talk so badly of crows before. They're my favourite bird. The corvids that include rooks, crows and ravens tend to score higher in intelligence tests than cats and dogs and are equally as smart as apes and whales. They can imitate just about any sound such as that of dynamite exploding in the mountains. They have been known to imitate the sound of wolves and coyotes in order to attract those animals to a carcass that they need help breaking open.

There is a dialecticized resolution at the end.

We looked at the poem, “Frost At Midnight”. The work is an aesthetic whole. It’s another crisis poem, as he is alienated from sensory experience. He’s in suspended animation with indications of life pressing through. It’s an inversion of the conventional nature scene.

The film of frost is related to the film of soot in the fireplace. A flapping piece of soot on the grid is called a “stranger” and it’s supposed to predict the coming of a friend.

The poem begins in silent darkness but in the second stanza it is transformed by memory into a loud scene.

The baby breathing is linked to the eternal language of god. Nature is presented as god’s language.

The poem ends where it begins and comes full circle.

She asked us how these two poems represent a redeemed imagination.

I said that it’s more that the dilemma in each poem is redeemed by the imagination. In Frost At Midnight the imagination takes the form of memory but then that transforms into a vision of the future. There is less control over the imagination of memory because it has to bend somewhat to facts. But one has total control over an imagining of the future.

He gives with one hand for his self and takes away with the other.

At the end I asked if the word “stranger” meant something else at that time because I was confused as to how something called a stranger could predict the coming of a friend. She wasn’t sure. I suggested that maybe it’s meant to mean the opposite. Later I looked it up in my 1888 etymological dictionary and found that “stranger” did sometimes mean “a visitor”. The word comes from the Latin “extraneous” by way of the French “etranger”.

That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason. The story begins in a mansion where a man named George gets a phone call from Charlotte. She’s his lover but he’s told her never to call him at home because his wife Louise may be listening on the extension. She is. She confronts him and begins to hit him. He tries to restrain her but as she breaks free she falls down the stairs. She looks like she might be dead but she obviously isn’t because this would be no murder mystery for Mason to figure out. Louise is injured by the fall and bedridden. A month later Louise won’t let George near her. Only her cousin Vicky, who lives there and manages the house and the elderly nurse, Nora May are allowed into her room. A new maid is hired and it turns out to be George’s girlfriend Charlotte calling herself Martha. George looks into Nora May’s room and sees her playing chess and talking with an imaginary friend while wearing several very expensive articles of Louise’s jewellery. He knocks on the door and she quickly hides the diamonds. George hands Nora a bottle of pills and tells her to give them to Louise. Wearing Louise’s diamonds Nora goes to see Perry Mason. She tells him she needs advice and money is no object. He wants to refer her to legal aid but she makes a sad face and he gives in. Mason takes one of the tablets to analyze and tells her not to give Louise any of the pills until she hears from him. She pulls out her purse to pay him and he asks what she would say their consultation was worth. She says, she doesn’t think a man like him should work for too little and he agrees. She asks, “Would $5.00 be all right?” He answers, “Just the figure I had in mind!” She gives him five crumpled dollar bills. When Nora gets home George is waiting for her with the box where she’s been hiding Louise’s diamonds. He tells her that the police might not understand about the jewels and that she should give the pills to Louise right away. Nora puts the pills into Louise’s hot milk and enters her room. Later that night Louise dies from arsenic poisoning. After finding the stolen jewellery and analyzing the milk, Lieutenant Tragg arrests Nora. The analysis of the pill that Mason got from Nora shows that it was just a stiff sedative. Mason visits Nora in jail and she tells him that after putting the pills in the milk she waited until George wasn’t watching, dumped it down the sink and made Louise a fresh batch. As the matron comes to take her back to her cell, Nora tells him not to worry. In court George explains that he’d wanted to temporarily sedate Louise so he could enter her room and retrieve Charlotte’s letters to him. He also reveals that though Louise had planned on cutting George off, she dies before she could change her will and left him $1 million. Mason asks Vicky to see if she can find the love letters. Later she brings them and says she found them taped to the back of the mirror in Louise’s bedroom. In court Mason says that Vicky must have put the letters on the back of the mirror herself, after the murder. He accuses her of having had the letters all along and of deliberately hiring Charlotte as a maid in order to incriminate George. If George were convicted of Louise’s murder then she would be her only living relative and would inherit the $1 million. Vicky confesses. Vicky couldn’t have found the letters where she said because Tragg had been in charge of searching the room and he would have found them. In the end Nora pulls out her purse to pay Mason and he asks, “What do you think is fair?” She says, “Well, I could have gone to prison, or worse! Would $25 be all right?” He says, “Exactly the figure I had in mind!” She gives him twenty-five one-dollar bills.