Joanna Moore

            On Monday there was only one cold symptom left. Deep down in my throat there is mucous that I have to cough up from time to time. Early in song practice my voice broke and I failed on a couple of high notes.

            When I got to class the only other student there was the young Muslim woman. I commented that it’s always just her and me and she laughed. I saw that once again the chalk had disappeared and so I went back down to Operations on the concourse level and asked for more. After letting me take a few pieces the lady behind he counter said she would talk to someone about the problem. When I got back upstairs, instead of laying out all the chalk on the ledge like last time, I just put out one piece and horded the rest in my backpack so we wouldn’t run out so soon.

            I asked the young Muslim woman her name and she told me it was Hager. The “g” has a “j” sound and it rhymes with badger. According to one site, the Arabic name “Hager” means “travel”.

            I asked Professor Weisman if Walt Whitman was directly influenced by Romanticism. She said he definitely was. I said that since Whitman was a direct influence on the Beats then that means the Romantics influenced the Beats. I told her that I think Ginsberg and Bob Dylan were more influenced by Blake than Wordsworth. I offered the view that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is actually quite Wordsworthian. She agreed.

            The professor suggested that I read David Galbraith’s writing on Bob Dylan.

            We continued with our study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry and looked at “Dejection: an Ode”. The poem is in conversation with William Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”. It’s a loco-descriptive, greater Romantic lyric. The speaker situates self in a setting, surveys the scene and is triggered to an insight. It ends up in the same place it started but with an added resolution or closure. It doesn’t mean the difficulty is resolved but it is at least insightfully recognized.

            In these types of 19^th Century poems the mind gives significance to nature because the mind is more beautiful. There are spots of time that maintain a renovating virtue because of the mind’s ability to engage with them and make them coherent.

            The Immortality Ode laments the loss of vitality but it’s okay because of the philosophical mind. The Dejection Ode is a letter to Sara Hutchinson with whom Coleridge was in love even while married to Sara Flicker. She was the sister of Wordsworth’s fiancée, Mary. But we can’t reduce the poem to biography. Romantic poets establish personal myths. The Dejection Ode is an evocation of personal loss and romantic alienation. Coleridge’s love was hopeless, guilty and unrequited.

            Coleridge was the most learned of the Romantics. He worked hard on philosophy, which it is said was at odds with his poetry, but tread carefully on that claim.

            Coleridge wrote the Dejection Ode after having read the first four stanzas of the Immortality Ode, which Wordsworth wrote while Coleridge was visiting. It’s a dialogue almost in response to those first four stanzas.

In the epigraph is the line “The new moon with the old moon in her arms”. Light and shade shift, the atmosphere is charged and the light is strange. He is anticipating the storm because he wants it to startle his pain and release him from paralysis. John Stuart Mill says that his life was saved by this stanza and others. Coleridge says he sees, not feels the beauty and this echoes the Immortality Ode. There is a loss of response and a paradox in his unimpassioned grief. He is saying he has no outlet while writing a poem about it. Coleridge is getting scary. What if nature does not meet us halfway?

Coleridge’s most famous lines are in stanza four. There is grief without pang. Some of this poem counters his Eolian Harp.

Nature is mere matter if not animated by the mind’s refraction. The mind constructs the world.

She asked us to explain the meaning of “we receive but what we give”.

I said that even when we are taking it in we are instantaneously processing nature with our minds. Our minds tell us everything we see. We make something out of nature. We ritualize it in order to understand and appreciate it. We dress nature up in wedding garments and shrouds.

She asked if there is a paradox in stanza two.

I wrote that unimpassioned grief is a state of mind. When he says that he sees the beauty but does not feel it he means that he recognizes beauty that he has felt in the past. The world was like a gift. This echoes Wordsworth lament of lost vitality. The storm parallels Wordsworth’s freeze.

Nature is fixed and dead without the mind. Coleridge is shoved onto the ground by his afflictions.

When he talks about joy he does not mean mirth, but rather the shaping spirit of imagination.

He turns from his dark dream and listens to the wind. He talks to the wind. The wind is conferring and constructing his nightmare. This is not the wind of the Eolian Harp. Images of horror are bestowed upon nature. The poem itself could be an unfreezing of paralysis. I asked if he had already resolved these issues in his mind before writing and she said that was probably the case.

She finished the lecture early to give back our essays. I got 88%, which is the first solid “A” that I’ve received in a third year course. In her note at the end she wrote: “This is an excellent, lively, intelligent and beautifully written paper. You use details extremely well. I look forward to the rest of your work this year.” I was singing during my bike ride home.

On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes, Courtland apples, ground beef, extra old cheddar and yogourt. At the checkout counter, the nice woman who seems to manage the other cashiers apologized for not remembering that I didn’t need bags. I told her she’s the only one that remembers that she forgot.

            I grilled the chicken drumsticks that I’d frozen before the weekend. I made gravy from the drippings but I shouldn’t have added water because after thickening it with flour, it tasted a little too much like flour.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. The story begins with two men, Jefferson and Lumis, leaving the South African Diamond Company and locking the door. They talk about going to the airport to meet Baxter. After they get in the elevator a woman in harlequin glasses opens the door from the stairs and goes to the diamond company’s door. She opens it with a key and begins to ransack the office in search of something. A man walks in who introduces himself as Baxter. He thinks the woman is an employee and she plays along. He asks her a question about Lumis’s wife’s arthritis and she says it’s all right now. She says that she has to go wash her hands but he stops her saying Lumis’s wife never had arthritis. He tells her to sit down and then turns to call the police. She grabs his briefcase, hits him over the head with it and runs out the door. Baxter recovers and calls the police. As they arrive the woman emerges from the stairs one floor down from the diamond company and tries several doors along the hallway. The door to Perry Mason’s office is open. The receptionist, Gertie asks if she is the typist they sent for. She says she is. She sits down and begins to work and turns out to be a very good typist. She tells Della her name is Wells. Paul enters Mason’s office from the back door and tells Mason and Della about the woman the police are looking for. She meets the description of the typist but when Della goes to the front, Miss Wells is gone. Mason goes to check out the diamond company and as he arrives an attractive brunette is leaving. Mason talks to Lumis, who tells him that Baxter, after reporting Miss Wells to the police, vanished himself. He was supposed to deliver their shipment of diamonds. Meanwhile at the docks an old man is fishing in a rowboat just off shore. He sees a car pull up on the dock and a man drags a man’s body from the car, tosses it in the water with a concrete block attached. The fisherman calls the police. Later, from a police line-up he points out the man that disposed of the body. The man he picks is Jefferson. Lumis comes to ask Mason to defend Jefferson. Mason goes to see Jefferson in jail. He says he was having dinner with a lady at the time of the murder but he refuses to name the woman. Paul comes to Mason’s office and tells him he’s tracked don the typist. She is Patricia Taylor, the senator’s wife. Mason goes to see her in her garden. She says, “This is private property!” Mason says, “So is the South African Diamond Company office!” She admits that she was the typist. She says that it all started when she was sending packages to Allied prisons in South Korea. A Captain Jefferson in the South African air force kept writing to her. She was not married to Taylor at the time but rather worked for him. At the time she had not fallen in love with Taylor and did not even like him and so the letters that she sent to Jefferson were mocking of Taylor. After marrying Taylor she asked Jefferson to return the letters but he wanted to hold onto them for blackmail. That’s why Patricia had ransacked the office. Later Mason sends Paul to search Jefferson’s apartment and Paul finds Patricia there. He also finds two pictures. One is of Jefferson sitting in a restaurant with Patricia and the other one at the same restaurant and apparently at the same night with the same brunette that had come out of the diamond company office when Mason went there. She tells Mason she will testify at Jefferson’s trial but for the prosecution. In court Mason puts Jefferson on the stand. Jefferson refuses to name his alibi because she is married and it would be ungentlemanly. Mason asks him if he knows Patricia Taylor but he will only admit he is acquainted with her. Burger cross-examines Jefferson and asks him to deny that he was with Patricia Taylor. Jefferson will not do that either. Burger says it proves he’s not a gentleman. Mason calls Patricia to the stand. She admits that she was with Jefferson on the night of the murder but only for fifteen minutes. That means that she is not an alibi for the time of the murder. The jury finds Jefferson guilty of murder. Mason figures out that the brunette with Jefferson in the photograph is Mrs. Lumis and he goes to see her. She admits that she was with Jefferson at the time of the murder and is willing to testify. Lumis goes to a trailer in a remote area where a bound man is being held. Mason and Paul have followed him there. Mason knocks on the trailer and when the guard steps out Paul throws him, punches him and karate chops him. This is the first time Paul has resorted to violence in the series. When Lumis comes to the door of the trailer even Mason exerts some force and yanks him outside. Court the next day is supposed to be for sentencing and asking for a new trial. Mason asks Jefferson to stand and both the defendant and the man who’d been tied up in the trailer rise. Mason says that the defendant’s real name is Kincaid and he did kill Baxter but he would need a new trial to prove it because some of the evidence presented against Kincaid was against the real Jefferson, such as the letters to Patricia.
            This was interesting in that it kind of breaks the formula that Mason never loses a case, since his client was found guilty. It turns out that his client was guilty but Mason only didn’t lose on a technicality since it wasn’t the real Jefferson.

            Patricia was played by Joanna Moore, who married Ryan O’Neil and was the mother of Tatum O’Neil. She played Andy Taylor’s girlfriend for several episodes of the Andy Griffith show.

            Mrs. Lumis was played by Joan Elan, of whom it’s surprising that she never became a star. She had a real presence and a unique beauty.