Getting Unrequited with Petrarchie and Lauranica

            It was raining when I got up on Wednesday and continued through yoga and song practice.

            The prominent high rise outside of my window is an apartment building on Dunn Avenue that’s just across the alley behind the three-story building that’s directly across the street from me. I see a side of the high rise that has no windows and so when I get up in the dark morning the building is invisible. But there’s one apartment near the top and facing west whose tenant always strings Christmas lights on the balcony in mid-November and so what I see is just a tangle of blue lights suspended high up in space until sunrise.

            I was hoping it would stop raining before I left for Romantic Literature class but no such luck this time. I was pretty much soaked by the time I got to OISE.

            I set up Professor Weisman’s desk and chair and since there was no chalk on the ledge I had to dig one of the spare pieces out that I’d hoarded in my backpack a few weeks ago for that very reason.

            Hager came in and a little later her friend arrived. When Gabriel entered the classroom he started a conversation about the rain. Before Hager got there the thought popped into my head that I’d never seen a woman with a wet hijab and I wondered if hijabis carry an extra hijab in case of that possibility. I wouldn’t have asked either of them that question though. Anyway they both showed up with umbrellas. I told the two young women and Gabriel that I ride a bike and so I got soaked and I would be riding up to St Clair and Yonge after class and so I would be getting soaked again. Hager’s friend suggested that I buy an umbrella on the way but then she remembered that I’d said that I would be on my bike. I told her that I have seen cyclists with umbrellas but not very often and they would have to drive slowly. Also if the wind is strong they could get knocked off balance.

            I walked to the washroom and greeted the professor in the hall as she was arriving. I could smell the aroma of burning sage somewhere on the floor. When I got back to the classroom I commented that someone must have been doing a smudge ceremony. The professor said, “Oh! That’s what it was! I thought it was something else!” She’d thought somebody was smoking pot. I said to Gabriel that at the prison where he works there must be smudge ceremonies for the indigenous inmates. He confirmed that there are. I said there are a disproportionate percentage of Aboriginal Canadians in prison and Blacks too, but he said that it looks pretty even to him at the South Toronto Correctional Centre where he works. I’m sure Gabriel’s experience is valid but according to statistics 28% of inmates in Canadian prisons are Native and 10% are African Canadian. That’s five times the percentage of Natives in the general population and three times that of Blacks.

            Gabriel told me that growing up in Nigeria he didn’t know that he was Black and he didn’t find out till he came to Canada.

            I reminded Professor Weisman that we’d talked about the silver rod in William Blake’s The Book of Thel as possibly being phallic. I wondered what the gender compliment to “phallic” when one is speaking academically. I knew that “yonic” used to be used but not anymore. She told me that the term would be “vaginal” .I said that makes sense since they are both Latin. She said though that the silver rod and the golden bowl are from the Eucharist. I argued that the last line that Thel hears before running away was, “Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” She confirmed that Blake is definitely talking about the hymen there.

            The professor began the class by giving us information about our exam next week. She said that we would have a choice of two topics, each on two authors for our in-class essay.

            We took a last look at William Blake’s “The Book of Thel”.

            Thel is Greek for desire.

            Her motto establishes both Biblical and sexual contexts.

            The rod and the bowl

            Wisdom and love

            Ecclesiastes:

            Sceptre and chalice

            Time and season.

            Thel’s motto challenges conventional wisdom just as the book challenges readerly expectations. The questions go to the heart of conventional uses of imagery, the division of the sexes and the sacred and the profane.

            The poem is discombobulating. Are the allusions Biblical or sexual?

            Thel is a virgin in a pastoral setting. The pastoral is about ease of being.

            She asks what the use is of existence if life ends.

            Thel is clearly a figure that is continuous with those in Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

            Is she entering Earthly existence?

            The questions she hears from the voice in her own grave cannot be answered.

            Why must we suffer? Why can’t we close our eyes to the poison of a smile?

            These are Petrarchian images. Petrarch was the poet who wrote “Songs for Laura” with references to “Cupid’s poison darts”

            Line 19 in plate 6 of The Book of Thel, "Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?" clearly refers to the foreskin.

            There is no resolution here and Thel does not reconcile herself to hearing the still, sad music of humanity as Wordsworth did.

            She asked how we experience the ending of the poem?
            She called on me to answer first and I said that it seems to me that Thel is visiting the future grave of her own innocence. The questions that she hears the voice from her grave ask are in a sense the opposite of those that she asked earlier. In line 6 of plate 1 she asks, “Why fades the lotus?” but in line 11 of plate 6 the question is, “Why can’t we just not listen to our own destruction?” The latter questions are more worldly and not about transient vulnerable things. The voice from the grave is more sexualized and more about the body. The ending ties into the overall theme of the continuous cycle of things and Thel is being invited to enter into a new and sexual level of participation in that in that cycle but she retreats.

            We are doing the work that Thel does not want to do.

            I asked what we should take from Blake’s image for the cover of the book of Thel, which shows Thel standing in the foreground in a dress and holding her shepardess’s crook. Beside her are the lilies which are spoken of earlier but behind those are the figure of another young woman, perhaps the future Thel, being it seems tackled by a naked young man that is jumping from the lilies but perhaps even part of them because the ends of his leg look more like stems than feet. The professor said that there may be the suggestion of sexual violence or maybe it’s drawing our attention to our own vulnerability.

            For the second half of class we moved from the trauma of William Blake to look at the sorrowful poetry of Charlotte Smith.

            Petrarch was an Italian early modern poet whose great love for Laura inspired him to write sonnets that are still read today and those in turn inspired the English revival.

            Sonnets are 14 line poems with the last two being a two-line unit called a couplet. The 18th Century sonnets had many rhyming couplets. Petrach had many imitators during the Renaissance. These poems always had a sonnet lady like Laura and the poet played the role of a man sublimating his sexuality into poetry and burning for a virgin Madonna figure on a pedestal, that was pure, inaccessible and would never consummate. The poet burns for the lady while at the same time admiring her chastity. 

            There is an old saying that poetry comes from thwarted and impoverished desire. Frustration is Petrarchian.

            Is the Patrarchian sonnet potentially anti-feminist? God yes!

            The Shakespearian sonnets are different because many of them were addressed to men and also because they were more about immortalizing the lover.

            The Petrarchian exception to the frustrated sonnet is the epithalamion sonnet. A book by Edmund Spenser entitled Amoretti and Epithalamion contained love sonnets to his fiancé. There was marital consummation and yet the sonnets were still Patrarchian in form.

            There are zillions of English renaissance sonnets and the sonnet became part of English nationalist pride.

            After the 17^th Century the sonnet disappeared, mostly because it had been displaced by longer forms. It was Charlotte Smith who brought the sonnet back in the late 18^th Century.

            Sonnet ladies were barely real and women were abstracted out of existence by the traditional sonnet. Smith was being gutsy because sonnets were supposed to be for men to write to women. She appropriated something that was of high cultural status. She was standing on her rights. She used them to represent her own desires but they were more sorrowful than sexual. She turned the sonnet on its head and hers became amazingly popular.

            Charlotte Smith had been pushed into marriage at the age of fifteen and separated from her husband after bearing him twelve children. He went into debtor's prison and she needed to write to survive. There was more money in novels then and the same is true now.

            Wordsworth said that history owes a great debt to Charlotte Smith.

            We looked at her elegiac poem “Written at the Close of Spring”. She is using the high prestige of lyric tradition.

            Not only is the renewal of the sonnet by a woman but also the scientific footnotes are her own.

            The flowers that her speaker observes are used as metaphors for the flowering and decay of human happiness but the footnotes establish the flowers as a real part of the empirical world.

            Smith – “The garlands fade.”

            Thel – “Why does the lily fade?”

            Her footnotes can be compared to the gloss in Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". She interrupts the fluid and melodious sonnet with a footnote. She keeps the reader in the real world and not in the Renaissance with an idealized subject. One’s mind should be exploding from the specific images she presents.

            The first eight lines of the sonnet make up the octave in which an idea is presented. Line nine is the beginning of the sestet of the last six lines in which the conclusion or working out of the idea takes place. 

            And so in the octave of this poem we have the image of fading flowers followed by four lines about fading humanity. It’s a conventional comparison but as she says in the final couplet, it’s a comparison that does not work. The couplet subverts our expectation because unlike flowers, we don’t get a second spring.

            I pointed out that the first line of the couplet relates to the octave while the last line relates to the sestet.

            After class I went back out into the rain and began my ride up to St Clair and Yonge to get a haircut at Topcuts. I could have picked a better day but my stylist Amy is only there on Monday afternoons and Thursday mornings and she’d said she was going away in December. Since I was only downtown on Mondays and since next Monday would already be in December, I figure that today might be my last chance to see her. The trip up to St Clair felt shorter than I expected, even though I’ve ridden up there probably a hundred times. I rode past St Clair to the Bank of Montreal to get some cash, but even with that delay I was three-quarters of an hour early for Amy’s shift.

From the way one of the stylists asked, "Can I help you?" in an almost suspicious tone, I think she thought that I was a homeless person taking shelter from the rain. Even when I told her that I was waiting for Amy she didn't seem to approve of me bringing down property values by sitting and waiting for so long. She reminded me that Amy wouldn’t be there for another half an hour.

While I was waiting an older woman with short red hair had just finished getting a haircut. She had mobility problems and made her way from the stylist’s chair to the waiting seats with a walker. I got her coat and under jacket for her and the other stylist helped her put them on. I opened the door to the street for her and she asked if she could hold on to me because there’s a slight drop to the sidewalk from the entry area between Topcuts and the store upstairs.

Amy arrived about fifteen minutes early for her shift and asked if I’d been waiting long. The other stylist said, “Half an hour!”

It turned out that I could have come on another Monday since Amy wouldn’t be leaving for Thailand until December 24. She said it’s a four-day trip to where her parents are but I think she was counting both ways and the time loss on the way back. It’s a 14 hour flight to Taiwan with a three hour layover before the plane to Bangkok and then whatever land transport she and her family will take to get to her parent’s place in the country. I added up the hours she quoted and they came out to a full day.

It should be exciting for Amy’s parents since they haven't seen their grandchildren for seven years and now her daughter is in her early teens and her son is a young adult. I asked if her parents ever came to Canada but she told me that her mother has osteoporosis so bad that she can’t sit down for very long and so she would be able to handle a 14 hour flight.

I asked Amy if she thought I should get a haircut more often but she said that my hair doesn’t look good when it’s too short and so every three months is fine. My last cut had been in August and it'd been starting to look grungy for the last few weeks.

After wishing Amy a good trip I headed back out into the rain.

I was very much looking forward to getting home and putting on some dry clothing but I needed a couple of things at Freshco. I bought four bags of grapes, a loaf of Bavarian sandwich bread, a package of one-year-old cheddar, a small tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (which they abbreviate on the receipt to “It’s not butter”), a can of coffee, a bottle of non-alcohol mouthwash and I found they were selling Irish Spring soap in packs of two for a dollar each and so I took three. The cashier commented, “You really like your grapes!”

It was nice to get home and to change into dry clothing. After lunch I took a late siesta and got up in the evening.

That night I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. A woman named Katie Mears is alone on a couch in a big mansion and happily flirting on the phone when someone sneaks into the room and Kills her with the fireplace poker. Later at Mother’s Katie's sister Helena is waiting to talk with Gunn. She wants him to find Katie, who’s been gone for two days. The Mears family is very rich and Gunn is surprised that Helena gives him Katie’s place of employment as a starting point, since she didn’t need to work to make a living. Gunn goes to the florist shop where Katie had worked and finds out that she had been a highly valued employee. In exchange for Gunn purchasing three-dozen flowers from the shop, which he arranges to be sent to Edie, the proprietor gives Gunn the address of Ramone, one of Katie’s boyfriends. Ramone is a playboy who works out a lot. He says Katie was just one of the many women in his life but doesn’t like being questioned. Gunn goes to Miguel’s Mexican restaurant and Miguel is very glad to see him but Miguel has an ulcer from eating Mexican food. Miguel knows Ramone but does not like him. He tells Gunn that Ramone works for a lonely-hearts club. Gunn talks with Clarissa, the president of The Grand Friendship Club. When she resents Gunn asking cop questions he threatens to call the real thing and so she lets him look at her catalogue. It turns out that Ramone is the star of her stable with a long list of female customers, including Katie Mears but with Helena's picture beside it. As Gunn leaves the club he is dragged into an alley by two suited thugs. They say, “You’ve got a big nose chum and we’re gonna cut it down to size!” They beat him and punch him in the nose and while he’s on the ground they say, "Save what's left of your nose and find another case!" When next we see Gunn his nose seems fine. Gunn talks with Detective Harmon at the police station and he tells Gunn that Katie wasn't just working a regular job for kicks. Helena had all the money. Watching Helena’s house, Gunn sees Ramone arrive. She opens the door and they kiss passionately. Later Gunn confronts Ramone at his apartment and accuses him of killing Katie. He admits that he was after her money but swears he didn’t kill her. Gunn believes him and so now the only suspect is Helena who may have killed her sister out of jealousy for her social competence. They need to find the body and so Gunn arranges to trick Helena into leading him to it. She hears a rumour that Katie has been seen at the flower shop that day. She goes there and is told that Katie had been there but went to Miguel’s. At Miguel’s she told Katie went to Mother’s. Mother tells her that Katie just left with a good-looking fella. In a panic Helena drives home and begins to desperately dig in the place where she’d buried Katie. Gunn gently stops her and leads her away.

Helena was played by Katherine Bard, who was married to producer Martin Manulis. He created The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and produced Days of Wine and Roses. .

            Katie was played by Marian Collier.