Industrial Tiger

            I got up Sunday when the alarm sounded and I began yoga. Halfway through though I started wondering if I’d been supposed to turn my alarm clock back last night. My computer and phone automatically adjust but the flying saucer clock is stupid. I looked at my phone and saw that I had gotten up an hour early as it was 4:25. I went back to bed for an hour but wasn’t able to sleep at all. I figured though that if I’d pushed ahead with my morning routine an hour early I would have been wiped out by noon. I decided to try to rest whether I could sleep or not and I think I made the right decision.

            At the beginning of song practice, before I even started to tune the guitar my B string just suddenly snapped. Luckily I had a back up. I spent fifteen minutes changing it and after that my guitar stayed in tune much better than usual.

            I spent at least three hours of the afternoon working on my essay and more than doubled it in size. It's now half as long as the required length and I think I've got some pretty good ideas. A lot of the concepts are separate right now but I think that I can pull them all together to relate with one another.

Night and winter go hand in hand to represent the negative aspects of nature. A land where children are poor is in eternal winter, with no sunlight, no harvest and the pathways are overgrown with thorns. Winter in the city is distinguished from winter in the country in that urban winter is both horribly real for poor and homeless children but also symbolic of suffering in homeless poverty. The Songs of Experience poem The Chimney Sweeper paints a before and after picture of a happy child outside of the city enjoying the snow but then transplanted to suffer as a blackened urchin against a hoary backdrop of urban snow.

The darker passions such as jealousy are a delight chained in night. Productive things are not done in the darkness of night. An invisible worm flies in the night to inflict illness on the rose in the poem “The Sick Rose”. As in another poem, "My Pretty Rose Tree", the rose is presented as a woman, the rose in “The Sick Rose” must also be a woman, like the young “harlot" of London afflicted perhaps with the curse of venereal disease from a life as a sex trade worker. The worm being either the disease itself or the john that spreads it with his secret night life.
            "The Tyger" may be not spelled as “tiger” because the subject of the poem is not about an actual tiger. The habitat of this creature is not the night of the forest as it would be for a tiger but rather "the forest of the night". To be of the night is to be generated by the night and since the night for Blake is a source for negativity it is logical to conclude that this tiger is a manifestation of negative darkness. A forest that is of the night would never be a forest in the daytime. The fact that it burns bright in the darkness suggests that its light is artificial. The question is asked as to what immortal creator could have fashioned this tyger with the implication that it could not have because it is man-made. Created with the force of shoulders and dread hands and feet applied to an artifice that assembled its working parts. Verse four uses entirely industrial language to speculate on the construction of the beast. The trend is to think of this language of blacksmith’s tools as metaphorical, but what if the tyger is a metaphor for the industrial revolution and the hammer, he furnace, the anvil and the clamp are real? The question of the involvement of an immortal hand still applies. Is there a god that can be held responsible for the horrible creations of humanity? Blake does not answer the question. He implies that nature made the lamb but that a different and contrary nature might have made the tyger. Perhaps human nature.

            I had an egg with toast for dinner and watched two episodes of Peter Gunn. An old low-level hood named The Frog is killed on the waterfront just before a meeting with Gunn. The Frog worked for a mobster named Swink who thinks Gunn has been given something by The Frog. Gunn goes to Mother’s where Edie is singing How High the Moon. The place is closed but Swink and his men come in through the back. As Gunn is not cooperative Swink has his men hold Gunn’s hands flat on the table while he raps his knuckles hard with his cane. It didn’t seem to break anything.  Gunn goes to see The Frog’s alcoholic cat lady girlfriend Loretta gives Gunn a book that has a record of everything The Frog did for Swink. Swink’s men take it away from him almost as soon as he leaves. They send a guy to kill Loretta and are about to kill Gunn. Loretta shoots Swink’s man and then comes out and shoots the guy who’s trying to kill Gunn. Jacobi arrests Swink. It seems Gunn is always getting rescued. Gunn gets a kitten from Loretta.

            In the second story they really played up the fact that Craig Stevens was cast to look and talk like Cary Grant. The story begins with a giant of a man named Clarence waiting for a man named David in his apartment. He strangles him, and then slips his neck into a noose to make it look like he hung himself. Next Clarence comes to see Gunn and takes him to his boss, an eastern style cult leader named Ahben. Ahben wants to hire Gunn to find a former employee named Joanna who stole $200,000 from him. Gunn tracks Joanna all over Europe as he’s being followed by a little fat man in a dark suit. Gunn finds Joanna in Spain and they fall in love. After a few weeks she lets him know that she knows he’s working for Ahben. She says she never stole any money and that it’s just that Ahben doesn’t like people leaving him. Gunn finds Joanna hanging and goes back to confront Ahben. There’s a fight with Clarence that after some great difficulty, Gunn wins. Ahben is about to shoot Gunn in the back when the little fat man suddenly arrives to shoot and kill Ahben and reveals he’s been following him because he’s a cop working for Jacobi.

            Joanna was played by Marian Marshall, who did three films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and was married for a few years to Robert Wagner.