Lucy Marlow

            On Friday morning I had all the windows open during song practice because the heat was blasting from the radiators. About halfway through though, even though the heat was still on the wind shifted outside and started blowing icy rain directly into my place, so I had to close them all.

            The hint of soot in the air left over from my Tuesday night potato-on-the-stove forgetfulness was barely noticeable two and a half days later.

            For an unknown reason my usual 90-minute siesta in the early afternoon lasted for an extra 45 minutes.

            I spent over an hour on my essay, this time analyzing the imagery of William Blake’s Tyger.

            The night in Blake’s imagery is not bound by chronological time but is rather an adumbral aspect of the human mind. This homo sapien darkness sows the seeds of its own jungles of trees of Mystery where terrible creatures like the worm thrive. But at the top of Blake’s food chain of manifestations of hominin horror is the deadly tyger. Blake spells the name of his beast as “tyger” rather than “tiger" because it is not the actual cat species of Asia, although its imagery is clearly drawn from that beast. The habitat of this creature is not the night of the forests but rather "the forests of the night". To be of something is to be part of it and so Blake's jungles are not fixed locations on Earth that exist in both day and night but rather shadowy negative places generated by the part of the psyche of mankind that is always caliginous. A forest that is of the night would never be a forest in the daytime. The fact that the tyger burns bright in the darkness suggests that its light is artificial.

Blake’s poem “The Tyger” inquires as to what immortal creator could have fashioned such a monster, but the question is not overtly answered. The text implies however that the creature is man-made. The tyger is created with the force of shoulders, dread hands and feet applied to an artifice that assembled its working parts. Verse four uses entirely industrial terminology to speculate on the construction of the beast. This language of the blacksmith’s tools of hammer, furnace, anvil and clamp are metaphors for the process of constructing a tyger that is the embodiment of the industrial revolution. But the question of the involvement of an immortal hand in the beast’s genesis still applies. Is there a god that can be held responsible for the horrible creations of humanity? He implies that nature made the lamb but that a different and contrary nature made the tyger. Another poem, “A Divine Image” suggests that the answer is human nature since the human form is a fiery forge and the human heart the burner of the forge’s furnace.

           

It was a rainy evening with a lot of sirens.

            I grilled my last three frozen chicken legs and made gravy.

            I watched the eleventh episode of Peter Gunn. It begins with Whitey Collins entering a library while several cops are staked out in disguise outside. Whitey secretly slips a piece of paper or an envelope into the spine of a specific book. Someone recognizes him and he runs out, getting into a gunfight with the cops. He shoots one cop disguised as a peanut vendor and then he is shot. He ends up on death row and on his day of execution he asks to see Peter Gunn. He tells Gunn how to find the $700,000 he stole years before because he wants Gunn to collect the reward and give it to his daughter. Whitey tells him a clue to where the money is but a clue can be found in the central library in Appleton’s Encyclopaedia of American Biography. A woman named Sandra with a poodle named Poochey is waiting in Gunn’s car and after kissing him while he removes her gun from her purse she asks if they can go for coffee. At the café there are two gunmen who force Gunn to a place where he is injected with something by Professor Olford. The professor is drinking constantly but tells the boss that he’s only been drunk three times in his life but one of those times lasted four years. Gunn is kept in a room and periodically tortured to find out where the money is. In between beatings Gunn recovers well enough to plan an escape. He rips the electrical cord from a lamp, slips the exposed end of the wire under the carpet in front of the door, pours water over it, inserts the plug in the socket and calls for the guard outside his room. When the man is electrocuted he takes his gun. He knocks out another guard, goes downstairs, hold the boss at gunpoint while he forces the doctor who’d administered the drug to call the police. Gunn gets the $700,000 and gives the reward for its return to Whitey's daughter. Gunn ends up with Sandra’s poodle while she's in prison.

            Sandra was played by Lucy Marlow, who did a few movies and TV shows. She married a baseball player and had two kids.