The Real Twilight Zone

            I worked on the introduction of my essay for more than half an hour on Sunday morning and learned a couple of new words. I never knew that the line between light and darkness on a planet is called the “terminator” or the "twilight zone". I'd always known what "twilight" is but I'd never realized that the "twilight zone" is not just a cool name for a TV show but a real astronomical term. So when I’m practicing my songs every morning I’m almost always in the twilight zone.

            William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience draws from nature for symbols to represent the two sides of human consciousness. Blake’s primary metaphors are day and night and within each of these he creates a pantheon of tropes with characteristics that he associates with one or the other side of the terminator. What he sees as the holy part of man is reflected in the light of the sun and the things of nature that mirror that radiance, such as clouds, sheep, flowers and birds. His understanding of humankind’s evil is echoed in nature’s dark, painful and terrifying aspects that appear in his night such as the frightening tyger, the invisible worm and cold winter. 

            In the evening I spent more than an hour on the paper, after which time my essay was three lines short of being four pages long. With ten days left till the deadline I still need to write another two pages. When I was ten days away from the turn-in date of my previous paper I already had the required page count, but then this essay needs to be twice as long.                       

            I did some of the required reading of Percy Shelley’s poetry. A lot of it is very political but in a deeply idealistic way with not many practical solutions. He seemed to be caught up in the same dreams of universal brotherhood inspired by the French Revolution that a lot of British Romantics were.

            I watched Peter Gunn. This story began with a woman falling through a skylight in a fancy nightclub and dying. The cops say it was an accident, but the woman’s boyfriend, a rich jockey named Billy thinks she was murdered. Jason hires Gunn to prove to Billy that she wasn’t murdered. The police say no one could have pushed her because no one came down the stairs and no witnesses saw anyone descending the building by rope. Gunn thinks someone with the skill could have jumped from one roof to another. He does some research and discovers that Jason had been a member of a troupe of acrobats. Jason has been following Gunn and when Gunn leaves the library Jason tries to drop a load of bricks on Gunn from a building that’s being renovated. There ensues a chase scene with a lot of scaffolding, jumping and climbing while Jason shouts that it was an accident but he’s glad she’s dead because she was only after Billy’s money. Jason slips and falls to his death.