Percy Shelley

            It’s usually so hot in my apartment in the morning that I have to do yoga and song practice with both living room windows open. But on Monday morning there was a strong, cold wind blowing directly into my apartment and so I had to only leave one of the windows partially open.

            During song practice, at the other end of the Dollarama parking lot, several large pieces of cardboard, like a pack of happy unleashed dogs, went bouncing westward along the alley.

            Before getting ready to leave for my first Romantic Literature class in a month, I read a chapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What a horrible monster that Victor Frankenstein is! He creates another living being and recoils from his own creation because of its appearance. He brings a sentient living thing into the world and immediately abandons it. Imagine a human child abandoned and kept from human contact and when it finally tries to connect with people they are violent with him. Of course he would become violent as a result of having no guidance in his development. In teaching himself to read and speak in a year the creature shows himself to be the most intelligent being in recorded history. Imagine if his creator had nurtured him from the beginning and taught him how to behave. This is a story about child abandonment.

            On my way up Brock Avenue I noticed that the old Beer Store on Brock Avenue is now nothing but rubble. Halfway between the railroad bridge and Dundas a guy was walking with two garbage bags full of cans. I slowed down and started speaking to him but I startled him. I said, "Sorry! I was going to say that it's a long walk to the Beer Store now.” He nodded and said, “Yeah!”

            When I got to the fifth floor of OISE, Gabriel and Julia were chatting in the common area and I went over to chat. They each shook hands with me and we said “Happy New year!” I commented that it’s contrary to nature to be at school. I held my index finger and thumb slightly apart and said that just before the holidays ended “I was this close to perfecting goofing off! But now all of that work has been thrown out the window!”

            Gabriel told me that there was a class in our room but I headed down there to wait anyway. Halfway there another student approached me and asked if I was sure we were in the same room this term. I said I was pretty sure since Professor Weisman had told us we would be. But the young woman showed me the posted schedule and it showed that our classroom is 5- 150 rather than 5-250. We walked together and found the room. It’s about the same size but awkwardly arranged and there are tables rather than desks. We went back to where Gabriel and Julia were sitting and waited for the professor to arrive so we could find out for sure where we were supposed to be. When Karen Weisman got there she confirmed that we would be in the new room.

            The tables were arranged seminar style and so we had to sit and look sideways to see the podium. She looked at the floor plan that was posted near the door and saw that the tables were supposed to be in rows. I think they should be in rows at an angle because her podium is in the corner.

            Before starting her lecture on Shelley she gave us a little review about the importance of detail in poetic language. What kind of person is talking? A particular sensibility is writing the poem. Be attentive to image patterns and subversion or affirmation of expectations.

            Take for example the experience of engaging cultural forms such as a concert of Beethoven’s pastoral 4^th symphony. The flute represents birds and the drums represent thunder. This is programmatic music. What is its purpose? What is its experience? You miss the point if you just say that it represents birds and thunder. It’s not reducible to its paraphrase.

            Actually, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is his 6^th Symphony.

            We need to know that Coleridge hurt his foot but we can’t reduce the poem to that fact. Poetry does not have a simple subject.

            How does one make sense of a literary product? How does the text generate meaning, feeling and experience? How do writers mobilize forms of meaning making? It’s not what the poem is about but what experience it is engaging and how it generates meaning.

            She began her lecture on Percy Shelley. He was a second generation Romantic. Wordsworth and Coleridge were like elder siblings that had witnessed the French Revolution first hand. Shelley and Keats in a way had it easier.

            Shelley was one of the most well read poets. Unlike Coleridge he did not write long arguments.

            Shelley was the son of a wealthy baron who was also in the House of Lords and would have inherited the title if he’d been willing to compromise. His family was very conservative. He went to Eton and then Oxford. He was bullied for not being interested in sports and for being effeminate. This helped him to develop a vivid sense of injustice. At the age of 18, after six months at Oxford, he was expelled for publishing an essay on the necessity of atheism. Around that time, even though he considered marriage to be an oppressive institution, especially for women, he eloped with Harriet Westbrook.

            Percey Shelley was a radical revolutionary with a political aesthetic but he was also a deft experimenter in literary forms like the ode, the hymn and the elegy. Unlike Coleridge, Shelley’s philosophy did not clash with his poetry.

            Shelley’s work was self-reflexive. His poetry reflects on the way his poetry constructs its meaning as does Wordsworth’s poetry in Tintern Abbey. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” constructs such a fiction of solace that the poem is as recuperative as the landscape. The poem comments on its own procedures as does Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

            Shelley is always trying to understand the mechanism by which he comes to understanding.

            We looked at Shelley’s poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty".

            A hymn is a song of praise. Hymns were in vogue in the early 19^th Century. Even women could find a cultural place by writing them. They were supposed praise spiritual entities. The poem is a hymnic ode. An ode is a dialectical process beginning with a perspective, followed by a counter-perspective and ending with a resolution. Hymns and odes trade on the author’s confidence of understanding the object being praised. This is a hymnic ode to a personified abstraction. Intellectual beauty is being addressed as if it were a deity.

            In the first line: “The awful shadow of some unseen power", "awful" means “awesome". The shadow floats among us and both the shadow and the power that casts it are unseen.

            The rhymes are carefully selected: “Power”, “Flower”, and “Shower” (a transient waterfall).

            “It visits with inconstant glance". Human countenance is as inconsistent as the wind.

            The Romantics rebelled against assumptions and tended to be suspicious of personified abstractions, which depend on the consensual understanding of the audience of a generalization to work.

            The second generation Romantics were more suspicious of ideologies and a hymn may come coded with belief.

            Common forms of understanding can no longer be taken for granted.

            The shadow of the unseen power is the context for hymnic praise.

            He’s drawing attention to the inadequacy of our cultural forms in getting it straight.

            She asked us to describe the interesting aspects of language in the last part of the first stanza.

            I wrote about the five lines that begin with “like”. "Like" implies commonality and he is comparing intellectual beauty to things that are accessible to everyone. We know “clouds in starlight”; we know the “memory of music". All of these things are common and they are valuable for the mystery that they invoke.

            Similes are obtrusively made.

            The repetition of the same word or phrase is an anaphora.

            Shelley’s similes are reminders of his aesthetic control. They call attention to the lyrical process. He's rejecting the equivalence of metaphor. These are frantic efforts to locate a spiritual anchor.

            A hymn to a spiritual entity would not tend to give information. He is exploding the expectations of the hymn. Making us aware of the generalization is not sufficient.

            The first stanza shows the impossibility of locating intellectual beauty. The second stanza questions the object of praise while playing with a form of praise. Why are we vulnerable to gloom? The third stanza asserts that efforts to name abstractions with certainty have resulted in the inadequacy of language. This points to the poet’s own self-reflection about his inabilities.

            Poet’s need to invent names like "god" but they become records of vain endeavour. God is a frail spell that will not release us from doubt, chance and mutability. Shadows are insubstantial images.

            This is a poem about the intimations of spiritual presence. If it is beyond representation then the poem undermines itself.

            We create the images we worship. When he gives up definity he feels it the most.

            She asked us in what respect must the poet “fear himself and love all human kind”?

            I said that he must fear that he may be wrong and that everything he comes up with is a “frail spell”. He is afraid of pinning intellectual beauty down to a hard orthodoxy.

            Fear is pervasive throughout the poem.

            That which is ineffable cannot be named.

            Professor Weisman gave us back our tests and I got a horrible C+. I was disappointed but so unsurprised that it was hard not to be philosophical about it. When there was just Gabriel and I left in the room she looked at me and sympathetically said, “Sorry, but you were capable of doing better.” In her note on my test the thing that I had neglected to do was to use textual examples to support my argument. I told her that I realized as soon as I walked away from the test what I had done wrong and I knew exactly what she was going to write. 25% of my mark in this course is already an A and so this drags it down a bit. Our essay and final test this term are worth a lot more so I still have a chance to get an A on the course, so as she said, it’s not a tragedy. I told her that I’d just started riffing as I wrote and I lost touch with what needed to be done. I said it’s like when one puts one’s shoes in the refrigerator and she nodded knowingly.

            She asked Gabriel and I how our holidays had been. Mine had been relaxed but Gabriel had to work at the prison through the holidays. He said that there is so much drinking and losing control over Christmas and New Years that there is an influx of prisoners. He was supposed to work until 22:00 on New Years Eve but ended up having to stay until 2:00 on New Years Day.

            It was much more bitterly cold when I left OISE than it had been when I’d arrived. I got some money from the Bank of Montreal in Little Italy on the way home and stopped at Freshco. I bought the firmest of some the too soft grapes they had to offer and a pint of blueberries. I also got spoon size shredded wheat; It’s Not Butter and a six-pack of paper towels.

            I had a late lunch and a late siesta.

            I worked on copying my lecture notes.

            I boiled a potato and a carrot to have with dinner but the water boiled down faster than I noticed and so half the vegetables got burned to the bottom of my new stainless steel pan. I’m not supposed to use abrasive cleansers on stainless steel but I didn’t have any baking soda. I got most of the black off. It’s funny that the potato and carrot that got saved didn’t taste burnt.

            I watched the Doctor Who New Years special, which will be the last Doctor Who episode until next January.

            Spoiler alert!

            In the 9^th Century a war was fought in England against a supernaturally powerful creature. The creature was defeated and the plan was to cut the monster’s body into three parts and bury them in three distant parts of the world. But by accident one of the warriors died while trying to carry his part out of England.

            Two young archaeologists meet on New Years Day in an archaeological site in the sewers beneath the Sheffield Town Hall. They are unaware that they are in possession of the remains of the creature, which under the ultraviolet light comes back to life. They notice that one of the specimen bags is missing and so Lin goes looking for it. She finds a squid-like creature on a wall and she touches it.

            The Doctor and her friends arrive because the Tardis has picked up some extraterrestrial readings at that location. Lin shows her where she saw the creature and it is gone but some of its slime is on the wall and so the Doctor collects a sample for analysis.

            Lin goes home and we see when she takes off her coat that the creature has attached itself to her back and is controlling her.

            The Doctor analyzes the creature’s slime and discovers the worst result possible. It’s the DNA of the most dangerous creature in the universe. It’s a Dalek without its robot casing but it’s a Dalek with special abilities because it’s a reconnaissance Dalek.

            The Doctor hasn’t figured out how the Dalek is getting around until she talks to Mitch, the other archaeologist. Yasmin says she’s been trying to reach Lin but goes to voicemail. Mitch says Lin never lets calls go to voice mail and suddenly the Doctor realizes that Lin is the Dalek vehicle.

            Lin goes to the city archives and since it’s New Years there is only one guard. She kills him and uses his fingerprints to get in. She locates and takes the Dalek extermination weapon that was being stored there.

            The Doctor tries to contact UNIT but the operator tells her that UNIT is now defunct because of budgetary issues.

            Lin goes to a junkyard-forge and kills the smith. She then begins building from scrap something to serve as a robot casing for the Dalek. When it’s complete the Dalek abandons control of Lin’s body.

            The Doctor, having tracked them there through Lin’s cell phone signal, insists on facing the Dalek alone because with Daleks it’s personal. It’s systems are not fully in sync and so she’s able to use her sonic to block its laser. She reveals herself as the Doctor and all Daleks are programmed to recognize that the Doctor is their greatest enemy. The Dalek flies away.

            Meanwhile Ryan’s estranged father Aaron has shown up to try to reconnect with his son. Aaron is an engineer and he’s carrying with him a prototype microwave oven that he’s designed. He is invited onto the Tardis and when he finds out about the Dalek and that it is mostly metal he says they can use his oven against it and so he begins work to refurbish it.

            The Dalek wipes out a platoon of soldiers to break into the biggest communication headquarters in England. It controls all satellite communication. The Dalek wants to send a message to call for a Dalek invasion fleet. As it is about to send the message the Doctor arrives. She slides under the Dalek weapon and attaches the microwave device to its casing. The robot vehicle of the Dalek is destroyed but it attaches itself to Aaron. The Dalek demands to be taken to the Dalek fleet or Aaron will be destroyed and the Doctor agrees. But she has lied and takes the Dalek within the gravitational pull of a sun going supernova. When she opens the door both the Dalek and Aaron are sucked towards the sun. She had hoped that the Dalek would be too weak to hold onto Aaron. Aaron is just holding onto the Tardis doorframe. Ryan gets Aaron to take his hand. The Dalek’s grip slips and it’s pulled out into space.