Rainbow Supremacy!

            On Monday morning when I got up I was depressed about the prospect of riding my bike through the aftermath of the weekend storm to get to class. Halfway through yoga I felt a little less old and figured I could handle the ride but I was dreading it anyway.

            I left five minutes earlier than normal. It was a very cold day and so though the streets had been ploughed the only melting that had occurred was due to salt and so the side streets were less clear than the main ones. O’Hara had some slippery patches but I rode slowly. Maple Grove, though not as clear as O'Hara was easier to ride on because the snow was even like paving all over it. Brock Avenue was clearer except near the intersections where snowploughs turn and deposit their dirty leftovers. The problem with Bloor Street west of the bike lane is that cars are parked further out from the curb after a snowstorm and so I have to go further out to get around them. The Bloor bike land had been cleared in some places and it had been salted. At some intersections and driveways ploughs had pushed their droppings onto the bike lane.

            When I got to my classroom the other class was just getting out and mine was just going in but because of the weather there were less of us. I rearranged a few of the front tables and put chairs under them.

            I commented to Professor Weisman that Romanticism seems to be a desert of humour except for Thomas De Quincey. I remarked that his “English Mail Coach” is hilarious. She said that not all of it is funny and I admitted that but the very first part is quite funny and so are some parts of “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”. She agreed to that. She told me that Lord Byron’s “Don Juan” (pronounced by Byron with a hard “J”) is where Romanticists go for poetic humour. Unfortunately we won’t be looking at Byron’s funny writing. Romanticists are actually quite sensitive about the accusation that there is no humour in Romanticism.

            She started the class by reminding us that we can only use scholarly sources for our research essay.

            We continued with our study of Percy Shelley’s "Adonais". Shelley's incorporation of the pastoral elegy is complicated. He uses the convention of the expectation of a consolation to write an anti-elegy.

            He suggests that society did not protect Adonais.

            Keats and Shelley were not close friends and so the poem is not just about the loss of a companion. Shelley was mourning the impermanence of art.

            In stanza 39 he uses a gothic description to invert life and death.

            In stanza 52 he says that if you want to be with the One you need to die. Art and nature refract glory. We can only receive intimations of spirituality.

            In stanza 55 the first line is the only time that Shelley every referenced another one of his poems: “The breath whose might I have invoked in song” refers back to his "Ode to the West Wind". Some say that the imagery he presents of being borne darkly out to sea is a prophecy of Shelley’s own death by drowning. A few suggest that this last stanza was written in anticipation of a planned suicide.

            “We strike invulnerable nothings" = impotence.

            The poem looks unblinkingly at art. It’s an elegy for the efficacy of poetry and in particular of Shelley’s own work. The cliché of the elegy is that they all tend to be self-elegies. There is no consolation here of fresh woods tomorrow. The best he can do is to establish the continuation of his own poetry.

            We looked at Shelley’s “In Defence of Poetry”. The professor recommended that we take the renaissance Literature course, which has a lot of defences of poetry.

            In Plato’s ideal Republic poets are banished because they are all liars. The temporal world is the world of becoming and a poor imitation of the atemporal realm of ideal forms. Poetry imitates the temporal world and so poetry is an imitation of an imitation. In the Republic there will be a philospher king but no poets.

            Sir Philip Sidney also wrote an Apology for Poetry. "Poetry can move men to virtuous action".

            Shelley’s Defence of Poetry relies on the principal of equivalence. The main point of the essay is that the imagination is a principal of synthesis. The imagination and therefore poetic language recognizes similarities. The imagination draws together objects that otherwise seem unconnected.

            Similes are not absolute but metaphor uses the equivalence principle of substitution. Saying “my love is a rose” recognizes certain points of relationships. To be a rose is to be everything good there is about roses.

            She recommended that we study rhetoric and catachresis.

            Catachresis is a way for metaphorical language to become practical.

            Poetry must keep language fresh. The language of poetry must be vitally metaphorical because it's imaginative language. Poets draw a relation between the temporal world and intimations of the atemporal realm. They draw together the beautiful and the true, which is essentially the same as religion. Imagination is a principle of synthesis. Poetry breaks the curse of surrounding impressions and habitual thinking.

            Se asked if any of us own an ugly bookcase but I was the only one that raised their hand. She admitted that she has one and said that the point is that we get used to it. We become habituated to constant impressions. Poetry breaks the familiar with metaphor. The poet is like god and recreates the world by defamiliarizing it.

            She asked us, “Why is the great instrument of moral good the imagination?”

            I made some notes but didn’t really come up with an answer that I would have raised my hand to voice and yet when she called on me I thought I’d wing it and see if I could come up with an answer on the fly. It felt like a fumble to me but here’s what I wrote:

            Poetry is accompanied with pleasure and a sense of positivity comes from the new. If we are stuck in habits of how we understand right and wrong. Poets have to live up to the truth they create.

            She thought it was interesting but that it’s not from Shelley.

            What I was trying to say was that Shelley says wisdom is mingled with the delight of poetry. He is implying then that the pleasure of poetry is directly connected to its wisdom. It is pleasurable because it is true. Poetry makes the familiar new and so even our morality that we have become complacent to becomes renewed. Poetry helps us understand our morality in new ways. Poetry is insight and so it communicates self-understanding, which is the skeleton of morality. When we become used to our morality we lose touch with it and so the poet’s imagination provides new ways to see what is moral.

            Andala said that seeing similarities is love and therefore moral.

            Imagination allows us to expand the circumference of our horizon. Empathy and love depend upon the imaginary understanding of others.

            Alterity is the sense of otherness.

            Solipsism is when we are caught in our own conceptions and are unable to engage with others. Frankenstein creates a monster by climbing into his own mind.

            She told us that next class we would be looking at Prometheus Unbound and she gave us certain passages to emphasize.

            I asked Professor Weisman if she is a Star Trek fan and she said she isn’t but wondered if I had an example that related to our lesson. I told her about an episode of Star Trek The Next generation in which the crew of the Enterprise encounter a species that they cannot understand, despite the universal translators conveying their language into English. They spoke in a strangely cryptic way, saying things like, “On the lake, at Tanagra!” Finally while being stranded on a desert planet with their leader and needing to understand him for them both to survive, he figures out that this civilization speaks entirely in metaphor. It was called “Darmok” and it was from season 5, episode 2. She liked that idea and said she’d look it up. She said there are theories that early language was metaphorical. I said that is really the only way to understand the Bible.

            She wondered why I would ride my bike in snowstorms when it’s a broken shoulder waiting to happen.

            I took Bloor Street to Ossington and for a while found Ossington southbound to be clearer than Bloor Street because there’s no parking on the southbound side and so the ploughs didn’t have to go around the cars.

            Since I knew that Freshco had sour grapes this week I rode past it and passed my place to go to No Frills at Jameson and King. They only had one small bag of black sable grapes left and the rest were red grapes, which were also on the tart side. I got strawberries, blackberries, three bags of milk, mouthwash and Irish Spring soap.

            I had potato salad for lunch and took a late siesta.

            I watched the full collection of videos from that March for Life event in Washington. It was kind of a perfect storm of imperfection and even the old indigenous guy was a bit in the wrong. I’d say the least blameworthy was the catholic kid that was just standing there and smiling uncomfortably because he didn’t know what else to do. His buddies were more culpable in perpetuating the negativity. The worst though was the leader of that BHI group of black supremacists that claim to be Israelites. That guy was absolutely toxic. I saw one of their private videos in which they claim things like all of the Vikings were Black. Another problem was where in hell were the chaperones for these Kentucky Catholic schoolboys?
            Anyone that is exactly like me should be rounded up and exterminated. Rainbow supremacy now!

            I worked on typing my lecture notes.

            I had my last piece of pork tenderloin and watched an episode of Peter Gunn.

            This story deviates slightly from the norm in that the show always begins with a crime being committed and after the dramatic moment the musical intro begins. In this case a patient is getting a cast off but when the doctor turns his back he stabs him to death. We see him leaving the medical facility and see it is a mental hospital. After that there is usually a scene with Peter Gunn in a more relaxed situation but this time it continues on with the escaped psychotic killer as he murders a guard and breaks into a chemical facility where he steals the chemicals he needs to construct a bomb that could blow up a large part of the city. Lieutenant Jacobi asks for Gunn’s help to find the bomber. He has sent a revolver to the mayor and told him that he has till midnight to use it to kill himself or else thousands will die. The bomber is Miles Spence and Gunn tracks down one of his old acquaintances through a late middle-aged female barfly tipster. Spence is a great lover of music and Gunn learns that he had planned on going to a concert. Gunn goes there and there is a woman playing what sounds like Baroque harpsichord music. Spence sits down beside Gunn with the bomb and forces him to take him to Jacoby. He holds Jacoby hostage while he sends Gunn out to convince the mayor to commit suicide. Instead Gunn buys a record player and a record containing the same music as the concert. He takes it back to the police station and tells Sergeant Davis to start playing it in three minutes. He goes back in Jacoby’s office and when the music starts to play Spence goes into ecstasy. He lets go of the pin of the bomb the release of which will cause it to explode when the spring moves it to the detonator but Gunn catches it and holds the pin just in time.