Mourning the Death of an Abstraction

            On Thursday morning I finished posting my translation of “Belinda” by Serge Gainsbourg and started listening to his song “Mangos.” I'll memorize at least the first verse tomorrow. 

            I weighed 87.7 kilos before breakfast. I had time to eat five clementines and sip some coffee before leaving for tutorial. 

            Some tables were removed from the classroom and so I didn't have to shift any forward to make room behind me. 

            The attendance question was “What did you do that you enjoyed over reading week?” A lot of students went to Montreal and or listened to Taylor Swift's new release. I was the only one who said they did school work. Sarah asked if I listened to Taylor Swift as well and her tone seemed a little sarcastic as if I wouldn't listen to her because of my age. 

            As I Lay Dying is part of the Faulkner universe, which is like the Marvel universe but his world is like ours. The same fictional county was the location for most of his stories. Some characters cross over as in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom. The motif is the disintegration of a wealthy family in the south. It's a peasant class in As I Lay Dying. 

            The genre is Modernism. Realism represented the real but some say Modernism is more real. Southern Gothic. 

            Mourning. Sarah says she's writing on mourning and the climate crisis. 

            I said As I Lay Dying while I was reading it was sometimes depressing and sometimes funny. But the whole thing is funny in retrospect. 

            After WWI the world was fragmented and so Modernism came into being. 

            Mourning. Background. Freud and Derrida. Mourning is conscious while melancholy is unconscious. We can experience mourning even if we lose an abstraction. It is important to mourn loss. Mourning is viewed as a work task one must do. It is normal to come across the “work” of mourning. The process of mourning is reality testing as Freud says. Our relationship to reality. It is revealed that the love object no longer exists. The demand is to sever our attachment to it. If we keep it we are delusional and pretending. It is understandable to not want to sever the attachment. If one's partner dies we don't just get another. The tendency to not want to sever causes turning away from reality and holding the object in an hallucinatory wish cycle. We pretend it still exists. The task is not immediate but over time, piece by piece, fragmented. 

            How this text might be presenting features of mourning. There is a physical enactment of mourning in Cash's coffin. It is anticipatory. Derrida says mourning is anticipatory. 

            I said Vardaman seems to be in denial. He thinks Addie is still alive. 

            Addie is spoken of in the present tense. 

            Jewel is Addie's love object. He is not Anse's kid. Jewel is taller and so above. We only know him through others so he is objectified. 

            I said Darl is also an object missed at the end of the novel. He was also taken away more unjustly than Addie. 

            Teeth can be an object even if one doesn't have them. Anse's reaction to Addie's death.

            I said bananas are suggested as a substitute for a train. 

            I said Darl is pure consciousness and so he has no object. All things are his objects. 

            Everybody has substitutes but Darl has none. He fought in WWI. He reaches paralysis and doesn't complete mourning. 

            Anse is happy in the end. 

            I said I don't think it is obvious that Dewey Dell was raped since the text does not say so. This started a whole argument with several women taking the opposite view. Paco agreed with me.

            I didn't have a chance to say that I think that Addie is the dead American dream and the family is a microcosm of the United States with Darl as the United States consciousness. 

            I rode to Yonge and Bloor, south to King and west to Sudbury. Sudbury is a horrible street of townhouses that should be exiled to the suburbs where they belong. At the top of Sudbury is Queen and Gladstone where I went to Freshco. I bought five bags of grapes, two half-pints of raspberries, a bag of kettle chips, a pack of frozen salmon precooked in a Mediterranean style, a pack of ground chicken, five year old cheddar, two cans of peaches, a pepperoni sausage, Breton whole-grain crackers and skyr. I weighed 86.7 kilos when I got home. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos at 17:45. 

            I finished editing my tutorial notes at 18:30. 

            I read most of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. It reads like a young adult novel. Skeet has a white dog named China that has had puppies. But some of the puppies died from some sort of dog disease and Skeet has to steal some de-worming medicine from a white farmer's barn. The fourteen-year-old narrator Esch is pregnant. There's a basketball game and a fight between one of Esch's brothers and the guy that might have gotten her pregnant. Then there's an organized dog fight and it turns out that China is a fighting dog. She's pitted against her father and after a long battle she wins. All of this time a tropical storm out on the Gulf of Mexico has turned into a hurricane and it gradually makes its way up. The name of the hurricane is Katrina. When it makes land the house is flooded and the family has to climb on the roof and then jump and swim. China gets swept away. Lassie come home! 

            I made a new batch of gravy but I put too much flour in and it is almost too thick. I had a potato with gravy, two chicken wings and a chicken spine while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story while Pyle is putting out a brush fire with the platoon he saves a rabbit and keeps it. When Sergeant Carter finds him with a rabbit he tells him to get rid of it. Gomer gives it to a little boy who says he'll have to ask his parents. Danny turns out to be Colonel Grey's nephew and he's visiting. The colonel says he can keep it if his parents say okay and they do. Gomer builds a rabbit hut for Danny in the woods behind the colonel's home and he and Danny name the bunny Harvey. But when Carter finds the rabbit hut he doesn't know about the colonel and he thinks Gomer has disobeyed his orders. Carter lets Harvey go. When Carter finds out that the colonel is involved he tries to get Harvey back. He and Gomer catch a rabbit but Danny says it's not Harvey. After several more rabbits it's still not the one. Finally Danny reveals that Harvey has a black spot on the back of his leg. Carter also learns that Danny's father is a brigadier general. Carter goes to a pet shop and buys a rabbit with a spot behind it's leg and gives it to Danny but it's the wrong leg. Carter tries to artificially put a spot on a rabbit in the right place. He tries paint, soot, marker and ink but Danny notices it's not real. At the last minute before Danny has to go home Gomer brings him Harvey. He says that Carter took so many rabbits out of the woods that Harvey was lonely and went back to the rabbit hut. A few days later Colonel Grey tells Carter that Harvey is doing fine but he wonders where the name Harvey came from. Gomer is about to explain but Carter interrupts and takes the credit. The colonel tells him Harvey just gave birth to three baby bunnies. 

            Danny was played by Bobby Riha, who starred in the movie “Jack and the Bean Stalk” and played Bruce on the Debbie Reynolds show. He is now a photojournalist.

            I finished reading Salvage the Bones. They survived Katrina but Skeet is still waiting for Lassie to come home. It's ironic that he's willing to risk the dog's life in brutal, bloody competitions while still mourning its loss. I didn't find the story that interesting, nor the characters. It was hard to tell a lot of the male characters apart.