Pilar Seurat

            On Sunday morning I revised my translation of the first four verses of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I finished transcribing the chords for the Serge Gainsbourg version of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. I found another set of the Edith Piaf version and transcribed half of those. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. I worked on my Critical Summary of “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl” by David Aers and knocked off another half a page. I just have another half page to lose and then I’ll have the required size. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before lunch. I had red lentil snaps with spicy hummus and a glass of orange juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. Yesterday it was below zero and I needed long underwear. Today it was above and didn’t. Before going home I stopped at Lucky Supermarket to buy some plantain chips. But they no longer sell the good kind that they had for years and now only have the same brand one can buy at No Frills. I got two bags. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in nine days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:15. 

            I finished writing this Friday’s Critical Summary: 

                                                  Mourning Transcends Gender in Pearl 

            David Aers in his essay “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl” writes that death is a “challenge to human identity, the disclosure of an utter powerlessness framing our will to control others”. He says, “we mourn, inevitably, for our selves”. These are good theses and there may be evidence in the poem Pearl to validate them. But Aers proceeds to screw his argument into gender specific examples that distance it from proving his original point. 

            Aers claims that the male gender of the mourning parent who narrates Pearl makes him more possessive and that his addressing his child as “my pearl” is an example of male possessiveness (242). He accuses him of being “the controlling jeweler, the man whose identity is bound up with appraising and setting gems”. But mothers also address their children with pet names that begin with the possessive pronoun “my” followed by the names of valued objects such as jewels. A parent of any gender could see her child as her jewel and herself as the jeweller who made it. 

            Aers maintains that the speaker’s emotional responses to his daughter are negotiations with an adult woman. It is true that his child appears before him as a comely maiden after having been instantly advanced to marriage age to become a bride of Christ. But there is nothing in the speaker’s dialogue with his suddenly eloquent child that shows that he is longing for connection with her as a young adult. He does not remember his child as a woman because she had “lived not two years” (489-490). Therefore the root of his bliss is a child and not an adult. Also his manner of speaking to his child would not be out of place if she were male or any other gender. 

            When the speaker asks, “Are you my pearl for whom I cried / For whom I grieved alone at night?” (242-248), Aers states that his “strategy” is to draw his daughter into their past parent-child relationship so that he can resume control in a “masculine role that combines rhetoric of worship with the practice of controlling female identity to fit the idealizations and demands of male language”. But the narrator’s question, “Are you my Pearl?” is merely an attempt to understand if she is who he thinks she is. He is reacting not only to suddenly seeing his child alive again but also to seeing her in a holy form. To ask her to identify herself and to tell her that he missed and grieved for her is not an attempt to control her identity. He is trying to understand how her past identity relates to her current persona as a Bride of Christ. There is no “male language” being spoken here, as his lines could be uttered by a female mourner. 

            Aers believes that the speaker is using the language of courtly love to manipulate his daughter as if she were the sought after object of courtly love poems (745-56). He states that the narrator is playing a dominant male role in that tradition in order to make his child feel the guilt of a “failing female” because she refuses to “play the part of the love object” (325-36). But in courtly love the lover and the object have yet to be united whereas in this case the parent and child have already bonded before their current encounter. Aers may be right that the language is that of courtly love but the dynamics are far from being the same. The speaker wants to bond again with his lost child who he recognizes in her transformed state. There is nothing in these lines that show him “trying to make her see herself as a failing female”. The child being mourned could be any gender and still be the source of his joy, distress, and grief. 

            There is also nothing gender specific about the possessiveness expressed by the mourning parent in Pearl. Possessiveness by a parent is drawn from a sense that the child is part of who they are. When the child dies there is a loss of the self that existed because of that child. This sense of loss is gender neutral. The natural process of mourning may not be possible without a sense of possession. 

            I read about half of “The Pleasures of Rhyme: A Psychoanalytic Note” by M. Faber. He talks about how rhyme serves as an early replacement for the mother. 

            I had a bowl of chili with plantain chips and a glass of orange juice while watching season 2, episode 9 of Burke’s Law. 

            Nicholas Amenor the richest man in the world is in town to close a big deal and is staying and working in the Biltmore Hotel. In the high rise being constructed across the street is a man with a rifle. In the window that he’s watching through his scope there are Amenor’s secretary Dana Prentiss and two men. The older man steps in front of the window and is shot and killed. Burke’s team is there when he arrives. The victim’s name is Kurt Stulman and he was Amenor’s bookkeeper. Burke and Tim meet with Amenor who says he is negotiating an oil lease with three possible buyers, all of whom hate him because of past encounters. Amenor introduces Sakito his bodyguard. Tim scoffs at his bodyguard being a woman. Amenor signals for her to demonstrate. Sakito reaches for Tim’s gun, he grabs her hand and she flips him onto his back before handing him back his gun. Tim goes to see Clint Perry and is accompanied by Dana who says she likes younger men. They arrive at a party that has been going on for three days. Two attractive and scantily clad women escort Tim to Clint’s office. Clint greets him with a Texas accent but after a couple of questions Tim tells Clint he knows he’s no Texan. Now without the accent Clint admits it but says it’s easier to get people to deal oil with a Texan than an MIT geologist. Tim condiscates Clint’s rifle to take to the lab and see if it’s the murder weapon. Sakito makes out with Burke in the Rolls on the way to see the Rafer brothers (played by the Smothers Brothers). Luke and Ghys Rafer are the richest brothers in the US and seem to be the original Dumb and Dumber. They are absurdly eccentric. They decorate their home from the Salvation Army and their clothes are from Goodwill. Ghys is played by Tommy and Luke is played by Dick. Burke asks if they’ve seen todays paper. They say they don’t buy papers. They wait until the next day when the paper is free. Later Amenor has just gotten out of his car when it blows up. Burke goes to see Elaine Truscott. Her home is full of big game trophies that she killed. She talks very tough and takes masculine poses. She says if she’d wanted to kill Amenor he’d be dead. Burke starts insulting her and telling her she’s both a fake as a hunter and as a woman. She points her rifle at him but then stops. He says he was just testing her to see if she was the killer. All the guns from Perry, the Rafes, and Truscott are clean. Tim and Les go back to Clint. He’s paid Amenor a down payment of $9 million on the oil deal and says he’d lose it if he killed him. Sakito comes to Burke and tells him the murderer called to say he’s coming to the hotel. As they get out of the car at the hotel a gunman starts shooting at Burke from the construction site. Burke and the sniper have a long gun battle as Burke makes his way into the construction site and as they climb the stairs and fire at each other. Finally Burke tackles him and it’s Amenor’s press secretary Lesage. They fight. Lesage tries to get away and trips, falling from the building and dying. Burke thinks Sakito is part of the plot to kill Amenor and she is taken into custody. Now Burke says that all the suspects had to be in on Amenor’s assassination. Burke says Amenor is already dead and he was killed by Nicholas Amenor. Burke goes to Amenor and asks for Lasage. Amenor doesn’t know where he is. Burke tells Amenor that the real Amenor was killed two days ago. Amenor wanted to remain invisible and so he hired someone to pretend to be him in public. Burke says the real Amenor was much shorter than the fake one. They fight and then the imposter runs but is blocked by Tim and Les. 

            Sakito was played by Pilar Seurat, who moved from the Philippines to LA as a child. Her first professional performances work was as a member of Ken Murray’s Blackouts dance troupe. She only appeared in three major films: The Young Savages, The Battle at Bloody Beach, and Seven Women From Hell. She made guest appearances on several dramatic series. She played Sybo in the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold”. Apparently when she appeared in Hawaiian Eye and kissed Troy Donahue it was US TV’s first interracial kiss. Her son Dean Devlin produced the film Eight Legged Freaks.