On Monday morning the power went off in my place just as I was about
to get ready to leave for class. This happens once every two months or so but
it usually only lasts for a couple of minutes. This time it stayed dead for
fifteen minutes. When I restarted my computer the writing I’d been working on
had only been partially saved and I didn’t have time to rewrite it.
I was the first one in class as has been the case for
the last few times. I took the time before class to read and make notes on a
printed page from my essay.
When Gabriel came in I was showing him how I’ve used our
textbook so much that it just automatically opens up at Wordsworth, Coleridge
or Blake.
The lecture continued our study of the poetry of William
Blake.
For Blake, physical nature is a hell that one must treat
with the imagination. The Romantics refracted the world through consciousness
but Blake took it further. He reacts to the Enlightenment. He situates himself
against mere reason and against the Enlightenment’s valorization of
mechanization. He was not against rationality but he was more visionary,
ecstatic and prophetic than Wordsworth or Coleridge. For Blake, context
resonates in the background.
The ideas of “Liberty, egality, fraternity” caused Wordsworth
and Coleridge to be sucker punched by the reign of terror and they retreated
into their minds. The Enlightenment also meant modernization and the world
moving to democratization with people having inherent rights. Rationality and
science precursed Romanticism but the Romantics were not throwing science away.
They were just qualifying it with imagination. For Blake, idealism can be
ominous.
The Book of Thel moves towards Blake’s prophetic period.
A prophetic poet has a future oriented visionary message and ideal.
We looked at Blake’s two poems with the title “The
Chimney Sweeper”, beginning with the one from “Songs of Innocence”. Professor
Weisman urged us to be attentive to the point of view of the speaker.
Chimneysweepers were skinny, young, male children that
were either orphaned or hired out for the job by poor families. It was only
around the 18th Century that western society started to get the idea
that children were not just small adults. The concept of children having
integrity and innocence that was distinct from their usefulness started
becoming more prominent. The invention of childhood sprang out of the
Enlightenment as did the abolition of slavery.
The situation described in “The Chimney Sweeper” was
real.
“Weep” is a cry and children were brought into the
profession at an age when they could not pronounce, “Sweep!” What is the
paradox in this poem?
There is an implicit critique of the quietist point of
view of the speaker. It does not feel good to think of these children being
enslaved to the detriment of their health. It is an ugly thing to hear the
young speaker in the poem be so affirming about his own exploitation. The
exploited child is given a perspective by the status quo that the way he is
being treated is okay. The poem exposes a sanitized view of Christian
redemption.
The poem has a melodious, easy narrative style. The
stanzas are not quite ballad stanzas. They are iambic with the alternation of
stressed and unstressed.
Many of the poems from Songs of Innocence are set in the
country. The dead chimneysweepers rising from their coffins into a pastoral
afterlife.
The poem sanitizes horror. The child is comforted with
the promise that no harm will come to them in the afterlife if he does his duty
in this life. There is a redemption deferred to the future. But in reality, if
one does one’s duty one could still be harmed. Telling children that they will
not be harmed if they do their duty is an aspect of harm.
We looked at Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper" poem from
"Songs of Experience". The perspective is different, as the child in
this poem knows that he is being harmed. There is a direct reference to the
fourth stanza of the previous poem in the line “make up a heaven of our
misery”.
Blake sees Jesus as the ultimate poet but he opposes organized
Christianity’s exploitation of the vulnerable.
We looked at Blake’s two “Holy Thursday” poems,
beginning with the one from “Songs of Innocence". On Holy Thursday the
poor, orphaned children of London were marched through the streets to St Paul’s
Cathedral. The children's benefactors would line the streets to watch and feel
good about helping the kids. Charity schools were relatively new in the late 18th
Century.
The children have clean faces like the children in the
afterlife in the fourth stanza of the first “Chimney Sweeper” poem. They are
wearing red and blue and green. This is sentimentalism as in poems like “roses
are red, violets are blue”. The poem is written in easy monosyllables. The
children are described as the flowers of London.
I compared the two "Holy Thursday" poems. In
the first one the staffs of the church beadles are described as being “white as
snow” while in the second the speaker declares that where so many children are
poor it is eternal winter there. There is a suggestion then that the church
helps to maintain the winter in which these children live.
The second poem uses polysyndeton, a literary technique
in which conjunctions such as “and”, “but” and “or” are used repeatedly in
quick succession in order to slow the rhythm of the prose, in this case the
word “and" is repeated to emphasize the long breath of exploitation. Each
use of "and" is followed by the anaphoric "their", which
refers to the children.
The children are marched led to the church like
sacrificial lambs.
The perspective of the first “Holy Thursday” poem is
like that of the first “The Chimney Sweeper” poem.
The charity schools fed and clothed the children but
they underfed them and were brutal.
The voice of the Experience poem resists shallow
closure.
We looked at the poems “The Divine Image” and “The Human
Abstract” and were asked to compare the speakers.
I said that the two perspectives are different but
mercy, pity, peace and love are not bad sentiments. The claim in The Human
Abstract that pity would not exist if we did not make somebody poor is to some
degree false. Those that we pity are not necessarily victims of man's
inhumanity to man. The two poems are both making claims about opposite impulses
that are inherent in human nature, just as the subtitle for the combined book
“Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the
Human Soul” says. It is in our nature to have pity but it is also in our nature
to put people in a position where they would need to be pitied.
The professor said that the speaker of “Songs of
Innocence” does not have as robust an understanding as the speaker in “Songs of
Experience”.
She said the line “and all must love the human form / in
heathen, Turk or Jew" that to say we must love even Turks and Jews is not
all that tolerant. I pointed out that Jesus said something similar, that even a
Samaritan could be a good person. She said she didn’t want to get into the
Bible in this class but it seems to me that if Blake really considers Jesus to
be the greatest poet of all time then the words of Christ must help with
understanding Blake’s context. The speaker doesn’t actually say “even a Turk or
a Jew”. Isn’t he simply addressing those that express hatred specifically
towards these groups?
The Human Abstract is a cynical poem. The line “mutual
fear brings peace” was quoted a lot during the Cold War.
Neither poem is necessarily expressing Blake’s own view.
The “Songs of Experience” resist sanitization. The
abstractions of pity, mercy, peace and love” are not dangerous in themselves
but only when used in a dangerous way.
I asked at the end of class that since Blake writes a
lot about the first man, is it possible that the tree that he describes as
growing in the human brain is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She
confirmed that a strong argument could be made for that.
As I left OISE and approached my bike I saw the guy that
walks backwards along Bloor. It’s been a couple of years and I think the last
time he was in costume. He was turning his head to make sure he didn’t hit
anything or anyone but he always walks backwards.
I stopped at Freshco on the way home and bought four
bags of grapes, a half pint of raspberries, a loaf of Bavarian sandwich bread,
some Earl Grey tea and a small rack of ribs.
In the early afternoon I posted my blog and put the link
on Facebook along with some related images and a video.
When I got up from a siesta later that afternoon there
was a message from Facebook telling me that one of the photographs that I'd
posted went against their “community standards”. It was this beautiful picture
of 50s nudist supermodel Diane Webber on her back and in a dramatic pose while
being lifted above the water of a swimming pool with one arm by a man that is
standing in the water. I guess it was because her nipple was showing that they
found it offensive. I find it offensive that they would be against such
innocent nudity. Anyway, because of this I was penalized and kicked off
Facebook for two days. This would be like my landlord telling me what I can't
post on my apartment wall. Fuck Facebook! I'll post what I want and if they
don't like it and kick me off of Facebook I'll just post on Twitter. It won’t
break my heart to be rid of Facebook. I do not approve of censorship. I have an
Instagram account that I’ve never used but I've read that Instagram is almost
as bad as Facebook about nudity so there doesn’t seem to be any point going
through the same thing there.
I tried to post the same image through my Myown Dick
Facebook page but Facebook caught that as well. I guess they didn't penalize
Myown because it was his first warning. What a ridiculous bunch of prudes!
Canada really needs its own social media site because the ones in the States
are way too uptight.
I posted the same image on Twitter with no problem
whatsoever. I have a Google Plus page but posting there is a waste of time
because Google is killing Google Plus next summer.
That night I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. In this
story, Gunn's girlfriend, Edie comes home from shopping to find a dead body in
her shower even though her door had been locked. Of course she calls Gunn. Gunn
goes to her place but there is initial confusion because she didn’t tell him
that she is using a different apartment while hers is being painted. Once Gunn
sees there really is a corpse he calls Lieutenant Jacoby, who is in his office
playing Spanish guitar when the phone rings. When Jacoby gets there he finds
something that Gunn missed. The man's name, Leland Gipson is on his watch. Gunn
goes to the dead man's address and talks to his daughter, Marie. He finds out
that the man was having an affair with a younger woman named Virginia, who
works at the Courtland Hotel. Gunn goes the hotel and finds out that Virginia
quit when Gibson moved into the hotel. The clerk gives Gunn Virginia’s
description and address. Gunn goes to the address and the building manager
invites him in. She’s a painter and says she has a portrait she’s done of
Virginia but when she shows it to him it’s an abstract that consists mostly of
three cubes. Gunn just says, “I thought you said she was a brunette!” The
manager says, “She has the soul of a redhead!” The manager’s model arrives and
he sits for an ongoing painting. She tells him he’s got the soul of a man with
a beard. He asks, “What colour?” She says, “Green!” It turns out the model is a
cab driver and he takes her to the same address three times a week. It’s Edie’s
building. Meanwhile Virginia and her husband Harvey are packed and wanting to
get out of Edie’s building. Gunn goes to see Edie’s building manager. He says
Virginia matches the description of Mrs. Austin, who used to live in Edie’s
temporary apartment and had neglected to return the key. Gunn goes to the Austin
apartment but it’s empty. Gunn picks a woman’s glove off the floor near the
vent and hears voices from the basement. Virginia and Harvey have
unintentionally locked themselves down there. Gunn goes down there. They hear
him coming, hide under the stairs and Harvey trips Gunn as he’s descending.
Gunn’s revolver goes in one direction and he falls in another. Harvey begins to
shoot and puts a hole in the steam heater. With no weapon Gunn turns to the
steam on Harvey. He keeps shooting though his visibility is impaired. Gunn
throws a few heavy objects at him and then runs. Virginia shouts that Gunn is
on the stairs but as Harvey fires he hits Virginia accidentally in the shoulder
or neck. Gunn jumps him and takes him out. Lieutenant Jacoby opens the basement
door and calls to Gunn. Gunn says, “Close the door! You’re letting out all the
steam!”
Marie was played by Canadian actor Ruta Lee, who is
remembered for the Twilight Zone episode, “A Short Drink from a Certain
Fountain”.
Virginia was played by Barbara Darrow, who is best known
for “Queen of Outer Space”. Her daughter married the son of Bobby Darrin.
The manager/painter was played by Australian actor
Marjorie Bennett.
