Belated Bloomsday Blues

I am a bad boy. I deserve to have a scowling Jesuit priest smack my hand with a pandy bat. How could have I missed Bloomsday? But missed it I did. I'm sorry, James.

James Joyce set his novel, Ulysses, on June 16th, 1904, the day Joyce and his future wife (and a saint for putting up with that high-maintenance motherfucker) went on their first date. So every June 16th, Joyceans celebrate by reading his works and drinking. It's called Bloomsday, in honor of the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. In New York they read the whole book in one sitting, sometimes broadcasted over the radio. Here in S.F., we have readings and plays—general geekiness over the Irish genius.

At some point in my mid twenties, I decided to read the classics, find out what all the hubbub was about. I picked Ulysses because I heard it was banned for being naughty. Looking back, I should have picked a far easier naughty read like Tropic of Cancer or Lady Chatterley's Lover, but Ulysses was there in all its close-to-700 page glory. It took me several months to read it, and I probably understood a seventh of it. But the prose was so beautiful that I kept reading. The book taught me to be an active reader. No more could I sit passively and let the story wash over me. Now I had to chew on sentences, figure out the context, look up meanings, and study Greek myth and Irish history.

I picked up Ulysses a second time later that year, this time with a book of annotated notes for Ulysses, a book as big as Ulysses itself. With the annotations, the book opened up for like a flower unfurling. I understood the story, and I fell in love with the book. It's sad story of lost people. Bloom's wife is going to have an affair that day and Bloom knows it. He travels around Dublin trying to keep busy, trying not to think of his wife's impending infidelity. Their lack of intimacy can be traced to their son's death at a very young age. Even though Bloom is going through a sad time, at heart, he is a good person. And his joy of life comes through the pages. In the end he forgives his wife and her last thought is a remembrance of him proposing marriage. The book ends on the word Yes—the most positive word in the English language.

The book's main style is stream-of-consciousness, which is the character's thoughts with no or little explanation. Here is Stephen Dedalus listening to the ocean while taking a piss on the beach:

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

Beautiful, innit? Read it out loud to get the full effect.

He also writes chapters like newspaper articles, plays, literary gestation (styles of literature imitating 9 months of pregnancy) and even a 45-page chapter with no punctuation. Of course, this absolute disregard for the reader, this seemingly impenetrability of the text makes a very hard read. I've bought copies of the book for friends and family, who've tried and gave up. I don't blame them; who has the time? This ain't summer reading. The difficulty of the text and the fact that it tops the lists of the greatest books ever written brings out the anger in people. They regard it suspiciously, as if it was some trick to make them look stupid. They feel it's a joke pulled by pretentious professors. It's just a book, relax. To not get into a book doesn't make you stupid. I don't get into fantasy books, but I don't think the genre is a joke or dumb, it's just not for me.

I keep coming back to Ulysses. I love its understanding of remembrance. Here's a beautiful memory Bloom has of making love with is wife, while they were courting. He's been drinking a glass of Burgundy with a cheese sandwich for lunch:

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs In the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman s breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Now you can see why it was banned, and this is pretty tame compared to when Bloom masturbates on the beach. Of course, now it's practically G rated. But even with all the erudition flying about, one point keeps coming up in Ulysses, the word known to all men:

— But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

— What? says Alf.

— Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.

Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.

— A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.

— Well, says John Wyse, isn't that what we're told? Love your neighbours.

— That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love, Moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet. Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair genteman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but

God loves everybody.

Amen, brother Joyce. I raise my pint to you.

Breathless and Paralyzed

I sit here, paralyzed at the keyboard. I'm trying to connect the dots of existentialism. But instead of making a leap of faith towards god, or becoming an ubermench, or being nauseated by a tree root, or embracing Marxism as the solution, I'm barely moving.

I watched Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle, otherwise known as Breathless, last night. Besides being the usual French tale of love and death sans plot, it was full of dialogue such as:

"I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy."

"I'm tired. I'm going to die."

"When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other."

Godard's existential dialogue is similar to Ingmar Bergman's work. To my contemporary ear, they sound cliché and pretentious. They've also been widely parodied. Woody Allen's comedy, Love and Death, turns this type of dialogue into a great joke:

Russian gentleman: So who is to say what is moral?
Sonja: Morality is subjective.
Russian gentleman: Subjectivity is objective.
Sonja: Moral notions imply attributes to substances which exist only in relational duality.
Russian gentleman: Not as an essential extension of ontological existence.
Sonja: Can we not talk about sex so much?

I can only appreciate existentialism through art. As brilliant as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre are, their writing doesn't create empathy. Even Sartre's plays are like the dialogue of Breathless: interesting, but not empathetic. But the literary approaches are wonderful, Albert Camus' The Stranger, Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, and, for me, John Barth's The End of the Road not only illuminate existentialism, but they bring it home to me. Especially the idea of paralysis.

James Joyce talked of Irish paralysis in Dubliners, but he saw it as an Irish response to the repression of religion, England, and provincialism. The existentialists see paralysis as alienation from being authentic. We can't be authentic because we identify ourselves through other people's eyes. When one realizes that everything is subjective according to a group belief and not our own, we become paralyzed by the thought that nothing matters. Nihilsm, really.

I read that Beckett would lie in bed all day. When Jacob Homer, in Barth's End of the Road, sits paralyzed in a train station for a full day, I fully empathized. I feel that paralysis myself, especially working in a corporate environment. This is a go-go world, where the powerful people are nonstop 24/7/365 getting things done. And when those things are done, there are more things to do. For me, pushing paper is hardly an incentive to get out of bed. Homer Simpson solves this dilemma by posting pictures of his daughter at his desk. I don't have children, nor expect any soon. And I'm not sure children can stop existential paralysis. The only thing that can bring action is boredom and sex. Boredom is the lack of interest for a restless mind and sex is a basic drive. So I guess the key to life is boredom and sex. I have to admit, I've never been bored by sex, and I will definitely get out of bed for it. Although it's better in bed.

I Believe in Miracles...You Sexy Thing

In the May 7th, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, there is an article about a Brazilian writer named Paul Coelho. Apparently, He has sold a zillion books worldwide, including the Alchemist, soon to be a major motion picture. I have not read Coelho, but according to the article he writes allegorical stories that really push upbeat, new-age, mystical beliefs. Coelho also writes self-help books, naturally. And he is quoted on Starbucks coffee cups:

"'Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure. Never forget your Personal Legend. Never forget your Personal Dream....'"

I don't have anything against self-help epigrams. If they make you feel better, who am I to judge? But the belief in miracles is what I have a problem with. Obviously, I am an atheist. Although that doesn't mean I'm not spiritual. I just happen to believe in humanity, more specifically in humanity's art. And art not only accepts tragedy and the pointlessness of life, it also celebrates it as a part of the binary of living. Joy and laughter being the other side of the binary. What happens when you start to believe in miracles, in gods and demons, you give up logic and accountability. And two recent news stories illustrate this point.

A Vegan couple was sentenced to life in prison for killing their six-week old baby. They fed their baby according to their beliefs that humans should not use anything made by or from an animal. The baby was fed soy milk and apple juice. Apparently, mother's milk falls under food made by animals. Vegans that I have met look sallow and malnourished, so it's no surprise that a vegan diet would kill a child. The parents believed that their Spartan diet would sustain a baby: basically they believed in a miracle. Now they are living a nightmare.

Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Iraq this week. He went there to jumpstart the progress in making a democracy flourish. Cheney's message to the Iraqis is, “We’ve all got challenges together. We’ve got to pull together. We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time." Now that should be on a Starbuck's cup.

Of course, the appearance of Cheney in Iraq will not trigger the miracle of peace and prosperity. If Cheney believes this, then he is more deluded than the Vegan couple. The whole administration believed in their Neocon miracle, but like most miracles, it was not to be. But once you state your belief in miracles it's hard to back down. You just keep hoping for something. In Cheney's case, he thinks legislation will bring together the Shiites, Sunnis, and the Kurds. Now that would be a true miracle.

The big difference between Cheney and the Vegan couple is Cheney has killed thousands of people with his deluded belief, while the Vegan couple killed one. They both should be imprisoned. But that would entail a miracle.