Marilyn reading Joyce

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

____Mark Leyner; My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist








I had the ridiculous good fortune today to read this. My post, whatever it might become, will be heavily influenced by it- and I strongly recommend Golriz to read the whole article, start to end.

*__*__*

It occurs to me, this all began with Ulysses. When I boarded the plane for China: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed., and so it began. Had I finished it, perhaps this would have all been done by now. The silent hero, we first meet, sitting on a bank, crying, a miniature beached-whale: The grand-strategist, the schemer, quick-minded Odysseus, lost, homebound, failure, loser, hero, anguished, assiduously brave, confused, moribund, stagnant, hopeless, deceiver, liar, adulterer, loyal; midway through his tale, he sits by a bank and cries. (i stopped reading, put the book down and stared at the blue pool. Its color was unearthly, looked more like a slab- a neon spaceship landed/ stared up at the piercing blue-eye of the LA sky/ no clouds/ never a blink to be found/ [sigh], let's try and fall asleep in the sun, (tears still in eyes.

My laptop sits on the book. It's big, it raises my laptop to the right height so i can lay on my stomach and type comfortably. The front cover is a little faded from the heat of the laptop.

The story of a universe in a day, rather:

the whole idea of celebrating an imaginary day -- or rather, a real day in an imaginary world, or, actually, a real day in the real city of Dublin, but peopled by imagined characters and events
____Elizabeth Bachner

constructed out of paper. actually, out of meaningless words put next to each other on paper, like an entire origami parallel universe where things fold themselves into (and out of) thin paper (my copy is as thin as bible paper).

And Odysseus sets his sail for the other side of the unknown world. Passes through nether-death-kingdoms, and carnivorous nymphs, and one-eyed giants. And Bloom walks sadly through his industrial city, a lost man, lonely, sits by the beach and masturbates. And ududQs fights off the shrieks of phonecalls, and doors slamming, and smiles through his cracked teeth and bruised lips, and takes his fallen pride and ties it at top and bottom to make a his sail, and looks for a horizon far enough to sail towards.

I notice that Ulysses isn’t really an odyssey at all, most of the time. Actually, everyone in the book is trapped in a small space, in small lives, in a single, interminable day, and in the nightmare of history from which they are trying to awaken. Homer’s Odyssey of the ancients is filled with genuinely long journeys, and unknown lands, and living gods. In modernity, you can experience exile, and lose your father, and lose yourself, and (maybe) come home, all without crossing an ocean. If Ulysses represents the apotheosis of high modernism, what would an odyssey be like for our new century? Maybe, to be right, it would have to not be written at all.
____E.B.

i turn around and look at my small closet, with the broken sliding door, and nod. Small spaces. Blankets on the ground. bodies lying, and rubbing against carpet. a small pack of tissues. three pairs of underwear. dirty Cons. the smell of dust.

MY ODYSSEY/ULYSSES/PARALLELS:

____-grandfather dies, occasionally returns in dreams to warn of various things (HAMLET THEME: check)
____-walks, is occasionally ridiculed, confused masculinity/the too-strong forces of femininity smile and nod and laugh/a matriarchal world is considered and fondled
____-sexuality lays sulking on the dirty floor of a train station girls' bathroom at Roma St. station in Brisbane (MOLLY/BLOOM THEME: check)
____-time stops and mundane minutes grow too long in attempt to parody the haughty pride of the Greeks, (definitely check)
____-the role of the Gods grows, diminishes; the Gods demonstrate a fickle, self-absorbed involvement in the affairs of their subjects; fates are handed and sold and traded for food-stamps and icecream sandwiches and bus-tickets (check)

and I start to get the strangest feeling: homesickness. It’s unmistakable as anything else. Molly utters her final yes and drops the final page at just before three a.m., and as I weave out into the Upper West Side night, I can imagine coming back for this monologue again, for the whole marathon, even, in a couple of years. That’s Joyce’s great, eternal contribution to literature. Homesickness.
____E.B.

(as Molly says in agreement: Yes) Yes. yes. yes. yes. yesyes. yesss.
(and Ithaca ends with the question, the big question: Where?)

and I stop and ask myself:
________Where?
____fu&*ing WHERE?
____(am I?)
____(are you?, where'd you leave me?
____(where have i gotten to since you?
____(where have i gotten to since i was me?
____(where the fu&* am i?
____even worse: (where am i going?
________holy crap, i hadn't considered that,
________which way is the wind coming from?

and in my stomach, i really just want: a bed. a familiar mug. for someone to still be there when the winter finally washes the dust off all this, Ash and her cold feet, or Mona calling me boy, or Martha looking at me silently. home.

“The only demand I make of my reader,” said Joyce, “is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” There are whole lives contained on June 16, 1904 or June 16, 2008. Joyce wrote in a climate that was hostile to Ulysses, and utterly uncomprehending of the darker, trickier Finnegan’s Wake. My wish today, the day after Bloomsday, is that the real poets who are still living will write some real work, however torturously. Work that might sprawl over thousands of pages and change style eighteen times, or work that pierces the heart of a life in a few short phrases. They should go on that odyssey even if it means madness, or blindness, or never returning home.
____E.B.

screw that.
i wanna go home.
(and the only way to do that, is to finish the 336 remaining pages)