No surprise that one of our most talented poets and twisters and transformers of words James Maynard put in an early request to reserve today- Bloomsday- as the occasion for his next submission.
And what is Bloomsday, you ask. Well read on, dear reader, and all will be revealed…
Enjoy.
Sirrahs! A happy Bloomsday! And yours. May you be lusty in living it, or somewhat lonely, may the prick ( the aginbite ) of an inner guilt be short, and the day turn long. May you wander your respective street with a hero’s verve. Oh rocks, yes.
Not know what Bloomsday is? Gadzooks! Let’s have a pint to come cleanly, speak. Why, Bloomsday is the day of an infinitude, it is the immediate in your face to celebrate what is in your mind, your heart, your . . . heh heh. Bloomsday is all what today’s mindfulness movement wishes to preach, if they had better words. It is to remember us to life, the infinitude of life, how a single day is made up of a universe of moments, thoughts, actions, events, many times all of these at once, crammed into a single soul. Bloomsday is our day for celebrating the infinite.
Spoken with mock seriousness ( aheam ), the 16th of June 1904 was dubbed “Bloomsday” a hundred and one years ago by readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The whole of this novel takes place from just after sunrise, Thursday, to a little before sunrise, Friday. During this day, nothing extraordinary happens. A funeral is held, a baby is born. A horserace ends with an unexpected win. In the early evening there are fireworks, and after sundown there’s a short thunderstorm. A young man, returned home from Paris in time to see his mother die, gets paid for a teaching gig, gives an informal lecture on Shakespeare and Hamlet, and, in his own jejune guilt, nearly blows the whole of his pay on a drinking binge. A married woman has an affair and much later is relieved to find that her period has started. Her husband, an advertising agent, our hero and this day’s namesake, Leopold Bloom, is cognizant of the affair. And so, not to cause a scene, he stays away from home, wandering Dublin in a perfect ordinariness: he gets some business done, attends the aforementioned funeral, goes to the library, the seaside, visits the book stalls, a couple pubs and restaurants ( where he eats or smokes a cigar, maybe has a small glass of Burgundy: our cuckolded Poldy is not one for the binge ). In these wanderings, the reader experiences some of the most beautiful words ever written: some filthy, some funny, some even a bit cliche. As people eat, talk, sing, argue, fight, cry and laugh, nothing extraordinary happens. You would be forgiven if after a week you forgot all about the 16th of June, 1904. And yet in that perfect ordinariness we become mindful of how packed full of moments a single day is. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Joyce makes this miracle happen — if lifting the veil on how all life is an epic is a miracle, which I do believe it is — by conflating our everyman Bloom as the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, and making his wanderings around Dublin in a day like the ten year roaming of Odysseus. Then, to wade into infinity, we are given what became known as “stream of consciousness” writing — unabashedly brought into Bloom’s mind. He is anxious about his wife’s affair. He often remembers his firstborn son, who died only two weeks into life. He thinks about his father, a suicide. He bought a bar of soap and is constantly having to shift it from his hip pocket to his coat, or back again. He thinks of commissions, food, the Irish troubles, when he met Molly ( his wife ) in Gibraltar; and he’s got a filthy mind too, one good eye always watching a skirt. We are even brought to his mind and body, as ( famously ) after eating at the Ormond Hotel he walks away and let’s out a few farts ( “I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaaaa. I have. / Pprrpffrrppfff. / Done.” ).
Stay, now. There is a little more to be said, and then I’ll let you go. You want to go, and best of luck to you. But wait, just a moment more. Give it one last scroll, then step away, put this in your pocket, go with God and live.
I will tell you now that Ulysses is not a difficult book, as some stuffy profs would like you to believe. It is, certainly, an English major’s reward for good behavior. That is, if one has studied English literature and has the tools to think critically of a text, they will have the most fun with it. But Ulysses is like climbing a mountain : if your thoughts are only about getting to the top then you will likely lose heart when you realize the altitude. Instead, look to the dells and the glades, the streams you cross, the rocks ( oh yes, rocks ) you turn over. Be aware. To read Ulysses is to be in a sober state of meditation, and the rewards return again and again. It’s true, a student of literature will have the most fun, just as any professional rock climber can take on the challenge of a granite cliff and never cringe. But anyone can take a stroll into this book and find beauty in it.
And there are guides. During my last travel through the book I used a very helpful online resource by Patrick Hastings, https://www.ulyssesguide.com/. This is well written too, and will give contexts and summaries to help carry you through the book, episode by episode. I also highly recommend Kevin Bermingham’s The Most Dangerous Book, which is about the publishing of Ulysses, and subsequent obscenity trials. This provides the historical context for the book, which helps to understand certain nuances and decisions that are made in the plot itself. Lastly, after you’ve returned from your first journey to the top ( yes ), Richard Ellman’s biography on Joyce is a wonderful extended read about the life of Joyce himself, who was not an easy man, nor did he have an easy life.
There, I’ve finished. God be with you, which is to say God b’w’you, which is to say, goodbye. May your journeys be, within your inwit, full and fat and lovely, and may you be discovered in your mind, all our minds, may we each wander into the miracle of the single moment. Amen.
Ohhh my heart aches for not having read Ulysses. I want to. Always have. I do love Joyce. I’ve read his letters, Dubliners and TPOTAAAYM. All fantastic. He had a major influence. Your description of the reading of it made me think of my reading of The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann). Epic.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Happy Bloomsday!