It’s always Bloomsday soon!
June 16th.
Every year.
The very day Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom were to meet, inspire our own inner secret thoughts about Bloom’s wife, Molly, then the two men find themselves whoring in Dublin’s Nightown, ending those 24 hours, leaving us alone with Molly Bloom in bed to hear her own inner secrets.
These thoughts, in turn, inspire our own secrets to… well… come tumbling out of our reveries.
Always somehow and in some way a symbol of the hunt for a perfect climax, musical or otherwise.
With James Joyce such a pilgrimage was never without “epiphanies”.
James Joyce’s glimpses of God, however, were never outside human experience.
Joyce’s undeniably Jesuitical distance from the Church that created the Jesuits was the distinctive mark or sign that can only be described as “Joycean.”
There are, of course, tales of ancient Irish paganism… and… well… Ireland’s inherent… “idiosyncrasies.”
“Get yer hands off me, yer not me dad!”
Did Joyce really care what “The World” thought?
I doubt it.
If even Parisian aesthetes couldn’t convince him to change a word of his novels and poetry, who or what other planet in the universe could?
“Oh, he had a filthy mind,” said Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle.
I trust she had a smile on her face when she said that.
Here is Susan Lynch (photo above right) starring in a moving portrait of Nora Barnacle.
Her stepfather’s not James Joyce either.
Joyce must have appeared in Nora’s life as her salvation from Ireland’s alternatives.
Then again without Ireland, there would have been no James Joyce.
Or Nora Barnacle.
Joyce, the saint of self-understanding.
The road to self-acceptance.
That’s not only Joyce.
It’s also Nora Barnacle.
She’s the revolutionary heroine of Ulysses.
In a hypocrite’s world, both Nora and Molly Bloom are flawless.
Ulysses
Ulysses is, in part, Joyce’s love song to his wife!
To his very own “Penelope” of Homeric fame.
However, neither Nora nor Molly Bloom remain the chaste target of opportunistic “suitors.” She who “enjoys” her “suitor” does so with the certain knowledge that her own ecstasies in life were Joyce’s greatest inspiration. Both as husband and artist.
If it were otherwise, the Joyce masterpiece, Ulysses, could not and would not have ended in Molly Bloom’s secret triumphs.
Meanwhile, my setting of James Joyce’s poetry entitled Chamber Music is now called Joycean Music.
The libretto is not pure Joyce.
The libretto is Joyce’s effect upon not only my mind but my music as well.
My progress is so slow with Joycean Music that it will most likely not see the light of day, nor the world hear its presumptions until my own eyes have closed forever.
God willing, the dark will descend with my words, “Yes, yes!”
Mine and Nora Barnacle’s way of saying “Thank you, God… for everything!”
Then what can you make of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?
One translation?
Finality’s Own Repetitive Death!
Not only Joyce’s own personal preparations for The Big Sleep but his code phrase for life’s eternity.
As disguised as Joyce may have tried to dress up his message, the essence of it is Catholic.
When asked if, after renouncing Catholicism, he might become a Protestant, Joyce declared, “I may have lost my faith, but I haven’t lost my mind!”
He took the best.
Threw the rest into the hypocrite’s corner in both of his epics.
His Finnegans Wake, when read aloud, becomes a mind-numbing, punster’s ecstasy. It can also become pure baby-talk.
I am certain that Joyce intended that as well.
Who knows if baby-babble doesn’t have its own, profounder meanings, something more eloquent than would seem to meet the ear?
It is certainly a benefit-of-the-doubt that Joyce must have rendered unto his own infancy.
Once upon a time
and a very good time it was
there was a moocow coming down along the road
and this moocow that was coming down along the road
met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
Bloomsday poster
That opening sentence to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, words without a period at the end, begins our whole, lifelong adventure with this man named James Joyce.
This Irishman who had to leave his own country in order to find the truth within himself.
Having left my own America 15 years ago, I can heartily recommend the migration.
I also hear the cry of Thomas Wolfe as well, “You Can’t Go Home Again!”
Joyce tried a return to Ireland and, well, it proved equally as unrewarding as “The Wolfe’s” effort. As my closest friends know, “The Wolfe” carries many more meanings for me than any of the more obvious ones, including both Thomas Wolfe and the more recent and more painfully acerbic Tom Wolfe.
That thought, The Wolves in My Life, is just a quick glimpse into the whirlwind of language which James Joyce not only threw himself upon but splashed about in for decades, happy as a babbling, functionally drunk baby!
As was offered to me on The Howard Stern Show many years ago, “Dick the Wolf and Wolf the Dick!”
So, on this coming anniversary of Bloomsday, I offer this Mini-Requiem Memory and Moriarty Mass for the blessed souls of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom.
Ulysses, Telemachus and Penelope!
Not “May they rest in peace”!
But: “They will, most certainly, continue to live with increasing glory, surrounded by Mankind’s inevitably bottomless gratitude!!”
Amen.
Who knows?
The Catholic Church might eventually canonize James Joyce… in about another 2,000 years.
