O, Rocks!

Today, I began a new blog called, "You May Leave if You Wish," which is to be a pseudo-chronicle, reconstruction of its origins, and preparatory musings of my upcoming journey to Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. Upon thinking about that blog, I of course stumbled upon the silent tomb of this blog, begun and abruptly halted three years ago soon upon having moved to Antwerp as a still slightly younger, definitely more naïve, Fulbright professor to teach British and American Literature at Universiteit Antwerpen. Much has happened since my last post.

There is a curious passage in Ulysses, which I am currently re-reading for the nth time, but perhaps really just for the first, in the so-called "Aeolus" chapter, which reads: "I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives." (Ulysses, 140) Curious for many reasons, not the least that it is not clear who the "I" is as most of the novel is in the third person, but also for its placement. Tucked in a completely innocuous sub-section of the chapter, this line is, for all intents and purposes, the philosophy of the entire book, if one were to go so far as to be so bold as to say, which I am now saying.

Joyce's penultimate tome about the day in the lives of quite a good number of Dubliners is about just that, the crossings and criss-crossings of seemingly inconsequential events that are essentially the further woof and warp of the fabric of our quotidian lives and are the determinants of the entire aftercourses of our lives as a whole. In the "Wandering Rocks" chapter, these characters move and sway through the streets of Dublin, sometimes meeting, sometimes not, but always affecting the others' lives in some way, whether grand or small, though always affecting.

However, to go further, which I have elsewhere (queue up  Jon Lovitz as "The Critic" saying, "Buy My Book! Buy My Book!"), this is Stephen's proof by calculus that Shakespeare is the ghost of himself, and is simultaneously his own son, father (this conversation is in the proximity of Trinity College...)and every other character he ever created and so on. A beyond-the-pale reflection of Joyce himself, who in turn is the creator of all of the characters in Ulysses, thus being thousands of people at once, meeting himself portraited as an artist as a younger man, Stephen, seen through the eyes of a more experienced, cuckolded family man, the everyman, Bloom.

Reading the "Circe" chapter last evening outside at the Jazz cafe, De Muze, in the heart of the old city of Antwerp, it was hard not to live some parallel lives of the characters I was reading. I first read Ulysses in Antwerp, nearly 18 years ago to the day, a good part of it in De Muze, where I also had the first date with the woman that I would be married to soon afterwards, and with whom I am now engaged in a divorce process as I write nearly two decades after that seemingly innocuous encounter.

Sitting there, looking up from my book intermittently, absorbing what I had read and glancing around, I wondered to myself as well. Am I meeting myself coming and going? Sitting in that cafe, in the same cafe that has been there, itself changed little, though now populated with new people, living different, yet similar lives. Young couples, where would it lead to? Older couples, where had it gone? Was I still that same starry-eyed American kid with a head full of ideas? Or was I now an older and wiser American who has seen much more of the world now, both physically and mentally, though still with a head full of ideas? Or, both? Or, more than both?

Auto-Metempsychosis?

O, Rocks!