Desperately Seeking Cyclops

As part of my MFA program, I have to read a portion of James Joyce's Ulysses. Just one episode. One out of 18. A mere 54 pages in my edition. A paltry 14 percent of the entire tome.  Have you ever read Ulysses? I've always been frightened of it, to be perfectly honest. I will admit that now. I know as a full fledge humanities person and all, I'm supposed to be, um, "learned" in all the classics and stuff, but if my relationship with the literary cannon of classics were an actual object, it would most closely resemble a ratty lace hanky. Or a piece of swiss cheese, or chicken wire, or a sieve, or a church. In other words, it's hole-y.

         I like Joyce I really do. I like the Dubliners. I really like Portrait of the Artist. But––and here's my point––both Portrait and Dubliners are small. They are dense, yes, but somehow density doesn't seem so bad when you can shove it into your back pocket. It's like my cat PorkChop. Small but dense. No no, that's not what I meant. What I mean is that sure she can be a regular crab cake and hook her claws in me until she and my sweater are one tangled heap of small daggers and shredded wool but I take comfort in the fact that she's not a puma.  There is something that is just plain daunting about picking up a 783 page book that is pretty much almost entirely solid print from beginning to end. And not just solid. Solidly Joyce. Even if the only section I'm required to know anything about is a slimmish bit nestled cozily in the middle. But after months of procrastinating, I finally steeled my courage and decided to face it head on. Heady with recklessness, I decided it might even prove the perfect thing to tuck into over my morning coffee, before the bleary haze of sleep has quite lifted and I can't pretend to have even a modicum of productive clarity necessary for writing or creating. Joyce could maybe serve to kickstart the old brain back into working order after an 8 hour slog through dreamland. 

Um.

I know.

But I gave it a whirl. I read it. All 54 pages of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Somehow. I remember my eyes bouncing along the pages. I remember the distinct feel of worn paper between my fingers. This is what it sounded like in my brain:

I reached the end and the momentary triumph of accomplishment soon crumpled as I realized I had not the foggiest idea what had just happened. A vague-ish idea that some guy named Bloom had just gotten a biscuit box thrown at him.

I had no idea why.

At least, I was pretty sure it was a biscuit box. 

But biscuit box or no biscuit box, it was becoming clearer to me as I weighed the emptiness of my accomplishment against the argument that I had at least technically fulfilled to the letter the requirement, that perhaps... I had not grasped as much as I ought to have. But still I clung to the hope that victory could be salvaged from the wreck of my endeavor. I would read the introductions at the beginning of the book. Perhaps a few juicy spoilers might let me know what I missed, and then I could go back and skim over those bits.

 It should say something when the court opinion that lifted the ban on Ulysses felt comparatively like a beach read. Especially considering its corker of a title: The Monumental Decision of the United States District Court Rendered December 6, 1933 By Hon. John M. Woolsey Lifting the Ban on "Ulysses." 

I pondered the favorable opinion of Woolsey––he liked it! for a bit, and considered that if he was able (and willing) to read Ulysses in its entirety just to see whether the accusations of smut against it panned out or not, perhaps it wouldn't actually kill me to go ahead and revisit "Cyclops" in its entirety either. And so I cozied up on the couch, and cracked the weighty tome back to the beginning of the episode.

No luck. 

And this is where I have to confess what I did. I am a little ashamed, but the truth can be healing. Even so, I can feel the tingle of shame from the reproachful gazes of all my English teacher friends out there. I have nothing in my defense. Simply put, I was desperate. 

I broke down and visited the internet.  

There, I said it. 

I know. I did what no self respecting reader is ever supposed to do. I read the Wikipedia page on Ulysses. I found the equivalent of a Cliff Notes essay on his "cyclops" episode and read that too. It was just one essay, that's all. And it was so short. Tiny, really. In true lazy scholar form, I don't even know where I found it. I think it was from some Joyce scholar or else a PhD student somewhere. He probably goes to a for profit college. And maybe he's not a PhD student at all. Maybe he's selling that essay for money. After cribbing it from Sparknotes or somewhere.  I know, I know. But here's the thing. 

That essay floating through the interwebs gave me back Cyclops. Because it gave me what I needed, which was a way into it. It helped me spin chaos into order. It turned that din wracking around in my brain into this instead:

Can you even handle another mangled metaphor? Because I'm on a roll.

It cut through the dense foliage and pointed to a place where I could at least get a foothold.  It turned this:

your mission is to walk through here readygo!

into this:

suggested route

by turning me into this:

Aaargh!    (image from minifigforlife.com)

After reading the essay, I felt invigorated, primed, and charged up.  I was ready to return to Ulysses. This time, I took my time going through. I made notes. I chewed over the text in slow easy bites, like a smooth morsel of lox or caviar, let it blossom in my mouth,  I fell into the rhythm of his cadence, let the lilting stream of consciousness wrap me and roll me and rock me mama like a wagon wheel. I went into Barney Kiernan's and felt the din of voices close in all around me. I heard music in the language and the passion in their voices. I found myself caught up and tangled in their tension and the love and the xenophobia and the drunkeness. I shivered with the delight of being let in on a secret each time Joyce detoured from the pub and launched into another swelling, hyperbolic narration.  I breathed his tall tales in, happy for the respite from the cramped cloyingness of the pub where citizen and his pals laughed and quipped and mocked and ballyhooed themselves silly.  No, I didn't find any of this from that enterprising for-profit, essay-selling, phony PhD's piece that I read. That essay had simply shown me a path in to the thicket of Ulysses. But once I was immersed, I lingered and strolled and hunted and soaked in the riches of Joyces world and words around me.  And here's where I can say that I feel vindicated. Because when I finished Cyclops, I still hungered for more. I didn't want to let it all go. I couldn't. And so I have started reading Ulysses from the beginning. I am not far along at all. I am also giving myself permission to put it down for a while if I need to. But I haven't felt that need yet. On the contrary, I look forward to every moment when I can return to his world. It is dense and thick, and impossibly overgrown in places. But if I need them, I will hunt for more essays on the internet or check them out from the library. Another metaphor (I know. Hang onto your hats.) I think of these additional or external pieces of info as maps because that's what they are. They  do not replace the rich beauty of Joyce's prose, but they can provide helpful landmarks and waypoints when I feel lost and mired. A map shows many routes through an area and marks the topography you'll encounter, but it can't tell you which path to take, or under which tree you'll discover to your delight, a sleeping fawn.  There's treasure everywhere in Joyce's language, but sometimes I just needed a little help finding my way in. 

Author. Irishman. Brilliant. 

The Negative Space of Success

Once upon a time, when pressed by my friends to choose, I decided that I would rather be rich than famous. My reasoning went somewhere along the lines of “because famous people get shot” and for any listening skeptics who might try and argue it, I could bolster my point with irrefutable proof: Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon. All famous, all shot, all dead. Rich people on the other hand, were just that: entities without a name. Strangers who got to luxuriate in anonymous wealth and spend their money on things like stuffed animals and trips to Antarctica (When I was ten, I would have mortgaged a kidney to be able to go to Antarctica. For no good reason except to feel I was a supreme badass for having been to Antarctica.), while famous people simply dropped dead in staggering numbers.  Naturally, it was a given that my friends and I would be granted one or the other of these two paths in due time. Voicing our preference was simply a measure of insurance, in case, you know, fate happened to be eavesdropping just then. After that, that it was simply a matter of patience and waiting until our formal entrance into “adulthood,” whereupon a choice, hopefully our preferred one, would be bestowed upon us and that, in effect, would be that.   Now that I am grown and thickly settled into “adulthood”, I am astonishingly enough, neither rich, nor famous.  Sometimes I think about that game from childhood, and  sometimes I wonder if my  ten year old self would be disappointed in me.

Because of course what was assumed in that starkly binary game of ours was that those two options, and only those two options, defined Success!   

            Perhaps as an adult, thickly settled though I am, I can laugh at the silly simplicity of this idea and pooh-pooh its folly. But on the other hand, have I really grown any wiser in the ensuing years? Maybe now I know enough to understand that Success! cam come without fame or fortune, but have I really gained a deeper understanding of what Success! fundamentally is? Simple test: would I recognize it if it came up to me on the street in a top hat and tails and knocked me over? Answer: no.

  

It seems that while we acknowledge how difficult an idea success can be to nail down, we also hold onto this delusional, hopeful notion that with just a little determination, we can sort of scrape around the edges of Success! and maybe define it through other ideas: wealth! fortune! achievement! etc. But the trouble is that these concepts are just as amorphous as Success!. It’s kind of like looking for shapes in the shadows of clouds.  Or something.

Success! is something we are all supposed to strive for.  We want to be successful! At least I think that is pretty true. Purely anecdotal, I know, but I have yet to meet somebody who says of Success!:

I know want to be successful. I want to feel like my life is successful, and that I am successful. But because I am utterly unsure what Success! even looks like, it easily becomes the plaything of Failure when I am not paying close attention.  You remember my recent post on Failure, don’t you? Oh, my dear devoted readers. I do love you.

So yes, Failure likes to squish Success! into any number of forms that just look so concrete you think you could practically reach out and touch.... just before they disintegrate into thin air.  Failure likes to dangle Success! and flap it around like a fly in front of a fish, a carrot in front of a rabbit, a hope in front of a dreamer. Failure likes to use Success! as a whip, urging you on with its bite even as its steers you towards despair.  Because what Failure assures you, is that no matter how you measure Success!, you will fall short. Sometimes I think I’d have an easier time trying to capture one water out of an entire pond of water. What is a water?

Exactly.

           

And so, when I am feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and I start to believe that the tickling tongue of Failure is absolutely right about me, I try to play a game with myself. Instead of trying to measure my Success! as a positive thing (what I’ve achieved, what I’ve earned what I’ve created, etc.) I beat Failure at its own game by measuring my Success! in the negative. That’s right. I  think about what I don’t do and what I haven’t accomplished. And thus does Success! slowly begin to emerge from the negative space:

 

See? It is a handy technique, and the best part about it is how widespread it is in its application. Here’s another negative that might help illuminate your own Success!: Not starting wars for stupid self-indulgent reasons. (...I’m listening to the Iliad on tape right now?).

   Anyway, if I understand nothing more than I did when I was ten, I at least understand that neither fame nor fortune is a reliable measure of Success! though I am kidding myself to think I wouldn't be just a little bit grateful for a teeny dollop of both. But I also know is that when I start to hunt for Success! in the hazy fog of nebulous “fame” “fortune” “achievement” and the like, I am in danger of letting Failure take over my brain and convince me Success! is a definable, bounded, discrete thing but that I am positively unequipped to ever find it. The beauty of negative space is that you know it doesn't exist, at least not in a material way. That’s why it’s negative space. And yet, it is something. It is what isn't. By embracing the fantasy and dreamy illusion of the negative space, I can turn it into something real. But Failure doesn’t believe it is real, and so Failure won’t find me there.