Bloomsday, 2020 — Liberation, Love, and a bit of Current Events
The only way I can hold Ulysses in my head long enough to make sense of it, is to focus on one of its countless facets at a time. And there are so very many facets. The book is a gem in more ways then one, but perhaps most directly in the near infinite regressions of meaning one can find, depending upon a tilt of the head, or the moment’s illuminating light.
With that said — oh, and happy Bloomsday to you all — the one facet that, for me, has been most giving over the years has been viewing the whole book as an allegory of a captive land and culture. Through this analysis, we can view the three major characters, Molly, Leopold, and Stephen each as manifestations of the primal forces of Ireland itself. They are all the land and culture, but like the Triskelion of the deep, Celtic past, they each whirl away from one another — and from the vital center — by their own incompleteness and dislocation. Molly gives herself to a sensuality she can’t (and perhaps doesn’t want) to control; Leopold, crippled by impotence, lives a life of voyeurism and wild imagination; while Stephen is an artist forced toward intellectualism by economics, and buffeted by forces beyond his scope or command.
Their solution, if ever they could find it, would be in tossing off the chains of history and oppression that are so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible. It would be found in liberation from churches, from British rule, from the expectations of their dead parents (and their dead children), and finding balance back at the central, rotating axial point of their truest human nature. Their Irish nature.
I found myself hoping, throughout the book, that in the end, they might all just end up in bed, fucking one another with abandon. And they come close! Molly wants it. Leopold would love to see it. And Stephen could certainly use it.
But it doesn’t happen. Not in 1904 anyway. Though, maybe, if we stretch the analogy a bit past breaking, it does during the Easter Rising of 1916.
What does happen at the very end of the book, is that Molly, after flirting with the notion of a tryst with Stephen, finds herself lying in bed with her husband Leopold. It is the end of that long day. And there they are, together. Not perfect. But together.
As the action closes, we retreat into her own thoughts, her stream of sensual consciousness. She knows she loves Leopold, and perhaps to remind herself of that, she remembers the moment that together, and through love and passion, they conceived the future. Literally.
She remembers their first kiss and the moments before she became pregnant with their daughter, Milly. Millicent Bloom, who remains distant in the book (perhaps as the future should) and whose name means work, and strength, and to flower.
Here is the last clip of the book’s final passage:
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
— — -
Most of the people in my world today are focused, properly, on the struggle for liberation, dignity, humanity, and autonomy in the United States right now. Black Lives Matter. Defund the Police. Enough if Enough. And Say their Blessed Names.
Today, on June 16, 2020, all across America, men and women of the same nature and identity are sailing through their days, like ancient wanderers from island to island, from pub to wake, from coastal towers to matrimonial beds.
And as they do, they too, are coming to understand that centuries of misrule by empires and priests, by traditions and unfair laws, are far more challenging as interior borders than they are in the external world. They are learning — or they know, and they are teaching others, less enlightened, like me — that the dismantling of patriarchies, and colonial mindsets, and empires is as much an inside job, as it is the work of the streets.
They’re learning (we’re learning), like Molly and Stephen and Leopold were learning at the very end of the novel, that the keys to unlocking our chains are found at the intersectional crossroads. They are found where our own lost, unmoored, incomplete selves touch the whirling whole.
And so, my Bloomsday prayer is simple, and it is offered to all the wandering heroes, sensualists, artists, and dreamers:
May we find one another.
May we find one another, and through one another, may we find liberation.
Amen.
— — -
yes
I said yes
I will
Yes.
