My Ideas Are Very Simple

Happy Bloomsday. Or is it Merry?

I started to read Ulysses a week or so ago. I am not ashamed at all to admit that I was unable to finish Ulysses when I was 19. Before that I had made several attempts, and read The Odyssey, which was mostly useless in understanding the book. Visiting a friend at Bard I sat in on poet Robert Kelly’s famous Ulysses seminar, where he read through the book with undergrads and discussed literary arcana. This was amazing. As a young poet I felt like I was being intitiated into the Bardic mysteries of language and symbol. So at Oberlin the following year I took the Ulysses course. We read the Obyssey and Ulysses and the professor dully charted out the parallels and like a dessicated, squeaking Joycean pedant, a Dr. Butt, he ground the most beautiful novel in the english language down to salty, bitter turds. My amphetamine fractured mind failed in the middle of Nighttown. But I swore I would read what I needed to read to understand the book and return to it. 32 years later I did, having read allof his other fiction and poems, his letters, critical studies, biographies, and whatever else that was relevant. I didn’t read the damn book but I did get an education.

Joyce’s ideas are very simple, as he said. And despite being the trinity of post modernism and all of its stupidities he actually saw, in utero, the ideas that dominate our mental and physical universe, in the way Shakespeare did. Simplicity is one of them. Or rather, that extremely simple premises bulk up into complex, self aware organisms.