The suspense surges, unlike drums from Africa, much like the pruned Celtic misstep of their communique, that fatal hiccup rounding the Isle of Man and beaches near Kent when squinting at the slate-melt of sky and bay had nothing to do with the sun and everything with the rain pelting out a message assuring you you meant to be rhythmic, once were, knew how two-stepping stones beading a creek was an homage to bestiality, knew how distance and literacy had converted the primal into "spirit," another homage, paling, nodding to the home of old with the keenest eye for the one ahead, for that old lady peering through storefronts, your death, your sure death.
I'm sure you understand almost nothing that I'm saying, Brandi and any happenstancer happening on this post and most of those preceding it. I haven't earned the privilege of Joyce to write the most intimate dreck and be heard, a la Finnegan's Wake. An irony surfaces about Joycean disdain for lesser wordsmiths: for all his hollering at nation and identity and order, how he bent for it like the greatest whore as he decried it, for that next potato, for the five shillings that would make his day, for the tool he became in rejoicing self-loathing. The hapless, poorly spent, beguiling fuck. Had Stephen lain the blade against the sun and soapy suds near my porch, a fifth of my homicidal self-awareness and a third of my reasoning, would have ended the tome before it began, the only fit abortion. Stomaching the purest self-defeat is hard; watching it lauded by reviewers rejoicing in the self-defeatism for the ease it grants their own victory is harder yet. How any Irish person could think with pride on Joyce disturbs me. If ever a trojan horse...
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