Bloomsday

Description

A Leaf from Bloomsday June again. Sixteenth of it. The dayday that returns by never leaving, circling in its own footstepwheel. Dublin wakes in breadsmell and tramclang and gullcry over the saltgray bay. Morning lifts itself by the bootstraps of habit. Men to shops. Women to windows. Children to games of empire and imagination. Kettles sing their small steamliturgies. The city thinks. And who shall say where a city begins? In stone? In speech? In remembered feet upon remembered paving? A town is only the dream of its walkers. Dublindream, riverrun, cobblememory. One day only. One man only. Yet all days in one and all men in him. There goes Bloom. Not kingly. Not spearbright. No bronze-greaved hero under the eye of Homeric heaven. Merely a man among men, hat upon head and thought upon thought, carrying errands as another might carry shields. A wanderer not over wine-dark seas but through newspaperstreet and pubdoor and cemeteryroad. The Odyssey made ordinary and thereby extraordinary. For what is Ithaca but home? And what is home but the farthest country when the heart wanders? The Greeks sang of the much-enduring man, storm-tossed by gods and monsters. Yet the modern world has its Cyclopes too: prejudice, loneliness, pride, hunger, memory. Its Sirens sing from music halls and bright windows. Its Lotus-eaters drift through the narcotic afternoons of habit. Its underworld lies in graveyards and in the chambers of recollection where the dead speak without tongues. Thus the old epic, wearing a new coat. Odysseus became Bloom, and Troy became Dublin, and the sea itself shrank into streets while remaining just as vast. For there are oceans between one thought and the next. Mindsea. Soulcurrent. Dreamtide. Walk a city long enough and every crossing becomes a strait, every public house an island, every conversation a wind to steer by or against. The heroic age never ended. It merely put on ordinary clothes. Some seek morals as customs men seek contraband in luggage. Poor searchers. There are none to declare. Laughter wears the mask of gravity and gravity the mask of jest. The world, viewed sidelong, becomes comicserious and seriouscomic. One writes not sermons but mirrors, and if the mirror reflects a thousand faces at once, whose fault the crowding? A man sees. A man speaks. A man thinks. Yet under every thought another thought swims fishsilver in the darkwater beneath. What one says is not what one means; what one means is not what one knows; and what one knows is not the whole of what one is. The nightmind hums below daylightmind like hidden machinery in the engineheart. And puzzles? Enigmas? Ah yes. Scatter them like breadcrumbs for future scholars. Let the professors quarrel in dustfilled libraries while life itself continues out the window. The argument is a kind of immortality. Meaning multiplies by division. So comes Bloomsday each year, that feast of footsteps and memory. Readers wander as pilgrims through chaptercountry, carrying maps that refuse to behave as maps. They celebrate not conquest but attention. The holiness of noticing. A kidney in a pan. Soap in a pocket. A thought passing over the face of water. The great epics once told us how heroes journeyed home. This one whispers that we are already upon the journey. And perhaps already home.