What Is All Of That?

This is a photo of part of James Joyce's bedroom. It's at the James Joyce Center in Dublin. It makes me wonder about Joyce's dreams. How does this bedroom affect him while he is sleeping? No, I have no answers to the question. It's just a wondering. A curiosity. The question itself doesn't strike me as unusual.

And, of course, wondering brings it it back to me. In my bedroom there is a bookcase and on top of the bookcase is this stack of books:

How does having this affect my dreams? Specifically, what is this pile of books doing while I'm asleep? Nothing, you say? I find that extremely hard to accept. Yes, I could do an experiment. I could move the books out and see what happened. But I won't do that. I'm not that kind of scientific person. And doing that would interrupt something important that's already happening. No, I don't want confirmation. I'd prefer just to recognize that something good is happening.

And what's that? Well. The books are slowly and gently implanting in my imagination and my dream world what will eventually become my new stories. Right now, some of the stories are infinitesimally small, fragmentary, discrete, embryonic. These are just tiny seeds that will eventually grow into bigger stories. But others are already more developed, larger, structured, nuanced, self contained. Some have internal logic. Some have surprises. Right now, all of the stories, big and small, may seem to be unrelated to each other. But eventually many of them will grow larger and more complex and more detailed, and they will reach out to each other and be linked to each other in surprising ways I can't currently anticipate. In other words, these stories will grow magically and densely, much as a small village grows into a large city surrounded by a galaxy of suburbs, all being connected by wires and pipes and roads and highways and various, more subtle, more ethereal connections. By media, thoughts and beliefs. And, of course, by their stories.

I am happy to be the incubator for these invisible seeds. I have chosen the books, I have read many of them, and I am anticipating their alchemy. If they weren't there, piled up on the bookcase, if they stopped sending out their spores, my nights would become dreamless. And I might be in danger of running out of stories. With them there, constantly changing them for other books, constantly replacing ones that I want to move, I'm assured of having all the stories I could ever want. And some time in the future, when they are ripe, I will sit at my laptop and download them.

Happy Bloomsday!

Where Bloomsday Begins: 7 Eccles Street, Dublin

Leopold Bloom is the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place Dublin on 16 June 1904. Today, June 16, 2011, is Bloomsday. Bloomsday is a national holiday in Ireland; it’s the only holiday that is based on a novel.

Leopold Bloom is introduced as a man of appetites:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Born in 1866, Bloom is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian Jew who converted from Judaism to Protestantism) and Ellen Higgins, an Irish Protestant. Bloom converted to Catholicism in order to marry Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple have one daughter, Milly, born in 1889. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, which is where the Bloom portions of Ulysses begin.

And then there’s always this (Ulysses page 674):

What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought thought fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.

Enjoy the day.

[Note to critics (yes, you, you know to whom I am talking): It is now Bloomsday in Ireland, even if it has not yet arrived in New York.]