O happiest of Bloomsdays to the boss who watches over our bed and serves as guardian of the threshold to the window!
Happy, too, the veil I laid over Joyce’s face after having worn this veil at the protest against genocide and empire which took place at the New Orleans Poetry Festival earlier this year! For what is a veil if not a gaze that commits to seeing through hue?
"As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.”
Like Dante, Joyce created a streetside universe of caricatures and persons from the town in which he was raised, a world to hold that woman he saw on the street, or that Beatrice that he imagined into eternity. Her name was Nora. She was what Steve Earle would serenade as a Galway Girl. Joyce noticed her "sauntering" down the street in Dublin and asked her out immediately. Nora agreed, but then failed to show up.
Happy Bloomsday to sauntering, itself— and to the literary saunter that gives rise to characters we chase through the crannies and alleyways at night!
Undaunted, Joyce pursued Nora with a note that led to an actual date on June 16, 1904, a first encounter realized in a casual stroll along the banks of the Liffey. As the two walked towards Ringsend, Nora reached into his pants and masturbated him. Their first date became the setting for Joyce's Ulysses. Anyone celebrating Bloomsday is "celebrating that first masturbation," in Louis Menand's words, or perhaps that profane moment made sacred by literature and memory. In Joyce's words, as offered to Nora in a letter two months later, what happened on that date was "a kind of a sacrament, and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy."
Amazed joy might be how Bach described his greatest choral pieces when performed in a cathedral, but Joyce's awe was more intimate. He felt no shame, no weight, and no transaction in relation to Nora. Five years later, on a trip to Dublin, he writes to her in Trieste: "It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers . . . and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes." That night "made me a man," he told Nora in a different letter.
Happy Bloomsday to being so made and unmade!
After a date, Joyce took one of Nora’s gloves home with him, and he writes to her to say that he has slept with it: “Your glove lay beside me all night—unbuttoned—but otherwise conducted itself very properly—like Nora.”
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle raised their children, Giorgio and Lucia, in countless apartments across Paris and Europe. He relished telling stories, filling bar stools, being generous whenever money appeared, and living at full nerve, although only two things ultimately matter to him namely his writing and his family.
“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism”: this is how James Joyce described himself to Carl Jung.
After two of Nora’s boyfriends died when she was dating them; the girls at the convent where she boarded in Galway called her the “man-killer.”
Happy Bloomsday to all “man-killers” and to the stelle, or stars, with which Dante ends all three books of his Comedy!
Happy Bloomsday, too, to the consecration of a sacrificial religious event by Stephen and Bloom, who honor such an occasion by urinating together in the garden!
Happiest of Bloomdays to you!
