Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 13:22:34 -0400
Subject: Bloomsday Revisited



Eric wrote,


> Happy belated Bloomsday!
>
> I was busy this past weekend, so I'm just catching up now with my
> E-mails.
>
> For those who may not be familiar with it, the novel Ulysses by James
> Joyce takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904.  It has become a
> tradition of sorts for fans around the world to gather together on this
> day to read passages from the novel or do other activities to help
> commemorate it.  Those who celebrate the holy day in this manner call
> June 16 Bloomsday.

Yes.  Every June 16th, there is a marathon reading of Ulysses on a local NPR
station.

>
> While not as visually dramatic as the Goths, perhaps, there are
> certainly more than a few affinities here.  A totally fictitious
> character, Leopold Bloom, is treated as if he were a real person, in >
ways that  are very ritualistic and, for some, almost sacred.  The
> banal aspects of  everyday life are transformed by the Joyce's prism > of
language into a word portal of deep mystery.

Yes, Joyce got it right,

And Coleridge,

> "The imagination, then, I
> consider either as primary or secondary. The primary >IMAGINATION I hold
> to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception,
> and as a
> repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
> infinite I AM.  The secondary I consider as an echo of the former,
> coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the
> primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in the degree,
> and
> in the mode, of its operation.  It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
> order to recreate, or where this process is rendered impossible, yet
> still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is
> essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially
> fixed and dead."

And Nietzsche,

> "It is only as an
> aesthetic experience that life can be justified. " .

In wanting  to go back to the savage, the child and the poet, we seek  a
life, a society, a model of conduct, ritual, and practice worthy of the all
the above, worthy of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, other visionaries.

As I was saying,

Let us imagine ourselves "outside" the so-called real world, Cosmos,
Universe(s), observing all that "is" - Including all that is to scientists,
deists,
atheists - the "facts" we obey to survive.

Dream of Gods dreaming people dreaming Gods.

Refuse to pore over the intricate mental constructs of religious,
scientific and philosophical pasts, (historians excepted) and think about
the future of the physical and mental worlds, the real and symbolic
universes we inhabit.

How is it that homo-sapiens - one of hundreds of millions of species which
have inhabited planet Earth - possesses powers of perception, consciousness,
memory, experience (stored memory) language, and communication, that
facilitate its dominance of all other species?

Why should the species be bound by the past?  Why
not invent new ideas of the sublime, the unknown, the varieties of aesthetic
experience, with all the confidence of ancient ancestors?

Regards,
Hugh