Celebrating Ulysses: Bloomsday 2012

Somewhere in the middle of this magic day I become fully immersed in the world of Joyce – everywhere “the heaventree of stars hung with humid night-blue fruit”; every interaction is laden with word plays and literary allusions; everyone is flirting and edging between absurdity and insight.

Readers are drawn here, as this is a book to be lived – to be discussed, argued about, made dirty with, reborn through, and celebrated… mostly celebrated.

There is something rare in an annual celebration of a book that takes over a city for a day even though few people have read it. But we in the London Literary Salon have: we’ve spent 6 months struggling and vaulting through the pages of Ulysses, laughing aloud, throwing the bulky tome against walls, sighing with deep satisfaction when the lyrical prose ignites a profound idea – recognising our humanity within the characters of this exasperating and gorgeous book.

In January the Ulysses study began with a reading schedule aimed at completion by Bloomsday: June 16th. There was a local celebration that involved a dramatic reading of the last chapter at the Pineapple Pub in Kentish Town. Nine intrepid readers joined me in Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday. We sang along to “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, heard the words of the book enacted in the actual settings, listened to impassioned academics propose their own focus on the power of the book (it is a book about freedom, about love, about the possibilities of language…).

It is a book to be read together; as with an exercise regime, you need the support and company of others to sustain you when the going gets exhausting. The book also requires multiple perspectives and voices in order to understand the specific allusions and to invoke the weave of voices that compose it. Sometimes our Salon meetings were a support group for readers, at other times a celebration. All of the Salon participants commented on how the book has changed them and how essential our work together was in guiding them through the wild waters. Reading Ulysses makes you slow down, pay attention, reflect on words and meaning—experiences our media-saturated lives make little room for.

As I made my way back to London with the salt of the Irish Sea on my skin and the electric moments of the trip playing through my
mind, I knew that daily life cannot always sustain such fullness. But the gift of the book and the absorption of the weekend is to live in the mode of the fully awake, as Joyce was: to experience, pain, bliss and people. The book – and the imagination that birthed it – teaches us to be attentive to the miracles of connection and beauty in the everyday.

A version of this essay appeared in the Camden New Journal 21.06.12

Stay tuned for details of Ulysses Salon 2013