AN EPIPHANY OF SORTS

Just the other day, my own Papa (aka, PapaBear; aka PapaKerm; aka PapaHawk; aka PapaFrogHawk; aka PapaJayHawk, etc.) suggested this post (below), which was on Facebook, should make its way to the Papa Dialogues. I don't know what this space is or what it will be -- but I do know it'll change. But I hope it's a nice place for me to come back to from time to time in order to look at pics of the boy.
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You know, I was just thinking about James Joyce, and I had an epiphany of sorts. An appropriate time for one, I suppose. But anyway, as I was putting the boy down for bed tonight, my mind was reeling as I tried to keep up with his and with him, to follow the collapsing and conjoining words of what he was saying, to keep track of the subtle references and allusions to elements from his day, to songs and movies and Daniel Tiger, to books and magazines and fairytales, some of which I know, many of which I do not. He started telling me about conversations he’d had, in medias res, as if I’d been there, as if I should know them. I struggled mightily when he asked me to sing a particular song, and after he ably sang a couple fragments from it, it still took me several minutes to realize that I did in fact know it, somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, in a place I had long forgotten about, and I felt pride when I made that connection, and I smiled and laughed with him, proud of him for remembering something from so long ago. And then, because he’s two, there was also the constant integrating of potty humor, of jokes without punchlines, of penis-talk and scrotum-grabbing and poo and pee and all that stuff. And he kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer. And as I sang to him his third “last song” of the evening, I realized that this entire interaction — beautiful and tumbling and humbling — was very much like my experience reading Joyce’s Ulysses about nineteen years ago now.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that the boy is a genius. Not at all. But I am saying Joyce was, at least in part, because he knew all of this already. We too often talk about how difficult reading Joyce can be. But really, it’s exhilarating and funny and heartbreaking and fun and bawdy and dirty and all the rest. Yeah, yes, it can be hard, but by intentionally obfuscating so much of what he did in the obscure, the personal, the private, the mythic, the collective, and all the rest, he intuitively and intentionally understood that in so doing he would be edging his way back toward what he would have called the universal. Funny to have an experience like aesthetic arrest tonight these two decades after first reading Ulysses not from reading Joyce’s text, but from trying to read the text of the boy himself.