Of all the literary precedents in my life, it is not James Joyce who features most prominently. It’s William Butler Yeats. You may ask, what’s the difference? I suppose, having completed my Sunday morning kitchen sink game of Jenga, there is no time like the present to explain.
Yeats’ works are spread more evenly across realms of poetry, essay, fiction, drama, and seem to follow a psychological aesthetic steeped in his personal, sometimes cockeyed, beliefs. Yeats had ghosts and visions, real and imagined. Yeats’ “widening gyre” and ominous beasts “slouching toward Bethlehem” tried to make sense of our limited senses, stretching out the mind of the reader, changing them, beckoning them, warning them. Yeats possessed a politic.
Joyce may have been more fun to be around, a better friend, a better drinking partner, and a better lover to his Nora. Yeats was emotionally stunted, more solitary, rejected fully by his Maude. Joyce spilled out what was in him effortlessly, perhaps with reckless vigor, then moved on. Yeats, more restrained and unsure, was constantly correcting and modifying his works until his death. Ultimately, I like Joyce better; but I feel as more an inheritor to Yeats’ burdens.
A crucial question in my mind is how the two would react to the full term of the 20th Century. Both seemed intent on describing its origins. How would they have described the century’s end? What medium would they have chosen? Would our technologies, our global horrors, our post-modern sensibilities render them speechless? Perhaps, Samuel Beckett is the answer. Perhaps, it’s Ulysses Bloomsday.
The Bloomsday Device is a complex construct of media and psychology, fiction and non-fiction, film, politics, poetry, and humor. I’ll call it Third Millennium literature, at least until someone gives it a better name. It is reverent to Joyce and Yeats, but steeped in my own history, not theirs. The fact that I am a lawyer, a poverty lawyer in a poor American city, and that I endeavor to weave my personal experiences into the fabric of The Bloomsday Device puts me on unequal footing with my literary ancestors.
Let me offer up an example: The OnePocalypse.
This November 11th will mark the first anniversary of the date upon which the day, the month, the year, the hour, the minute, and second, simultaneously read “11.” This digital succession of ones happened twice that day, of course. I dubbed the hours between the two -- 11:11 a.m. to 11:11 p.m. -- the OnePocalypse. I wrote a poem about it. I put up a video on YouTube. I blogged about it. It entertained me. But it also tapped into my inner-Yeats.
It seems impossible to imagine that the digital read of a clock-full of ones could not have existed in the worlds of both Yeats and Joyce, but imagine we must. It is, perhaps, the most mundane, most prevalent distinction between the contemporary mind and those of the past. We may now casually distinguish between the analog and digital, but Joyce and Yeats could not, like fish unaware of waters ahead. But aren’t those who, today, fail to see the metaphorical distinction between wound clock-time and atomic clock-time swimming against an invisible tide, as well? Doesn’t the binary code of zeroes and ones that created the words before your eyes have meaning for the modern mind? If so, then I see no better moment to memorialize it than the OnePocalypse.
What if I suggested the OnePocalypse was the ultimate break with the past, and beginning of our collective future? What if I suggested it was also a doom and gloom end only for those who fail to see it? It is not inconsequential, certainly for Joyce fans, that, in binary code, a zero is a “no” and a one is a “yes.” In this regard, the OnePocalypse is the ultimate affirmation, a “yes I said yes I will Yes” times three.
I am confident that my literary ghosts approve of this analysis, a sliver of self-regard writ large upon our common screens. And while the Bloomsday Device churns on, often unnoticed, I’ll celebrate your hopeful participation in this newly-christened, one-year-old millennium, even if you don’t.
