Sleep-Talk of the Modern Writer: A Joycean Saga, Part II

James Joyce, textorized with an excerpt from Ulysses by Maxf 

“Oliver St. John Gogarty noted that the typical modern writer was doomed to go on talking to himself but that it was left for James Joyce to go one step further and to talk to himself in his sleep in Finnegans Wake.”

From Charles Reznikoff Bio on Poetry Foundation 

Internet, technology, modernity, and history, the Joycean nightmare, the daily dream of the silenced voice, speaking in thought, imagining a placeless space of mind, the code of subjective emergency. I lay half-awake, surfing the viral webs of unreason in my sunless haunt, of trivial whereabouts and soundless frequency. An internal vibration wakes me into another dream of subconscious sleep, the inactive pause of breath. In the information age, for the modern writer, free speech is a painless bubble of thirst. My words are a mere spidery sleep-talk, spinning the collective web on and on, to perchance catch the insect eyes of innumerable minds, insights unseen, and only felt, as the nerve of a quiver.

See related post: A Joycean Saga of Psyche, Muse of Endless Night

_________

Before I went to prison I sat around a family circle. My grandfather was in his prime and all of his siblings were alive. That was the last time he put on his sailor cap. 

Portrait of a Sailor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A new fish stinks straight out of water. These metal bars are hot with memory. I clean past my fresh environment. There is a consensus of suicide and the death of life. I steal a look through my most haunted imagination, and it’s real. A shark-toothed man with pomade-drip hair and an orange shirt draws his own jaw. A thin, black-haired youth pierces his erect member into a cellmate. Even if I were passing straight through this corridor, it would be hell, and this is my new home. 

Prisoners Exercising by Vincent Van Gogh

I’ve returned to my grandparent’s abode. He’s dead. I wake in the middle of the night. The house is empty. I have never seen it empty in my whole life, ever. What am I doing here? The only presence is the lightless noise of my empty past.  

__________

"A secret curing,

Brewing twilight

In the motionless loss of our human presence

From the awaited future, yet eternal sound

In patient happiness breeds the contented need to produce

Chirps

To entice the sickness of pride to leave with day and unite mind

With a grateful stare into the mind’s ending"

excerpt from "City Birds"