Evoking Memories

Anniversaries do it. Evoke memories, that is. If James Joyce was capable of thinking of marketing, he would have realized that he would mark June 16 (1904) for the literature set. Bloomsday.

For those following along, I've been toying with the idea of reading Joyce's Ulysses myself for a while. I prepared. I bought Stuart Gilbert's 1930's exposition on it in a Paris bookstore (The Village Voice). I read it, too. Mostly in the bathroom if you must know. It took almost two years to get through it. I shook my head at the untranslated French and Greek thrown about. I read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I watched movie versions of Artist and Ulysses. I read various biographical and explication materials. I read a prose version of The Odyssey, translated by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia).

Yesterday, I decided the time had come. I would read James Joyce's Ulysses. I would carry it to the gym for the bike and take it any time I needed reading material and didn't take newspapers. And I did. I'm a few dozen pages in.

In 2004, I visited Dublin. I flew over alone and met a friend who had been visiting Edinburgh, her place of birth, from her home in Cape Town. She helped me seek out the plaques embedded in the sidewalks marking spots from Ulysses, went with me to places like the James Joyce Cultural Center and sat with me while I had a pint at Davy Byrne's pub. She even talked a friend of her son's who took us out for a drive into going to a Martello tower that houses a museum of some sort. (We didn't get to see inside because it was closed, but I was thrilled to see the tower.)

So the day (June 16th) makes me think of Joyce's book. And the copy of the book I chose to actually read (I found three in my piles) was one I bought in Dublin. I thought of my friend. How one day on our visit to Dublin she had awoken with a swollen eye. And how we would much later learn that it was a symptom of her breast cancer once again rising up in her brain. My friend is in perhaps her last battle with her disease now. She's far away in Cape Town. But every day that I read my Penguin Classic version of Joyce's book I think of her.

Dates and places have power to evoke memories. From June 16th to Dublin to Cape Town. We joked about the swollen eye, called it the "Dublin Eye" when the symptom came and went and bedeviled her before it was known that it was an announcement of what might spell her doom. Our joke was a sly reference to the London Eye which is really a sightseeing ferris wheel. Which I visited in a break from a business trip in 2002 while my mother was in a hospital dying. I was melancholy on the trip but I bought a souvenir picture of myself on the London Eye to show my mother who was eager to hear about the trip and ask for souvenirs.

And now I've arrived back to my mom and her cancer: Multiple Myeloma. And I think of my friend who is waging a valiant battle against it.

Chains of memories and thoughts, unbidden and sometimes unwelcome. It's how we operate. From the date June 16th and off into the world of fiction and then into the facts of our lives.