Ulysses and Other Occupational Hazards

 

James Joyce

There are places where people go to find acid, and there are places where people go to find Joyce. Both are tests of endurance. Morningside Library, 10 a.m. — the kind of grey Edinburgh morning where caffeine and philosophy are forms of self-harm.

I was wandering through the aisles when I saw it: a rack marked CLASSICS, declaring from its laminated sign.  I stopped. Out of guilt, vanity, or a vague sense of cultural duty to complete a book I had never managed to finish, I pulled out Ulysses, a far cry from his gentle middle class essays in The Dubliners. 

The book sat heavily in my hands. I opened it somewhere in the middle, expecting fireworks, but what I got was fog. The stream of consciousness hit me like static — buzzing, erratic, and vaguely alcoholic. Words flashed and vanished, meanings tangled, neologisms tumbled invented on the spot. Joyce was out there in the ether, spinning sentences like a man trying to outdrink his own brain.

I thought: Why did he bother? Was it the drink? Or Irish revenge on the English language?

Hard work!

Back in my university days in Toronto, I’d met a man who worshipped Joyce like he was a literary god and a drinking buddy rolled into one. He was wild-eyed and once cornered me and said, “Have you read Joyce? He’s in me! He’s the greatest writer in the history of literature.  Am I Joyce?”

It was less a question than a confession. I nodded, not wanting to interrupt the ongoing catharsis.

Toronto was my first taste of a wider western  world — polite chaos wrapped in winter. I lived for a while at 99 Madison Avenue, a French Colonial boarding house with a verandah perfect for breakfasts and existential crises. The kind of place where everyone seemed to be running to or from something — rent, responsibility, or the 1980s.

I worked first for an old Polish guy tearing out tree stumps, then for his son and a friend who were building a sauna in their attic in a house in Pape. I didn’t ask why. You don’t question when you are paid by the hour and are left to make up your own time sheet.

Sometimes I wandered up to York University, where I’d meet Tony Woolfson, psychology lecturer, philosopher, and part-time mind mechanic. His students — mostly Korean or Chinese — watched politely as he dissected Freud like a frog on the slab.

I remember his estranged wife, Maureen — sharp eyes, Glaswegian edge. She once said, “When you were around in Glasgow, I could hear drums beating. They were exciting times.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe the drums are still beating somewhere — under the floorboards of old houses, in the thrum of an unread Ulysses, or in the hollow rhythm of a man trying to find meaning in a library.

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