July 25, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: I have to, as usual, work today, but at a different place, so I won’t have as much commuting time taking up my day. It rained last night so I’m curious to know how the creek is faring. When I wake up, Moi is milling around the house, getting ready to take Mway out to fetch stick (she won’t take her for a walk when the weeds are wet). (I have to break off for a moment and jump in the pool; sweat is pouring down my face as I write.) Mway must bark for about 10 minutes while waiting for Moi to take her out; “Damn it,” I think to myself, “take the dog out already.” Finally she takes Mway out, and I have to deal with my computer warming up. I don’t have to leave for work till noon; Moi plans to bottle beer, and has cleaned the kitchen, with a strict pronouncement that I have to eat my breakfast by a certain time. At any rate, when Moi finishes fetching stick with Mway, I decide to take the dog for a full walk; there could be thunderstorms this afternoon and evening. Mway is already outside when I step out the door, about 10.
State of the Path: I stick to the main path. The weeds are dripping a little with rain, but the path is fairly open since I clipped many of the weeds a few days ago, although there is a new line of weeds leaning into the path, including the moth mullein I spared with my clippers. At bug land, the red grass, with brown lower stems, is bent over and thatched together. Between the pin oaks and the hedgerow, the ground looks like an autumn scene: no plants, brown leaves and broken branches, dead branches hanging down from the big oak in the hedgerow. I walk past the flowers that, when I look at them today, I doubt are St. johnswort, but I have no time to bother to try to identify them today. The weeds are choking the path at the swale from bug land, through the red willows, and on the other side of the ridge. I wander over to the feed channel. There’s a little bit of water in it, and I don’t intend to step across. Just before it, I spot a new wildflower with a pink carnation-like flower; it looks something like milkweed; I’ve leafed through Audubon without finding anything I can confidently say is it. The purple wildflowers stand tall in bug land, a dozen or more plants in all, as nameless as ever. On the other side of the ridge, before the anthill, a bramble clutches me across the chest, almost scratching my face.
State of the Creek: The pools look a little fuller, but not as much as I expected from the hard rains last night. The rock beds between the pools are still mostly dry. At the pool beyond the big locusts, the water does not yet touch the piece of vinyl siding.
The Fetch: Since Moi already threw stick for Mway, I expect Mway to only fetch the stick once up at the clearing. And, dripping with sweat as I am, I’m very happy when she does just that.
1 comment:
James Joyce’s Ulysses: My Obsession – Why? by M.
Continued from July 24.
And this is all there is to it, this sniffing out of phenomena, this elemental pairing of subject and object. For unlike Dawson, which sits on the boundary between Spencer and Marx and is governed by a treaty of compromise between these two giant states, Dublin is not incorporated into a grander scheme of things. By sheer proximity Vico may lay claim to it, and many other ideologies, including even the Catholic Church, may by military action appropriate it for a time: Dublin, because it is uncared for, is susceptible to outside laws and influences. But in the long run it exceeds these by the sheer burgeoning of its contents. Dublin is nature, or consciousness, in the sense of these words before they are defined in contrast to each other. It resists all theories of science and religion, all interrogation beyond the simple question “what’s going on here now?” This is why we have said that Joyce wrote Ulysses primarily for dogs. Is it too much to also say that he was a dog himself? Given the biographical evidence, probably so. But this evidence does not preclude the possibility that at some time during the mad Irishman’s life some monster scientist implanted a dog’s brain into his head. If, at this late stage in Joycean studies, Dublin seems too well-trod upon for some human readers, considering this possibility just might revive the wall of goldenrod standing around their feet. M.
Post a Comment