Clematis Paniculata
We've had a rather feeble shot at saying hello to George Luis Borges. Within the context of a temporal reality, today I look up at him as an early Postmodernist with Post Ironic tendencies and Magical Realist leanings. Baxter and I loath those sort of categories, but to make ourselves sound important we still use them. Meanwhile, off and on, I've sat on Borges foot stool since the post office days, a good fifty years ago, and I still have a slight grudge against Tolkien, Frank Herbert and perhaps JG Ballard for distracting me. But when you get your books from second hand shops in a welsh city that boasts a university and hard drinking Welsh Nationalist Poets, what do you expect, you can't pick and choose! Either way, George Luis Borges had respect for our man Arthur Schopenhauer, for both his pessimism and his metaphysics. He embraced Schopenhauer's understanding that can be précised this way: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." You have to love that simple summary of an exceedingly complex set of ideas. Borges own understandings included the suggestion "metaphysics is fiction," and indeed his blurring of the real with fantasy is beautifully ironic. I know, Baxter is also wondering whether he exists and if so why hasn't the Spleen been given a kinder, more generous personality. As for James Joyce, Borges, like so many, Borges went love hate on him. He loved Joyce's blurring of dream and waking and he hated Joyce's lack of respect and somewhat cavalier attitude for those of his readers who have struggled to battle through the ridiculously long sentences at the end of Ulysses. Just to be sure on our shared definition of ironic. In 1502 it meant: by which a man sayeth one thing and giveth to understand the contrary. These days in the world of Giant Electricity Guzzling Language Modes, Irony means: a contradiction between what appears to be true and what is actually true, or between what is said and what is truly meant. It's easy to forget that all of Joyce's Ulysses happened on one day, meanwhile all of Homer's Ulysses was a ten year odyssey. And here I think my point would be Joyce's Penelope, Mrs Molly Bloom, definitely had a large number of admirers, including a possible lesbian attachment, as well as an abandoned singing careers, and on that one day, the 16th of June 1904 while her husband Leopold was having a Merry time out with menfolk and barmaids, Molly had joined with her very good looking lover, Blazes Boylan. And there she was at the end of Joyce's Ulysses, lying in bed with her husband Leopold, wandering about the meaning of it all and not finding a great deal of hope. Homer's Penelope, in most accounts, not all, had remained faithful during her husband's ten year absence, had done rather well with the family business, and was happy to see Ulysses back even if he had changed a bit and may have been suffering from post traumatic stress and a sort of narcissistic paranoia. Sadly for Molly, and in my view a tad cowardly of him, Joyce had given Molly the responsibility for the final word of his very long Ulysses. That word was "Yes." It was the word Molly had used in her answer to Leopold when he plighted his troth on a day out to a fishing village north of Dublin, many years before. Joyce thought Molly's "Yes" was a female word, whether good or bad, Molly accepted her lot, submitted to it, her "Yes" was an affirmation of her life and her place in the world. It was happy word, a happy ending. Born in Dublin James Joyce died in 1941 in Switzerland, he was called a modernist.
