Please Bear With Me Here As I Expound at Length About James Joyce

Please excuse the fact that the following entry may sound

like the ramblings of a hopeless hipster. Bear in mind that this is

not the case. I hope.

So I took a perusal at my copy of Ulysses today, and I started thinking about how James Joyce's prose has been described again and again as almost schizophrenic. (James Joyce is perhaps the most influential writer of the 20th century. He broadened the palette of language and introduced new literary devices, most famously stream-of-consciousness, which attempts to trace a person's internal monologue. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, but exiled himself to the Continent in 1904 and lived out the rest of his days in Zurich, Paris, and Trieste until 1941. All of his stories focus on the lives of average Irish men and women, and combined satire with experiments in linguistics and pure narrative. He used symbols which he called epiphanies to create universality in his work. He produced landmarks of literature including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. Finnegan's Wake is an ambitious attempt, through dream imagery, to tap hidden racial memories and is a rumination on the cyclical nature of the Universe. But I digress.)

Joyce's daughter, Lucia (whom he was very fond of) was at one point in time a patient of Carl Gustave Jung (around the time Joyce was writing Finnegan's Wake, I believe) due to her mental illness which Dr. Jung diagnosed as schizophrenia. This, as well as the burden of crafting Finnegan's Wake and the pains and blindness he was developing due to glaucoma proved to be too much for Joyce and he had a nervous breakdown.

He visited Jung one day to plead with him to allow Lucia to be released. He argued that she was not mad. "The things that she does with language aren't so different from my own experiments in my writing." Insightful as always, Jung said to Joyce: "You are diving. She is sinking."

I suppose my point is that the great geniuses of any genre are sensitive to realms normally hidden (or concealed, rather) from the lay populace; that is to say, their grasp on the human condition and of reality at large may in fact be greater than that of the average person. Maybe that's a no-brainer, but Joyce's experience reminds me of what Friedrich Nietzsche said: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Furthermore, I think that every genius is slightly off of his or her rocker. The line between insanity and genius, I think, is one of productivity. A madman doesn't introduce anything to the world of any use to anyone, and can't return to reality, whereas a genius provides insight and new ideas and can put his (or her) feet back on the ground after having his (or her) head in the clouds. I guess that that is the crux of my thought today, and kind of relates to what I remarked about the supernatural earlier today (Gosh! Far earlier! Practically a day ago!).

Sheesh. I need to sleep; I've already thought a couple days' worth of thinking.

By the way, all of you should check out this group called Minus the Bear. They have interesting ideas, and also some of the best song titles I've ever heard of, i.e. "Damn Bugs Got Him, Johnny," and "We Are Not a Football Team." Give them a shot. Well, I s'pose...