Railing Against the Machine

They say there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that has been will be again, no matter the weary dreams of men. The thoughts and theories of a Utopic society where all is fair and right in the world are lost in the common threads of the web of life.

In Episode Two of James Joyce’s historic novel, Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus proclaims, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake!” There are many theories as to the meaning of Joyce’s choice of words within the context of the novel, one of them being Stephan Dedalus’ desire to overcome his own less than stellar childhood. Not so ironically, after reading the biography of James Joyce, himself, it is glaringly apparent that Ulysses is a veiled biography of Joyce’s own emotional world, since boyhood.

Joyce didn’t grow up in your average household. His father was nowhere near father of the year, and his mother, well in Joyce’s eyes his mother was weak and in need of protection, as well as an overwhelming amount of love and adoration. Thus, throughout the iconic Ulysses, Joyce smatters the contents with attributes of amor matris.

The entire work of Ulysses is a diatribe of Joyce’s view of the world in which he lived as a child, and the one in which he lived as an adult; in some cases nothing more than an exercise in stream of consciousness. In my humble opinion, it is Joyce making sense of the world in the only way he knew how – through the art of writing – giving order to the chaos.

Which brings all things full circle. There are none of us who have had the ideal childhood. By way of misfortune, or by way of fortune, all of our pasts are flawed, marred, and scarred. Whether we grew up in lavish homes or in mud huts, we all began this journey in the same conglomeration of star dust as human beings – impractical and imperfect.

We go about our lives, growing into the expectations of the environment in which we are immersed. Most people never question, or at least outwardly question, the outcome of their lives. You grow up in poverty, you die in poverty. You grow up wealthy, you die wealthy. And in either case the world keeps turning.

And then, there are those who rail against the machine; like James Joyce. Of all the things in the world he did not want to be the most was to be like his own father. He knew, since the time he was about ten years old, that the likelihood of that happening was pretty high. His father was cynical, and critical at best, when it came to Joyce’s obsession with writing, and learning. In those days, you rose no higher in society than your father’s position. If you did, you fought like hell to get there, with no regrets and no apologies.

Joyce was, by no means, a heralded author in his day. In fact, he was more popular in Great Britain and Europe than he ever was in his home country of the United States. American society was, to his chagrin, much like the man he knew as his father – cynical and critical, but Joyce never gave up, he didn’t quit. He kept on writing and traveling abroad, because that was where he found the meager bits of joy that existed in his life.

Sometimes we have to go deeper than the story that we are reading, and delve into the life of the author in order to understand the true depths of the premise. Sometimes, first impressions are not the ones intended, and we cannot judge a person by the chapter of their life we walked in on. We aren’t perfect, not a single one of us.

Ulysses was written in eighteen separate, yet connected, episodes, covering the entire life of a man we simply knew as James Joyce. He was, at times, impractical in his methods, improbable in his theories, and imperfect in his life. But at the same time, James Joyce was iconic in writing one of the most remembered works of modernist literature. James Joyce a.k.a. Stephan Dedalus overcame his childhood by simply being who he was – with no regrets and no apologies.

In literature we learn to live, to love, and to conquer.

Peculiar Children

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.”  ~ Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

As children, we never imagine our lives to be extraordinary, unless of course we are engaging in the land of make-believe. And, oh what a land make-believe can be for small children. It is filled with the fanciful and improbable, perhaps a vast kingdom of our very own, or pirate ships, or mayhaps even the wild, wild west.

As we grow older, as we all do, we put our childish things away and begin to behave as adults do. We become stoic, prim and proper, or to put it simply, we become just like everyone else. Soon, the land of make-believe becomes distant memories of a time  long forgotten and lost in the hustle and bustle of adult life. We forget how to dream.

I don’t know about you, but when I go home to the small town where I grew up, I find myself wandering in the mists of time. Everything is different, yet the same. The schoolyard of the elementary years still sits a half a block from the house where I grew into a young lady. When I look across the landscape, I see a different playground than the one that exists today. I see a tall silver slide, where Henry fell from the top and in all of our seven years, we believed him to be quite dead. He wasn’t. I see the old wooden merry-go-round and hear the chanting voices of children crying, “Faster! Faster! Faster!”

My eyes move toward the city swimming pool that sits empty just across the street. The scene shifts to a hot summer day when I stood staring into the abyss of the ten feet of water below me. The kids in line behind me taunting me to jump, I face my fear and take a leap of faith.

I kick the dust and gravel of the alleyway that separates the school from the neighbors, making my way toward home – home that isn’t my home anymore. Strangers live in that old house now. Sure, I know the mother. She was my older sister’s best friend all those years ago. Some things change, but the walls of that house, they hold all the laughter and the tears of my youth. The basement the scene of a roller disco unlike anything the world had ever seen, and probably should never see again. It was the venue for world champion gymnastics, and the greatest superstars that would ever grace the stages of the world.

At the end of the driveway stand two great mountains of snow, where King of the Mountain took on a whole new meaning. Our mother would scold us for digging snow tunnels, certain they would cave in and kill us all. In the spring, the melting mountains became streams that swelled into rushing rivers where paper or stick boats raced their way to the finish line – the grate to the underbelly of the city.

Just up the hill and a ways more the open fields are covered in snow. The smell of fuel and the roar of the snowmobiles as they raced, bouncing across the crests of snow fill the air.

Our lives as children were anything but ordinary; we simply failed to see just how extraordinary it was. Our hearts and minds were open to the possibilities of the universe. We were uninhibited in our imagination and our hope for something more, something grander than we viewed as our ordinary lives. Perhaps, we appear a bit peculiar in our memories. Perhaps we weren’t quite what we would view as perfect. But, oh what an extraordinary time it was.

Children need to imagine, to dream and to hope. They require something more than the mundane existence of mini-adults. They need to get to dirty, and bruised. They need to create adventures they otherwise wouldn’t have. They need to have a place to go back to when they have grown, and smile, and laugh, and perhaps take just one more spin on the merry-go-round, chanting, “Faster! Faster! Faster!”

I Can't Adult Today

Summertime was great back home on the shores of Lake Sakajwea. The family – the whole family – sometimes fifty or more at a time would gather down on South Pointe of Parshall Bay, spending the day fishing, swimming, grilling, and roasting marshmallows over campfires when the sun went down.

Time rolled forward and Summer would turn to Fall. It was my favorite time of the year. The town would swarm with kids who had been here or there throughout the summer. The fall evenings would fill the air with the shouts and laughter of children, playing kickball, or a game that the title is no longer politically correct to name, hide and seek in the dark, and so many other games, until the streetlights sent us home. As we got older we would sit wrapped in blankets, star gazing and talking about boys – the ones we liked and the ones we didn’t. We would tell our secrets and pinky swear to never tell a single soul, take it to our graves.

The world turned one day at a time, and the winds of change would bring Old Man Winter across the plains. It was time for sledding on the Rock Museum hill, or snowmobiling on the streets to make the old people mad, trick-or-treating in homemade costumes, and building igloos in the backyard. Halloween would slip quietly away and usher in the Christmas season, requiring our best behavior for the simple gifts we received. The windows of Main Street would become laden with all the finest gifts the stores had to offer. The streetlights would be decked with boughs of holly, stars, or jingle bells. Santa Saturday would come and go, and soon Auld Lang Syne would be on the lips of the older folks as the ball would drop in New York City.

Love would be shared in the classrooms and between lovers at the Redwood Mixer as Valentine’s Day came and went. Shades of pastels would replace the rose red, again requiring our best behavior to entice the favors of a benevolent bunny that came and went each year. Spring arrived with the first sprout of the crocuses on the prairie. Pomp and Circumstance would become the theme, accompanied by the cheers of the graduating class as caps were tossed in the air in celebration of the close of childhood.

Every now and again, we all travel down the familiar roads we traveled as children. For me, as a writer, it’s an integral part of what I do. My memoirs are contained in every story and novel that I write. And yes, sometimes I miss Donna the Kid, those are the days I want to say, “I can’t adult today.”

Have a great week everyone!