Tattoo guns burned into the skin I argued with

Diary 25th April

Last night talk about beginnings. The opening passages of novels. Mention of Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

“Introibo ad altare Dei”

Joyce’s mockery of the Roman Catholic mass: the bowl a stand-in for the chalice of wine which, in the mass, becomes the blood of Christ; the stairhead becomes the alter steps. Buck, of course, serves as priest…According to Joyce the novel opens on Thursday, 16th June 1904 at 8.30 AM. The 16th of June is the feast day of St. John Francis Regis, a saint much venerated in southern France. Since it’s a feast day for a confessor the appropriate vestments for the mass are white and gold. However Joyce mentions a yellow gown, and priestly vestment would be cloth of gold, not dull yellow. In the middle ages heretics were made to wear yellow.

Mention of the razor – sign of the slaughterer, the priest as butcher. While ungirdled suggests violation of the priestly vow of chastity. “Introibo ad altare Dei” – from psalm 43:4 – ‘I will go up to God’s alter’ used as the opening prayer of the mass…This mocking invocation of God is a reminder of the opening of Homer’s “Odyssey” with its invocation of the muse…

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From Joyce to Nabokov. ‘Lolita, light of my life…’

‘Lo-lee-ta’ the middle syllable alludes to the poem ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe the lover of young girls, a tragic, frustrated figure. Annabel Lee is variously invoked over the course of the novel; both she and Lolita die, the later figuratively as well as literally with regard to her fading nymphic qualities…Ah, those childbrides can never survive.

Lola, a diminutive of Dolores, is also the name of the young cabaret entertainer who enchants a middle-aged professor in the German film ‘The blue angel’…Dolores derived from the Latin, “dolor”: sorrow, pain, traditionally an allusion to the Virgin Mary, our mother of sorrows, and hence an invocation of the less than spiritual poem of Algernon Swinburne, “Dolores”.

And so it goes on, allusion and invocation, layer upon layer. The seemingly simple made complex…just like life.

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I’ve said things to upset a lot of people over time. I’m okay with that. I used to worry about how I was perceived by others, but then one day I decided I didn’t really care that much. So now I just say things I feel like saying and to hell with the rest of the crap.

If nothing else it’s more honest.

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My sense of wonder at the hyperreality of love is echoed by day-to-day commonplaces, the banal backdrop to our lives…We are like characters from Pushkin or Boris Pasternak. Yes, yes, I see you as my Lara. Obsessed, as I am, with images of you in your bath…

We are as alike as two drops of water.

Your nakedness echoing Eve’s innocence in Paradise Lost, when she recounts first catching sight of her own reflection in water:

Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as the expanse of heaven; I thither went
With unexperienced thought . . .
…..
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned.

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And our deranged minds become “bien ranges” once more…