Proteus
stilla maris, stella maris. drop of the sea, star of the sea, beaming out the necrotised telemetry of holiness, holiness, holiness. it is easter, 2016. kidder and i arrive ahead of the festivities. green streamers. the bruised lobes of lilies. walk past the arthur griffith house each morning on our way to the strand. pole star, lodestar, lodestone, dropstone. drop of the sea, star of the sea. see? i was speaking about st jerome. celestial pole. of sailors. apostles of salt. of stilla maris, stella maris. of joyce. and endlessly. kidder – not a scholar – says dedalus is a dead loss, geddit? i'd never thought of that. is it dead, though? or deed? daedalus. designed the labyrinth, was imprisoned in a tower for his pains. martello. embattled between the hammer blows. no towers here. will we walk on the dunes? we will. and after, will we follow the road into the city? alright. and after, will we go on the train to the tower? we might. and look at the death mask? morbid. but of course. consult it like some oracle. grows in my dreams to ten times its rational size. zardoz head. all powerful oz. i had been trying to finish. or trying to start. approaching the same half-thought at tangents. according to my supervisor, joyce scholarship is oversubscribed, and what is it, besides, i am trying to say? i want to write about the cockle-pickers. the cockle-pickers? sharp notes of heady contempt. here is a person – here is a person – here is a person who reads and expects to encounter themselves, who will emphasise the word peripheral untroubled as to who created the periphery. heavy, esturising light. stunt kites. grey, belabouring birds. i can't get it out of my head, the way he looked at me. here is a person – here is a person – never searched for themselves in a language and literary culture that evicts or refuses them. are you still on about that? well. what is the periphery, but the cartographic and imaginative limit of the nation. and what is the phrase sparks fly at the edge, little brother, but the outcast's consolation? how to say? it isn't the margins i mind. it is how they come to despise and consume the very margins they create. worse to be incorporated than ostracised. well, then?
*****
birkbeck, 2017. i upset a by telling her i think virgina woolf is a classist cunt. is this a joyce thing again? fuck off. woolf wrote of ulysses: "an illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. when one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?" and it is a joyce thing. and it isn't. the assumption, and the so-what? of that assumption. self-taught? because joyce is irish he must be some kind of chippy little autodidact? not quite. but if he were, what difference would that make to his literary merit? how woolf figures the features of ulysses as bugs. with a scrutiny she would not apply to a class-credentialed english writer. a has never been on the receiving end of that logic, so she doesn't know. if you surpass them in technique, then suddenly those techniques were never worth acquiring in the first place. and damn them for that. but what i have loved in joyce – in ulysses – is precisely that raw, relentless quality. it's something the language demands of you: the floor is made of lava, you must keep moving in order to survive. joyce's engagement with english – with language – is a transformation chase to confound all predators. a savvy escapist, a quick-change artist. in the riddle and the risk of language. to move, not merely a wanderer, but a fugitive, see? a doesn't see. woolf couldn't see. was incapable of seeing. whose writing requires a room. a contemplative position unequally possible for everyone. joyce was hardly some working-class hero, you know! a, bristling. no. she's right. but suppose the room is impossible? or represents another kind of carceral enclosure? the labyrinth and the tower. the right to a room, yes. but also the right to no room. the right to be heard without room, outside room. and oh, for a writing of the provisional! the contingent! the makeshift, shifting make-do world! there is nothing sedentary in joyce. nothing stifled or confined. to dismiss the language tactics of the margins is to equally denigrate the lives and experiences that produced those tactics. we will agree to disagree. what an english thing to say.
*****
dublin, 2016. green-brown peeling kiosk. girl with an angry, corrugated face serves coffee, asks what we are to each other. my baby brother. sceptical. we don't sound alike. we don't look much alike, aside from our height. and the teeth, dear god, learnt not to smile with an open mouth. ten years between. a finger, its thick thimble of nicotine, circling me, stabbing me out: where are you from? odd emphasis. on the from. makes a change. i have come to envy, mistrust, and despise in equal measure those who have a one word answer for that question. what should i say, and what does it mean, and why did you feel the need to ask? i am from no island, and all islands. my home is my coat. my coat is my flag. how much of this space is mine? how much of this past can i claim? why am i here at all? we were only ever passing through. your nation is an arch, can never be occupied. in the stretch and seam of these islands, worked into these islands, like black mould worked into a crease. as we moved from place to place my version of english would gather scrappy offcuts of dialect from this town or that, drawing them into itself like a dirty snowball rolling down hill, an improvised hybrid of disparate languages, none of which i perfectly possessed. i make people uneasy. my voice is a fraught meeting place for sounds, for names, for the many queasy allegiances they represent. state of grace, grace of being stateless. just say london! christ! kidder, laughing. it's not a trick question. but it is. if not a trick, a trap. you didn't grow up in the eighties, and you didn't go to school, so you don't know. you don't sound like us, so you don't know. i didn't think of myself as irish at all until irishness was interpolated onto me. identity was not a cultural given, but a belonging i came to through an intense experience of non-belonging. to be expelled, denied. to have been persistently racialised, as i now understand it, by poverty. but i'm not irish either, not here, not enough, pikey being a word that removes me from the newly hallowed precincts of irishness. to tell a conference full of irish speakers that i feel the absence of the irish language as a prior loss. prior to what? to marty, to my father, to everything. and how can i mourn in english? dragging my tongue through its donkey cant, over and over. what kind of grief – what kind of love – can ever be made in such a mouth? their language dies in my mouth, tooled into toothache, broken up over the blue flame of my nowhere accent, impossible pedigree, black wick of my wagging, wrong a million ways.
*****
birkbeck, 2017. i'm still trying to write about joyce. but when i start i find that i also want to write about the hosts at conferences and festivals who ask me to repeat myself, to slow down, to ee-nun-see-ate. about the man at a "safe space" arts event who quite literally screamed in my face because the words i used and the rhythm and speed at which i used them made them fucking impossible to caption, thanks. i want to write about the proofreaders down the years who have "corrected" or replaced a word in irish, in scots, in shelta, in humber dialect with a modern english word that kinda-sorta looks the same but not really. i want to write about the experience of being an outsider in english. as an undergraduate, i asked myself if speech were safe or possible in a language that enables only its limited and colonised forms. how would i speak, if that language were all i had? at this point i discovered james joyce. if i say that like recognised like, i'm not talking in terms of talent or skill, only in terms a wrestling with language, of an infiltration, a sabotage, an unmaking of english with and inside of english. that forcing of the unhomely home to make room for us. that isn't modernist scholarship. no? that's scarcely scholarship at all. i cannot write myself into the centre from the periphery, must remain peripheral, producing only peripheral forms of thought. well, okay. then i am not a scholar, then i am only a poet, where poetry is another kind of margin, another kind of periphery, in the hierarchy of literary production. i'll write it this way: if my cockle-picker could speak, what would she say?
*****
“Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?”
are you? what can this walking mean to you? us walk. we are walking people. between the stride and the sprawl, where walk is not a way through, or towards, but a manner of residing, itself of being in. to move is an umwelt, a weltschmerz. see, us can do it too. eternity? eternity is that exhaustion of invention where even language fails, is failed by – what? you do not think so? baby boy, us wrapped this peddler's french around a slang of subtle woe while you were hastening grace through all its mullocked homilies. half-smile, you have, perturbed and curdling, the gloomy bunting bound around your born-again. and no, you are mistaken, i saw you first, from a long way off, from a long way back, in battered boots across the shingle and the shale, across the flats, their wide brown ledger of sucking mud. face on you, like lankly scunnered, dank stink of the beach, of anything that rots. come closer. no? why not? you've hands enough to gather blades of ruby dulse – famine's strap – but tastes so fine. burnt bacon, bitter syrup, winter mornings. tastes like welcome bandied into sinewed hymn. gadjo, come. our coney-cant, our pelting speech, this mad caprice of surplus mouths. fall in with us, fall in, fall through a trapdoor left in language. stephen, your name is stephen, the wren in its rokkering calls your name. come swim this totalled sea with us. didn't you know, our first language was trees? an alphabet too tall for english mouths to mither. they removed their teeth with pliers, stretched themselves like snakes around the dying bonny of it. don't be like them, poet, yokefellow. catch us up as we stumble, string out wiry beyond the sight of tide.
*****
stephen's walk in ulysses is portrait's euphoria inverted. another circle. return without restitution. the hiccuping, looping time of – trauma? – grief? which lives on through its traces, its aftermath, its effects of repetition and deferral. dublin, 2016. joyce postcard from the writer's museum: when i die, dublin will be written in my heart. not cute. none of that brendan shine sentimentality, but pointing to a poetics of pained incision, something cut into and out of flesh. so, is dublin the labyrinth or the tower? i don't know. or ireland? i don't know. or language? i don't know. crowds. martial music. that's your man! that's your man over there! go on, tell him you love him, throw your knickers at him. and what happened to your nice english manners? laughing now, run across the creaking yardarm of the quay, pelting him with stale french bread, his shadow stretching ahead of him, leaping hare, tinners' rabbit, fleet and witchy thing. where'll be written on your heart when you die? you, my dear. i'm not a place, i'm a person. you're a state of mind, you are, a fucked one. seriously, though? seriously. you are my elsewhere. silence a while, walking. joyce's father was an alcoholic, did you know that? says so? says why'd you have to bring that up? oily water, bagpipes, busking, a bladder of wrecked sound strained and plaintive. talk about something else.
*****
i think what i recognised in joyce was the operation of shelta within the difficult and contested space of the english language. there are shelta words and phrases a plenty in finnegans wake, of course, but more than this in both finnegans wake and ulysses, joyce seems to me to relish and to replicate shelta's varied linguistic parries and evasions, making use of reversal, metathesis, affixing, and substitution. it's how shelta transposes consonant clusters, prefixes or suffixes groups of sounds with irish words. shelta incorporates romani, polari, irish, and english. it is various, peppered with local and cross-continental slang. it is also spoken fast, has its own clipped and cantering rhythm, its own terse, t-stopped, compressive poetry. so it seems too quick, sounds "garbled" to an english ear accustomed to a more measured meter. straight-jacketed ache in their iambs, they've got. the fucking trouser press of pentameter. shelta is also tactical, imaginative, controlled, supremely inventive. while i only have handfuls of words in shelta and in irish, these are rhythms drummed in the gut. language alive at the sharp end of everything: opportunistic, omnivorous, restless, questing.
*****
joyce is not a traveller. but he was an outsider. and he was perpetually restless. joyce is a citizen of the world, not in the sense, i think, that he was equally at home anywhere in europe, but in the sense that he was equally ill at ease, could find no real sense of home in any one territory or lexical field. what is home anyway? that which we reject, that which rejects us, but from the orbit of which we are never able to absent ourselves? and i am thinking about marty now, who died at the edge of the sea, sleeping rough, who will never come home. if they opened him up, what would be written on his heart? blackstaff and lagan, the sign of the crow, the sign of the cross. the gantry, the gruney, sprawled amid a sweet debris of cresses, sweeney's-sedge, the adder's tongue. broom and barren brome. cheat grass, chess grass, quake grass, wheat grass, wake grass, weak grass, downy and drooping. what is nature? the totalled meadow, its yield of trashy obsoletes, those tall and loathly larrikins – a drunken health of weeds. home, at the point of a hastily tabled motion, with seven shades of blessing beaten into him, knocked out of him. flogged, flayed, fettled and fixed for luddwork or for mcjob, the spatulate grasp of a hand, carpal tunnelled into permatemp. a warrant out on his non-event, or paranoia's dish rag whimsy. three sheets to spatchcocked. spat out. choked on. the gut, bursting-bitter, his gaze bruised where it broke on the steep black bank. the bricked-up hallelujah of any straining mouth. the lung leached, and wetly levelled. stitchwort, skullcap, stonecrop, sheep's bit, the heather-hampered dead in the splitting greatcoats of their cud; their grammar of flax and shock. marty, a skew and coppered hand toward the soaking light. bog orphreys under him. their sullen tumescence. and all those clean-living converts of barley, those numbered baldies, that government of galloping pockets who would not love him back. what would he say, in nerve and circulating murmur. mouth filled up with sand.
*****
i love ulysses, but i haven't always known what to make of parts of it. in proteus, where the sight of the cockle-pickers – "red egyptians", gypsies, travellers – sparks in stephen a kind of erotic reverie that is tinged with both melancholy yearning and disgust, i wasn't stoked by the way joyce uses richard head's the canting academy (1673) as the source for their speech, equating the imagined "thieves cant" of early modern london with the language of romani and traveller people. yet, these figures, this language, is bawdily, earthily, playfully part of the world around it in a way that stephen feels awkwardly excluded from. where else would they be but the sea? on the edge? it is presence. a vital sliver of attention. and i'm sad that the only role imaged for the girl is as a "strolling mort" – fake widow and pickpocket by day, prostituted woman by night – but her presence, their language is pivot and epiphany in stephen, when he realises that their cant is: “language no whit worse than his. monkwords, marybeads jabber on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.” there's a comradeship of language, none of which deserve elevation above others, all of which are worthy of preservation, militant and enthusiastic cherishing, those units of attention and care so often denied their speakers as citizens or subjects. so i have her speak back. not in riposte, but as one lover of language to another. against loneliness. sorrow. against all that divides us.
Dr Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of seven poetry collections and of numerous chapbooks, including Hyena! Jackal! Dog!, which was published by Pamenar Press last year, and Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Her Ph.D. from Birkbeck College, University of London, is titled, "Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma". She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters.