returning to a stream-of-consciousness

getting funky w it (it being modernism)

thanks for reading Link Lunchboxes (this is issue #3). your eyes mean a lot to me and times are tough, so here’s 20% off a full year’s subscription to the BGH (only $4 a month!), available until June 30th.

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ulysses and reading (slant books)

Just returned home from a short walk around the neighborhood. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about cognition lately. This Monday, I was reading the fourth chapter of Ulysses while sloshing around in an ice cold bathtub as the weather outside the apartment edged above 95 degrees Fahreneheit (I live in the US! Sue me!) and the temperature inside the apartment felt like it was a good bit higher than that because the ceiling fan does all-too little to move the air around.

The fourth chapter of the book is one of my favorites as Leopold Bloom, clunking around the kitchen, realizes he doesn’t have any ingredients at home to make breakfast, his house is invaded by a cat meowing at him for milk, he takes to the sidewalk, buys some sausages from the butcher down the street, picks up the mail, finally eats his ideal breakfast, and takes a dump while reading a yellow newspaper. Nothing much seems happen, but the whole world is happening; Bloom thinks about his wife, upstairs still in bed, he thinks about buying property, he thinks about his jewish heritage, he thinks about his friend’s funeral, he thinks about his daughter, he thinks about his son who had died only a few years ago when he was a toddler. His name is no mistake: cognition, when free and easy, blooms outwards not unlike a flower or a polaroid as all of the past and all of the future ties into a nice bow on top of the present.

The words Bloom thinks here, and the words he says out loud, and the things people tell him, are all muddled up together in a single stream of language. This is Ulysses and it’s how the book works as a whole. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes,” Stephen Dedalus whispers to himself in the novel, in chapter 3, while looking out on a Dublin beach and on the sea beyond. This phrase could refer to the beach, it could refer to phenomenology (the philosophic scuffle between our senses and phenomena beyond), or it could simply refer to your act of reading, right now, “thought through my eyes.”

But it occurred to me while I was reading Ulysess in the bathtub that I feel my best whenever I’m thinking — and living through my thinking — in words, sentences, and sometimes, if the process is really freeflowing and comfortable, in complete paragraphs. But whether this is the muscle in my head waning or simply a part of growing up (I’m turning 26 next Friday), this act of thinking→living seems to happen less and less as time goes on.

And suddenly, just like that, I’m worried — sitting in this ice cold bath — that my thinking has left me behind. And so I wracked my brain to try and figure out what has happened. There’s not only one issue behind this change, of course, but rather a handful of parts; but, as I’m sure you can guess, there’s a culprit behind the sheer tabula rasa of my brain: obviously, the pesky notification.