James Joyce
Faculty Evaluation
27March2000
Moses has come down from the mountain with the tablets
of Yahweh the Elohiman singing I yama yama yam. He says he has the 'Big Secret'
all spelled out in roots and branches of some tree or other. Just watch his plosives
and stops, labial and dental. Damn. I see in his tree an epiphanysymphony of twink
tinkling golden apples ororanges in the spun. It wasn't a burning bush he saw
but the blessing for pottage burning down the old oves of oaks and the life-sustaining
sacred swells. The Moonme measures the nightly skine knot content to stoop a mons
u ment, and thessun splaying shadow games with a gnomon and waiting for nomana.
Nomama. Woman. Cuneiform characters went marching into flatland and went tooty
linear beth. A cacophony of postbabelite curses shouting at holycowhorns to get
out of the road. A cab waited in the dust between the seething walls of two rivers.
The gates are open. The scrub and blasted earth show where the hoofs and mouth
have suppressed growth. The garden was abandoned long ago yeahno. No flamings
word stood centennial just the sss and thes tones. The trees boneys were removed
long long ago yesterday and placed in an abbey some where North enorge of a ear.
Charlie told us early on in the Linguistics
lectures that all we would learn would be exhausted within the first hundred pages
of Finnegan's Wake. It was in these lectures that he told us of the 'big
secret' of how to decipher the privileged ivory tower speech used in graduate
level professions. He showed us how it was all a shell game made up of the Greek
and Latin roots - just one branch on the Indo-European language tree. He pointed
us in the direction of numerous texts, which if we would continue the detective
work he was showing us, we could learn the history of the words we used and not
have to continually look them up. I have been interested in etymology for some
time, yet with Charlie's lectures on Proto-Indo European roots I found a piece
to a puzzle I have been working on regarding a paradigm shift in social organization.
As we saw in Condren's Serpent and the Goddess there was a shift from milk
or kin ties to blood or king ties or, from matrilineal to patrilineal. If we had
not spent the time we did on the PIE root *reg which denotes rulership and spatial
demarcation, I would not have recognized the connection with the PIE root *me
denoting the Moon and measurement of time. Another revelation that Charlie offered
was in regard to how visual clues are of more importance than auditory clues in
learning language. He suggested that a better way to teach younger children languages
would be to film native speakers so that they would find it easier to replicate
the movements of the vocal organs.
We also worked on the 'zeitgeist' or spirit of the times, which put Joyce's
work in context to a greater movement in the arts towards Modernism. This was
important in that it shows that these masterpieces aren't created in a vacuum.
Not only are the artists responding to the environment that they are working in,
but in relation to other artists and cultural movements, they are part of a progressive
tendency towards a unified expression. In listening to the music of Ives, Cage,
Wagner, and Reich, as well as the discussions of Coltrain and avant garde Art,
we began to see that what Joyce was doing in one medium was being done by others
in a similar fashion in other arts. We also discussed the work of Einstein in
physics as he was working toward a universal expression in the physical sciences
as Coltrain was in music and Joyce was in language and literature.
In response to my writing assignments Charlie was encouraging and challenging
at the same time. My first paper of annotations on Dubliners, he remarked
that this was exactly the kind of work he was looking for. In my second paper,
he upped the ante by suggesting that I had made a contribution to Joycean studies.
He said that my comments on Portrait of an Artist as A Young Man had forced
him to return to the passages in the text, as opposed to leading him away from
it, or making a quick judgment. Like the venerable Obi-Wan Kenobi teaching a young
jedi in the ways of the force, he suggested I listen to my own thoughts on the
text before seeking out other sources for explication of meaning. He told us to
listen to the sound of Finnegan's Wake, the singsong ringsound o, for the
texture, instead of attempting to derive some recognition of linearity or plot
progression. Hear the force, and it will guide you.
My only criticism of the program would be that we should have spent four weeks
on Ulysses and five weeks on Finnegan's Wake, instead of reading
through his other works. I understand this would have been a disservice to the
students who were not continuing the Perspectives on Ireland program. Charlie,
like Sean Williams is one of those rare individuals who just by their presence
drive you to excellence. I took this course not only because I enjoy Joyce's work
and I have an interest in Linguistics, but more importantly because I knew that
the learning experience at Charlie's hands would be rich, rewarding, and challenging.
An educational dream come true, which I would hearken back to throughout my education
and in years to come.