motorcyclemeditation.com

A good long motorcycle ride, a hundred miles and fine weather, perfect for solitude and quiet thinking.

A minor personal milestone to mull, more like a major one. Finally the moment arrived, the time right, no further putting it off, pick it up, start and keep going, don’t give up, managed to finish. Ulysses. Still reeling from the cerebral onslaught, only now on the motorcycle, brain bruised, starting to make sense of it.

Strange how it works, encountering something truly new, a bit like learning to ride. The decision to proceed made in necessary ignorance. The door opened, the new landscape perceived, the initial disorientation, the enormity sensed. Then the gradual coming to terms. Then, if you’re lucky the thrill persisting.

Joyce’s scalpel slicing, incisions so accurate that it’s only later you feel the internal bleeding. An irreversible initiation, containing a barrier to anyone uninitiated. Unable to go back, unable to understand how anyone can think otherwise.

Wonder if Joyce rode a motorcycle. Would have suited him. Handling an incubus much too big for confining frameworks or others’ easy understanding, slicing through, going where it leads. Worlds coming in continuous maelstrom, old thinking revealed as teethgrindingly pedestrian. Words, the very tools of understanding requiring reinvention. Joyce taking on everything. History, sex, art, war, friendship, Shakespeare, language itself, everything else besides.

One small problem, journey of the book finished, might be a good idea to read it again. Might understand it better, make more sense of all the things that flashed past, couldn’t grasp them at the time, too much was happening.

Oh well, a future adventure to look forward to. Still even without that, sitting here pondering on the motorcycle, the world looks different.