Wavewhite wedded words*

I haven’t shared many thoughts on my experience of reading Ulysses. This has been more out of sheer laziness than a lack of commentary. I will try to be more forthcoming in the future.

To get started, one of my favorite things about the book is that Joyce basically invents his own language. I don’t think Ulysses was written in English, really, it is written in Joycean, an ever changing, ever surprising mixture of different tones, colloquialisms, rhythms, and sounds. I truly loved his descriptions of the sea, especially as a poet.

The following poem doesn’t owe much to Joyce, especially as it is not particularly experimental as far as language is concerned, but it is my response to walking along the beach on a turbulent spring day.


Sea Green

We watch the waves crunch
like soft gears on the beach,
a mouth full of froth and sand.

The meek Mediterranean wants
to be an ocean today, beats
its chest with white fists,
eats the land with fury,
and howls deeply. The sky

is a flash and muffle, the sun
has come and gone, gold
mixes with grey reflections,
cold green, vague blue, the water
is pale and moody, the color
of the lip of a china tea cup.

sunshine marrying*

I chose this picture of a few forlorn rose petals in the sun after a wedding in Sitges to bring up my disappointment over the vote today by the California Supreme Court on Proposition 8. I truly don’t understand it.

How can the government have the power to pass a moral judgment on the validity of your love for another person? By upholding measures that deny gay people the right to marry, the government is deeming their feelings and their basic rights as irrelevant, unworthy, and wrong. On what basis does the government have the authority, wisdom, and ethical sensibility to base this judgment?

Why not ban people from marrying each other if they have only known each other for a few days, if they have been married before, if they are a certain difference in weight or height, if they have ever been in prison, if they are both sterile, if one person has voted and the other person has not, if they don’t pay their taxes….all of this seems just as arbitrary to me in the face of making a decision about with whom you want to share your life and love. I say that anyone prepared follow through with such an important commitment deserves to have their union recognized by their government. All the objections seem to be purely religious in nature. What about the separation of church and state? The 1st Amendment? The 9th Amendment? Or the fact that the constitution never actually mentions marriage?

Why have we not come to a point in our growth as a species when we realize that our complexities go far beyond what our ideas of nature, religion, and history are able to explain?

In light of all of this, here is a sweet article about a lesbian couple marrying in Connecticut.


For the record, Spain, despite its large Catholic population, legalized full marriage rights for gay couples in 2005.