Yes

 

Yes to the Give Way sign flattened at the school corner on my walk this Bloomsday morning. Yes to scoured concrete paths, chipped and repaired and etched with twig landings, that I walk along from my local library visit, off the train. Yes to the deceptive elegance and reach of the eucalypts that stretch across the street, teetering on blossom time this Bloomsday. Yes to different fences of weathered brick, white palings streaked at nail point, multi-shade pillars upholding the transit of a multi-shade cat giving highly original mrkgnaos. Yes to the Give Way sign that points the way home along the hillside, thoughts of why is Ulysses an experimental novel in a way no other book is an experimental novel that hundreds read every day with regular enthusiasm? Yes because it’s already, in the very process of being written, not a novel with a start or an end, but a creative structure that is about styles, borne on by the body. Yes to the winter sun hard-lit on the roads and against the night-cold walls. Yes gives way to new, it has to anyway, change there is for sure, and we changing with that. Yes to the door opening and the borrowed books falling out of the bag and conversation with late-risers who soon will go out into Bloomsday, whatever that is, this day, almost the winter solstice for us. Yes to lunch of reheated frittata with mustard, views of the rooves grooves and grids, thoughts about what else to extract from the forest of scribble in my Bloomsday paper. Yes to the litter of words across the pathways of paper, odd letters that never even find a way into the tomorrow paper. Yes to afternoon at home, the therapeutic washing-up, the catnap next to the napping cat Obsidian, the browse of hand-me-down old issues of the London Review of Books. Yes to the needle in the groove, the irresistible truth of I’m Only Sleeping, the inexplicable majesty of Tomorrow Never Knows. Yes to the Voice. Yes to everyone who grasps the elementary decency of the Voice, the dignity of the Voice. Yes to the necessary next step that must be yes. Yes to where that begins at the place where slowing down is required, giving way, watching for Give Way signs, listening to the glistening trees in sunlight. Yes to the birds high above our kinds of windows, turned inwards against cold, square to keep the warmth in. Yes to the small words starting up a story half-forgotten, returning in inexplicable humility from the groove days of Good Day Sunshine. Yes to the interludes agreed to, timeout from not seeing the forest for the trees. Yes to this LRB writer who, notice, says in her great rambling poem going over several columns, open your eyes. Yes to the regular punctuation mark of Bloomsday that is yes, somewhere on pages litterly every place, right there in front of you, yes in your face, giving way.