Joyce’s Cropse
Graveyards, Language, Switzerland
James Joyce said Zurich was so clean you could eat off the streets but he must never have walked up its alleys. It is a city for trams not tramps and after the three-kilometre walk uphill to the zoo and his grave I am sweating despite the cold. Crossing roads I get trapped on tram tracks by railings and the trams are always coming. But I like to walk a city to feel it in my feet and see it in the faces and now I know there are chip bags and empty cans and urine in the lanes and alleys of Zurich and that there are not that many faces to look into. (Though I heard a man mimic a bird while moving a couch).
James Joyce does not lie beside Jewish writer Elias Canetti. I read that he did and he does not. The grave in between the writers is covered in green moss and cannot be read. There is fresh cat shit on it’s small shrub and the grave number 80427 marks it out. A cat pads among fine-clayed mole hills and I sit on a bench in front of the grave and eat tomatoes with thick hunks of bread and cheese. The small hedge around the Joyce plot is tadpoles turning to frogs for me. I saw it only once before in the garden of the house I grew up in and do not know its name. Small green leaves. Joyce liked to throw over the time-bound structure of words, to maul words like plasticine into each other, and crops’ and ‘corpse’ become ‘cropse’ and so death becomes life and I like his hedge.
The animals of Zurich zoo stare like the people and their zoo is getting depressing in a dimmer-switch dusk. The buggy mothers are gone now. It had been me and congregating buggy mothers. Now it’s just me and the snow leopards and the wolves that are left staring into the space of snowy enclosures. But Zurich zoo animals look at you and I have enjoyed myself here. In Dublin zoo the lion only roars before the gates open. The monkeys only look you in the face before the buggy mothers come. And I only saw the tiger at full tilt, ten-foot stretched and staring, when I drove the red mules by him on the morning bin run when I worked there. And that was before people.
The tram back down the hill is busy. A woman looks at me nervously. Her suitcase is nearby. She looks at me. She looks at it. She looks at me again. Suitcase. Me. Suitcase. Suitcasemesuitcase. She has no control over the suitcase or her own wild imaginings. I look at her. I look at the suitcase. When she looks at me I look at the suitcase. I do this until I get off the tram and she takes one last watery look.
No one stares like the elderly women of Switzerland. They are implacable. On the train platforms they have opportunity to stare for anything up to 17 minutes. I know. I time them. I laugh at them too because I do not know what else to do and I am the fool 17 minutes early for a train. They are implacable. Perhaps they find me impalpable. Not perceivable. Incapable of being grasped or comprehended. I blame the cheese. I wonder about their gods too.
Byzantine icons are for sale in a shop near the James Joyce Foundation. Some of them look very old. Next door there is a man restoring a silver chalice and nearby a ghost tour of the old town. A bald Englishman is saying something about a fella called Rudolph and walls but I give up earwigging when he catches me out. The ambling is cold until I discover a pyramid of singing children dressed as elves and beneath them I drink mulled wine and eat bratwurst. Two American girls stand beside me. One talks like the rush of a broken sewer main. The other is an occasional ‘yes’. I eat more bratwurst and go to an book shop where the only thing in German is the shop assistant. I struggle with myself and finally buy Scoop by Evelyn Waugh because I feel I should read it and it is not too expensive.
The year I was born Jury’s Hotel on Dame Street sold the interior of their bar to a Zurich banker and there are not many Victorian era bars left in Dublin so I go to have a look at the one that got away. The James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse is a dull and cold place from without and inside bright and lavish. I push through the crowd of dull-cold looking bankers who might be elegant and lavish on the inside but who are still as soulless as this place and I go and have a drink in the train station beneath a 40-foot man with a coffee on his face.
On the train back I think about 40-foot men and why one and not another and about how myths do not explode but sag like soil settles hard on wormy truths. And I wonder on the epic of 80427 who adds up to 21 which is not exactly the number of return but on its way back around all the same. And getting off the train in Yverdon, with blankets of dark laid onto a plastic dream language every girl hanging around the station is a gilded fawn leg in booted disdain and I think Jesus. Why do they even publish Evelyn Waugh.
admin @ December 8, 2008