Ah yes, distractions. 

  There are so many distractions in our world today, to the point where it is very hard to distinguish the proverbial wheat from the chaff. Many commenters [on my YouTube videos] have taken me to task for minor errors, oversights, or mispronunciations. ‘Details’ I say to myself, but what about the underlying patterns I am aiming at? Do they come across? 

  Because for me and what goes on at the Omphalos Cafe Life is not about ideas, which of course we are all taught a great deal of from very early on in our lives, it is about patterns. Ideas are static and dead, whereas patterns attempt to capture the wonder and mystery of the Flow that is Life. 

  For instance, has anybody in academia ever drawn together the pattern of death and resurrection at the heart of both Ulysses and say Moby Dick? The same pattern that Miller writes of in his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, how he (the gestating artist) died to the values and customs of the world into which he was born (New York and Western Civilization) and ended up reborn into a new awareness and relationship with Life? 

  Not that I am aware of, and yet could that pattern possibly have some relevance or even importance to what we face today, with our ageing civilization and its increasingly rigid and hard line ways and beliefs? 

  Two Thousand years ago the Roman Empire was beginning its long decline and another message of death and resurrection took powerful hold in the hearts of a tired, downtrodden and hopeless folk, Christianity. 

  Now this is far from advocating a return to Christianity, because we cannot go backwards. I’m merely pointing to Living poetic patterns.    

  Anyway, I walk the streets of Montreal noting instances of this sort of thing, a breaking from the old time ways, magnificent churches everywhere but scarcely attended, and young people everywhere searching for a new relationship with themselves and society at large. Everything is being questioned; where are the answers to be found? 

  So that’s it. Today it’s not easy to talk, or perhaps sing about these things. People seem to want the comfort and security of static ideas, for they are easier to hold on to in our heads. The young pile into schools to be fed a steady diet of ideas and concepts, but do those ideological constructs truly capture what is going on? Are they enough, or is something profound left out of all the equations? Something vital and dynamic?

Life?

  It is stuff such as this which I strive to address in my videos, such as ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses And The Failure Of Our Academic System’, ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses, Awakening To The Wonder’, and ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses: Wake Up You Blockheads.’

  All the very best, Jeff