Notes on Ulysses from the Temple of Shampoo

As you may remember from my previous post, I have purchased a cherry-red alarm clock - although not yet a watch. It falls apart if you look at it funny, but it chirps like a budgie on crack, which is what I'll need if I insist on getting up at 6am tomorrow - which I do.

While I was testing the alarm I read a chapter of Ulysses and the corresponding chapter of its companion. I now know that the alarm clock works when set 20 mins into the future, and that Leopold Bloom a potato has he. Whether the alarm clock actually wakes me at my desired time remains to be seen, but I have asked the desk clerk to come and bash on my door at 6.30, just in case.

Anyway, I was wandering the streets trying not to think about the fact that my hair really needed a wash: the many gymnastic contortions that would be required with my description-defying "shower"; the detangling of many knots; the slightly cheap feeling of being naked but for thongs; the necessity of sleeping with my wet hair splayed across a towel, resulting in unmanageable tangles upon arising.

Suddenly before me, like manna from heaven tarted up in neon lights, appeared a Beauty Salon. (I'm pretty sure this was the name of the place.) And glancing at the price (about US$3 for a wash, blow-dry and straighten), I figured that it was probably false economy to spend the evening swearing in the poky little bathroom when I could, for the price of a sandwich back home, be luxuriating in a nice, clean salon. After all, I'll just eat one less sandwich when I get home, and that should even it out.

So I walked in and then I was being detangled by an exceptionally thorough Vietnamese girl, and before I knew it, I was lying prostrate out the back, the cold jets of water trickling down my spine. It's actually rather stimulating to have your hair washed in cold water when the rest of your body is clothed and relaxed.

And as the beautician raked her acrylic nails across my scalp, I began to think of Leopold Bloom, and how the fragmented, lyrical prose of all of Joyce's work seems especially suited to travellers whose own thought processes may be equally fragmented, if not especially lyrical.

And as my hair was being enveloped in a fragrant, shampoo-y lather, came the line Mrs Dalloway decided she would buy the flowers herself into my head. And then I began to reflect on the similarities in Joyce's and Woolf's work - whether, as per a previous email, there were "masculine" and "feminine" sensibilities that could be invoked even when much the same style and language was being used. I began to ponder upon the necessary gendering of the omnipresent third person and the subtleties and nuances effecting these differences in prose.

As my hair was being gently conditioned, and combed with professional, acrylic fingers, my mind skipped to The Leopard, in which these two sensibilities happily co-exist, (and which is currently the book under discussion in a long-distance bookclub). And I thought about how these two sensibilities are inherent in us all, and that while Joyce (mainly) wrote men and Woolf (mainly) wrote women, this does not at all mean that either one could not as easily have written the opposite.

And as I floated over to the chair to have my hair blown dry and straightened, I realised something. So far, several people have suggested that my moments of fretfulness over the past few days have been the result of my natural tendancy to overthink things, and have suggested that rather than thinking about things, I just experience them*. But this dichotomy need not exist! It is perfectly possible to enjoy an hour's pampering and also think of Joyce! There is no diammetric opposition between thinking and feeling - they can live together happily. It's just a matter of finding the right balance - which, come to think of it, is advice I think I've heard before, in a breakfast cereal commercial. So from now on, I have decided to have my cake and eat it, too - have moments of pure sensory exhiliration, and moments of analytical bliss, but mostly try to walk the sanity-preserving tightrope between the two.

This is all bloody obvious, right?

And while we're being self-conscious and post-modern, I do realise that it is tremendously neo-colonial to go to an Asian country and have my every whims catered to by a pair of smiling locals. But my hair is shiny and it smells like flowers - and I don't care.

Tomorrow I'm taking a boat down the Mekong Delta, and I'm going to smell all the smells, and experience the humidity, and drink in the uniquely Asian quality of light, and I'm also going to think of James Joyce if I bloody well feel like it.

That's if my cherry-red alarm clock actually does wake me up.









*I realise that the example I'm using is not quite what you were talking about. But I think I will be fairly simple to apply this pseudo-revelation in practice, in regards to certain other things I may or may not have been overthinking. Ahem.