Manifesto

“If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”
Ulysses, James Joyce

With eyes wide shut, we stir our ships homeward. Sailing the murky waters of a brave, new world, we tread upon a past dim and distant until we find them—words marrow-deep, indelible, and abiding. To read James Joyce is to remember, to be, and to await. Grieve. Weave. Bequeath. To know that all we do is borrow; borrow time, borrow bones, borrow words. To strip until clad in verity. Committed to nurturing Joyce for whom he was, a truth-teller, it is incumbent upon us to seek out the equivocal primordium of the human experience. By our troth, we hereby pledge to seek out Joycean pillars in literature, transcending spatial and temporal boundaries of movements and epochs. The Non-Serviam Society endeavours to foster the love for the written word, mitigating its longevity in the twenty-first century. On an ostensibly dichotomous quest to make Joyce the Wordsmith and Joyce the Intellectual more accessible, the Society aims to educate by giving Joyce’s work a new shape through various forms of media and genres. It is through demystification, reimagination, research, and adaptation that we vow to honour the evergreen intellectual acumen Joyce left in his wake —for the future is but a palimpsest. It is a story rewritten from time immemorial. Thereupon we go, but we never truly leave. Joyce is the Anthropocene, forhe is here, among us, having never truly left.
Metempsychosis.
Grieve! Weave! Bequeath!
Intellectual imagination! Non serviam!