On his wise shoulder (Ulysses, 2. 30) through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
Stephen in his dread costume speared the ashplant forth in the gravel. White on black descending, through honeysuckle and groves of purple lilac, he was like a cherub dressed for death, going towards no uncertain morning. Half twelve at the Ship(U, 1. 19). But how to traverse space? My fate is lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities it has ousted. (U, 2. 21) In effect I have been prattling with Deasy for eternity, trading my soul for sovereigns, the servant of servants. His cold coins weigh in my pocket like a ransom. But he would like me to stay and teach the kiddies, a stony effigy in frozen music Spoken by J.J. O’Malloy in Stephen’s company at U, 7. 115.
That paranoid Deasy, poor patriot. He laughs at Jews and knows not of what he speaks. I suspect he suspects I suspect he is a right and virtuous man. But he reeks of the decay of empire. The Jews: we never let them in: rather play with ourselves. Incestland. Our flag is a paper curtain closed to opportunity. To the natives: welcome, you who are already here! Ireland expectsU, 1. 13. that every man this day will do his duty.
At the turn of the road off the Academy’s entry, Stephen continued downhill towards Sandymount. When a cloud passed at once across the sun, a shadow perforated the bright avenue and wind blew through lilac. Deasy with his belligerent cough hacks his way unknowingly to an obscure end: my mother’s too. Before death, no one knew her. Then a brief period of publicity, the infamous glow of the corpse wrapped up in newspaper elegy like a sunday fish, then no more. Death is the death of deathSee U, 2. 21. E.g. for Stephen’s solipsism and self-torment in respect to thinking. Cough, cough. Convulsive word. It grows in the lungs, pneumatic seat of the fire whose seed our stoicSee, e.g., the 3rd c. BC Stoic philosophical school and its belief in the divine allotment of reason in the form of a ‘breath’ or ‘seed of fire.’ father planted, and flowers in the throat. Bloom spray of phlegm. Now parched, withering. But what’s in the air? Disasters in the sun?Hamlet, I, i. Some musk, some wind I dread of ghostly intervention that capers after like a shadow skipping. Cloud: cough of a sick God.
Yet what do we know? No plague has a source, least of all the one eating away the family tree. I the uprooted. Yet plagues are kinds of patterns, tragedies for pathologists. If Buck were here he would inoculate the man Deasy, but tolerate him too. Trade joke for joke, to maintain the vascular flow of prejudice. It’s good for the blood: boil it. But it all flows like this fell wind rising along the road: Illness, races, people, parties, all ends as exodus and war, world without end. And I thought I was home again after so long gone in the lemony streetsU, 3. 35. of gay Paree. I could not escape. The plague precedes the panacea. The Theban See Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle miasma prowls like a panther around the city walls. There’s knocking at the gateMacbeth, V, i., nails on my doorknob, beating a drum, a curse. Out, damned spot!(ibid.)
But alas, there is no bed for me now. No palace, no threshold to bolster this grief. Everything intrudes: weave, weaver of the windU, 2. 21. The cloud has passed, I smell the trees. It fills the vacuum of space, to the brim and over. Mother’s scents too: wax and rosewood, the odor of wetted ashesU, 1. 9. as if she knew the world were slowly rotting, and left. Where to go? The sea! Unencompassed, thallasa thallasa Greek for ‘the sea, the sea!’, adapted from Xenophon’s Anabasis.. A great sweet motherU, 1. 5. Alas, she is there too, inescapable horizon of the known world. But still: in space. The wind is rising some strange perfume, a scent of lilac.
I smell the trees.
How do you do, sir?The chapter opens as Bloom is preparing to enter the bath. He sees Hornblower and imagines a conversation. (U. 5.557)
Well.
They say good is not the answer. Adverb, adjective, something.
One means that you are good and not evil. The other means that people draw water from you.
Broken water when Molly had manfully borne her painJoyce uses the adverb to describe childbirth at U. 14.1313.. Some eat the afterbirth, after birth. Pussens might well eat his own, didn’t feed him. And what will the world do with Paddy Dignam’s young when the worms had eaten Paddy Dignam?
What could the world do?
Maybe donate money.
Leopold Bloom had and would consumeA play on Ulysses‘s introduction to Bloom at 4.1. with relish the events of his day; not yet mourning, though dressed in such, not yet Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be—though at most times a foolA play on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in 1915. The question of who Ulysses sees as Hamlet is a compelling one.. Hamlet, throw off thy womanly griefA play on Hamlet 1.2.68, wherein Hamlet’s mother implores him to end his grief. Claudius will later call his grieving “unmanly” at 1.2.94. and sing no more love’s old sweet songAn earworm. This song was sung by Bloom at U 5.157-161.. But a bath must be the thing, would be the thing, could be the thing to rejuvenate the KingA play on Hamlet, 2.2.539-40. The play Hamlet references is called “The Mousetrap” and suggests several possible parallels here.. Pour the water in his earAgain, a Hamlet reference. Claudius murders King Hamlet by pouring poison in his ear. and Pallas AthenaAthena was said to have been born when she sprang from the forehead of Zeus. (“Athena”) pops out, passes over.
Like my doorjamb, painted in lamb’s bloodThe celebration of Passover was so named because the angel of Death passed over those who had marked their doorways with lamb’s blood during the tenth plague inflicted upon the Egyptians by God. (“Passover”). I wonder: how does He know lamb’s blood from other blood? Perhaps from the grass they eat or the fat? Clover. Fever of the hay. A languid flowerShortly hereafter used as a euphemism for Bloom’s penis. U. 5.572., roses. Perfume and must and that heady flower of woman. Choking, tearing perfume.
–My soap?
–No.
But are bees? Buzz. BuzzHamlet, 2.2.330..
Not roses: by any other nameA common mistake, Bloom inverts this statement—”a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”—from Romeo and Juliet 2.2.58.. Germanium. Germany. Lilith, fall of man. Lillian. Lilac.
Haven’t smelled since. That day at Mat Dillon’s.