Claaang.That sound hurts me. It’s a kind of punishment. Like a slap to the babe’s bottom. Out with you! It leaves me here like an orphan on the strand. But where is the mark to show my passage? No ticket, no birthmark, thrown into the wild. KantMore precisely, the child cries to express his freedom from constraint, and a loss of a home. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, I. iii. 7: 268. said that’s why the baby screams. Didn’t ask for all this. At a crossroads the son will meet his father, and there he will pay him back. But my father is already a hack.
The man in black at the party, whose extended palm revolted me, he was like a photographic negative dissolving. Insubstantial pageants fadedThe Tempest, IV, I.. Is it in the air somehow, with me? The body, res extensaDescartes’ famous definition of the body as an extended thing was opposed to the mind or ‘thinking thing’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Med. II., with a thousand arms and feet: and he wanted me to take a present. The world is too much with usTitle of a sonnet by William Wordsworth. to accept bribes for sticking around.
No.
Light of bells without future
at Clongowes like the ringing barges far at sea. Take me away from this Island of misfit fantasy, I implore you. That memory is unwelcome, it dropped me into the uncanny mausoleum: abandon all hope, ye who enter hereDante, Inferno III, vii: into the past’s inferno. It’s like the waves of the sea: all comes back to haunt you.
Non serviam Latin: “I shall not serve” uttered famously by Lucifer in the Vulgate: Jerimiah 2: 20, less famously by Stephen in Portrait.. Am I closer to Bloom now that I know his name?
Now Bloom has conquered the past I was forced to pass by. The wandering Jew whom we tax with avarice.Ulysses, 9. 169. is now a king in his castle. Yet he had to wait the longest. Nothing came to him by luck. It wasn’t by lottery she chose him but he was lucky nonetheless. The limping godHephaestus married Aphrodite and kissed the throat that sings. Bad luck to come, though. Buy some netsAphrodite, in an infamous affair, was caught in bed with Ares, a rival God, when Hephaestus built a snare to catch her in the deed.
Washed in the blood of the sea.
What is lilac but the body’s attraction to stained air? Purple-smelling. Scents passing through like drafts through mother’s boudoir. The enormous toilet where she burned rosewood incense: a room of mirrors. I can see her again at anytime, in a crackedUlysses 1, 6. reflection.
I am a thousand different Stephens. Like I told the police in Paris, Other fellow did it, other me.Ulysses, 3. 35. I was not there, I was there. J’accuse! This one has gone on living in filth, the other has remained in the garden, a clean-washed Adam without his Eve, without the bellybutton.
Stephen walked down to the wooden barrier between the tram course and the climb down rocks to the Strand. I hear the soft precision of the waves lapping. Clockclicks. Sounds awaken.
Which of you have done this?Macbeth, III. iv.
Claaang.And what did that boy mean by not taking the candy, anyway? Precocious, they call it. Talks like a grown boy. Not like the screaming of a babe, babbles. And this racket? Ah. Yes. Tramline now same as it was at Dillon’s: brriiing, brrrinnng, clang. Startles. Clears the head. Like hearing a noise in a dream but the noise is real. That is, the real noise is in your dream. Dream the noise of the real.
Back to it again, though.
—Molly, Mr. Bloom said to no one. She was like the sun on this beautiful day.
He saw in his mind her image. The long grace of her legs approaching the chair, the pleasure of her sitting. Breasts. He saw her body recline into that motion of repose. A terror, to be thrown back into this wild, where Molly was so distant from what was?
—Rudy, Mr. Bloom said to no one.
—Boylan, Mr. Bloom thought to no one and retreated.
Strange the sound those trams make. Is it mechanical, somehow? Hammer strikes inside, energy transferred. Some is sound, some is vibration. Light is energy, too. Black can grab it, though: absorbs. Refracts. Light strikes a photograph negative. Is its energy absorbed? No, energy is constant. Same light goes around and around forever. Must burn the plate somehow: chemical? Chemical sounds, in the future. Bells of light.
He saw Stephen as he was, who was not Simon of the ringing, nonmechanical voice. How much he had grown in those years, though strayed. Prideful. Though not, perhaps, without warrant. Heard he was the youngest ever at his school.
Something to make an ad of, maybe. Bright childCompare to U. 8.7310, Bloom’s idea for an ad with “smart girls” writing. reading hard book: make you think your child couldn’t. Want to prove it. Not that schools need the help.
Would he and Rudy have known each other? Might have helped to tutor him. Rudius Latinus Bloomus, Esqorum. Molly might be like a mother to him, now he’s lost his.
What energy powers memories, I wonder. Lilac, this one, but they come on you like water. Waves over and over and over. Sometimes hard to know what’s happened.
Boylan and that other word. Mr. Bloom longed for the cool enamel of the bath. The gentle words of cleansing: ego te absolvoLatin: I absolve you.. Poor Paddy. Poor Rudy. Poor Menton, even, sour chap. Poor tired, endless world.
Saying No with a claaaang in his well-sunned heart, he turned his face to the sun and smiled. From its paper pocket, the scent of lemon mingled in the lilac air. Pussens meowed, poets dreamed, and Bantam LyonsJust prior to Bloom entering this memory, he encounters Lyons, who mistakenly takes Bloom to be offering him racetrack advice at U. 5.541. bet on horses.