BLOOMSDAY!
THE SEA!
THE SEA!
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Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
– Buck Mulligan, in Chapter 1 of Ulysses
Notes:
“Algy” is a shorthand reference to Swinburne. “Epi oinopa ponton” is Greek for “the wine-dark sea,” a phrase used by, and thus here an allusion to, Homer in The Odyssey. “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The Sea!, The Sea!”), as Wikipedia concisely explains, is from a story by the Greek historian Xenophon, a contemporary of Socrates; it’s what was shouted by thousands of soldiers upon seeing the Black Sea after many days on land.
Swimmers at Forty Foot near Sandycove
Dublin Bay, Ireland
(near Martello Tower,
the location for the scene quoted above,
and where James Joyce swam regularly)
Associated Press photo, 2006
Dublin Bay, Ireland
(near Martello Tower,
the location for the scene quoted above,
and where James Joyce swam regularly)
Associated Press photo, 2006
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BLOOMSDAY!
BLOOMSDAY!
WATER!
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What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
– from Ulysses, Chapter 17
Note: A great prose-poem, embedded in the novel. Incredible vocabulary, epic reach. At least two wonderful poems patterned after Joyce’s have been published over the decades. In the late 1920s, American expatriate Harry Crosby published “Madman”, a prose poem which recounts the characteristics of the sun in a manner very similar to how Joyce in the passage above sets forth various qualities of water. In the late 1990s, Lisa Jarnot published “What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?”, a prose poem in which she recounts, with a more personal perspective than either Joyce or Crosby, but in the same serial manner, certain qualities of fire.
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BLOOMSDAY!
Ulysses!
Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922
(the first edition)
the events of the novel
take place
on
June 16, 1904
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BLOOMSDAY!
James Joyce
Paris: 1926 Photo by Berenice Abbott
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James Joyce
A Portrait by Constantin Brâncuşi
used as the frontispiece for
Tales Told of Shem and Shaun
(Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929)
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BLOOMSDAY!
Ulysses!
Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922
(the first edition)
the events of the novel
take place
on
June 16, 1904
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˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜
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BLOOMSDAY!
JAMES JOYCE!
Paris: 1926 Photo by Berenice Abbott
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James Joyce
A Portrait by Constantin Brâncuşi
used as the frontispiece for
Tales Told of Shem and Shaun
(Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929)
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BLOOMSDAY!
. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.
. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.
. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.
BLOOMSDAY!
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3 comments:
yes
I enjoyed this. Much.
I'm re-read Finnegan's Wake. It's a religious text of tremendous magnitude, and it keeps warping my semantic circuit to it's will.
Thanks Anonymous. Wake remains a great thing for me too. I'm lucky enough to have a recording of the book being read. The pace of teh reader is mostly too fast, but still, when a segment comes up on the iPod spin, it takes me away, and usually means I pull the book off the shelf yet again, to check some insane pun or run of words.
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