kidneys of wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.9 Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam1 thought of that, invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint.2 Isle of saints.3 You were awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo!4 Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: Naked women! What about that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no- one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies5 on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara.6 Pico della Mirandola7 like. Ay, very like a whale.8 When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted
the midst of a nightmare church service. he attempted to express, in the writing, the
9. Vessel in which the Host is kept. Stephen is moment at which 'the soul of the commonest imagining such a service, with himself officiating object . . . seems to us radiant.' Stephen's recollec( he almost became a priest). tion of early and exotic literary ambitions is drawn 1. William of Occam or Ockham ('Dan' means directly from Joyce's ambitions at the same age. 'master'), 14th-century English theologian, who 6. Cycle of change and recurrence, in Indian mysheld that the individual thing is the reality and its tical thought. It is connected in Stephen s mind name, the universal, an abstraction; he was con-with the constant ebb and flow of the sea by which cerned with hypostasis?the essential part of a he is walking. thing as distinct from its attributes. 7. 15th-century mystical philosopher; his Hepta2. A parody of the words of Drvden to his distant plus is a mystical account of the Creation, much relative Swift: 'Cousin, you will never make a influenced by Jewish cabalistic thought. poet.' 8. Polonius to Hamlet (Hamlet 3.2.351) with ref3. Ireland was called 'insula sanctorum' (isle of erence to the changing shape of a cloud. The Pro- saints) in the Middle Ages. tean theme of constant change, of ebb and flow, 4. Oh yes, certainly! (Italian). and of metempsychosis (i.e., transmigration of 5. Joyce s term for the prose poems he wrote as a souls: a major theme in Ulysses), is working in Steyoung man. An epiphany, he said, was the sudden phen's mind. The following sentence is a parody of 'revelation of the whatness of a thing'?of a ges-an elegant, condescending modern essay on Pico ture, a phrase, or a thought he had experienced; or some other early mystic.
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ULYSSES [PROTEUS] / 220 5
them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst.9 Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.1
?Qui vous a mis dans cette ficltue position?
?C'est le pigeon, Joseph.
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar Mac- Mahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.2
?C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en 1'existence
de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon pere.
?II croit?
?Mon pere} oui.
SchlussHe laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles.4 Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet,5 fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boid'Mich',61 used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi.7 You seem to have enjoyed yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes.
9. The atmosphere of the sandflats reminds Stephen of a desert island where people die of thirst. (The island of Pharos, where Menelaus found Proteus, was an 'island of dreadful hunger.') 1. The Pigeon House in Ringsend, an old structure built on a breakwater in Dublin Bay and which in the course of time has served a great variety of purposes, suggests to Stephen the Dove, which is the symbol of the Holy Spirit, and this in turn suggests an irreverent dialogue (supposedly between Joseph and Mary when Mary is found to be pregnant: 'Who has got you into this wretched condition?' 'It was the pigeon [i.e., the Holy Dove], Joseph'). This he had picked up in Paris from the blasphemous M. Leo Taxil, whose book La Vie de Jesus ('The Life of Jesus') is mentioned in the next paragraph. 2. Stephen had first met Leo Taxil through Patrice, the son of 'Kevin Egan of Paris,' who in real life was the exiled nationalist Joseph Casey. The phrase 'my father's a bird' comes from The Song of the Cheerful Jesus, a
