Ruby Penelope Ulysses # 22

Last chapter of both Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses; Penelope.

Double glassed beach reading.

Odysseus had returned to Ithaca and was recognized both by his swineherd and his faithful dog.
As he entered his castle he had to shuffle out lots of parasitic wooers, who sought to overtake his wife and his throne.
Penelope didn't recognize her long wayward husband at first. It was not until he could identify some secrets about the matrimonial bed, Penelope accepted Odysseus as her husband.

Leopold Bloom's wife Molly, is the Penelope of Ulysses.
We last left them in a narrow, squeaking bed in 7 Eccles Street.
Now it is revealed that Molly in fact did commit adultery with Boylan this very day. Bloom was aware of the fact, and had even helped arrange the situation.

The last chapter is one coherent text without punctuation or paragraphs.
We are let into Molly's head, a stream of thoughts vaulting out, like a barricaded flood let free.
At times, I must admit, I feel Joyce is belittling his wife. The language is vulgar and the detailed descriptions, even worse. No wonder the book landed directly on the feared Index list of the Catholic Church.
Even so, my sympathy is with Molly.
She's mourning over her dead son and is also worried about her young daughter. (The daughter of Nora and James Joyce was diagnosed with schizophrenia and their efforts to get her cured all failed.)

Molly (Nora) is a middle aged, fading singer, who now has to perform in faraway Belfast,- with young Boylan.
She's clinging to memories from her youth, being a celebrated belle at Gibraltar, (Galway, actually).
She has no hopes for a future with Boylan. She knows in her mind, her heart and will are set to stay with Bloom.
She remembers Poldy's proposal on June 16th 1904, now famous as Bloomsday all over the world.



"miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom" James Joyce



"he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th" James Joyce



"the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing" James Joyce


"coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa"James Joyce


"I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning" James Joyce


"they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons ", James Joyce


"yes he said I was a flower of the mountain" James Joyce

"the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets "James Joyce.



"then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." James Joyce

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Ithaca Ulysses # 21

Jaeren this week.

The chapter about both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus returning to 7 Eccles Street, the Ithaca of Dublin is called the chapter of questions and answers. Maybe because of the painful things Bloom presumed waiting for him at home, he searched for every way possible to distance him from the
real fact, and in all possible ways procrastinating the moment he had to face his fears. (Had Molly been unfaithful or not?)
The first 3/4 of the chapter, Bloom and Dedalus, (He and he), discuss everything under the sun in minutiae details. All actions are also described the same thorough way.
I wondered where have I read a book in similar style? A.A. Milne, (the Disney version doesn't count), and his stories of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh.
So this week I have been reading Joyce by daytime, (lots of words used in this chapter, which even giant Webster had trouble to explain, and I could not lie in bed with two tons of books beside me). Therefore A. A. Milne became my bed buddy, and the conversations between Piglet and Pooh as always gave me many good laughs and sweet sleep.
I did in fact look up to find out who of the two great authors inspired whom. Joyce won the price or race here too. Ulysses was published in 1923 and Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.

The little white chair from my childhood, my teddy, Serina's book.

While Bloom was making Dedalus cocoa they discussed every topic under the sun, in the universe, as a matter of the fact, macro and micro cosmos, religion, psychology, politics, agreements and disagreements. They laid plans for the future and by sunrise said goodbye. The only thing Bloom could not offer Dedalus, was a "shelter from the storm," a room for the homeless.
He had to literally face the music, find out what had been going on, while Molly and Boylan had been rehearsing for the upcoming concert.
Did he find evidence of foul play?
He did.
Even so he did not confront his wife, but laid down beside her, fearing that his enemy had been there just some hours earlier.
Why?

Yours truly seeking shelter, while reading Ulysses on a local beach. Shortly after, I fell asleep.


"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." James Joyce


If you double click some red attached to the divers foot.



This matchbox lay in the car Serina inherited after my dad. As the car was handed over to a cousin, Gunnar put the box over in our Land Rover. We were camping this week, and needed light. Gunnar fetched the box, and we suddenly met my dad again. One safety pin, one paper clip and some valve parts put there for emergency use. Ten years ago.

"What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump."James Joyce

Boat passing lighthouse at sundown

"He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.

---

As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived." James Joyce

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Eumaeus Ulysses #20

Female sailor making her way to Ithacan coasts

According to Homer the swineherd Eumaeus was the first person who met with Odysseus and his son Telemachus as they finally returned to Ithaca.

Jame Joyce let his two alter egos, Leopold Bloom and young Stephen Dedalus enter an old, somewhat dirty coffeehouse, after being saved out of the claws of Circe and her maids.
The inn keeper was said to be the once so famous Skin-the -Goat, a member of the invinsibles. The legendary gang who stood behind the successful and gruesome murders in the Phoenix Park.
They became heroes among the common Irishmen, but most of them were caught and hanged.


"They used knives. Knives are not an Irish weapon. Maybe they were Italian," Bloom wondered.


Dedalus is encouraged to drink some strong, obscure coffee brew to sober him up, and also try eating " a roll of something".
"Liquids I can eat,"Dedalus answers laconically. James Joyce

They soon also meet an old sailor who seeks their company to do what old sailors are best to. Overwhelming an audience with weird experiences and a
firmly timbered view of life, society and politics. The long months and years in crowded cabins at sea are the sailors finishing schools. Many never made it to the end though, kept floating among pubs in the brackish water close to the docks.

"His Eyes were thick with sleep and sea air." James Joyce

"Illfated Norwegian barque," James Joyce

For a long time the conversation takes up various Irish topics. The betrayal of the Church (esp. considered Parnell, who almost gathered enough voices for Home Rule for Ireland, but was garotted by his own, for having an affair with Mrs. O'Shea.One of the saddest moment in newer Irish history.) The exploitations of farmers, and for that sake Irish land, used for export and high income for English noble landowners. Shipwrecking of tallships (on the one cliff of the huge Galway Bay) to crave insurance, and loss of work places for the Irish.

Jews. "He took umbrage of something or other, that muchinjured, but on the whole eventempted person declared, I let slip. He called me a Jew and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts
in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a Jew too, And all his family, like me, though in reality, I am not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath." James Joyce
Norwegian tradition of barrel making for freighting of herring.Trade called cooper.

Both Joyce and Bloom are heavily influenced by their contemporary majors. Freud's and Darwin's ways of thinking are evidently coloring the conversation.
Joyce has many almost prophetic statements from his own bosom as well.
"Turks, it's the dogma. Because, if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die, they'd try to live better.At least so I think". James Joyce
A striking pendant to the suicide bombers of today.

A typical Penelope handicraft demonstrated.

With Stephen having nowhere to sleep. He was locked out of his tower, and gave his last money to a beggar, Bloom invited him home to the later famous house in 7 Eccles Street.
I presume next chapter will contain a meeting with Molly, Bloom's Penelope.

All pictures are made with my cellphone cam at the annual Harbor Days in Haugesund,

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Circe # 2 Ulysses #19

Outtake from the Underworld; Joyce's Nightworld.

"Stitch in my side. Why did I run?" James Joyce

"Are you looking for someone?. He is inside with his friends." James Joyce
"Bloom. He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on." James Joyce

The chapter "Circe"is written as a play.
Leopold Bloom is chasing his alter ego young Stephen Dedalus in and out of scenes in Dublin's Red Light District.
In various costumes and roles Mr. Bloom tries his best to save his young image from becoming himself.
A challenging task, which Leopold Bloom take upon whole hearted, and which he inevitably is bound to loose.

The quilt is made of ties. The artist named it "All my men."

"Marion. Go and see life. See the wide world."James Joyce

Likewise our hero is torn between the many tempting females, Martha, Zoe, Gerty, Mrs Breen, Bridie, a Millionairess, a Noblewoman, Mrs. Thornton, Kitty, The Veiled Sibyl and finally the mighty queen; Bella Cohen (with whom he in a burlesque hallucination changes sex). All the time he's preoccupied of the thoughts and doings of his wife Molly, who Stephen met this very day, June 16th, and who now probably is being unfaithful with the appalling Blazes Boylan.

He gave me a flower and told it was a rare species, picked high up in the mountains.

I showed it to a gardener, and he revealed, it was a common hothouse flower.

I know James Joyce has read Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt", even in original language. Peer has an equal surreal experience in Egypt, meeting the Sphinx, being robbed by beautiful Anitra in the desert, ending up at a Madhouse with people of various nations.
I think, maybe this has been kind of an inspiration to Joyce.
The chapter of Circe is ending in a tragedy. The fighting, but misunderstood Bloom,wearing all mankind's mischief on his weak and bursting shoulders,
meets his dead son Rudy once more.

The rooster crowing about betrayal

"(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.) James Joyce

BLOOM
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!" James Joyce
"In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket." (U15.4966) James Joyce

Underneath all the theater, drinking, womanizing, clown making, political issues, religious doubts, love and lust is the deep and unhealed sorrow for his dead son, Rudy. As was the case in Joyce's own life.
I keep thinking of my granddad, Gunnar's father and Terry's father. They all lost a child, and people keep saying, "the sorrow marked them for the rest of their life."
The Nordic skald, Egil Skallagrimsson comes to mind. He was a viking and served viking kings, making great poems about their victories on the battlefields.
Then he lost his son Bodvar, and his grief was so deep, he didn't want to live anymore. His daughter persuaded him to write a memory poem about his beloved son. Sonatorrek
has become unique in Nordic poetry, historic, praised and loved ever since.

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Circe Ulysses #17

Herring jazz, south quay end pub and regatta.



Intoxicated dreams of Marilyn Monroe.(The diva's father came from our town, ergo are we entitled to a statue of her honor.)



"(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans."James Joyce introducing chapter Circe.


According to Homer Circe was a woman with extraordinary power. She spellbound men, and then turned them into swine. Odysseus' men were captured and degraded this way, but the hero from Ithaca managed to force Circe to set them free.

Transcending to "the underworld"

During the festival anything can be bought. Bloom probably would have felt he needed a dream catcher.

Rabinowitz, "the man who loved Haugesund", was sent to extermination camp by the Nazis. He was a brave man, who fought racism with his pen in all the papers of Norway in the thirties. He also created a rather great clothing company, producing and selling manufacture and shoes. This wall ad has been seen on the quays since Rabinowitz was on the height of his power.

In Ulysses our antihero Leopold Bloom meets Circe in form of a brothel owner, Mrs Bella Cohen.
Bloom stumbles into the "night town", the red light district of Dublin, to save himself, young Stephen Dedalus, from the yarns of the prostitutes.

Bloom then find himself in a toxic, hallucinating world, where everything is turned upside down and anything impossible can and will happen.
In this state of body and mind he is tried for court for having sent obscene letters to the female noblewomen of Dublin. Great scandal, he's found guilty and sentenced to public flogging on his bare behind.
He is miraculously transferred into Ireland's next king with pomp and circumstance. Then suddenly persecuted as a traitor and condemned to "be hanged from his neck until he's dead".
Beautiful Zoe (meaning life) lets him in to her brothel, and so far our tormented friend is safe.

Needed these days; eye-contraceptives.

Boozing session.

Strange fruit; Jazz musicians from New York.

To find ruby pictures for this sequence, I had to transcribe reality. We have no brothels in our town. Buying sexual services is forbidden by law in Norway. To prevent trafficking and exploiting of the helpless this law was made about ten years ago. A strong woman's group stood behind this act of law.

A certain nightlife has grown forth in shade of so called "herring jazz festival".
It used to be a four day celebration with rather good and exotic trad jazz bands.
After 24 years, its content has changed. The quays have been filled up with several hundred meters of pubs, pouring alcohol over thousands of guests. The red, green and purple fluorescent lights along the sidewalk remind me of the term "red light district".
In the movable stalls one can buy anything a tourist may want.
Do I sound negative? Well, let me hurry to add that the waterfront of Haugesund is a most beautiful sight and place to be any time of the year. The armada of yachts and sailboats revives proud memories of this historic harbor.

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Oxen of the Sun. Ulysses # 16

Ireland 1982. James Joyce and yours truly at the National Gallery of Ireland.I tried my best, to connect. As you will see, he's an elusive guy, not easily caught.

Odysseus

"In Homer's The Odyssey, Odysseus is warned during his journey into Hades by the ghost of the Theban prophet TiresiasIthaca. If the Oxen of the Sun were harmed, Tiresias foretold the destruction of his ship and the loss of all his men. Circe also prophesied this fate. Upon reaching the island, OdysseusOdysseus'sHelios was so outraged that he threatened to bring the sun to Hades rather than Earth unless he had revenge upon the crew of Odysseus. Helios's will was immediately appeased and as a sign, the hides of the cattle began to crawl about and the meat began lowing like cows. For six days, the cattle were slaughtered, but on the seventh, the winds changed, and the fate of the crew was sealed." to leave these flocks unharmed if he wished to return home to ordered his men to avoid the island at all costs. His men overturned his rule and landed after each swore not to harm a single head of cattle or sheep. After a month of unfavorable winds and the exhaustion of all rations onboard, crew slaughtered some of the cattle while he slept. " Acknowledgments; Wikipedia.

The Odysseus of the 20th century, young Stephen Dedalus and mature Leopold Bloom meet at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin accompanied by Dedalus' old buddies from the tower.

They are all waiting for the earlier mentioned Mina Purefoy to give birth the a child. She has been in labor for three days.

This chapter is also at least three dimensional.
First and foremost it's a praise of life and of women giving birth to new lives. Joyce is all sweet, soft and realistic at the same time when he describing the strive and blessings of motherhood.

"It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured. Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves, their greatest doctors, the O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees, have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the relapsed found again health whether the malady had been trembling withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that allhardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.

To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the case was so having itself, parturient in vehicle the reward carrying desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her thereto to lie in, her term up."
James Joyce

My baby drinking warm coffee on a rather cold August day

The words of Joyce are reminding me of my favorite psalm 139:
"13 For Thou hast made my reins; Thou hast knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I will give thanks unto Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
wonderful are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
15 My frame was not hidden from Thee,
when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, and in Thy book they were all written
even the days that were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."

Our wonderful four hour hike on the beaches yesterday. Ittacha of Norway

Joyce is very upfront and personal, when talking about the excruciating pain by loss of his only son, Rudy.
The chapter is also a tribute to the English language. Joyce is joggling with quotations and styles from various authors, Dickens, Defoe, Bunyan, Shakespeare (as in every chapter), King James' Bible, Goldsmith, Malory and many more.
In a surreal scene old Bloom is trying to help and save his younger self, Dedalus. He's referring to them as Sir Leopold and Sir Stephen.
Furthermore Joyce is using Gaelic, German, French and even some Nordic languages. Blooms day is on a Thursday, meaning Thor's Day, the day of the Nordic thunder god.Late at night a thunderstorm is raging. Both young Stephen and Joyce himself were frightened of thunder.
These are but teasers and fragments, hoping to encourage more to read about the fabulous one day journey and lifetime of the modern wandering Jew and Irishman.

Ireland 1982. Posing outside a traditional Irish hut.
As usual, the pictures are made by me, except the ones where you can see me.

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today