Ulysses
Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?
The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality (white,
yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar): their degrees of brilliancy:
their magnitudes revealed up to and including the 7th: their positions:
the waggoner’s star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular
cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the
interdependent gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous
discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel,
Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of
distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite
compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive
and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin
of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the
birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric
showers about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, 10
August): the monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon
in her arms: the posited influence of celestial on human bodies: the
appearance of a star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating
by night and day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and
amalgamation in incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the
period of the birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent
neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude)
of similar origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and
disappeared from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about
the period of the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of
(presumably) similar origin which had (effectively or presumably)
appeared in and disappeared from the constellation of Andromeda about
the period of the birth of Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the
constellation of Auriga some years after the birth and death of Rudolph
Bloom, junior, and in and from other constellations some years before
or after the birth or death of other persons: the attendant phenomena
of eclipses, solar and lunar, from immersion to emersion, abatement of
wind, transit of shadow, taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of
nocturnal or crepuscular animals, persistence of infernal light,
obscurity of terrestrial waters, pallor of human beings.
His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and
allowing for possible error?
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not
a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the
known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the
suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and
of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in
space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as
a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present
existence.
Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?
Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the
delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection
invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the
satellite of their planet.
Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological
influences upon sublunary disasters?
It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the
nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to
verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the
sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.
What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and
woman?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian
generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her
luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and
setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced
invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to
inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent
waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to
render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil
inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant
implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm:
the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the
admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour,
when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom’s, who attracted Stephen’s,
gaze?
In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom’s) house the light of a
paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller
blind supplied by Frank O’Hara, window blind, curtain pole and
revolving shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street.
How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his
wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?
With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued
affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with
suggestion.
Both then were silent?
Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal
flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.
Were they indefinitely inactive?
At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen,
then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs
of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual
circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to
the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations
were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form
of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate
year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of
greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the
institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the
ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic
consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the
invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity,
reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pilosity.
To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus
circumcised (1 January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain
from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine
prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic
church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of
the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine
excrescences as hair and toenails.
What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?
A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament
from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the
Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.
How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal
departer?
By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an
unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and
turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its
staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and
revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.
How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?
Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its
base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and
forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.
What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of
their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?
The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the
bells in the church of Saint George.
What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?
By Stephen:
Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet.
Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus excipiat.
By Bloom:
Heigho, heigho,
Heigho, heigho.
Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day
at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south
to Glasnevin in the north?
Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in
bed), Ned Lambert (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed),
John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in
bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave).
Alone, what did Bloom hear?
The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth,
the double vibration of a jew’s harp in the resonant lane.
Alone, what did Bloom feel?
The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing
point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the
incipient intimations of proximate dawn.
Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind
him?
Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy
Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis,
Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin
Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart
(phthisis, Mater Misericordiae hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy,
Sandymount).
What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?
The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the
apparition of a new solar disk.
Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?
Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house
of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of
the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the
direction of Mizrach, the east.
He remembered the initial paraphenomena?
More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at
various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer,
the visible diffusion of the light of an invisible luminous body, the
first golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.
Did he remain?
With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering
the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed
the candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front
room, hallfloor, and reentered.
What suddenly arrested his ingress?
The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into
contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible
fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in
consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.
Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of
furniture.
A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite
the door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack (an
alteration which he had frequently intended to execute): the blue and
white checker inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the
door in the place vacated by the prune plush sofa: the walnut sideboard
(a projecting angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress) had
been moved from its position beside the door to a more advantageous but
more perilous position in front of the door: two chairs had been moved
from right and left of the ingleside to the position originally
occupied by the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.
Describe them.
One: a squat stuffed easychair, with stout arms extended and back