Skip to main content

Analecta 11 Sirens BLOOMSDAY AFTERTHOUGHTS



This year’s online Bloomsday seminar via Facebook was a global conversation in the privacy of our own screens. Each of the eighteen short films, released online by Bloomsday in Melbourne at the hour set for each episode, were treated as the ‘papers’ to prompt online discussion. Episode 11 included contributions by Steve Carey, Sian Cartwright, Carly Ellis, Frances Devlin Glass, Sabia Mac Aodha, Margaret Newman, and Carol O’Connor, whose initials appear where their thoughts are represented in these analecta.

In the beginning, or very soon after, there was a sound poem. We are still listening to the flow and fragment and feel of that sound poem. These particles of sentences and words and letters are but the compression of the sound poem into our present. We hear them in the city, in some crowded space, or anywhere like a woodland, an iso-bar, and can hardly believe our ears.

Joyce signals in unusual ways things that will be described more fully later. Buck’s send-up of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory early in the story heralds the complete exposition of the theory itself, later in the Library. Inexplicable noises that we meet at the start of the bar scene at the Great Ormond Hotel are found in their full context as the full scene unfolds. They are everywhere, expanding and fluttering through the windows. By the time of the brothel scene and then Molly’s monologue, this pointed connection of words and sounds works in retrospect, as we hear the connections again, but from a different vantage point and with changing tones and inflections.

The word ‘jingle’ is used in relation to Blazes Boylan earlier in the story. (FDG) We hear it in Molly’s bedroom scenes. It is one of a number of words in the novel that are carefully used to signal resonances in the reader and connections of meaning. The happy word ‘jingle’ connotes anything but happiness for Bloom at this juncture. Sad song for a ‘jingle’.

The refrain “Sweetheart, goodbye” picks up on Bloom’s fears of cuckoldry. (Sian) Song lyric turns that way. What was discovered in bloom as a delight may, by a simple turn of time, become cause for sorrow, the song now a reminder of that which is lost.

Every episode pushes the boundaries of readers’ expectations a bit more, but if we had to identify where push comes to shove, so to speak, it’s the Great Ormond Hotel. The author gives no signs, no explanations about what’s happening. It’s the point where Bloom is really starting to crack, but it’s the most musical (literally) of moments, full of music. Inexplicable, the sound poem opening must have surprised in 1922 and even today is both beautiful and somewhat formidable.

Bloom’s own response is the word music going around in his head, making him dizzy with love words and love of words. Oh, the language of love. (CO)

‘Flood of warm jamjam.’ Bloom’s nostalgic love, resistant. Bloom in musical prose and syncopation, with singing elements. He never lost for she’s not gone. Meanwhile, an engagement in hypnotic revelry, rich allusion, and comfort. (MN) Yes, he never lost for she’s not gone. His love proves resistant to the present predicament, the immediate sense of loss. For even now, Bloom is already moving circuitously homeward. Homeward still, for he never lost for she’s not gone.

‘He smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes.’ The senses pervade, they swap roles and act as servants for each other, alive in the verisimilitude that Joyce would have us know as the Great Ormond Hotel.
   
Musemathematics. At which point on any given page do we say there is more Joyce than Bloom in that sentence? One scoffs at the literary critic who calls Bloom uneducated. There sits Bloom, in a crowded bar, far from the rooms of isolation, musing on the connections between music and mathematics, even as he absorbs the narcotic known as music to soften his own pain. Uneducated, indeed.

Musemathematics. We ponder the connections between music and mathematics, even as we resign ourselves to being hopeless at both. They are both languages guided by patterns and rules. (Sian) Music is not just time and rhythm, but understanding that the possibilities are endless: infinity, imagination, an ever-expanding universe. (SMA)

Musemathematics. But then wonder how much is the recorded thoughts in plain English at work in his mind. How much the passing sign, the glimmer of what goes on in his mind, made temporarily visible by words alone on the page of the novel. How much is Joyce’s words of what Joyce wants us to think is Bloom is thinking amid the sensuality of the present.

Musicians: a cupboard of instruments and a mad sketchbook of video plans. (CE) Photographers: a space between and chosen angles that will revisit their undarkening room. Actors: a closet of use-by finery and a dialogue of loose-fitting closeness. Writers: a ghost of vocabulary and a whole landscape of incorruptible syllables. Sculptors: a backyard of unrefused refuse and an installation of volcanic innuendo. &c. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because of Florence. Many o
4 comments
Read more

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that deliberate
Post a Comment
Read more