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"Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me." --James Joyce [Ellmann p163]

joyce in ulysses
was explicitly elevating
perfectly random everyday minutia
to the status of
universal immortal literature

every life
can be seen as art

even blogged or twittered*

(linkblogs should reward
such artists)

 
 
 
 
.

* eg [who's dancing] [what we dreamed]

[bottom post pending]

rather mysteriously
not to say sinisterly
joyce studies are in an
anti-meritocratic rut

ellmann's 'magisterial' biography
has errors on every page
and sytematically denigrates joyce

joyce's carefully designed
program of riddles
has been dismissed
as beneath scholarly notice

conjectures

trilogy tetralogy

epiphanies

Ulysses: settings clocktime

worldtree: PoA FW

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

given joyce's attachment to symmetry
a portrait/ulysses/wake trilogy
would have seemed lopsided

 _ _________ _________ .
 | | | | :
 |P| | |S:
 |o| | | :
 |r| Ulysses |Finnegans|S:
 |t| | Wake | :
 |r| | |A:
 |a| | | :
 |i| | |T:
 |t| | | :
 | | | |S:
 | | | | :
 ~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ .

unless he hoped to append
"something simple about the sea"

.

we know joyce determined in 1907
to rewrite 'stephen hero' as the prequel to ulysses
because he needed stephen dedalus
to reach the end of that book
in just the right shape
to serve as bloom's telemachus

and in fact
joyce couldn't finish 'portrait' in 1914
until he'd drafted the opening of ulysses
so the intervening gap would be minimal

(if scylla and charybdis really was conceived
as chapter two
and not relocated until after 'portrait'
had gone to press
that original plan may have left
discernible footprints
in the last chapters of the earlier book)

but if, now, finnegans wake
is really the key to ulysses
with bloom the dreaming everyman

then these three works
are a true trilogy

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

only two episodes of ulysses
take place entirely outdoors

proteus (3) and
nausikaa (13)

both on sandymount strand
one suggesting stephen wanks
the other portraying how bloom does

only one episode takes place
entirely indoors

penelope (18)
suggesting how molly wanks

the rest move between
in and outdoors

but all
surely significantly
end outdoors

except ithaca (17)

01-oooooooooiiiiiioooooo
02-iiiiiiiiiiio
03-oooooooooooooo
 
04-iiooooiiiiiiioiio
05-oiooooooiiiioio
06-iiiiiiiiiiiiioooiooooooooooo
07-oiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
08-ooooooooooooooooooioiiiiiiiioooo
 
09-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiio
10-oooioioiioiiioooiioooooooooooioooooo
 
11-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
12-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
13-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
14-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooiio
 
15-ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
 
16-ooooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooo
17-ooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
18-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
 
 
 
 
.

in designing
the riddles of ulysses
i think joyce relied on
a fiendish corollary
to conan doyle's 1890 dictum

only those who've studied ulysses
closely enough to eliminate the impossible
will dare to acknowledge
its improbable truths

so take the following
with a grain of saltpeter:

16 june 1904 was the historical date
of the general slocum disaster
termed in ulysses a beanfeast
at which 1021 attendees died in a fire

so when
on 10 march 1923
joyce drafted the first vignette of fw
dating it internally as
"after that same barbecue beanfeast was all over"
we may suspect we're still
at #7 eccles
with ROC = Bloom-the-dreamer
and Boylan and Stephen the "all of them gone"
and ROC's heeltapping perambulation
equated to Bloom's own
in the last half of Ithaca

but if ROC is Bloom
then Tristan and Isolde
can only be Bannon and Milly
putting Bloom's condom to use
the following day

so then
could Patrick's eventual socking
of Berkeley
be a hidden explanation
of Stephen's wounded hand
after the altercation with Mulligan
between Oxen and Circe?

Mulligan might naturally have told Stephen
about Milly and the condom
or about Bloom's gluepot

but could Stephen have been so offended
as to strike Mulligan in Bloom's defense?

and if Berkeley is Mulligan
and Patrick is Stephen
then is holy St Kevin
Stephen as well
rather than the awol-in-ulysses Stannie/Shaun?

.

"Gunther had shown up with a tall blonde beauty named Gretchen, who spoke no English or Spanish and only a few words in her native German, such as 'cocktail' and 'zigarette.'" ---Against the Day, p640

how long will it be
before they can make a wristwatch
that reads your brainwaves
and displays each word
you think or read or hear or say?

with a wireless link
back to a printer
that feeds out
a continuous paper tape

one inch every ten seconds
printing every word
in your stream of consciousness



thoughts in purple
speech in blue
heard words in green
reading in red

so one of Leopold Bloom's
hourlong internal monologs
would occupy thirty feet of tape

his full day and night
720 feet

now
consider all six billion earthlings
each generating 720 feet of tape per day

illiterates lacking any red printing
(reading-addicts heavily red)
recluses lacking green and blue
(garrulous people heavily blue)
and pynchon's gretchen mostly lacking purple
(shakespeare's cassius dangerously otherwise)

now flatten earth's surface
dymaxionwise


keeping it full-scale for once
and flip it sideways
so all 6,000,000,000 tapes
stream towards the left
all at the same six inches per minute
50 miles per year
1000 miles per generation
4000 miles per lifespan (earth's radius)

and if we could reconstruct the tapes
of generations past
inching all the way to the moon
5000 years ago
when written language (red) began

and ten times farther than the moon
for our genetic eve and adam
(the likely startingpoint
of complex bluegreen spoken language)

ten times more
(as close as venus comes)
for our divergence from neanderthals

and less than four times that
to the sun
and the likely conquest of fire
1.8 million years back
93 million miles of 'tape'

.

"...none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes
of a 'real' person
awaken in us
can be awakened except through
a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist
lay in his understanding that,
as the picture was the one essential element
in the complicated structure of our emotions,
so that simplification of it
which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple,
of 'real' people
would be a decided improvement.

A 'real' person,
profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only
through our senses,
that is to say, he remains opaque,
offers a dead weight
which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift.

If some misfortune comes to him,
it is only in one small section
of the complete idea we have of him
that we are capable of feeling any emotion;
indeed it is only in one small section
of the complete idea he has of himself
that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

The novelist's happy discovery
was to think of substituting
for those opaque sections,
impenetrable by the human spirit,
their equivalent in
immaterial sections,
things, that is,
which the spirit can assimilate to itself."

One of Pynchon's girlfriends praised this quality in his company-- everything they did together seemed transformed into a movie.

And Joyce's method, after extracting an epiphany from its arbitrary context, was to re-clothe it in a "decor ideal".

.

from a human-factors standpoint
when creating web graphics
it makes the best sense to fit them
to the average browser window

and similarly when visualising (eg)
the Tree of Life
it makes sense to scale the visualisation
down to the appropriate human scale

eg the whole worldmap
shrunk to the width of a notebook page

or the whole history of life
(3 billion years)
shrunk to the height
of a stack of books
(or a breadbox)

but more often
we'll need to zoom in
with both horizontal zoom
(for space)
and independently
vertical zoom (for time)

so we zoom in on our chosen time-span
until it fits the height of a breadbox
and on our chosen space-map
to fit the width of a notebook page

eg Leopold Bloom's wanderings
by foot, carriage, and tram
over the 16 hours of Ulysses
span two miles square



with most of the day spent standing
more-or-less still
(ie, a vertical line
on the Tree of Life)

and Bloom's walking speed
at this scale
by contrast
is quick enough to appear
almost horizontal

so here
and in general
human worldlines are normally
all right angles
lacking any obvious diagonals

(unless the topic
of the zoomed map
is the trip itself)

.

joyce revered dante's inferno
beyond all other art
for reasons i'm sorry to admit
i still can't entirely fathom

but dante at least invented
the genre of cruci-fiction
nailing his parochial enemies
to an eternity of earthly contempt

which surely appealed
to the youthful Stephen Dedalus
of silence-exile-and-cunning fame

but joyce also recognised from the first
that precision was a better revenge
than exaggeration

and by finnegans wake it seems
his ultimate target
has become himself
splayed and vivisected

incarnating all sins




in ulysses though
we face the test case
of gogarty/mulligan
still beloved of critics
for his exuberance

but likely doomed
eventually
like dante's nemeses
to cruci-fiction

once we resolve the riddle
of the midnight fistfight [notes]
and the morning rage [etext] [notes]

and i'm certain joyce
would have relished the prospect
of crucifying all the world's villains

mathematically
geometrically
on the Tree of Life

.

perhaps the most sinister trend
in the fiasco of 20thC social science
is the near-total disappearance
of the topic of will

wm james gave it a whole chapter in 1890
but more recently
the predominant characteristic
of college-educated liberals
is the weakness of their wills
as if
the sinister 'They'
can't abide
strongwilled liberals
preferring bloodless eunuchs
like Chomsky or Nader

and marginalising anyone who manifests
a streak of Blake
(or Christ his Tyger)
as emotionally unstable
tying gentilepeople in knots
of guilt over Original Sin

while Their secret societies'
satanic initiations
require ritual shedding of
guilt and conscience

a process mirrored more graciously
but slowly
for the deeply spiritual
as karma-burning

(joyce had miraculously mostly achieved this
by 1904
but silently, cunningly
exiled it into his work

with an occasional attested oral slip
systematically marginalised by Ellmann
as emotional instability)




but how strange
that our nervous systems
so easily hand themselves over
to others' wills

how unfamiliar
the physiology of mind-wrestling [broken link there]
as we strain to resist
Their persuasive evil

what might it look like
in an nmri scan?

the most elegant design
ought to employ
one of the two available brain hemispheres
jungianly
as acting-agent-of-the-Other

but i think too
the muscles of the will
must be mainly in the face
especially around the eyelids
showing worry and strain

(wilhelm reich taught an exercise
for breaking down
character armor
involving slow alert 360-degree
rolling of the eyes)

pick an opinion
on the yahoo zodiac
and color green
all statements that agree
with that opinion
red those that disagree
yellow if they're mixed

when the opinions vary
along a dimension of liberal/conservative
make the liberal pole green
the conservative red

now consider an individual lifeline
on the Tree of Life
stereotypically green in youth
redder with age

different issues are first addressed
at different ages
(joyce illustrates this in 'portrait')

and in youth
(or youthful maturity)
various different opinions
may be experimentally adopted

extraordinary intelligence
may discover a deeper pattern
that switches conditionally
between green and red




now zoom out to the branch's immediate family
and its community
and track the patterns
of conformity vs rebellion

contrarianism for its own sake

alternation of generations

then zoom out spatially
to see the community's
unity or diversity
vs its neighbors
(wars normally fought across boundaries)

and whether opinions are evenly balanced

and whether the minority is
clustered or dispersed

out to the geographic antipodes
where the given issue may or may not
even be of any interest

and zoom back chronologically
to see how opinions evolved
from ignorance

or whether they've polarised artificially
only in this epoch of inauthenticity

note largescale cycles
between liberal and conservative

opinions that have gone extinct

wars of conquest that convert
opinions en masse

"Kidneys were in his mind..." --James Joyce

ever since Herophilus (300BC)
anatomists have speculated
on the location in the brain
of specific patterns of thought

with nmri scans now able
to objectively pinpoint
increased activity

but i'm skeptical how far we can get
in unifying this nmri data
without first introspecting
a general model of thinking




that such introspection
is the domain of novelists
is illustrated best by Joyce's Ulysses
where every sentence
in Bloom's stream-of-consciousness
represents an explicit joycean hypothesis
about how thoughts evolve

for example
cartoonists regularly parody brainmaps [eg]
by offering diagrams
of how some celebrity
or some class of persons
allocate brain regions
to characteristic topics

so we could tally
what percentage of Bloom's thoughts
concern his past vs his future
his business vs his family
science vs art
Molly vs Martha




but the idea of the yahoo zodiac
is to challenge the AI community
to exercise their novelist's imagination

by mapping out
introspectively
the sets of concepts required
for any sort of thought

so with Bloom's kidneys
we can imagine mapping
all Bloom's favorite foods
vs an average Dubliner's
or all Bloom's favorite activities
ditto

and we might envision
tracing those differences
backwards
down Bloom's biographical 'branch'
on the Tree of Life
to their (possibly freudian) origins

and in the same way
draw concept-maps
for each of Bloom's 10,000 explicit thoughts

and from this beginning
eventually gain a purchase
on the unification
of those nmri brainmaps

the constructions
'had an epiphany' [350k hits]
or 'experienced an epiphany' [25k hits]
occur nowhere in joyce

because for joyce
it wasn't about
discovering something new

it was about
expressing one's true nature

so i find epiphanies
in flickrpix
not when the subject
is somehow wising up

but when they're
showing
their
selves

[more]

this new zodiac
differs from the old
'radial ontologies'
in that
the zodiac's 'stars'
are words and
strings of words

where the ontology postulated
ill-defined story-fragments

but they should map closely




now since every internet community
has its own favorite turns of phrase
they should each have a predominant 'sign'
on the zodiac



and someday no doubt
Google Trends
along with mapping places and times
of searches
will list the web communities
(slashdot, imdb, rigorous intuition)
that use each phrase
most often

if joyce was right
then every story on our
radial ontology
should be part of a yin-yang cycle
with a distinct natural rhythm

each healthy storyrhythm
jamming improvisatorially
with all the others

with the most extreme cycle
the saga of a hero's
trespass and fall

wrenching apart his city
his civilisation collapsing

eventually reborn
like daisies on a battlefield

and the hero's hesitancy
before this dreadful fate
producing a
[catch]
in the great rhythms

a hesitant nation of meditators
tuning in
to the rhythm of their breathing

listening for the [catch]
in the improv jam

way back when, we painted
a white stripe on each human branch
each time its human
spoke a word

and we saw those stripes
in small groups
synchronise
when people chanted or sang together

or alternate, in batches
when they conversed

and we saw poetry
badly recited
forming uniform stripes

as the rhythms of network newsreaders
follow a limited set of patterns

or someone reading aloud

or the inner voice
of the narrator
as we silently read a novel

but when a good novelist writes dialog
a much broader set of rhythms can be used
to capture their mood
and reveal their character

(Joyce is the champ for this

George V Higgins gets an honorable mention)




now if we consider the cylinder
(or cone)
traced by a branch's radial ontology

with lit stars
when ontology-categories
are being actively
incarnated
as lifestories

we may view that life
as a novel
with stars implying
an almost-infinite
cascade of words

out of which
the novelist/biographer
chooses a finite subset

that can represent
all the important themes

not omitting, one hopes
words in rhythmic patterns

capturing the character's voice

the blue stars
of facts denied
often trace unbroken
lifelong lines

especially
for our culture
in the realm of sexual curiosity
the original sin of Eve & Adam

with a mysterious historical shift
introducing this inauthenticity
some time since the bonobos

and with each newborn human
trained anew
to restrain their sexuality

Freud's unconscious
or Jung's shadow (see esp Bly)

while the rare battles of artists
to free themselves
normally end in poverty
and persecution

with persecution-events
escalating in intensity
exactly as efforts to become free
intensify

persecutions uncaused
or self-caused

or indeed perhaps
caused by a
conspiracy of initiates
who have wilfully
desecrated those taboos
to win
occult power
over men

(Joyce on Gogarty: "he seems
to have little hesitation
in condemning generations
to servitude")