Thursday 8 January 2015

Tuesday, 6 January 2015, Pages 205 - 213, Lestrygonians, Episode 8

Read as far as "The harp that once did starve us all." (Gabler 8.907) (Penguin 213.11)

Bloom is still wandering along the Westmoreland Street. In the pages we read today, we enter his mind, follow his thoughts, his stream of consciousness. He does not meet anybody with whom he converses. But he sees lots, remembers many things - among them much about Irish history. So Bloom keeps challenging us as we follow his thoughts!

Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament (today's the Bank of Ireland) on his right, Bloom sees a flock of pigeons flying. He wonders on how they would pick on whom to do it on. For example, the fellow in black... That makes him recall his childhood friends, Upjohn and Owen Goldberg, who used to call him Mackerel (a slang word for a pimp or bawd.). We don't know why he was called thus.

At the crossing of Westmoreland and College streets, Bloom sees a squad of constables marching, coming after lunch from their station. Another squad is moving towards the station. Bloom thinks of the song, 'A Policeman's lot is not a happy one', replacing the 'not' with 'oft', thus changing the meaning of the song! On seeing the policemen, Bloom thinks, among other things, of the demonstration that took place on the day (18 December 1899) Joseph Chamberlain came to Dublin to receive an honorary degree at Trinity College (Gifford 8.423-24). Bloom had got himself swept along with the medicals. At least so he got to know young Dixon who had dressed his bee sting much later in the Mater Misericordiae Hospital. Now, years after that demonstration, Bloom thinks of those students who had participated as silly billies as surely later half of them would have become magistrates and civil servants, having given up their 'revolutionary' ideas.

Bloom thinks of how raw youths are made to become informers, using among others, housemaids, barmaids, tobaccoshopgirls to gather information. The one, who knew how to frustrate such spies, was James Stephen, the organizer of Irish Republican Brotherhood.

As all this history comes to Bloom's mind, his smile fades, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity's surly front. 
(Source: Trinity_College,_Dublin,_Ireland_(Front_Arch).jpg)
Bloom has suddenly become philosophical. Ah, how do words matter! Useless words. Things go on same, day after day. Police march. Trams move. Dignam is buried. Mina Purefoy is waiting to give birth. To yet another child. One born every second somewhere. All are washed in the blood of the lamb (recalling the phrase on the flyer he had been handed over at the beginning of his walk.)

Bloom catches the sight of John Howard Parnell, marshal of the City of Dublin, brother of Charles Stewart Parnell, passing by the window of Walter Sexton's shop, across the street from the Provost's house. So his thoughts move to city marshals, to both the Parnell brothers, to the election John Parnell lost to David Sheehy, etc. Just then, Bloom overhears a conversation (... of the towheaded octopus....) between a couple riding bicycles. The man in beard was A. E. (What does that mean?) aka George Russell. The woman could have been Lizzie Twigg. Bloom had thought of her earlier that day, when he passed the newspaper office. (He had placed an ad in the newspaper, and one of the answers he had received was by a Lizzie Twigg.) Bloom thinks of A.E.'s vegetarian habits, of Twigg's stockings that were loose over her ankles. 

By then Bloom has reached Nassau street corner, and stands before the window of Yeates and Son, opticians. Must he get his old glasses set right or find a suitable pair in the railway lost property office? He checks his eyesight by looking at the sun, thinks of sunspots, eclipses, and again of the timeball on the ballast office....

Bloom's thoughts - expanding - move on to what made the universe as it is, of its origin, of gas that became solid, then  world, then cold, ... of the moon. Thinking of the moon reminds Bloom of the full moon on the night when he walked down by the river Tolka with Molly, who was humming, The young May moon she's beaming, love. He recalls Boylan being on her other side and imagines their fingers touching in question and answer. But Bloom does not want to think more of Boylan. He tells himself, 'Stop. Stop. If it was it was.'