The first mention we have of Scylla and Charybdis is in the story of Jason, a thousand years before Odysseus.

There were two great whirlpools in ancient days.  One with the Wandering Rocks, at the Northern extremity of the Hellespont, the entry into the Black Sea; and tested by Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, this at Colchis, thought to have been at the delta of the Danube.  Here was the terrible Charybdis; opposite the Wandering Rocks.

Troy, fought over, destroyed and rebuilt at least six times at the southern end of the Hellespont, this because command of that furious waterway was a rich source of spoil and tax for those who so commanded the strait.

On his still remembered voyage Jason chose to risk the passage through the Wandering Rocks.  Scylla and Charybdis the alternative route. The city of Istanbul now commands the entrance to the Black Sea; the City was founded by the Greek colonists as Byzantium about 630BC, captured by the Romans about 330AD and renamed Constanthople; it was taken by the Turks, renamed Istanbul in 1403.

Homer gives Odysseus the choices.  He chose the Charybdis, the Vortex and lost only six men.  But the vortex he chose surely lay between the sea jutting capes of Sicily and the toe of Italy, far indeed from the entry into the Black Sea.  Here are no Wandering Rocks; As Odysseus made the passage on his release from Calypso, Homer makes no mention of these rocks.  It is from these Southern waters that Odysseus was washed ashore at Phaecea, rescued by Nausicaa, hosted by her father, and granted sea passage.

'Just a swift trip through the night', and he is, after ten years of fated conflict with Poseidon, home, on Ithica.

It may be thought that the expression 'Even Homer nods' arose from this particular episode for it seems, that in coupling Odysseus with the Wandering Rocks, though only in a couple of lines, that Homer was lost; for a few moments, thinking as he wrote, of Jason and his adventure in that far Northern Sea; There is no doubt that Odysseus sailed South, as did all the others, when they left the beaches at Troy; and no doubt at all that it was but, just a swift trip through the night to Ithica, this his last voyage.  Thus home.
 

Such a swift trip there the night quite impossible from the northern terrors. Phaeacia itself, and Alcinous, are interesting in that it was but a small island, so far removed from the Aegean, that Alcinous was not required to send a contingent to Troy. This a tiny and isolated kingdom, but famed for its skilled seamen.

We should be aware, that the tides were much higher in Jason’s day. For the land mass about Turkey and around Great Sea have been abruptly rising for millennia; witness the terrible earthquakes which so often devastate the area; several recent, and the very extreme areas of low lying lands around the edges of the sea.  In Homer's day the sea covered these lands. This uprising of the land evident throughout most of the Mediterranean.

The Bosphorus is all that remains of the once open seaway between these two inland seas; scores of once busy ports throughout the Mediterranean now useless; and no Scylla, no Charybdis, and no Wandering Rocks.

At Thermopalye, scene of the Spartans heroic stand, the sea is now a hundred yards from the fatal road from which hundreds of Persian soldiers were hurled into the water. Athens likewise, now far from the sea.   Both Marama and the Black Sea much smaller than in Homer's day. 
 

So don’t be too discouraged; in the thirties it was a small claim to fame that you had read Ulysses; today, few know it; as from the beginning, it is a book for the intelligentsia.

This present look at Ulysses, as seen through the glass of 80 years of reading, is addressed to the Reasonable Man, as defined in the Law Courts; in the thirties those same Law Courts supported the censors, forbidding public access.

Copies circulated in Australia, despite the ban extending in an undefined way until the sixties: I imagine most of the old Sydney Push read it during the thirties; my copy was loaned and in strong demand.

The Reasonable Man must, in the twenty first century still fight his way through the twisted usages of our beautiful English language, become infuriated with fractured word processes; with the infernal paragraphs of internal monologue.

It is a shock to realise that the next four hundred; three hundred; two hundred; one hundred pages are going to be the same; the same; the same! Even the exotic erotica of Bella Cohen’s brothel does little to lessen the sheer task of reading the damn thing. Little wonder that the censors were angry!  So much to plough thru; so little porn.

Understanding as to why the work has become a literary cult; why the University dons have had a field day with it; every enigma become a fit subject for analysis, is a problem. Perhaps the thousand books that have been written about him, his family, his books, letters, and his literary ephemera, is the answer; it is a book written for the dons; some claim for the Americans.

One should note at this point that Finnegans Wake though less comprehensible, a more enigmatic, darker and deeper venture into the subconscious psyche, is probably the better story of life; but of life after day; an uneasy, restless night.
 

Father Conmee is proceeding south along North Circular Road; Mr. Deasy is moving north along the same road, they pause, in passing, the one by the other, on their parallel but opposite ways. 
 

Later, that evening, Mr. Deasy retires; well satisfied with young Dignam, content in the knowledge that his wage will be well spent.

Stephen, far from retiring, still in drunken revelry. Father Conmee, reflecting on his day long pilgrimage, well aware of the activities of his flock, mused a little on the many lives he has touched this day; wondered yet again how long before all men achieve salvation; dimly aware of Africa and India and America and a thousand other places yet to open eyes and hearts to the Word. Wondered yet again that the Work might indeed demand a thousand years, such is the condition of the human race; thought dimly, in the hallway of sleep, that faith indeed is the only hope of mankind; slipped as wanted into prayer, from the obligatory into contemplation without words; then moments of blissful union with the shadowy unity which enfolds us all, and so to sleep; a good man.
 

His biographies are easier, more pleasurable, more interesting to read than Ulysses. Yet Ulysses may well be read as an extension of  ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ as a young man.

Now a mature man looking at that day from a distance, but without the rather florid artistry of  'The Portrait'.

That backward glance is made through eyes that have seen too much of life; the early smokes and glow of hellfire have been extinguished, but the ash, the smoked walls remain; the toxins of dire poverty; his mothers wretched life and death still bitter in his soul; and the most savage blow perhaps, his father, his pension in his pocket, no longer caring for the dying mother, the starving sisters, for as a child, he loved his father.

Yet Joyce, well knowing their plight, for they are several times mentioned in Ulysses, followed the old mans steps, and visiting the hovel then their home, kept his hand in his pocket.

How could he ever forget that the day of Simon Dedalus and his son Stephen, is that of James Joyce and old hard hearted John Joyce? Father Conmee, if ever he read Ulysses, would have had no trouble in tracing out the relativities.

It is the terrible story of the Fathers folly being vested in the Son, to be relived yet again in an infinity of wasted life; to be the subject of a great novel; yet another version of Homer's Odyssey, a version compounded of the faults and weakness, as well as the great talent of the Author. 
 

Ask any writer. It just happens. The same with our muses. Where do they come from? What music, what magic will we be listening to in another four thousand years? Have we heard all that is possible? Read all possible combinations of our twenty-six letters? The seven magic notes? Hard to imagine the wonders yet to be revealed. Please God, some relief from the Wars.

Our years are but few on the evolutionary path; our consciousness still emergent; we cannot know the wonders or the ills of our future. What may the human mind accomplish when that pagan animal resident in the old brain is finally subdued? How long Oh Lord, how long?
 

The sense of consciousness, that momentary overpowering sense of unity; John Donne flooded his poetry with it - Mr W S showed a hundred flashes of it. Mr GBS wrote extensively of it. Mr J.A.J. spoke of it in a wealth of epiphanies; to him it seems all that Dublin was aglow with it; Tolstoy and Ibsen and Blake and Swedenborg and Wordsworth and Swinburne and the Romantics and a thousand others - All of us sense it - All artists know that, whatever the words, those words are utterly unable to express the surge, the depth, the vital intensity of spirit flowing in the creative mind.

The emotion we call love is our richest experience of it. Every true coupling gives us a dazzling vision of it; the stronger the human consciousness, the richer, the fuller, the most compelling the life. The most demanding power of it in our lives; and in many such brilliant minds, is the clear understanding that the life evolving on this most unique and beautiful planet is ever concerned with the further growth and development of that consciousness; for it is the manifestation of the spirit.

That so many sense life as sexuality is no surprise. We find in our sexuality a richness only rarely experienced elsewhere. That 'elsewhere' is that excellence in action, in performance which is a sublimation of sexuality; this is the excellence we exalt in ballet; in all our sports - athletics - in our arts and science, but in these days of fresh invention, in a material sence physically and mentally. When there is no such empathy between us, the fire is scarcely possible, and if demanded, is cold; as the gamekeeper said to Lady Chatterley, "You’re not with it today.” 
 

The profligate use of words destroys the profundity of: too many words, blunts the keen edge of perception.

Thomas of Ockham, way back in the 13th century knew this well; he devised a rule to simplify the intricacies of the current style of debate. Saying (in Latin); “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity,” or as reduced by his own rule “Keep it simple.” So we now, some of us, apply Ockham’s Razor to our work, having also in mind Kipling’s, “Boil it down!”

The rule is paramount in 'good' writing. Editors have it ever in mind.

Joyce may or possibly did not know this as a rule, placing a good deal of trust in his own belief that 'genius is always right'. However the principle is the marker between 'prose' and 'literature'.

He knew intimately the nuances of every style in the writing of English, used such, drawn from a thousand years of literature in Ulysses; Knew the power of the concise paragraph, the pointed sentence, the barbed phrase, the happy allusion, the elusive epigram, the brevity of wit, the dozen other little tricks of the writer, and of English grammar. To hold the attention of the reader, never a problem! Except for those paragraphs, the miles of internal monologue.

But he chose to destroy the keen edge of his perception, to blunt the power of the taut phrase; to confuse the understanding, to strain every level of acceptance, social and literary, and to impose on his readers, yet more words. To compound this profligate literary romp, to fling 'Finnegans Wake' at us with neither index, glossary, or translation of foreign tags phrases or paragraphs, bons mots, in languages known and unknown, mythologies, and other abstruse and arcane knowledge garnered from the textbooks of the world.

And yet again Why? 

The text conveys something of an answer. ‘It’s all flummary, I calls it...’

There are many such self-critical references. Search them out, consider the context in which they appear; form your own conclusions. Charles Dickens wrote on poverty and the miseries of the poor with such clarity and power as to arouse the active sympathy of a nation, Ulysses still read in the Universities. 

One can but wonder what Joyce had, deep and purposeful in mind. It is difficult to glimpse. There is power of conviction in Ulysses, but such defies understanding without careful restructuring; the social comment buried in his technique, well beyond reach of the reasonable man.
 

So we use the intellect as a tool; use it for purposes dictated by some other part of us.

Spirit some say; soul say others; its just primal energy say others; nous, said Teilhard de Chardin: GBS called it the Life Force; he may have simply said life.

But whatever the name it is that within us, 'closer than breathing, closer than hands or feet', which uses the intellect for its own purposes, as it uses the body.

Catholic or Protestant, Brahmin or Muslim, Atheist or Agnostic don’t give a damn or intense believer, in all of us, it is that, the ‘I AM’ which calls the tune; plays the game, lives the life.
 

It can lead the eye and the mind thru the labyrinth of the Wake;  listen, attentive to the ninth symphony; follow the melody, enjoy the variations; accept the dissonances.  We accept the beautiful symmetry and colour of the Last Supper; look with complete satisfaction on the colours of Turner, the ineffable look upon the face of the Mona Lisa; all this, and remain the lone entity, the I am; inviolate, the self.

The mathematician takes a simple statement such as 'xⁿ + yⁿ = z^n'  has no integral solutions for z greater than 2! 

This simplicity has enormous potential; the proof challenging many of the best minds of four centuries.

We do the same with language; Joyce offers us.  Ulysses and the Wake; they demand time, exposition, concentration, investigation; they challenge our conventions, literary and social.  But put the book down, and the day returns, the sun is warm, the birds cheerful, the flowers as sweet; traffic on the road below the same. 

Few books, little music, less art, touch the human spirit to change; this the work of Life, and she has no bondage to time.

This is as it must be, for we have perhaps one hundred million years of maturing growth in that consciousness before us.  We will discover a new mathematics, a new vocabulary, new and entirely sharper senses; we will be different, either a little closer to the angels, or giving Belial a taste of something terrible, and strangely that consciousness which animates the bag of bones is such, that we are able now, so soon after we come down from the trees, able to, should we wish, to direct the victor of evolution to somewhat of our own ends.

Surely on this road we will make mistakes – terrible mistakes such as the man Hitler made; and let us not forget that even a good man such as Churchill made some terrible mistakes.

But at the end of that long road we may well find ourselves, not just a primal pair, but the billions of us, back in the garden; this beautiful world terra formed, and we will unite in the judgement, ‘that this is good’.
 

Another little treasure. This from one of the great American magazines, 'The Ladies Home Journal', a gleaning from the fabulous sixties.

The writer, Katherine Anne Porter had the honour of a Pulitzer Prize for her collected short stories, still splendid reading.

This particular gem was entitled, 'A little incident on Le Rue L’Odeon'. She writes of No. 12; of Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, which had been closed since the German occupation.

Sylvia had refused to sell her personal copy of ‘Ulysses’ to a German officer, and well aware of the possible consequences; for the Germans were ruthless as they were rapacious, immediately stripped the shop and went into hiding.

In the 60s when Katherine was there, the shop was still empty, but Sylvia’s flat above the shop, was as she left it, her personal belongings preserved; a strong sense of the dynamic creature she was, the good companion to many.

Sylvia Beach wrote her own memoirs, interesting and essential for serious study of Joyce.

They tell us much of Joyce the hard businessman, the cold friend, the friendship cooling on his part as time passed; almost habitual with him, and more of the impecunious writer.

Katherine offered much in her observations on the Paris expatriate group; Joyce, Hemingway, Ford, Scott-Fitzgerald, Williams, and others, many of whom never made it into the Halls of Fame, yet found their way to Sylvia Beach, her ever willing encouragement and help.
 

We are connected in a mysterious way with our ancient past by our thought processes, merged deep in our subconscious; one section of the brain still alive in its animal life. This is a tool, and a splendid tool, we use to convert observation and sensory impression into experience, into learning, and into action appropriate to the circumstance.

In our very early years, we moved into instant reaction to some life-threatening incident. In more modern situations, in a society which protects us from mammoth bears, sabre tooth tigers and Goth Vandal and the dreaded Viking, our deep reactions to the events of the day are more mundane.

Deep thought tends to be directed toward specific purposes, the speciation of selected study; the daily round in ordered society stimulating thought to fuel creative effort: even our more lively intelligences tend to be strongly conditioned by the protracted schooling we insist upon, thus modifying our instinctive reactions.

Our brightest are conditioned from Kindergarten to post Graduate University - twenty plus years of structured learning before ever meeting a sabre toothed tiger in its modern guise.

The process has been productive, creating a stable society, and that most marvellous creation we call Western civilisation.

The underlying miracle is, that all is the product of the deep hidden mind of humanity, its male strength moderated by its female intuition, and hey presto; yet another wonder, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, an Einstein, and today, Harry Potter. Whatever happened to the world? The computer will enable us to unlock yet more miracles, the chip and its children even more.

But do not overlook the work of our hands.

The computer, the net and the Web, man in space, the medical wizards; the administrators who knit all together; the engineers who give us the car and the roads, these wonderful interchanges. Beware there are other aspects, the flamethrower, the land mine, the firestorm.

There are occasions when moral questions arise in the mind, the internal advice is felt as the emotion we call 'conscience'. When our early training is steeped in religious teaching, that inner decision is so often heard as 'The voice of God'.

Thus the terrible experience of the schizophrenic sufferer, and War, the terrible sickness of the human mind.
 

These effects from early experience can be traced in the philosophy of the ages. I think of poor Keirkegaard, unable to escape, despite his intelligence, from the influence of his father, his fathers God.

Gratefully, we moderns, in general, are rarely subject to such constraints. We are subject, almost daily, to new ideas, new inventions, new opportunities, new challenges, new advertisements, new calamities; and our philosophers, our thinkers, our writers, yes, even our priests are ever evaluating these new experiences with a resultant flow of new books, philosophies, and the New World thought which, like it or not, is touching our lives.

There are other influences. Many years ago a wise old Hebrew noted among other memorable events of his time, “Now, there is nothing will be restrained of them which they imagine to do!” Good or evil, as Hitler demonstrated to us. This choice of good or evil ever the personal choice. 
 

The deep subconscious demands direction and purpose for its best performance. Keirkegaard was yet another writer fated with publishers claims of genius. His long discussions on free will, our beautiful, dangerous privilege of choice, is branded and confined by the God: of his day. He seems innocent of the new society emerging around him, and eventually, all attempts to resolve the problems besetting him, are turned back into the old channels. What of the new to be evaluated before we incorporate it into the permanent structure of society? What direction should we move into with our new powers? This last a pressing question for Australia. President Bush, new to his power; bows immediately to the pressures of his warlords or perhaps it is he leads them.

“We shall spend trillions on Star Wars.”

With a flick of the tongue he creates 'Rogue states', and a new 'enemy', either ignorant of or uncaring of the vast social problems at home; Washington, and the others, surely stirring restless in their graves. I remember the words of another great American, “It is better to have friends than enemies.” Thankfully, the rest of the world noted with pleased surprise, the Chinese appeared more amused at his antics then impressed. “Let him waste his trillions.” This Australian, for one, expected and expects better than that from America. 

As Joyce might have asked, “How world tingling is your imaginationings?”
 

This paragraph written on Bloomsday June 16, 1999. A Wednesday, Wodens Day.

He said, “Wailsday.” 

It is, here in the South, early winter; a time for delight. Our dry season, for we are semi-tropical, and the rains come in the summer; the wind but a gentle breeze, the nights still and cool. Birds on the wing, and in the early evening, the great gathering to the nights roosting trees. Some fly in forty-fifty kilometres from their regular feeding grounds and fly back again in the morning, for they choose an area for the feedlot, farm it in a systematic manner; and protect it from intruders; boundaries may not be fences, but they are clearly understood. 

I have watched crows, formidable aggressors, hunted from the territory within my view by parakeets, loud in their anger: once, watched, about forty of these jewelled creatures, alive in flashing crimson and green, yellow and blue, raucous in anger, defending a nest of tiny chicks against a predatory crow.

This morning I am listening to Margaret Throsby, on A.B.C. talking with Graham Henderson; a song of his choice - the lovely Celtic 'Macushla', the essence of the relationship the feeling; the flow; between man and woman touched by love.

It made me, writing about Joyce and his Ulysses, feel angry. For a moment, at the dearth of beauty in the book. The small understanding of love.

Sure, Blazes Boylan sends flowers and fruit to Molly Bloom.

Molly remembers flowers; there is little else, just a couple of lines. Nothing memorable. There is in the ‘Wake’ the adoration of Anna Livia Plurabelle - but, The Wake is a different book. Why so little of the beauty in this book?
 

It is the Romans to whom we owe the blame for the name Ulysses, instead of the Greek original Odysseus.

It was Joyce himself chose the Roman Ulysses as the name for his book, and the theme of the work.

However, the book was fated from the beginning.

For The Romans, ‘two’ was the most fated of all numbers.

The second month was devoted to Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. The Manes devoted to the shades of the dead, fell on the second day of the month.

Born on the second day of February Joyce was surely touched by the Fates. Interesting also that the book was published on his birthday, possibly confirmed that fate.

Strangely the names we give to all our numbers with one exception are Anglo Saxon. The single exception is the word 'second'. One, is the first, second, third etc. up to omega. Second is not Anglo Saxon; it is French. 

Pythagoras, in his theory of numerical principles, had the second, 2, as the Principle of Diversity; of strife and error. Is there, one wonders, a day on which all books should be published?

Joyce surely fated in literature as in life.
 

'A child', some perceptive mind has noted, 'is an instrument, designed through millennia, for the express purpose of converting the atomic elements into a living creature, capable of apprehending its creator and of contemplating the splendour of the work - An ill fed, ill-taught child has been robbed of his birthright'.

My Greek Odysseus is a little scornful of our teaching methods and programmes.

He notes that up until about 10 years ago the best teaching was at home.  Mentions the old tag, ‘Home is the best school; the best hospital’, always been parents who put the kids second – even third, in their lives.  Always will be.

It’s the parents you should be teaching.  Kids learn confidence at home; then they can do anything later.

As usual I listen.  He’s right.  But change these systems?  Specially not the systems, like education, health, justice; the systems deeply embedded in the bureaucracy. 

Take three generations to do that.
 

The social structures we build about ourselves are but walls to contain and protect ourselves from the enormity and power of the world around.

The universities and the Monastic retreat to shield and nourish the precious mind; the banks and the great merchant houses to govern the bounty; the City with its diverse institutions and amusements for the health and welfare of the people; the home for the shelter and nurture of the children. The entire gamut of human capacity as found in the individual, and the personal reaction with his fellows; but ever it is the individual, the vital man or woman, who is the fount of new ideas, the champions of old ideals, the strength of society and of civilisation. Such men as Odysseus in the old Greek world; and it is and interesting exercise to list a few of such who have made our present world what it is. 
 

And what, dear James of the Eternal Feminine Principle?

The ancient Earth Mother? Cybele and before her the enigmatic Lilith. 
Artemis?
Demeter?
Aphrodite?
Athena?

All rich parts of the life of Odysseus. The Ultimate spirit. The Feminine qualities of Creator and of Creation?

Surely one, at least, in Dublin had some such vision. Always worth writing about; always the prize, the spice, the very reason will a man leave all, forsaking all other, for her.

But you said you would like to put everything into your book. But you’ve only put half into it, and not the best half. You caught a glimpse of her in Nora; she took you, for better or worse, richer or poorer, and enabled you to do Ulysses and the Wake. Why not give praise in Ulysses?
 

Social life very different in James’ day. No picture theatre in Dublin; the social scene played out in the drawing rooms and the salons; for the lower class, family visiting, and for the men, it was the home, not too much sport, and the public house.

Today there’s a very wide field of choice. Organised sport of a dozen kinds; education; a hundred volunteer groups; these working in almost every aspect of life; theatre, motion pictures; TV in its several forms; the computer with the Web and the Net sites; recreational fishing, once restricted to the landed gentry, but today a huge national industry; and with variations on all the above themes.

So much so, that many homes are fractured by the competing interests.
 

Every now and then Republic rears its ugly head. Strangely – or perhaps not so strangely, the push comes from wealthy men, men well able to spend millions on election campaigns.

Just like Uncle Sam and a dozen other republics. 

In better days, a plain lawyer, such as Abe Lincoln could stand with a chance of election. Not so today.

Presidencies the preserve of the powerful – so it seems; and they quickly become dictators. The present incumbent in America prepared to police the world!!!
 

Democracy always a tender growth. Even the Greeks who 'invented' democracy could maintain it only by the threat; and exercise, of either exile or death

Today we are too kind for such rough treatment. We could, though, reduce the numbers of reps in the house to about 70 – 80, elected pro rata to population; double the staff allocated to them to handle the work load of research and keeping the electors happy; 

Put a bar; and a heavy one; on election expenses. The present system foolishly expensive.

Create ‘no party’ electorates men or women genuinely representing all the electorates.

A 'front bench' of either party hacks or trade unionists either grossly or undemocratic .

Include the 'right or recall' for errant reps.

Such might reduce the power of cabinet ministers who tend to become either powerful bureaucrat or potential dictators. We have seen several such indicating on the social policies.
 

The Greeks in the heady days of Odysseus would have exiled them.

Our forests sold for peanuts, a case in point. Develop sustainable growth forests by all means but get a fair price for the product.

However these paragraphs must not become a political pamphlet.

Merely a comment on 'republic'.
 

Then of course there’s the junk mail.

For the single men, still the pubs; and for the boys and girls, the romantic walk by the riverside is replaced by the night clubs; the disco and other nocturnal adventures.

Here in Queensland, the old bawdy house is replaced with the ultra decorated, and licensed brothel; but the business is the same.

Education now compulsory; still evaded by that everlasting ten percent not interested.

Education now reaches up from Kindergarten through to University. Thousands of young people moulded in the rather restrictive patterns dictated by the bureaucrats of the Education Department; far too many of them with a severely restricted experience of life, and sadly many lives constrained by fictional and unrealistic images of life beyond the schoolroom.

It’s much the same in other aspects of life. Cradle to the grave!

Watched over; cared for; spoiled; over developed; directed; controlled; regulated in all aspects; and you must be careful if you don’t conform.

Specially so in our political life. Must be a loyal party man able to do anything; but find to ones horror; when your get there that democracy has been skilfully transformed into a two party parliament, dominated by a one party dictatorship.

The reason one supposes, why some want a republic. This of course a one man dictatorship.
 

The perceptive reader will have noted, and will further note, the repetition of some phrases of criticism in these notes. This is inevitable, as inevitable as the repetition of the internal monologue; of the pachyderm paragraphs; of the distorted syntax, the fractured morphemes of Ulysses. These features ever with us as we read; and ever causing a sense of irritation in this otherwise calm and ordered mind. That irritation, slight as it is, so often stimulates comment and observation on other aspects of the work and, one trusts, justifies the repeated thought.
 

Reflecting on Stephen, his indecisive mood this day.

Wonderful story of the essential capacity of our kind, well known in the Shaky Isles, and heard as a child come to mind.

There was a doctor Thacker, a good G.P. and Mayor of Christchurch in the old days.  He had a son; a young fellow who in the nature of some young fellows, made good use of his Dad’s money and prestige, but sadly forgot, or failed to realize his own capacity.

Dr Thacker passed on, as we all do, leaving a very wisely worded will, a loving fathers last thought for his son.

Yes son, the fortune is yours, but only when you have earned your degree at University; become a doctor and become the Mayor of the City.

This a challenge indeed, but, and the ‘but’ is crammed and packed with purpose and determination, but the young man displayed his capacity, his real worth, and achieved all three of his fathers conditions.

A wise father; a sturdy son.  One of the son’s achievements as Mayor was a splendid public toilet block.  A notable structure in those days; beautifully appointed, white tiled throughout and with a permanent attendant. 

For the times a significant public amenity provided at the good doctors personal cost, and known for many subsequent years, as Dr Thackers Town Hall.  There are morals in this story for all.

The common sense wisdom of the father.
The determination to succeed in the son. 
The public beneficence of the successful man.
A story for the whole world.
 

John Gardener, one time chairman of the great and generous Carnegie Foundation wrote with other wisdoms:

“For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it had blighted a hundred.”

This is so.

Poverty as known in Australia is a political concept. In the Ireland of Ulysses, poverty was grim starvation; Millions shared that horror, in city and countryside, village and pretty country towns spread over that so beautiful island. Though the 17th and 18th centuries’ poverty condemned millions to a destitution and death unknown today.

Here today in Oz, for all peoples, Aboriginal or Caucasian, Greek or Italian, Irish or the hundred other ethnic peoples settled here; if they know hunger it is invariably mismanagement so many amongst us unable to make a good life despite the bounty. The bounty here in generous; hunger felt sometimes is desirable, but poverty as suffered by millions in the world is unknown.
 

Every successful writer must know, or face his talent, with an almost brutal understanding, that the secret of success is the ability to sit down - denying the call of the wild world, and write.

His second desperate driving force is something to write about; it’s either, remembrance of things past; to ruminate of things present; or a construction of things to come. If the gods be good and bounty heaped upon you, a creative spirit, flowing from our deep wells of consciousness, acquainted with magicks; rich inventiveness; a passing understanding of tragedy; of humour, of grace and a deep knowledge of the human spirit in its agonies and its high emprise; these will be your tools.

If armed with all such; talent aspiring to greatness indeed, if, I say, armed with all such you do not undertake the task of writing, all will be wasted within you.

It should be noted, in passing; that the high road to successful living, be it in passive or in active mode, is the same; whatever the target, the simple ability to do the job now! 'Whatsoever thing thy hand findest to do; do it with all thy might!', is still a good gospel truth. 

Useless, the typewriter, the keyboard, and the computer; useless the writing pads, the pens, the whiteout, the paperclips, the filing cabinet, the notes, and the notebooks. Useless the happy days in cafe and restaurant. The brave talk, the argument, the analysis, the research. All these defeat the purpose, mock you, unless you find time, make time, steal time, to actually get on with the job, write it down, let it roll, then read it - then break it down, cut out the nonsense, the unnecessary; refine it to near perfection; and if you do this honestly, in good conscience, keeping the creative flame high and clear, you will learn to write and write well.

There are many aspects of language. They range from personal contact through poetry and literature - laws and accounting, and over the past couple of centuries, a vast flowering in a score of specific sciences.

Always a salutary thought that from our simple twenty-six letters, plus a comma, a full stop @ etceteras we have compounded nigh on half a million different words, and the process continues.

Joyce, better than most of us, knew this; his vocabulary was enormous; he also well knew that words have meaning, and at more than one level of experience.

We admire his use of language relative to his characters.

Bloom meditates in his own blooming language; Gerty MacDowell is hers; and thank God for the light relief, so does Buck Mulligan.

Thus the citizen and the sailor; so the broken frumps in Bella Cohen’s place.

But in a hundred other places, these heavy padded paragraphs of ephemera. 

Why?

Why that disgusting adjective used to describe our immortal sea?

Language is the meeting of minds. The use of brutal, or explicit, or just dirty language, or the use of well-chosen language is always an exposure of the speakers mind; a matter of personal choice; always a revealing choice.

All who use writing as their creative medium must, for their own dear sakes, use this awesome weapon with care.
Once uttered the word cannot be recalled. Whenever it becomes necessary to say 'sorry' it is too late, the damage is done.

Was it not Cardinal Richelieu who said, “Let him put but five words on paper, and I have him.” And was it not Eliot who said of Molly Blooms reverie, “I wish I had not read it.”
 

Readers may have smiled at my complaint of J.J. and his back street attitudes towards the other half of our human kind. Yet reading The Portrait and Dubliners, it’s clear enough that he was a reasonably sensitive man, and an observant man.

What happened? I vote for Ezra Pound and the infection of Imagism. There is no love in Ulysses. Mrs Joyce’s little boy Jimmy found no love even in the placid loyalties of the Bloom’s for each other. Even Bloom’s feeling for Rudi, his dead son, is the sorrow of loss rather than of love. 

Those who seek some insight into the nuances of love as different from plain sexuality would do well to turn to Shakespeare who was very wise indeed in understanding.
 

Reading the Portrait, Ulysses and even dipping into the Wake (when the water was clear enough) ever confirms the rather cruel? thoughtless? unfeeling? insensitivity of Joyce in all his relationships with the rest of his world of sorrows.

This as revealed is these books. I have no doubt that as a man with a couple of children, his daughter a gravely disadvantaged child, and a warm hearted Irish redhead for companion, lover and wife, that as a man he was indeed sympathetic; and suffered, as do we all from his 'feelings'.

But Ulysses! It is alive in both the earlier books.

As with Beauty, so with tragedy. John Eglington at Paddy’s funeral, “It’s a funeral. We better be serious.” Poor Mina Purefoy, her 'troubles' greater than those of Ireland, are made a ribald joke, exploited in a dozen shades of English idiom.

Many writers over the centuries have, in the remorseful end, decided that life tends to be a cosmic jest; others a cosmic tragedy. Most see the beauty of the world in its infinite variety; and realise the divine quality of life, ever despite, often dreadful its circumstance.

Few of us agree with the banal view that we live lives of desperation, with only death or drink for relief. Most of us, even in the simple life of the poor, or as peasant, would sooner be alive than dead, and mysterious as the living entity is, despite our often dejection and our more rare, and nearly fatal desperation, we enjoy the mystery with our best composure. We endure happenstance, accidents, folly, fate, and destiny, bad luck with somewhat of the same fortitude as we think of death with its dark oblivion or its possible afterlife.

Finnegan saw it; thought of it as but Earth sleep; ever with its sometime awakening; “Not yet mister Finn, not yet awhile. We’ll call you in good time.”

Not the slightest suggestion in Ulysses. Everything in this the greatest novel of all time. tends to be the banal, the mediocre, the plain ordinary. Which is a pity.

Our modern consciousness of the environment; the sheer beauty of Life in all us forms the awakening interest in the wild places; the immense tourist traffic, which is at heart but the search for beauty, such changes in the awareness of the world augers well for the future; the future of our children.
 

I wonder how many of those who think of Joyce as a genius have ever bothered; been curious enough to read, not only Joyce, but Gogarty? Or, in more familiar terms, have they read Buck Mulligan? Or in more honest terms Oliver St. John Gogarty? Joyce, with probably a warm and ribald deliberation to caricature his friend; was he not wearing a pair of Bucks cast off pants as he left Martello Tower this day? 16 June 1904? As Malachi Mulligan, Buck to his intimates, both names chosen with intent. Many years after that day, and Ulysses under construction, Gogarty became aware of this usage of his persona, and during one of Joyce’s rare visits to Dublin tackled him. Joyce admitted it, “I mean to put everything into my story.” Gogarty is reputed to have replied, “I don’t care, so long as it’s literature.”

“Well, literature it is.” as one American review said. “A good bad book.”

But to this reader, it is literature tinged with a gentle malice; a touch of envy.

Mulligan is made to be town jester and more cruelly, is Buck Mulligan the common town jester; 'Buck' the “'eductio ad absurdum' of the rather stately Oliver St John, the Gogarty bestowed name. But Oliver St. John lived a very different life from that of Kinch or Jim Joyce, from that of Buck Mulligan.

The men were associates at Varsity, Gogarty at Trinity, Joyce at University College. 

Both started on a medical career; Jim dropped out in his first year, and Oliver went on to become a distinguished surgeon; both men wrote poetry, as do many others. Oliver produced ten books of excellent verse; Yeats said he was, “One of the greatest lyric poets of the age.” James produced three; Oliver produced three successful plays, James one; Oliver wrote ten books of literary comment on life, all still readable; James four; one good, one dull, one brilliantly difficult, and one an enigma.

Oliver produced this considerable literary output during an extraordinary career as a practicing surgeon, a social reformer campaigning actively to rid Dublin of it’s slums and improving living conditions for the poor; he became a senator in the first Parliament, and as such a target for the IRA. All this is but a small part of an extraordinarily busy and productive life. Interesting also, that he spent his retirement years self  'exiled' in America.

During the long years of the writing of Ulysses, James would be well aware of the positive life and achievement of Oliver, making name, reputation, and fortune in Ireland, his excellence undisputed, whilst James was still lost in Europe in his day dreams of genius, but a genius in the hard grip of poverty relieved only by the generosity of a patron and the meagre rewards from the burden of teaching.

It is ironic to reflect that Joyce’s vignettes of Mulligan were to be amongst the best of Ulysses?

Did James realise this? We can only speculate.
 

I have now had the opportunity to look over the judgement of the United States district judge of the Southern District of New York - John M. Woolsley, on the question of the alleged obscenity of Ulysses, which was banned from America until his judgement made its printing and open sale possible in 1933.

In brief the judge said: 
“...On account of the length of Ulysses and the difficulty of reading it, a jury trial would have been an extremely unsatisfactory, if not an almost impossible method of dealing with it.”

“ ...But in Ulysses, in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.”

“The words which are criticised as dirty are old Saxon words, known to almost all men and, I venture to say to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce was seeking to describe.

“In respect of the recurrence of the emergence of sex in the minds of the characters, it must always be remembered that his locale is Celtic, and his season spring.” (A most human and understanding qualification for a judge of a High Court)

“Accordingly I hold that “Ulysses” is a sincere and honest book, and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed of by its rationale.”

“As I have stated “Ulysses” is a difficult book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns...”

“...did not excite lustful thoughts but its net effect was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.”

“...I am quite aware, that is some of its scenes 'Ulysses' is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive but normal persons to take. My considered opinion, after long reflection, is that while in many places, the effect of  'Ulysses' on the reader might be somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be aphrodisiac. 'Ulysses' may therefore be admitted into the United States.”

There is of course much more; the judgement is a well-reasoned, simply worded easily understood piece of writing with excellent credibility. James most surely rejoiced, I see no grounds of appeal but wonder still why Joyce chose to deliberately to water it down in the flood of words.