There were other women than Penelope in the house of Odysseus. Some fifty wenches, maids, waited upon the suitors as they lounged around the great hall.

There were bread and dainties to be prepared, tables to be cleaned, floors to be swept; the floors of all the homes of the day were earth; and they alone would know the other demands made upon them by the suitors.

Most, if not all these girls would be marriageable; all would be mature in terms of their day; many attractive to the men, who, well fed, had nothing to do; and thus, but naturally, some formed alliances with the young princes; were they not sons of rich and important men? And the men on their part, not at all certain of Penelope - Only of one us could win her, and clearly Amphimomus was the most favoured by Penelope.

So in the nature of mankind, of the housemaids, “Just a dozen,” said old Euryclea, the housekeeper, “Have been unfaithful.” They were hanged.
 

There are many bright spots - rays of warm sunlight breaking through cloud cover of June 16, 1904.

“How sometime do his comeword shame speak for his homeday.”
“Moansday”
“Tearsday”
“Wailsday”
“Thumpsday” (must be pension day)
“Frightsday”
“Shattersday”

What, no Shunsday? And why Thumpsday? Must have been payday back in Dublin. Many women here in Oz fear payday – after a few beers it is Thumpsday.
 

There are other books; readable books, books that demand completion before sleep; gardening books; God wot!, books of high adventure, good novels, excellent fiction, and my lady murmurs cook books, and children’s books and now Harry Potter. So why plough through Ulysses? My Greek friend thinks my interest is quaint.

There are betters and worsers, the creative impulse of generations, and, few or none so prolific as this generation; and there are days on the beach, and some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, and the 6 am walk, and the moonlight walk along the beach together, and that confounded lawn to be mown, so much to do.

This story, Ulysses, writ for the professors; cooped in their dens they have time for it. Certainly not written for the hoi poloi.

“Where there is no understanding the people perish.”

Some critic said Ulysses was invented by the Americans, this presumably a reference to Pound I rather think Joyce invented Ulysses for the Americans. The Wake he wrote for his own pleasure. 
 

The most poignant trifle in the miscellany of paragraphs of Ulysses, the only scene to excite any real empathy in the day, is the brief description of his sisters, starving, the pitiful travesty of a meal, shared with a starving cat, still loyal in the way of cats, in the disgusting hovel they called home; and Stephen, the eldest of the family sits aloof in his day dream of undiscovered genius, with money in his pocket; but none for his sisters.

The grim starvation of the poor of the day; was also starvation of the spirit and mind, relieved by one of the girls spending a precious penny to buy a tattered French lexicon. The very soul of Ireland shining though the horror of their poverty.

For those with some sympathy for the family, the sisters were able, but occasionally, to wring a penny or so, and sometimes a shilling from the father, still playing the man about town, on his scant pension; and a greater charity, help from the nuns of the near convent; Sisters of Mercy indeed; and in the wings, the younger brother, soon to have the beneficence of a job, and to become the salvation of his sisters.
 

This segment of Ulysses, heavy going already.

Time for reflection; time for thought!  So many books poured out of publishing houses; we have little time to make use of any, so a moratorium on books for an hundred years, and the golden opportunity to read the best, and reflect on them.  Hopefully one of the books of a past era, will be an old favourite, Barrie’s 'Peter Pan'; Stevenson’s 'Treasure Island', both still in the bookcase.  There are others, the Bible for it’s magnificent prose and commonsense wisdom; Shakespear for Shakespeare’s sake; but this is not a chest of books for the desert island, so the last on this little list would be Ulysses.

Of the few books mentioned above only W M S qualifies as genius.  Joyce certainly not.  Not a dozen genius since written history began, and James is not such.  A great talent, but he possibly dashed his own hope of being read for a thousand years by his own hand and style.  The world will want something rather more robust than a humorous literary curiosity.

No doubt his book may be around, stored amongst the multitude in such places as any National Library.  So will scores of millions of others, but in a thousand years it will be the books of that generation which will be about the studies and work places of the world.  The only probable others, Homer, the Bible, the Koran and Shakespeare; Ovid, Tacitus, Seneca, Pliny, the early Greeks and others of that age mind fest for specialists only, as they are today.

The modern cheap reprint still available but only in the books which excite the common man; severely edited, condensed to verbs and nouns, and probably self-destructing to make way for the new crop.

In that day, if we haven’t tried of reading, we will have so much that is creative to do, that reading will not have much of a place in life.  We will have new and better ways of teaching and learning.

In our current phase of growth, we have with devious cunning, invented the motor car, the aeroplane, TV, the pictures and theatre, radio, spectator sports, the disco, the computer, credit cards & the mobile phone, all to occupy or enhance the opportunities offering, or to fill in our spare time, some wastefully, some few gainfully, and still find time to be the highest, per capita, book buyers in the world.

So, in Joyces hoped for millennial year, we may still be reading what passes as books in ‘that day’ but Ulysses?
 

My daughter, in a light moment, dreaming as she watched the tide rising above the sand banks; watched the herons, grey, blue and the white, the terns, the gulls and the big graceful pelicans, and the brown sea hawk above, the swallows close at hand, and coming back to our own reality, me reading Ulysses, said, “Anyone with the patience and perspicacity to finish Ulysses should be able to write a book about it - either about Ulysses or the Journey.”

This, you will know by now is my choice.
 

Ulysses is the Latin form of the Greek Odysseus. Ulysses has been so used from the time of the first English translation by George Chapman, in the time of James I, and of William Shakespeare.

Before this time the only knowledge of Homer was found as reference in the work of the Roman writers and poets.

The first full texts of Homer, came with other treasures in the hands of refugees fleeing the Turkish invasion of the Far East.

In England, Chapman, a notable scholar, and like Shakespeare, also a playwright, obtained access to the text of Homer, publishing his translation of the full text of the Iliad in 1611, and the Odyssey in 1616, both from Latin texts. 

It is thus that Odysseus became Ulysses in the West. It would be more than one hundred years before the full Greek text would become available to English scholars.

Their direct translations from the Greek have not yet broken the habit, even amongst well educated writers, of using the Latin Ulysses, denying Odysseus his natural birthright.

Joyce must surely have known this simple truth. For the matter is simple enough. Odysseus was indeed Greek; Homer had him Odysseus and he should surely be called such. One can imagine the wrath of Odysseus, to learn that his beloved Penelope was wife of Ulysses, the scorn of Telemachus to be told he was son of that roman fellow. Only the women will know what Penelope would be thinking. 
 

Joyce must have had some understanding of the agonised, but supremely positive and creative history of the Jewish people that he set up Leopold Bloom as his Ulysses.

The old Hebrews are somewhat the father figures of humanity; they stand in history as the archetypical survivors amongst mankind, and their children whom we call the Jews, are still finding their way home.

It is the fire of the spirit drives the bright intellect, nurtures the thing we call vision, and since Abram’s far times they have had a deeper understanding of the I AM, that elusive hidden identity within, which is the self, the thing that can say I AM, in each of us who is sufficiently alive. To understand, Abrams intuition became the death of the old plural gods, gods in the heavens, in the seas, the rivers, the hills, the fields, and the beginning of the concept of the One God – a concept never understood by the church leaders. Still agonizing over the nature of the ineluctable modalities of the trinity. 

Ever the quiet voice within, leading us through our manifold follies, toward lost Eden, coaxing or driving, each on our way back to haven home, the garden, and souls salvation.

In Finnegans Wake Joyce explores the Dream, knowing he must suffer earth sleep again, and hoping, trusting, for trust is stronger than hope, that next time round he will do better than this. This is a vain hope indeed. That some Jews fail, is of little consequence - no man is perfect. Everyman knows failure. Even some Irishmen fail. Henry V had somewhat to say of Englishmen who took the easy way. Even some Australians are layabouts!
 

John Drinkwater, was it not, wrote:
 

 The high soul walks the high way
 The low soul gropes the low,
 And in between, on the misty flats
 The rest drift, too and fro.

This the great sinewave plotting the human heart. The rich vitality and intellectual power of the children of Yahweh have always been welcomed in the Halls of Power, despite the ghetto and the pogrom.

We would do well to base the education of our children on the ten great precepts laid down to guide the children of Israel; our societies would stand stronger upon such foundations. The first five for our personal development, the second five for a strong safe society. 

When we consider the devastating depressions which have wrecked millions of lives through the years, it well may be wise to consider of the Hebrew concept of the Jubilee year in all our commercial dealings and build it into the financial structure.

Such a planned fresh start of a new fiscal cycle every fifty years would be infinitely preferable than the 'boom and bust' folly of today; would ensure a more equitable use of wealth and reduce and redress vast areas of human abuse and misery, and the mature man of the ten precepts the fitting citizen of such world. 
 

There two, possibly three, very deep 'epiphanies' Joyce was to call them, each clearly discerned in the work.

He was clearly influenced, whilst at University, and becoming a competent exponent of the Italian language by Gabriele D’Annunzio, the flamboyant adventurer, and an emerging hero of the ferment of the Italian awakening.

His concept of the 'New Man' robustly pictured in his books, 'Child of Pleasure', and 'Flame of Life', influenced thousands of young minds.

He was but one of the many European writers on the theme. Goethe had paved the way with 'Faust', Byrons 'Manfred' stirred many, Butler continued the work with 'The Way of all Flesh' possibly Joyce had a copy of Butler’s translation of Homer, and Shaw projected the New Man and Woman in a dozen first rate plays. 

Wells introduced the concept of the 'New Man' as scientist; In France the ferment stirred mainly amongst the artists; a sort of late reverberation of the Revolution.

Nietzsche had stirred Germany to its very heartstrings. Over the Big Pond the ferment took a different direction. America was deeply engaged still, in its great struggle to create a cohesive society out of the multitudes she had welcomed to fill her vast 'empty' lands and the aesthetics of art were rarely to be subject to the introspective analysis suffered 'over there'. The poets discussed such, but never with the French neurosis, and 'Uncle Sam' emerged as the father figure of American identity.   The brisk businessman.

The net effect of this introspective questioning of the human mind become a kind of social sickness, producing many sadly oriented works; the sickness came to a head in the thing we called Nihilism, not just another 'ism' but this with deadly potential.

It seemed to burn out in the follies of the 50s and collectively we turned away from it in the 60s, the virus confined; the body politic moving on to the magnificent years of the Baby Boomers and their manifold achievement. A cyclical epoch in our day!

James, as a University student, and talented, could not hope to escape, or even wish to escape from the forces shaping the society about him.

Studying Italian, it was the figure D’Annunzio pictured, the self-contained man, disdainful of the lares and the penates of society; free of the conventions of his profession and alone in the world, strong in himself.

This dramatic sea change, 'epiphany' he called such insights. Overnight - he changed. The easygoing student today, the poseur tomorrow.

His father, no doubt about it; shocked. His peers, amused or scornful.

In his work, this adopted idealism is discussed and shaped in the Portrait. He would, 'forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race', a noble ideal; Ayn Rand did an infinitely better job for America, but then she was later than Joyce, and the American examples, the entire American society, economic, social, and artistic was more youthful and vigorous than that 'over there'.

In Europe there were many forces at work in the literary world.

It is hard to imagine James as captive to any of them; he seemed to be beyond that; but the sudden and very public change in his outward persona toward the end of his Varsity days is to my mind certainly due to D’Annunzio; Ezra Pound the great linguist to be the catalyst remaking his literary style. 

Had he been wealthy; able to dress in the fashion of the new man, he would have become a typical Victorian dandy - as it was there is a touch of the pathetic, conditioned by the sheer strong will of the man in the quarter hat, the physical pose, the cane; The cold man with outlandish literary ideas swarming in the head?
 

There was little sympathy for him in Ireland; Ireland was awaking to its renaissance, the demands on her intellectuals of a very practical nature. Not at all interested in the aesthetics of immature genius.

That he went to the dismal world of the contested border city was but another grave error of judgement. Genius makes no mistakes; Indeed!
 

Dadaism? Cubism? Nudism? Impressionism? Modernism? Escapism? Pessimism? and most of them Egoism; made public. The day of the individual; write what you will today, someone will try to classify you as modern or post modern.

It is the same - or has been through this twentieth century. One manifesto after another; art and life slotted into a most limited category; Fauvism? Cubism? Life and Art immeasurably greater.

So it was in Joyce’s day, but the choices were limited compared with today’s options. These options, enhanced by the computer writing programmes, spell checkers, and the miraculous printer have made the production of novels to be easy work. The traditional drudgery of writing gone, and gone too the starving in the attic; for better or worse, the job is easier; but the creative spirit still the driving force.

Literature will never be the same again! Gunge literature - black poetry, the rap songs, and the highest suicide rate the world has known.

The craft of Literature has for long years, nurtured the Vision of the goodness of Life; clear in the Odyssey, but obscured in Ulysses. The preservation of Beauty is also absent through Ulysses. Of all the verities which have sustained our kind through war, famine, disease, oppression, it has been folktale, fantasy, the storytellers have been the firm base. The literature of the ages has given us the enjoyment and the endurance of the Gift of Life, this in spite of all.

We have some long stretch of living before us as humans, two hundred million years perhaps. Whatever the time span, we need these verities for our own personal individual sakes; for the race; these verities are the scaffolding of society, the foundation for any future civilisation.

A score of differing religions have nurtured the verities through our past. Today the religious spirit is not popular, perhaps not entirely relevant, but we ignore the verities to our own peril. Perhaps the computer will restate then for the rising generation, for we will never reach the stars without such support.
 

The landed gentry held England and Ireland in an iron grip during Joyce’s early years. Tens of thousands of English, Scotish and Irish families had fled and were fleeing the lands of their birth, filling the Colonies and creating a wealth undreamed in England. Wracked so long with unrelenting class war, England had then the Boer Wars and a new phase of Irish troubles brewing. That the infamous Black and Tens were maturing for their grim work in English prisons, was believed by the Irish, hotly denied by Lloyd George. Whatever the truth Ireland was waking in somewhat of a ferment, and every intelligent man in Ireland, and many of its women had fears for the struggle of emancipation from England, or from the Church; “What side are you on?” was a dangerous question; sadly, still so in the North.

Perhaps Joyce, with the Irish troubles looming thought London a risk and settled for a quieter life. Who really knows?

Perhaps Nora may also have feared London for its anti-Irish sentiment, and she with a ready tongue; and a husband with a future. The artistic feminine society a challenge she would rather not face.

We can be sure Nora would not be intimidated by the Aunt Agatha’s, but would surely become impatient with them.

Perhaps it was simply that James had a definite job offered in Pola, so Pola it was, and a teaching load, with reviews, translations, a few private pupils and the unrelenting struggle to steal time for his real talent. Then the long, hard road to Ulysses.
 

Note; Reuters Dec 13 1999.

The manuscript of Ulysses, together with other memorabilia of Joyce and some of his characters will be displayed in an exhibition 'Ulysses in hand' to be mounted in the Beattie Library in Dublin Castle by Bloomsday 2000.

This is the first time the manuscript has left the United States since its sale to John Quinn about 1920. Quinn sold to Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach in ‘24’ and the manuscript has reposed in the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia since that date.
 

It is of passing interest that the Book of Kells, one of the national treasures of Ireland and magnificent in its monastic illustrated pages, rich in their hand crafted letterheads and textual decoration is now on display here in Australia this early 2000.

Joyce, but naturally, mentions the Book.

The Book was created in the Bishopric of Colomba at Kells in County Meath on the East coast of Ireland. The original community was founded on Iona, an island of the Inner Hybrides in 563 AD. This monastery, which had a strong Celtic heritage was destroyed in 806 as the Vikings invaded the islands of Northern Britain establishing strongholds in many favoured parts of the Orkneys the Hebrides, and in Ireland. Dublin itself was a Danish citadel until captured by Brian Boru in 1014, retaken by the Danes, it was taken again by Richard Strongbow in 1170. Christ Church Cathedral 1053 and St. Patrick’s 1192 attest the importance of the city.  The Book is housed in the famous 210 ft. long room in the Jacobean College Library, one of the many colleges of Trinity. Trinity was granted charter by Queen Elizabeth in 1591, it already had a history of more than 200 years as a centre of learning.

The Book is the finest extant example of the monastic illustrated manuscript; magnificent in colour and design. It contains the Four Gospels with the usual comments and interpretations and also records on the history of the Abbey of Kells. 

One of its pages is devoted to ‘San Gato’ Saint Cat, and shows a stylized cat assisting a monk in his work of illustration; ever a lonely task as is the lot of any writer.

Clearly enough, this pictures the cat in its already ancient role of companion and comforter; in this instance in the long hours of monastic artistry.
 

The best introduction to Ulysses is the ‘Portrait of the Artist’ as a young man!

Here we have, all laid out in plain English and Latin; the slow destruction of the blossoming mind; a deep empowering of guilt; the endless homilies to condition language; sermons, pages of ‘em; confessions, all moulded to the conventional dogma of the day; all debasing the pristine human spirit,; all in sad company with the women of night town; in the background the harsh structures of a poverty scarce understood in the Ireland of today; the lares and penates of the upper echelons of society to which he could never aspire. It is all already laid bare in the Portrait; he seems to have matured but little by the time he recalled all in Ulysses!
 

There is no doubt that modern writing styles do allow the author to intrude into the story. This intrusion must however be done with skill and delicacy; done blatantly it is somewhat objectionable - and sometimes as in Ulysses, overdone. 

Film creator Alfred Hitchcock does perfectly in his films, as does Colin Dexter in his Inspector Morse stories.

But James Joyce offers us:
“...of the persons in thus Eyrawyggle sage, which thorough reable is to ent from and, if from tubb to button all falsetissues, antibibellous and non actionable and this applies to its whole wholume.”

This specific, possibly inspired the American censorship, of work in progress this dutifully followed by British Customs. The realisation that his book was indeed 'actionable' clearly hurt him, a hurt, assuaged by the eager public demand, stimulated as ever by censorship.

A natural genius for words, for language; why did he use them so? Why did he so use that genius to write this story? Surely not just mocking his readers? But the story fails the language, Joyce built too much of his faceted intellect into this Odyssey.
 

A review of the Australian poetic tradition with beautiful readable comment on the many memorable poets - Hope, Wright, Harwood, Stewart; Douglas not Harold, who does not achieve the canon; the author, no less than Clive James, offers this phrase;

“Now that they (these poets) have become part of that heritage themselves, the new critical task is to assess them."

“They have made it easy for us; every name from that period wrote at least a handful of poems powerful enough to travel through time and space without benefit of academic apparatus.”

It is his last phrase must be used in relation to Joyce. His reputation stands solidly on academic apparatus.
There is much more, a well-wrought view of the greats of Australian poetry.

They broke forever the early tradition of English inheritance and dependence on the Old World, truly Australian in idiom and imagination, even when, as with Hope, writing on classical themes.

Clive James to be thanked and congratulated on this first rate review of the time; and for what the comment is worth; most appropriate that is published in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement.

However it was but the one phrase which drew my attention; ‘without benefit of academic apparatus’. I have had the undoubted pleasure, tinged with awe, to see the great collection of Joyceana, approaching 1000 books, I was informed - all - or nearly all, were academic comment; exposition - a veritable jungle in which Ulysses seems but an adjunct - almost just an accessory to this vast body of work. Much of this, particularly the bibliographic material is good. The viewing of the Joyceans, courtesy of the Librarian, at the University of New Zealand. 

Clive James 'review', is a key piece in the Times Literary Supplement of Jan 5, 2001
 

His big compound words. The chemists science is full of them - many extraordinarily long. Mary Poppins gave us supercalifragilisticexpeallydocious. Come to think of it, most of the sciences go in for such compounds; even do better than the Germans who chose compounding words as a substitute for the more subtle grammatical usages we English have designed; yet it is English that has become the lingua franca of the world.

Roald Dahl offered Scrumdiddleyumptious and the Church encapsulated an entire schism into antidisestablishmentareanism. A heresy of the early church, you must refer to your dictionary for the meaning of the scientific compounds (haha). Mary Poppins for the meaning of her word, and of course to Jas. A. Joyce or J.J. as he refers to himself in the Cyclops segment, for the meanings of his compounds of several hundred lettered words.
 

They seems no reason why Homer should not have composed his poems, collated, corrected them, and sold copies to others, as in the way of modern poets. The only real difference that in those days, every man was his own publisher. He may even have employed scribes to do the copying; this an ancient trade; or even, as some did, have selected slaves, quality men captured in the wars, and trained for special duties, often employed as tutors of the children of their purchasers, for in the great slave markets there was careful and skilful assessment of the wares, the best, always to the highest bidder. 

So, much of the debate on Homer is a trifle pedantic. The man who must have 'proof' of human activity, human action, feeling and belief in some uncertain place at some uncertain era of four thousand years ago, is limiting his choices. Men then, much the same as today, with the mild exception that today, we do not need to kill, to survive. A kinder, gentler day. But be sure, even then, men could be kind to one another, in the context of their times. They treasured excellence in their arts, as in other skills. Words, treasured as was gold.  The excellent standards, in their art, enduring.  A challenge, to the best of us today.

Wordsmiths, either poet or philosopher, and today novelist, have ever been popular, become known, respected, and often respectable, and then wealthy and accepted members of the tribe and city. Some deal in gold or wheat or other such; others deal in words and song. 
 

It seems half the world is in mourning these days. Diana, Princess of Wales is gone from us. 

A terrible accident, the kind of escapade which should never have happened, and as ever with humans, the most impossible rumours.  The blame game at it’s vicious worst.

Conspiracy or no conspiracy, nothing can detract from the widespread sorrow.

A lovely woman, if somewhat unsure of herself.  And one suspects many clearly saw her as a victim.

The floral and other tributes as never seen before. The open spaces around Kensington Palace literally smothered with flowers and cards.

A sad and bitter day for millions; She lies appropriately, poetically, not in any graveyard, nor in Westminster, but enclosed on a tiny island, isolate, one woman of the millions, centred in a beautiful lakelet in the grounds of the family home.

Few, if any, of this worlds myriads mourned so deeply; not through all time.
 

Those young fellows have done it again the Rugby World Cup this time, defeating France in Cardiff.  This their second World Cup; 35 to 12.  The legendary John Eales in charge.

The Welsh would have enjoyed the game, as did millions worldwide on television.

One occasion when they sang 'Australia Fair' with credit to all.

Congratulations men!  And to the ladies; The World Cup at netball.  From memory this their eighth World Cup.  Vicki Wisdom, Captain.  Liz Ellis made her name with the words, “Netball has come a long way; men now play the game, but at a lower level.”
 

By chance in a coffee shop?

Chance, coincidence or something deeper?

“Something deeper?”

“Surely!” The feeling, strong sometimes, of a purpose. Morning tea time in adjacent offices one supposes, for the shop fills up. A vacant seat opposite at the table, and a voice enquires; “May I?”

Engrossed in reading, hardly looked up, “Be my guest.”

“Thanks mate.”

Then within a few seconds, he said, “You’re reading ‘The Odyssey’!”

This a statement. He has noticed. An obvious fact.

“Nothing wrong with that, it’s not forbidden.”

“Never been forbidden in three thousand years. But unusual.”

“Do you speak, read the Greek?”

“No, just the English,” adding the conjunction to make the point.

He leaned toward me, and in a low voice, recited the opening lines of The Odyssey, a soft modulated flow of speech, not understood but good to hear. Greek, as she is spoken. He paused, smiled, “It’s marvellous in his language; the vowel sounds!”

So our friendship began.

He grows onions; comes into town regularly for the sales, and now visits, deeply interested in Ulysses, of which he has known nothing; equally interested in my writing. He thinks Australia a wonderful country, but so old! The mountains only low hills now; the soil eroded; loves the wines, keeps a good cellar; when he tells me this, he is told of Hortalus, a Roman who held the equal of 55,000 gallons in his cellars, but died, and so unable to enjoy them.

“He was a Roman.”

“Indeed, but Rome was settled by the Greeks.”

“True,” he said, “But the soils make the man. In Greek islands the soils are hard, like Australia. Italy soft; marsh and bog everywhere. It makes a different man."

“That is so. The differences not great but they matter.”

“Not much, the differences of degree only.”

He nods, “I could not grow roses on my soil; it is perfect for onions.”

He grows several varieties, the red onion, a hot Spanish onion and a delicious onion to be eaten raw, like an apple, and spring onions for the early market, and garlic.

I tell him we use onions, raw in the salads, baked in their skins for the roast meal. 

He nods, “They are good.”

We finish coffee, have done with talking. He rises to go, but is detained, “Please visit us, read Homer in Greek. We keep a good red. You will be welcome indeed.”

So he is a welcome visitor, usually in the late afternoon, the work of the day in town completed.

And we sit out on the balcony in one of the best places in the world, the river before us, the trees rich with flowers and alive with birds, some good red wine and the talk of Homer and Odysseus and Ulysses. And they call it chance, or coincidence, but despite my disbelief, so often wonder of something deeper. A link in the intangible network we weave about ourselves.
 

We who live on this beautiful east coast of Australia, have, most of us, no real ideas as to how so many millions of our kind live in other places on this equally loved earth. There are primitives there, with wholly different values of life, and death. Men who kill without a thought of right and wrong, kill to survive, kill to acquire, men in whom the commandments mean nothing at all, yet have unwritten laws enabling them to live amicably with others of their kind, yet will kill even there when driven to it.

There are peoples who live and fight for existence in terrible cities, where poverty, squalor, and filth, with its disease and despair are inescapable. There are miseries such as we never see and can hardly imagine; and even in the favoured bounty of Australia, plenty of men and women who prey on, and exploit others, uncaring of the harm and pain their actions cause. 

Social workers tell of people here living in filth and squalor, by choice; such the human condition; no less degenerate, those who prey on others, in all levels of society. That so many of these live in good homes, have high level jobs and good salaries, expensive motorcars is of little consequence; they are by definition, poor humans; we would be better without them, at both the top and the bottom of the heap.

The interesting, wonderful thing is that we are as a people slowly growing and developing into a cohesive and caring maturity. That some fail is a pity, but that so many achieve that maturity and live strong, confident and creative lives is the real achievement of civilization.

Another million years will, we trust; and trust is stronger than hope; find us much further along the way. The Brisbane of today, compared against the Brisbane of 1904, and the daily life of its citizens justifies that trust.

What pity that religious dogmatism, folly and sheer wickedness, such animal nature denies the good life to so many.

Dogmatism!  What, has that to do with it?  Simply that if the church threw off its rituals, and moved into a new and realistic format, our civilization could take yet another great leap forward.
 

Recalling that first reading of Ulysses as a young man, we found then little reason for the censor’s dictum of obscenity. 

The mysogyny which bedevilled James sneers at us, throughout Ulysses; a complex literary thing for it seems to have no place in his life style. A hang over, an echo of the teachings of his church years.  It engenders the neurosis in many of its followers; The great liberation of women surely a spin off from our wholesale revaluation and rejection of the church; The priesthood also grievously affected. None other than that great Church man St. Augustine prayed “Lord make me celibate, but not today.”  Yet strangely it is the women who are the true heart and soul of the faith. The loyal believers who despite the terrible history of the church have nurtured the continuity of the faith, its very existence through the centuries.

Without these loyal, believing, mothers of millions the Christian faith would have subsided into nothing more than a few monasteries, scattered through the East.  Places of refuge for the half men seeking salvation from the abundant vitality of life, the search for god but a monastic ritual. 

But James was not wholly won over by the church.

Life has a strong and clear purpose for mankind and he saw promise in the fresh eyes of Nora Barnacle.  This with the helpful push from two or three or four other women, he achieved the purpose and we have Ulysses.
 

It is a matter of interest to most of us as to how, and some of us why, evolution has developed our sexuality to such a high level; or for the religious, as to why God made it to be so intrusive in our make up. The only answer seems to be seen in the enormous seed bearing capacity of so many living things, this capacity ever conditioned by the equally prodigal waste of that same seed. Mother Nature surely did not mean all such seed to come to maturity. Millions of young born to die in their first hour; the human species excepted.

Many people think only the strongest survive, but observation shows otherwise.

We have been killing off our best and strongest in the wars of more than fifty centuries. It is the meek who inherit the earth, and in the plant world the lucky seed that falls on fertile ground. Then every now and then nature confounds us by producing brilliant intellect and mental maturity in a deeply faulted body.

In the animal world, mothers kill off the runt in the litter; others are made to have young annually, sometimes at longer intervals; the rodents generally excepted. Why? Indeed why. 

Humanity very different. We were suddenly given that great frontal lobe of the brain; stood upright, on flat feet; lost the tail; given loose tongues; and a pair of extremely useful hands; a genetic change with a quantum leap, and our infants utterly helpless.

And not the least amongst such gifts prominent sex organs, and the libido to use them.

Perhaps we were meant to stay in the long grass of the savannah, under the trees; perhaps civilization and the city a cosmic blunder, or more likely just human folly. The Christian God also very interested in sex, creating Adam and Eve as a most seductive pair, with both the means and the will, and knowing full well the power of the passion designed to drive them. One knows, of course, that the matter is more complex than this. With mankind, we have free will; the power of choice in all our personal ways; all too often the choice a folly. Most of us regulate our sexuality as we regulate other aspects of life. The experiments and questioning of developing youth very much a testing and a counter test, in the search for a mate, and this in modern society a time of high risk.

As ever with we humans, the reasonable man meeting reasonable girl, will have little trouble in coming to terms with her; it is ever the reckless and foolish who provide the drama. But there are other factors at work. What of the low sperm count, pandemic in modern man? The incidence of AIDS and other social diseases? The extraordinary level of failed marriage, the western phenomenon of the single mum? Something’s happening, and none of us know either the direction or the end, the product of a century of bitter turmoil.  How wonderful, to be able to return in a couple of hundred, or thousand years, and see how they are managing things. Joyce has nothing clear to say of the general human problem.  He simply observes it.  The play of Gerty MacDowell the adultery, the couple of fantasies, but little of serious comment, except to say, with brutal candour; “This is how it was in our part of Dublin.” 
 

He talks, in another long paragraph, of the possibilities which might come his way, had he chosen to be a singer.

It’s a good, amusing and very human paragraph, full of rosy vision of success, adulation, money, the good life.

And then, Joyce, he would have time, between engagements, to practise writing, in those spare moments when he felt like it!

And fame was born of such fancies; but ephemeral. A fancy only.

As it happened it was teaching occupied his prime time; the works of genius produced only in his spare time, and this possibly only when 'he was desirous of doing so'.

We should remember that, though these words are ascribed to Stephen in 1904, they were written in his maturity, out of a mind plagued by such thought. 
 

It is in his farewell to his mother, at the very end of the Portrait that Joyce, all unaware of the bathos, makes the grand statement:
“Welcome, life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

This was the 26th of April; on the 27th he uttered the prayer which is to grant him the greater strength; grant him the confidence to be himself, whatever.

“Old father, old artificer, stand with me now, and ever in good stead.”

Me too, old father.
 

It was Churchill said of Russia:
“It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

He offered this to the world in 1939.
Someone said it of the Wake, published in 1939.
Who said it first?
 

Stephen is the enigma.

Buck Mulligan honest, bluff, humorous too; cheeky, observant and quick to comment on everything.

He lies there in Ulysses waiting for some budding D.Lit. hopeful to take him out, arrange his parts and rescue him in his own right as a modern Saint Malachi of Erin.

One pre-empts the influential reviewers, 'A book to remember', 'The quintessence of Joyce', and 'The spirit of the New Ireland'. Such was Oliver St. John Gogarty.
 

Bloom, whose day dodging Boylan is the heart of this 16th of June, is a less likeable chap altogether. As with Stephen, introspective but driven with that weak sensuality which has become endemic amongst so many men of this generation.

Is it diet? Is it feminism? Is it hereditary? Is it good for us? Who knows, but such a man with a normal, vital wife can expect her to become very interested in any vital normal man with time on his hands.

That so many such husbands have been raised as boys, dear little boys, instead of being raised to maturity as men, is yet another matter. Such men can never accept the full role of husband and father in the family. Always in need of mother, either she herself, or as the unfortunate surrogate mother in the persona of his wife, mother of his children, running the house, the shopping, the laundry, the school, chores, and the male of the household dependent on her. Thus Bloom, happy in his deep discontent, to close eyes to this latest infidelity; and, possibly, may even be dimly grateful for it; for her happiness is dear to him.

His discovery of; his care for this clearly unhappy young Stephen is paternal. His understanding of the youths maleness, his deep need for the good companion is hidden, covert, but inescapably drawn in the penultimate ultimate chapter of Ulysses; revealed in the clearly, intimately drawn picture of that spare room; the bedroom. His wife’s careful assessment of the fact; her amorous daydreaming, her anticipation of the interest of  'a decent, young, well educated man', is utterly feminine. Her dissatisfaction with an elderly, slightly indecent, and superficially educated old man is natural, and clearly lined out in the story. 

Both enjoy the quiet homely deceptions at No. 7 Eccles Street; neither will forsake that security, and both will, with tact and care satisfy their own real needs. Bloom will live to boast, 'he has had fifty years of happily married life; never a real argument', both will grow old gracefully, their follies failing them as the years add their weight to the spirit; the cat, or her successor growing old with them. 
 

My Greek friend is Australian, no doubt about it, though no cricketer he is, as so many others, touched by the death of Don Bradman.

Don Bradman gone.  There's a name. 

A great cricketer.  Seventy years gone since he made 452 runs, not out at the Sydney Cricket Grounds in 1930.
The degree of public feeling is a surprise! It must be forty years since he played for Australia.

How he played, an English associate said, “He ruined cricket for thousands of young men in England.” 

I said, “Hardly ruined cricket, he became rather, a role model for thousands.” He had wonderful wrists, eyes and judgement. Play any ball to where ever he wished round the field. Never one to feed the fieldsman.

Rejuvenated the game, round the world.

He also had an opinion on sledging, and never indulged himself in the rather immature displays of some of our moderns when taking a wicket.  But then, we are a young country, with much to learn.  It’s pretty certain that James never played cricket.
 

It seems clear that this unfortunate young man, never, in his church attendances, nor in its rituals; nor during his education, at the College or at University; nor in his wretched family life in the devotion of his mother; ever, in any way, realize or understand the universal underlying truth of Catholicism. This truth, despite its terrible history of bigotry and war, the church has kept alive and vital in the hearts and minds of untold millions.

Or is it that the people have kept the faith, despite the follies of its priests?

Whatever, the Church does; and it does plenty; this truth still has a power; it has transformed into song and art and architecture the lives of thousands of our best minds through two thousand bitter years. Whatever the religion, diverse as they are around the globe; whatever the creeds, East to West; the grim Northern mandates, or the happy indifferent South; the essential simple truth is the same. Faith in ones self, faith in life. Though they fight to death over the dogma, the names, those myriad names of the Gods, they live by the Universal faith, so did James Joyce, ever his own man. 

Thus also, the rest of us.  All through human history the confidence man has always made a good living; specially when organised as in banks, the TAB; it used to be in private hands; the bookie; too good to leave there; now its pokies taking a billion a year from the weak ones; and the credit card takes its billions from the rest of us. 

And the charities ask us for more than 150 million a year to look after the ruins.

Why – and why again?

The flaw appears to be the folly of indifference. Indifference toward the known rules of conduct, of self care, of care for the teaching of the children.

So, before handing out millions in charity we should perhaps demand re-education; learn how to live; to manage your affairs.

There is a wonderful powerful Chinese wisdom. "Give a man a fish; he will be back tomorrow, for another. Teach him how to fish; he will look after himself."
 

He missed a good opportunity to put some fire into Ulysses. 

Several scenes from the Portrait would improve the later work.

The vignette describing the Christmas dinner ruined for Aunt Dante; the men arguing and deepening the rift; the gulf, between the devotion of the woman and the loyalties of the men, for the cause of Ireland.  Superb writing!

Both the men R.C. from birth but their faith, as ever with men, transferred to the cause.

This segment could well be transferred – to Ulysses; the blaze of a deeper meaning to life than anything else revealed in that middling day.

It is the same with the women, they have an instinctive deeper faith in life, deeper than ritual. Know little of theology, is as strong in the Protestant, as in the Catholic, in Islam and in every faith; it is central to our humanity, the women, the hinge, the pivot on which all life swings.

She has no care for either higher criticism or High Church. A living and vital reality; inherent to the teachings of all religions. Women burned at the stake in Elizabeth’s time for their faith. Woman ever the heart of the faith.

If there is indeed an afterlife, the churchman will have more to answer for than will the laity.

It is the women who cherish the faith; the children learn best in the mothers care; sense deeply that faith, and become strong in confidence.

Strangely, it is the men transfer their faith to the Cause, whatever it be. In Ireland, the National dream; but the women keep the faith close to the heart and it enhances and beautifies the daily round. Faith is the confidence of our humanity.

Pope and Priest but caretakers of the bricks and mortar, the ritual; the teaching so often not practised in the politics of the church.

For those with eyes to see, the heart to understand, Faith is indeed; 'The Way; The Truth; The Life'.
 

Yet another of those terrible incidents which expose the depth of human folly and sheer blackness of soul.  Why some descend to such is unknown, but we do have, a 'right' that is a duty, to protect the innocent, about to be slain by a crazed aggressor. The right surely to protect self and others.

This, time a mad man in beautiful Tasmania, shooting down some thirty souls in a crazed cold blooded rampage.

Truly our civilization is a delicate fabric, all too easily forsaken; something very dark indeed, in our souls.

The only time this kind of behaviour is seen in the animal world is possibly the wild dog pack, or in the fox, both of which kill for the sake of blood thirst.

Few of any other animals behave thus.

But we humans; we have a long way to go before some form of genetic cleansing will mend the race of this fatal flaw.  The activists will proclaim we have no right to 'modify' such potential killers. No right? Indeed!
 

Joyce seemed hardly to notice that his Ireland was fighting for its soul in his early years. 

Here this year 1999 we in Australia had a more peaceful word to say in respect of our sovereignty, and perhaps, our soul.

We voted decisively against becoming a republic.

Things are bad enough with a dictatorial P.M.

Dangerous to give him presidential authority.

We are leading members of a Commonwealth of Nations, let this suffice.  Why take the risks of republic?

Looking around the world there are not too many examples of flourishing republics. 

Plenty of examples of nations robbed and abused by republican presidents where some army general has taken control.

Even the great United States has little to offer.

The decline from the quality of great founding presidents a sorry history.

The powers of the president, despite constitutions, all too easily exercised and abused.

Hitler not the only leader to declare treaties and constitutions to be only 'scraps of paper'. 

The nature of our reigning monarchy is that of a peaceful, maturing, non-intervening, benign and historical ancestor. A better Head of State, than a republican President with an astonishing ego. 

Mrs. Marcos and 1000 pairs of shoes!!
 

His mother desperate for a show of love, from either loveless husband or son. 

His sisters ragged, starving and desperate.
Mrs. Breen trapped with a near insane husband.
Mrs. Dignam with a dead husband. 
Mrs. Purefoy with an absent husband.
Nurse Callan, a wallflower waiting to be plucked.
Mrs. Bloom made light, of every man. 
And the Lord Lieutenants ladies in the back seat of the brougham. 
Mrs. Cohen and her women in a sad state indeed.

Woman are ever lonely in Ulysses. 
Women are ever lonely in his hands.
Not the slightest, understanding of woman.
 

The Melbourne Cup is on the way again, there’s nothing like it in the world, not even in Ireland which has produced many good horses.

None of the great classic races compares; this because of the widespread national interest; the country virtually stops work; they will win and lose millions today.

Money has much to do with the fever.  The ladies spend undisclosed thousands on extraordinary fancy hats; beautiful dresses; all such to display their attractions to perfection.

The men also present well.

The enclosure a very different place from the concourse where the hoi poloi, having fewer charms to display, have spent not so much on the trimmings; many treating the day with a broad touch of humour. Fun today – work again tomorrow.

The enclosure is remarkable for yet another interesting feature.  There will be at least three hundred millionaires delicately concealing their wealth behind good-natured smiles and the usual pleasantries.  God Bless them.

The caterers also reap their reward.

The odds against picking a winner vary, thought the Slippers and the other qualifying races tend to sort out the winners, and the influence on prices at the yearling sales is amazing.  The best feature of the Cup though is the horses; even the ladies, with their hats and good looks are forgotten as the horses move off towards the starter’s paddock.

Those magnificent animals!  Those thousand pounds of muscle, beautiful, in nerve, taut control, balanced so finely on those delicate tiny hocks a magnificent creation.

In action, the nearest thing to flying in the animal world; the feet more delicate; more precise in action than the ballet dancer; even than the beautiful precision of the Irish jig.

On the farm we used and bred the solid Clydesdale; also a beautiful creature; yes, it is a day for the horses, this pre-Christmas unofficial holiday here in Oz. This world attraction, this unique Australian thing.