James Joyce's "Ulysses" Part 1 574 words

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing.

Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.

Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides.

She gazed straight before her, inhaling through her arched nostrils.

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's wheedling voice: --When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said.

I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world.

The body to be exhumed.

His hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.

His hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.

They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats.

To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's looms.

Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon.

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

--I'm giving you two lumps each, he said.

A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack.

Reincarnation: that's the word.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead: _And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars._

Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said: --The bard's noserag!

_His singing of that simple ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the whole course of my experience._

They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, _Frauenzimmer_: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: --Come up, Kinch!

Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.

Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore.

Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes.

The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery lane.

Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?

O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.

A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last.

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale.

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness: --It is a symbol of Irish art.

Electuary or emulsion.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.

A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

Illstarred heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia.

Condole with her.

That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's wheedling voice: --When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said.

Piebald for bachelors.

--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses.

Kosher.

Lethargy.

Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it.

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stepping into the porch he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again behind the leather headband.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing.

The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.

Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic).

Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

Anemic a little.

Licentious men.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade.

An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure, hollow shells.

She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang: _I am the boy That can enjoy Invisibility._

Like through a colander.

His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief.

She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right.

A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.

He strolled out to the doorway.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides.

Then the insides decompose quickly.

His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.

He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping.

To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter.

Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly: --I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

No browbeating him.

Bob Cowley lent him his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of it from that good day to this.

Mortar and pestle.

Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley.

Prr. Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form.

Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs.

--I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when...

--Scald the teapot.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data.

Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats.

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

--I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack.

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping.

He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell.

--Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book, what is a pier.

Sir Lout's toys.

--If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning.

Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart, eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.

A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron.

Here, I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.

A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

No use canvassing him for an ad.

Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife.

He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted: _--Goodbye, now, goodbye!

Gluttons, tall, long legs.

Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.

A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (_descende_!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed.

A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning.

Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack.

A dwarf's face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's was.

Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it.

Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.

Today the bards must drink and junket.

Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs.

A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread, dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a granite block.

His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other.

Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

Monkwords, marybeads jabber on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.

Is it some paradox?

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead: _And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars._

A sleek brown head, a seal's, far out on the water, round.

Water rushed roaring through the sluices.

Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges.

Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches.

Death by misadventure.

And snug in their spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the gentiles: world without end.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.

The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides.

Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night.

--In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth.

More than doctor or solicitor.

His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript.

Then he put a forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat.

His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade.

--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his.

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight.

Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder.

_Tiens, quel petit pied!_

You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street.

A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: --Don't mope over it all day, he said.

Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain.

Much better to close up all the orifices.

Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere.

Salvation army blatant imitation.

The froeken, _bonne a tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.

--There's five fathoms out there, he said.

A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the

With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and his strolling mort.

--He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said.

Loose tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner.

Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs.

Elixir of life.

He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed towards the cardinal's mausoleum.

On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs.

Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade.

And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats.

To lap better, all porous holes.

Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.

--It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last: --Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say.

Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue?

Funeral be rather glum.

A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords.

So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood.

Again: a goal.

--Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight.

Their likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in the struggle.

Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.

Switch off the current, will you?

They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out.

Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding.

It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out.

Prolonged applause.

The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.

Bought it at the governor's auction.

The best obtainable.

In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters.

The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate: toothless terrors.

--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.

Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.

Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews.

And the retrospective arrangement.

A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly.

A gruesome case.

A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the

His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop.

Pert little piece she was.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine.

They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator's form.

Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

--You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack.

A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.

Must get those settled really.

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight.

Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of common sense._

--Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.

Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.

Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.

Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells.

Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los Demiurgos_.

He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead: _And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars._