Everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening.

a note to my children..

Amid a deluge of daily misery for all concerned since the atrocity of 7th October, I have found three aspects to be particularly upsetting. 1. The fireball at the Al-Ahli hospital; 2. The open letter from Artists for Palestine UK and 3. The Israeli bombing of southern Gaza after it declared this to be a safe zone for civilians.

The morning after the horrible disaster at the Al-Ahli hospital car park, my adult child had no doubt it was the Israelis that had bombed it because that’s what they do. Brought up in a secular Jewish home, toured Israel with school, has loads of Jewish friends etc. but that was the immediate assumption based on all the media reports. Despite the subsequent investigation pointing to a likely accident caused by a Hamas rocket, doubts linger and so I assume, they do most for of the non-Jewish world. That to commit, what if intended, must be a disgusting war crime, is simply what Israel does.  My stomach lurched, and I determined there and then to write down my thoughts, if only for my family to read them.

This was compounded by reading the open letter from Artists for Palestine UK. My goodness what a bunch of self-serving lemmings, from whom I see that at least Steve Coogan has had the good grace and sense to try to distance himself…a bit. To write in such passionate terms about humanity and preventing blood-shedding, without a mention of Jewish blood loss (yes they will refer me to the pathetic shadow of a hint), not only defies belief but undermines the essence of the very valid humanitarian issue, that is lost amid their enraged hyperbole. I mean one presumes that some of these people are not total w**kers. They are blessed with artistic talent, some have achieved great success, others a modicum of it and I dare say there’s considerable intelligence among them. Why then do they behave so w**ky when it comes to Israel/Palestine? I try to answer below.

The third vomit inducing event is strap-lined by the Israeli bombing of southern Gaza having encouraged people to retreat there but might also include the disproportionate and collective punishment of Gazans by the rigorous prevention of sustenance and medical supplies.  Israel declared itself to be at war with Hamas and rightly so, after what happened. But if at war it must play by the rules of war.  I’m no expert on what the lines are, but we feel mighty close to crossing them and at which point Israel risks losing many friends including many Jewish ones and this is not a fight to fight alone.

It is an unalterable law of physics, as applicable to solar systems as it is to atoms, that bodies polarise, then collide, then polarise, then collide ad infinitum. So thought the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and I agree. There is a pro-Palestine narrative and a pro-Israel narrative both reaching back over 100 years. They contradict and cannot each be entirely right. Yet each side clings to its own, unwaveringly. One chooses to believe what sometimes seems alarmingly fallible evidence, because to admit its fallibility feels like denying one’s own heritage and history; one’s own point of being.  But if that is the case, Israel and Palestine are destined to polarise and collide ad infinitum, the likes of Hamas will continue to fire rockets from beneath hospital beds and Netanyahu will remain trapped by the nutters who think this is our land because God gave it to the Jews.  

Sane people must wrestle control of the asylum. There is a middle way. The mesial groove as James Joyce called it in Ulysses. Palestine deserves to live as a valid entity. Israel too deserves to do the same and if you don’t believe this, if you believe that this can’t happen because Israel stole the land, then you are part of the problem, part of the perpetual violence. Artists for Palestine UK, I’m looking at you as much as at hard-line Zionists with reciprocal intransigent views.

The middle way can only be a two-state solution. The detail will be considered by clever strategists, and of course all sorts of huge obstacles to overcome, but one assumes based on a return of all or at least much of the occupied territories and I’d say an enlarged Gaza strip with both Israel and Egypt bequeathing land so that the New Palestine will be at least equal in square miles to what became known as the occupied territories and even a fair bit more. Viability comes at a cost. It would have to include a safe connecting corridor between Gaza and the West Bank. Naturally Hamas cannot be in control and Fatah have shown over the years enough pragmatism and engagement to be encouraged to step forward. Reparations will probably ensue. I’m not so naïve as to think this is easy, let’s do it, but it is the only conceivable end game short of Armageddon.

As I say, people on both sides cling to their narratives. I set out mine below, which even though I’ve believed it for decades, I am prepared to concede is fallible. I have pre-conceptions and biases which may be wrong, that narratives I have doggedly clung to over the years, might be unfounded; if only there was a debating forum where the oxygen has not been sucked out by the extremists. I’m very happy to discuss it with those that believe it to be entirely wrong, provided they allow for the possibility that their own narrative may also be fallible. The allowance for fallible narratives, a concession that the other bloke might be right in some respects, is an initial trembling step on the road to peace.

There’s even a middle way in the middle way. People that remain utterly convinced of the righteousness of their position yet will concede for the sake of pragmatism. That peace is too important for the moral high ground to get in the way. That too works, though I’m not sure for how long.

Who am I? I’m a 64-year-old atheist Jew from Ilford. I’ve spent various youthful summers on Kibbutzim, the first one in 1977, very close to the then ‘non-border’ of the Gaza Strip. I’ve also attended several lectures and events hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. They were generally informative and worthwhile, given by empathetic, passionate, and intelligent people. Without wavering from Zionism, it was obvious to me that Palestinians deserved all that Zionism had given Jews. I joined the Labour Party in my 20’s and resigned during the nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn. I’m not an academic expert but have lived through and paid avid attention to the Israel/Palestine conflict since 1967, which endows authority of a sort.

One cannot debate with those whose actions stem from the belief that God is on their side. They are beyond help and a coalition of the sane must wrestle power from them. It behoves the remaining sane people (religious and secular), to engage with those on whatever side, who might be willing to stress test long held beliefs and even if still convinced they are right, to look beyond it for the sake of peace. That is a debate worth having.

If I manage to offend any combination of my children, my Jewish friends, and my non-Jewish friends, I guess I made my point.

And to the Artists of Palestine UK, I artily-fartily say: Opened are the double doors of the horizon. Unhinged are its bolts. Why not see if you can peek through?

Part Two.

That’s the gist of what I want to say. If you want more detail, I set out my Zionist credentials and beliefs below, fallible though they may be, and I hold my position up to scrutiny by exploration of the following questions. Not in a dry academic way, this is not a thoroughly researched thesis, but just giving my view to my children, and to anyone else that might be interested.

1.      What is Zionism?

2.      What is Palestine?

3.      Is Israel a) unlawful b) apartheid?

4.      Why is this conflict out of all the world’s conflicts a) so enduring and b) so pre-occupying?

5.      Is Zionism racist?

6.      Is anti-Zionism racist?

7.      Is there hope?

1.      What is Zionism.

From people’s reaction to the word, you’d think it was an awful swearword. ‘I’m not ant-semitic I’m anti-Zionist is the common refrain’, so that suggests that people actually know what it means. Put simply, it is the Jewish aspiration for a homeland, for self-determination. That Jews are more than a religion (I’m a Jew and an atheist), they are a people and like other people, deserve self-determination and a land of their own, like the French or Italians. That gets confusing because there are French jews and Italian jews but that’s really the point. Since biblical times, when Jews were expelled from, for want of a better word, Palestine, they have been nomadic, having to make their home in whatever country would accept them and often as second-class citizens, and for centuries prohibited to work the land and confined to occupations such as money lending.

That it be a homeland in Palestine stems from a yearning to return to the spiritual home, the land of the bible, such yearning reflected in prayer and secular sentiment, emanated 5000 years ago and has endured an exile of some 2,000 years. Throughout this time, despite two expulsions, a significant number of Jews remained in Jerusalem and, subject to some fluctuation, became the majority ‘religion’ there somewhere around the 1870s. From the orthodox religionists to the Marxists of the 1890s, the urge to return to Zion, to Israel, was palpable.

That Zionism existed as an ‘ism’ since the 1890s is not contested, nor generally is that all ‘peoples’ have a right of self-determination. What is contested, is firstly whether Jews can be considered a ‘people’ and secondly, whether Palestine was by then, an appropriate place to return. The first point is pretty easy, in that it is not for non-Jews to categorise or deny Jews as a people, a race, a religion or a combination of all these.  If Jews feel they are a people that is sufficient coupled with many anthropologists pointing to the many common bonds between Jews dispersed around the world for centuries. I deal with the second point below and in para 2.

So, if a kind soul is willing to concede that Israel in whatever form has a right to exist as a Jewish entity, then such person is a Zionist, no matter how much they deplore what the Israeli government (or those acting under its auspices) does and has done for decades and no matter how much they support the Palestinian cause. They are Zionists. So, a lot of the heat can be removed from the debate by simply asking what someone means by Zionist/anti-Zionist. All the apartheid and other tags become irrelevant to the ‘ism’, because that relates to whether a practitioner of Zionism (i.e., a particular Israeli government) brings in nasty laws or not.  It is not whether Zionism is good or bad, though of course this is nuanced, and I consider below in 3(b).  

As to the second part, whether it is legitimate for that Jewish state to be established in Palestine, we need to know what is meant by Palestine and that is addressed in 2 below.

But first, a common accusation is that Zionism as an ‘ism’ is wrong ab initio, because it is born out of a bad or at least terribly discredited colonial thought process. It is a product of the age of imperialism and belongs in the rubbish basket of history alongside the slave traders. It is simply the ‘West’ imposing itself upon indigenous populations, generally for economic benefit. I accept that it is no coincidence that the thousands yearlong yearning to return, finally took hold in the age of nationalism. Of course, other factors were relevant; Russian pogroms, Marxism, the transmission of literature coupled with a widespread ability to read, a non-economic spiritual pull to settle in the homeland and in due course, the holocaust. But certainly, Zionism is born of a colonial percept that one can travel to other parts of the world and create there a new nation. But if this is valid anti-Zionist criticism, then surely, having set fire to the Israeli flag, such criticizers with equal brio, must burn the New Zealand flag, followed by that of Canada, the US and Australia, not to mention about 50 other countries. Because if they do not, they are holding Jews to a standard that they do not apply to other peoples and nations, and that is an integral aspect of the internationally agreed definition of antisemitism.

As Zionism is such a broadly defined concept, simply a desire for Jewish self-determination, it is understandable that it attracts a broad variety of proponents. It’s tempting to consider Zionists to be right wing, land grabbing militarists. But I grew up in the socialist-Zionist tradition. Communist would be more accurate but that was a discredited term by the late ‘70s. Nevertheless, the system of kibbutzim meant that Israel a capitalist country, was heavily influenced by people with far-left tendencies - generally anarcho-syndicalist - well into the 1990s.  I recall Tony Benn and Eric Heffer coming to a West Hampstead basement, to meet with us at Mapam UK in the 1980s and requesting that we convey their comradely greetings to brothers in the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union movement. Whisper it, but Ken Livingstone too.

2.      What is Palestine?

From Roman times onward, the Levantine area now broadly comprising Israel, the occupied territories, the Gaza Strip and Jordan was known as Palestine. During the ‘Zionist’ era, let’s say 1890 onwards (seven years before the first Zionist congress), it was part of the Turkish empire until 1917 when it was conquered by the British in WW1, and incorporated into the British Empire until, give or take, the UN  resolved to partition what was left of Palestine (see Jordan below) into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, in November 1947. Essentially bringing the State of Israel into being under international law.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 is cited by anti-Zionists as one of the root causes of the dispute and this must be right for it gave an impetus to Zionist migration into the area from Europe. But looking back, it wasn’t over helpful to Jews either.

It was a letter on behalf of the British government declaring support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Note ‘national home’ not ‘state’ though this may be splitting hairs but the key words for today is, ‘in Palestine’.

Looked at via a 2023 parallax, this appears to confirm an existing state of Palestine back in 1917, full of ‘Palestinians’ and so obviously the Zionists must have imposed themselves into an existing legitimate Palestinian state. But this is far too simplistic a view. There was (in my narrative), no sense of state or nationhood then in Palestine it was simply an area run by the British, populated in the majority by Arabs and in minority by Jews. Arabs at the time, from say 1850-1964 did not consider themselves Palestinian, rather as Arabs which populated the world from Morocco in the west to the Persian border in the east. This certainly does not detract from the reality and legitimacy of Palestinian nationality as today exists but does provide context at the time of the Balfour Declaration and highlights the danger of applying labels casually decades later and without proper consideration. I illustrate this in two ways.

1.      In 1922 the Sharifian Solution was drawn up by the British to maintain control of the middle east. It entailed ‘giving’ to three princes of what is now Saudi Arabia, areas of the middle east broadly corresponding to modern Iraq, Syria and for our purposes Jordan. Winston Churchill drew a line through then Palestine and simply gave the two-thirds share of that to become the state of Jordan. It was not proper independence, that did not occur until 1946 but it established Transjordan. Neither this nor the full independence of 1946 invoked Palestinian riots on the streets of Amaan, Jerusalem or Nazareth objecting to this denial of Palestinian sovereignty, because the local population did not consider themselves Palestinian, rather Arabs of various sects and villages. And sources state that in 1922, half the population of Transjordan was nomadic. There is not to this day, a Palestinian claim to Jordan as there is to Israel and as there is not, one should ask, why not? And if it is the case that it didn’t matter to the local Arabs that their nation was overnight given to strangers from Saudi, it rather suggests that there was no sense of nation. Moreover, the violent objection and uprising at the very same time, to Jewish control in a small part (see the maps) of the already far smaller western Palestine, points to such objection being based upon not that it was taken over by strangers, but that the strangers were Jew, not Arab. When the PLO was founded in 1964, it sought to establish an Arab state in ‘Mandatory Palestine’. This excludes Transjordan. Again, I ask, why?

2.      Let’s consider the use of the word Palestine prior to 1948, even one may say prior to 1964.

There were many instances. The Palestine Electric Corporation Limited, The Palestine Football Association, The Palestine Broadcasting Service, the Palestine Communist Party, and the Communist Party of Palestine were all Jewish organisations, alongside others more obviously so, such as The Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association. It’s likely that prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, people self-identifying as Palestinians were both Arabs and Jewish Zionists but more likely, mainly Jewish. Following Israel’s inception, all the Palestinian institutions renamed themselves Israeli equivalents but even then, even after the discarding of the label by Jews, there was relatively low adoption by Arabs of the word ‘Palestine’ until around 1964 with the founding of the PLO and one may ask; why then? And why at all?  

But there was some Arab use of ‘Palestine’. Prior to the Arab revolt (1936-39) the Palestine Arab Party was established in May 1935 and the revolt itself was also referred as Thawrat Filastin al-Kubra but generally the term Palestine does not seem to be something that politically and culturally defined the non-Jewish people of that region and did not carry the meaningful political currency that it now does until some time after it was adopted in 1964.  

To reiterate, none of this is to cast doubt on the real and vibrant Palestinian culture, sense of history, sense of injustice, of suffering, of diaspora, of collectivism etc. etc. as now exists but when one speaks to proponents of the cause (as I have done many times and include myself in that camp alongside the Israeli one), one would think that Arab Palestine existed always and forever and that is the narrative they cling to. Just a little research casts doubt on that.

3.      a) Is Israel unlawful?

Israel self-declared its existence on 14th May 1948. This followed the United Nations adoption of the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab on 29th November 1947 and a recommendation that the partition be formalised by October 1948. The Arab part included all of what became the Occupied Territories and more besides. The Jewish area was a smaller version of modern Israel (excluding the Occupied Territories). Jerusalem was wholly within the Arab part but to be designated the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. Whatever that meant. In any event the besieged Jews of Jerusalem were cut off from their brethren. The UN resolution for this two-state solution, passed 33 to 13 and was accepted by the Jewish side and rejected by the Arabs.  

The day following the declaration, on 15th May 1948, Israel was attacked by the surrounding Arab states, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Israel wins the war and establishes the borders comprising modern day Israel (excluding the Occupied Territories). What we now know as the West Bank was acceded to Jordan.  

In terms of legality, a Declaration of Independence following a United Nations resolution, provides Israel with a legitimacy few countries can match. Of course, it grew with the spoils of war (including west Jerusalem) and territory won in war, especially a defensive war which 1948 must surely be, is following an international acknowledged armistice, generally considered legitimate. For example, not many would question the legitimacy of Alsace being part of France. Contrast with the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip also acquired as spoils of war in the Six Day War of 1967, yet Israel at the time claimed no sovereignty and most of the world community consider such territories as unlawfully occupied. In 1967 Israel claimed these territories were defensive buffers only, over which it had no claim but has revised its position over the decades and annexed east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The Gaza Strip was returned in 2005.

The 1948 War of Independence, known in the Arab world as the Nakba (the catastrophe) also saw the tragedy of the displacement of around 700,000 Arabs between 1948 and 1956. How and why they became displaced is the crux and source of the current conflict. The Arab view is that they were forced from their homes by Jews. The Jewish version is that the surrounding Arab states called on their brothers to evacuate because their superior armies were approaching and would drive the Jews into the sea, whereupon the Arabs of Palestine could return not only to their homes but also claim all the Jewish homes and possessions. We cannot know what really occurred and so piece together what we can. It is the case that in 1948, the Arab countries were confident they would wipe out the Jews who were militarily far inferior, with many Zionist combatants being recovering holocaust survivors and already ravaged by a civil war that had raged for over a year in Israel since the UN partition vote. By same token there is evidence (widely accepted and verified) of a massacre inflicted by Jews upon Arabs at the village of Deir Yassin and if it occurred there, it’s reasonable to assume it occurred elsewhere.  

One might balance this by the expulsion/displacement of over 900,000 Jews from Arab lands at same time. These became Israeli citizens whereas displaced Arabs were not allowed into any of the surrounding Arab nations but rather held by their own Arab brothers in displaced persons camps to be paraded for ever more as the evidence of Israeli crime.

And if Arabs were displaced then displaced from what? What were the demographics of Palestine, say around 1930 (to take a snapshot), where was it situated and how did that compare to say 1918? There is confusing data, firstly because each side of the conflict has its own statistical narrative and secondly it is unclear whether Arab numbers include or exclude that majority part of Palestine that became Jordan in 1922, which is around a 400,000 variable. One would expect Muslim numbers to plumet at that point, yet several sources indicate that they increase and I’m not sure how to interpret that. It’s also the case that Arabs were attracted towards Palestine by the increased Jewish economic activity. What is obvious is that in 1918 there was a significant Arab (Muslim/Christian) majority, which reduced but still existed until the 1930s.

Most Arabs lived in villages, predominantly in the north, and together with Jewish co-habitants, in cities - Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth. In between were expanses of land, near the coast good arable grazing pastures but much of inland was uninhabited in between villages, and in the north, much was swampy, and malaria ridden. The extent of Eucalyptus trees planted between 1910 and 1950, mark out these uninhabitable areas that Zionists say were uninhabitable and which they purchased and turned into good arable land.  

I attended a lecture at Palestine Solidarity Campaign around 15 years ago, in which the presenter was compiling a book recording testimonies of ownership of land and attempting to piece together into an atlas of sorts. It was a work in progress. It recorded how land passed from Arab to Jew. Sometimes this was by force. Other times purchased from absent Arab and Turkish landowners or from the incumbent Arab owners/owner-occupiers. So the claim that the Jews stole the land is utterly spurious. Purchases are documented and the evidence that land was lawfully acquired is overwhelming. The contrary argument would be to claim Jeremy Corbyn’s house on the grounds that it was sold by your great grandfather and you rather wished he hadn’t. That not only must Jeremy give it to you for free but pay reparations for having bought it in the first place. Equally, where plots of land were stolen, reparations should be paid.

So, the Jewish claim of a land without a people for a people without a land is clearly romanticised nonsense. Denying the existence of a Palestinian people (or whatever label one uses) is racist and every bit as repulsive and dangerous as ‘Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea..’ But this does not make Israel illegal.

My view is that statements that Israel is an illegal state are simply wrong. Where the borders legally begin and end is far more questionable and at some point, if we are ever to see a durable peace, some/most/all of the Occupied Territories will need to be returned plus substantial reparations paid to those displaced, including potentially to those with valid claims for lost property within green line Israel. On this, see part 4 (a).

3 b) Is Israel Apartheid?

The anti-apartheid movement concerned the racist laws in South Africa enacted in the second half of the 20th century. They created a classified hierarchy of racial types, separated them and applied laws to enforce the separation. Geographically, economically, sexually, politically. Countries are racist; this sadly is a universal truth, but South Africa seemed unique in imposing laws not seen in the West since Nazi Germany.

This bears no comparison with Israel. At least not within Israel excluding the Occupied Territories but quite honestly this is to split hairs. To establish a Jewish state or an anything state is to walk an increasingly challenging political tightrope. What is it to be British? Or French or Italian? What laws protect the Italian-ness of Italy? How will Israel uphold its Jewishness and any claims to democracy with a dwindling Jewish population and an increasing Muslim one?  The Nationality Law heads down a dangerous path. What criteria did Israel apply to conveniently recognise as Jewish, a million immigrating Russians in the 1990s? Why should I, a British Jew have a right to Israeli citizenship when a Muslim born in Nablus and living 10 minutes from ‘Israeli’ settlers, does not?  Is Israel a racist society? Yes. Is it undemocratic? Yes, and getting worse all the time. Is it a ticking time bomb that will explode any claim to being a moral society if these factors are not addressed? Yes.

But to call this apartheid diminishes that term to something meaningless, which might be applied to India, pretty much all Muslim countries, and countless others.

Two pillars of Israeli society, the military and the civil service are not uniquely Jewish. It is compulsory for Bedouins and Circassians to serve but Muslims can and do volunteer and there have been several very high-ranking Arab officers in the IDF. Arab Muslims (and so of course Christians and others) participate in all strata of Israeli society. Most at the poorer end in the construction and services sectors. Many are on the margins of society, likely paid cash in hand but is that so different to minorities in Britain? But the rich Israeli/Palestinian Arabs live alongside rich Jewish Israelis in the best neighbourhoods and on lush kibbutzim; the real estate developers, the hi-tech millionaires/billionaires. Arab Israeli doctors and nurses work in the Israeli health services, there are Arab judges overseeing Israeli trials and Arab members of the Supreme Court. There are currently 17 Arab MKs (Members of Knesset) out of 120 and an Arab political party, the United Arab List, formed part of an Israeli government coalition in 2021. So, there are Arab law makers, law deciders and law enforcers.

Israeli society is extremely fallible but not uniquely so. Nor, for those of us around at the time and members of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, is it apartheid.

4.      Why is this conflict out of all the world’s conflicts a) so enduring and b) so pre-occupying?

If one searches ‘Disputed Territory’, Wiki throws up 29 in Africa, 7 in North America, 8 in South America, 39 in Asia (including 4 relating to Israel), 16 in Europe, 4 in Oceana and 55 disputes involving states outside the UN (mainly relating to China but including the dispute between UK and Turkish Cyprus).  Then there’s 27 disputes confined within an existing state where an internal group claims some sovereignty. Ignoring those relating to Antarctica which are unlikely to involve people, that’s 185 current ongoing territorial disputes of which 4 involve Israel.

a)     so enduring

The gist of all the lectures I attended at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is that the land is Palestinian, stolen by Zionists in various waves from around 1905 to 1967 and continues by creeping footsteps ever since to this very day. Not only de facto but by formal annexation. The conflict will continue until this wrong is righted and no matter how long it takes, every inch will be re-taken so that Palestine will again be free….from the river to the sea.  

Some of the stolen land allegations are undoubtedly true. As is the hundreds of thousands of people displaced. What is equally true is that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan could have absorbed their displaced Arab brothers just as Israel absorbed an even greater number of displaced Algerian, Libyan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Moroccan Jewish brothers who had their land and possessions appropriated. Instead, the Arab nations chose to showcase them in holding pens where several hundred thousand Palestinians over the decades turned into millions and the current world-wide diaspora. Be in no doubt, this was a calculated political decision based on the one fundamental premise: it was ok for Jews to live within the Arab caliphate with diminished rights but utterly unacceptable to have Jewish sovereignty over any part of it, no matter how tiny.   Approximately 8 thousand square miles out of five million. 

For its part, Israel, while paying lip service to trading land for peace if only it had a partner to talk to, has at same time taken advantage by turning a temporary defensive buffer into permanence by annexation and the permitting of its civilians to settle among  and increasingly often, terrorise Palestinian neighbours. 

Israel’s military strength coupled with the power of its US and European allies means that there is no prospect Hamas and its allies achieving their declared aim of driving all the Jews into the sea (Palestine will be free etc. etc…) in the foreseeable future. But recent events show that it is not empty posturing and Israel can be hurt…badly.

b)     so pre-occupying? 

The world-wide territorial disputes referred above all come at a horrible human cost and invariably civilian. There are countless other conflicts, thankfully now resolved that have involved far more civilian deaths than Israel/Palestine since 1945.  

The wiki page, List of Wars by Death Toll shows that since 1945 (establishment of UN), over 32 million people around the world have died in conflict. It doesn’t distinguish between military and civilian and ignores conflict where the number is less than 25,000 which is dealt separately. The deaths attributable to the Arab/Israeli conflict (1948 to date) is 116,000. This is all sides. That’s 0.36%, a comparative speck of dust. There are many conflicts in places I’d not heard of, in which those deaths alone dwarf the number in Israel/Palestine. The figures are disputed but the disparity is so colossal, how wrong can it be? 

Yet during the same period, the number of UN resolutions condemning Israel in each year, often outnumber those relating to the rest of the world combined in each year. The extent of the horror elsewhere is so overwhelming that this makes no sense. This can only be reflective of an unreasonable bias against Israel which is terribly counter-productive. It not only retards meaningful progress to help Palestinians, it feeds into Israeli hawkish siege mentality and above all, must divert huge resource from the clearly more needed areas of conflict throughout the world.  

It is my no doubt fallible and jaundiced belief that during these 75 years, opportunities have been missed for an establishment of Palestine in return for recognition of Israel but on each occasion, this has been rejected by Arab states and Palestinian leadership in this ‘all or nothing’ strategy.  

5.      Is Zionism racism? 

In 1975, the UN resolved that Zionism was racism. In 1991 it revoked this. The ‘ism’ is simply a right to recognise self-determination for Jews. That should be as uncontroversial as self-determination for Mauris. But self-determination (to borrow from Snr. Guterres) does not operate in a vacuum and one person’s liberation is another person’s lebensraum. In a post-Holocaust environment, the Law of Return seemed an innocent and welcomed practical necessity. It now favours one race over another and for no decent purpose whatever. But that is an application of the ‘ism’ rather than judgement of the ‘ism’ itself. If liberation and self-determination mean anything and after all, Palestinians are not shy at claiming an entitlement to it, then it can’t be right for one and racist for the other.  

I’m not keen generally on ascribing entitlement based on race. But we all do it. The French, the English, the Americans, the Italians, the Irish, all think there’s something special about not just their nation but they, as a people. Israelis certainly do, supercharged, but why do we expect higher morality of them than everyone else? It’s about time we all focussed less on nation and more on humanity.

6.      Is anti-Zionism racist?

I hope by this stage we are all comfortable that it is. To hold Jews to a higher standard not applied to others is antisemitic. Israel is an imperialist rogue state, yet New Zealand, Canada and the others are not. 

There are appeals to boycott Israeli products, there are marches on the streets of cities around the world weekly. Embassies are bombarded and synagogues burned. If you join such marches and do not with equal fervour also weep and gnash teeth regarding at least a dozen or so of the other 181 current conflicts, you need to take a good look at yourself and ask why not? If it’s simply that its cool to be anti-Zionist, that’s not cool and it’s time to grow up. If people can get to Jews and kill them, they do and sadly its likely they will do soon in western cities. To highlight the dreadful loss of innocent Gazan blood is obligatory. But to do so without the same consideration for Israeli victims, worse yet, to regard these victims as somehow complicit and deserving, is racist and disgusting.  

As to those Artists. I shouldn’t single them out, but they are a convenient anacronym standing symbolically for the thousands of smug entitled politicos on the left side of politics but the self-proclaimed right side of history. Why are they generally anti-Zionist? Forgive my flippancy and of course this is generalising and patronising to the many dedicated, well-meaning folk who think deeply and passionately about the issue. But for others it’s laziness. Pro-Palestine is put on a plate for them. It’s easy and has been since Qatari Petro-dollars ensured it’s been front and central since 1973. At Uni all the debates were won by the Palestine side because any dissenting voice was cancel-cultured or screamed into silence. Which is desperately sad because both sides deserve justice but especially the Palestinians and faux debate and scare tactics deter rather than encourage that.  

Understanding how and why China has ethnic-cleansed a million Uyghurs is tough and China is too powerful an enemy. Over 100,000 died in Ethiopia in 2022 in the Tigray conflict, (“sorry, never heard of it..”) nearly 100,000 in Ukraine (“you sure that isn’t anti-Putin propaganda?”), Mali, Myanmar – and others, have awful statistics to dwarf anything in Palestine, ten times over. But some of these types need to amble down Stokey High Street having done their bit, by joining the Palestine march, so they don’t need to worry about that other stuff.  They sit in the café and there’s Jeremy over there, a study of self-righteous but pained contemplation as he absently stirs his latte. If any of them had any balls, if any of them paid more than lip service to what might actually help suffering people, they’d march with a Palestine flag over one shoulder and an Israeli flag over the other. I’ll join them in that.

7.      Is there Hope?

For what? And for whom?  

Let’s start with kickstarting some sort of peace initiative because we must hope something positive can come out of this. What has occurred is epoch changing, not just for Israelis and Palestinians but for the world. But even before this, Israel was a society on a terrifying brink. Over 5% of the entire population (so in Britain that would be 3 million people), took to the streets to protest the anti-democratic direction the government was pointing. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen, including those in special forces and vital positions refused to perform their service. Whether this contributed to the awful security failure, is for another day, but the point is, there is a huge consensus in Israel for anti-government protest. It may not be the majority; it may not deter Netanyahu but for now his hand is stayed by a cross party coalition. Naturally for now, the disgusting atrocities have united the nation, but the rifts remain.  

In the context of bringing home the abducted (and there is no other context), enormous international pressure should be brought upon Israel to a) play be the rules of war and b) use the opportunity of a weakened Hamas to promote moderate Palestinian leadership and when sensitive and sensible to do so, reach out to the Palestinians. To those that say this is impossible because of the victims, well from what I read, I say that many of the victims were trying to do just this in their own personal ways.  

For Gazans? Not much. They will continue to pay the price. But Palestinians have for decades shown themselves to be resourceful perceptive and discerning and must know that Hamas cannot be the way. If they find moderate leadership willing to accept a future alongside Israel, then the future can be brighter and full of hope. International funds will pour in.

One can only hope.

PS. This blog is obviously a departure from the others concerning James Joyce.

Russell Raphael © 2021-2023

Nymph O’Mania

Post Twenty-four

In his schema Joyce labels ‘chapter 4’ Calypso and Homer tells us that Calypso was a nymph. A nymph that held Odysseus captive on her island for seven years of sexually frenzied hard labour. Poor guy. Yet he never lost sight of his goal Ithaca and return to family and so like Heinrich Tannhauser to Venus he pleaded ‘Göttin, lass' mich ziehn!’, Goddess, let me go! After all, there’s only so much orgiastic frenzy an Ithacan pilgrim can take.

Cajoled by Zeus via his messenger Hermes, Calypso relents and Odysseus is allowed on his way. And so in our book Bloom too is released from some sort of imprisonment to commence his Wanderings of Ulysses. Joyce takes liberties with the Homeric chronology but as he calls the chapter Calypso, we are bound to ask some questions for instance:

·        Who is our nymph?

·        What trap?

·        Where is Ithaca?

 Who is our nymph? The island of Gibraltar was originally known as Calpe’s island. That Molly is Gibraltarian must raise red flag alert that she might be Calypso and indeed there is much supporting evidence. She has her husband running around after her, making her breakfast, clearing the clothes, fetching the book etc. etc. Like Calypso, Molly is into sex; the smutty taste in literature and of course the likely infidelity that afternoon with Boylan. Even the hiding of the incriminatory letter beneath the pillow smacks of Calypso who was known as ‘the concealer’. Maybe she and Bloom have been bonking like mad these last seven years and so it all fits. We’ll see. He Bloom, certainly thinks erotic thoughts as we know from his lusty reverie concerning next door’s maid.

But there’s another contender. Midway through the chapter we learn that a framed picture ‘the Bath of the Nymph’ hangs above the marital bed. She reminds Bloom a bit of a younger Molly: “Tea before you put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer.”  So which is it? Or is it both?

It may be helpful to park this while we consider the other issues. 

Trap? What trap? Bloom is a free man; he ambles to the butcher and returns to his house; still apparently unfettered. Thus far, we have gleaned that he’s a decent man who makes his wife breakfast in bed and speaks empathetically with the cat. He’s a little lustful as he ogles the next door maid but inside our heads who among us isn’t?  It’s not one might think, a morning of powerful emotions. Pleasant warmth, even this early. Yet “Grey horror seared his flesh” and “He felt the flowing qualm spread over him.” This not a man without a care in the world, no matter how benign the morning.

The two phrases relate to different but related concerns and as it transpires, point I feel to the same trap. The searing of his flesh occurred amidst reading the Zionist flier and just as a cloud cast him in shadow. The Promised Land in that instant morphing from overflowing milk and honey to a desolate barren volcanic dust-bowl. The uncomfortable qualm oozes down his spine is as he reads Milly’s letter; in particular her reference to Boylan. She turned 15 the previous day and not only is she on the verge of sexual activity and now resident in Mullingar, miles from her father’s protection but she’s on the radar of Blazes Boylan. We know that Bloom suspects him of taking sexual liberties with Molly but oh my god, is this sexual predator also after his daughter Milly? Little wonder the qualm spread down his spine as he read her letter.

The trap though is sexual bondage of a broader nature. Molly’s likely infidelity and Bloom’s lusty reverie in the butcher both stem from the broken sexual chemistry between husband and wife. We don’t yet know details but throw in that their poor son Rudy died aged only eleven days and we are sensing something is amiss between the sheets. Sure enough we will ascertain in due course that it’s really been derailed since Rudy died eleven years ago.

Bloom’s Promised Land, his Zion, his Ithaca is not an Israel to be (see my post 3: The Promised Land is No Place Like Home), it’s in bed with Molly, performing the beast with two backs. He’s (indeed both of them) caught in the trap of a marriage that is sexually off the boil and he doesn’t know how to get it going again. Despite his wife telling him to scald the teapot. See my post 4: Poldy, Scald the Teapot! .

So let’s return to just who has him trapped. I’m sure Molly is quite wrapped up in it but am an insufficient amateur psychologist to explain why. I’m on sturdier ground with the nymph whose picture hangs above the bed, the ancient but younger Molly. Bloom we shall discover, believes the Jewish apocryphal tale that the baby’s health comes from the father. So blames himself for Rudy’s tragically early demise. Sex with Molly risks more babies, more death. Bloom cannot take that chance. Imagined sex with the nymph above the bed and as we shall see, similar sordid but safe encounters are a poor substitute but at least no-one is getting pregnant.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Put A Pin In That Chap

Post Twenty-Three

Among the many interesting lines in Proteus, the sentence “Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you?” is I should say, up there with the best of them. But what is Stephen and Joyce getting at? Some possibilities are considered below.

The most obvious in the chapter that Joyce later suggested might be known as Proteus, concerns the sea god Proteus himself. He lurked around the Nile delta, where sailors were stranded unless Proteus provided wind and waves. Menelaus was stuck there on the rocky island Pharos, just as Stephen will be stranded on a rock on the beach as the serpentine tongues of waves lap about him. Eidothea, daughter of Proteus takes pity on Menelaus. She explains why he’s stranded and that his only chance is to capture Proteus when he comes ashore with his herd of seals for noon slumbers. But that’s easier said than done for Proteus is a shape-shifter and will wriggle, shake and alter for all he's worth to escape. But pin him down and he’ll help.

So there’s our first interpretation: put a pin in Proteus to hold him down, just as Menelaus is equally pinned to the rocky island.

Our second and also pretty obvious, is that in this chapter of change and creativity, Stephen is trying to create. One might in a way, consider his musing as a sort of practical, testing out his theorems on aesthetics; all that very tricky theoretical stuff that Stephen tried to explain to Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen is trying to compose a poem and it concerns a vampire and virgin blood.

We have the line:

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

A vampire, a spirit residing in a no-man’s-land between human and animal, often a bat and able to change from one to the other. Killed or pinned down only by the plunging of a wooden stake through its heart. So that’s two.

The third is practical and runs from that lovely Joyce-created word, ‘almosting’. Stephen used it just earlier in the context of trying to grab hold of a dream before it disappeared up the flue of dawning consciousness. Here he needs to scrawl that vampire line on a bit of paper before he forgets it. He finds Deasy’s letter (yes, Nestor was of help in unintended ways) and tears off the blank end on which he can pin it down.

I think though my favourite gloss on the words relates to his erotic reverie. Ever since he imagines that the female cockle-picker gives him a sideways glance, he has uncharitably designated her a gypsy prostitute who can’t wait to get her lustful hands on him, her body he assumes in his poetic and vampiric reverie, being controlled by the moon and free of guilty restraint. He describes his sinful thoughts as ‘Morose delectation’ and fully expects the punishment which Thomas Aquinas says will surely follow. Not to mention that he fears going blind which may well be attributable to the same cause. These Jesuits have much to answer for and poor kid, he’s already on the look-out for vengeful thunderclouds which shall strike him dead. With sex on his mind, one may only imagine what’s going on in his trousers, “Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers in May.”, he thinks, as his lust and his guilt vie for control. So, with his hand grenade in danger of exploding in his underpants, he’d better regain control by putting the pin back in it.

Whether he manages to do so or whether like Bloom in a few hours’ time (on this very rock?), he ejaculates into his trousers, is moot.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Hello Harvey

Post Twenty-two

Harvey, one of our North London Ulysses brethren asked the far from original but nonetheless worthy question: just what is the point of chapter three, Proteus? After plodding through two readings we were approaching half way through and like Harvey, some of us felt about as ‘stogged’ as that empty bottle of porter in the sand. Some passages do seem like an unfathomable mess of words and it is very tempting to just skip it and run to the sunny uplands of the joyous and far more fathomable Leopold Bloom.

So for Harvey and no doubt several others who thought but did not express the same question, I shall try to plead the case for Proteus and justify why it’s worth hanging in there. I don’t mean this to be a guide to the chapter, I can heartily recommend my book if you want that (!). This is not so much a what’s going on as a why is it going on.

By way of background, Stephen walks along the beach at Sandymount Strand. He engages no one and simply thinks to himself. Which means that its pages of dialogue are either memories (e.g. time spent in Paris with Kevin Egan and Patrice Egan) or imagined (e.g. the visit to his Aunt Sara in Strasbourg Terrace and his various discussions with his younger self).  It is probably also relevant in a structural sense that it is the last ‘chapter’ of the three chapter Telemachiad which may indicate a parallel both to Penelope being the last chapter of the bookending three chapter Homecoming and also to Hades, chapter three of the middle section, which occurs at the same time.

Significantly and obviously Proteus helps to establish Stephen’s character. There is no understanding of the book without understanding the three protagonists and so we can’t simply skip knowing Stephen, especially if we have not read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even if we have. The initial two chapters hinted of certain themes and characteristics; his guilt regarding his mother, his disdain for his father, his rejection of religion but this is a modernist book and so character will not be gift wrapped in narrative, rather it must be teased out as we walk half a mile in Stephen’s shoes - or rather Buck Mulligan’s cast-off boots. This chapter completes our stream of consciousness training. Telemachus was some initial prep in a chapter of significant dialogue before we limbered up in Nestor. To hazard a guess, I’d say Proteus is 10% narrative, 90% interior monologue and zero % dialogue; we really dwell under his skin and need to glean what we can.

He's a man in turmoil. Invaded by various demons and they work in mischievous concert. Let’s start with his lack of self-confidence. We saw this in Nestor with his envy of schoolboys whom he expects, are for all their tender years, at comparative ease with sex; already in imagined relationships whereas his younger self sat alone atop of a bus screaming ‘naked women’. His disdainful accusations directed at his younger self punctuate Proteus. The books he was to write but never did, the embarrassing play acting in front of his bedroom mirror.

His notion of self and self-worth is to my mind revealing. As he looked in the cracked mirror in Telemachus (and amateur psychologists will have a field day with that image, Wilde readers or not), he said:

“As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me?”

I hope I’m not alone in relating to this confused notion of self. I sometimes look in the mirror and wonder who is this face I see? Or occasionally if I catch myself in ugly profile (as Bloom will refer several chapters hence) I marvel at the strangeness of the person that is apparently me. I rather hope we all do this and that it is not just Stephen and I! What is self? We need the Proteus chapter not to tell us who we are but at least to remind our several selves to pose the question.

Proteus the sea-god was/is a shape-shifter and could become all manner of different beings, different personas. It’s almost impossible to pin him down; “Put a pin in that chap, will you?” Same with us and certainly the same with Stephen. For a while I was perplexed by his thought re the alibi bus ticket :

“Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

‘Other fellow did it: other me. ‘ points I think, to his paranoia at being comprised of various selves and was so unsure of the real Stephen that he needs evidential proof in terms of the punched ticket. The notion that one of his personae is capable of murder feeds into the imagined killing of the post office official and his inability to save a drowning man, both a little further on in the chapter.

I have previously blogged [Fathoming Fathoms] on the molecule changing ‘barnacle goose’ reference in this chapter and also on similar [The Milky Way ] in chapter nine with AE;IOU; both are of the many references to Stephen’s confused and arguably schizoid notion of ‘self’ which will also be replicated by Bloom in Circe and elsewhere. Little wonder he’s confused in this chapter of confused notion of reality. If we cannot trust the ineluctable modality of the visible, audible, tactile etc., that is, if we cannot trust what we perceive to be the reality around us, how can we trust our notion of self within it? And where does that leave self-worth? Aristotle’s answer was to move on and create some sort of reliable framework otherwise we all just go mad.

Having considered Stephen’s notion of self-worth, or lack of, let us ponder another essential characteristic evolved in this chapter, his bitterness. He feels alone and embittered. Resentful of the colonising Brits, he’s also mistrustful of the Fenian bombers such as Kevin Egan and equally of their political comrade, Arthur Griffith and his newly formed Sinn Fein. He feels usurped by the Catholic middle class in the guise of Buck Mulligan that accommodates the Brits and which has left him literally but more importantly spiritually homeless and of the simoniac Church (dringadring and jackpriests) which banishment from his life leaves a spiritual void. It is though perhaps in Art for that defines him, that the bitterness bites to the core. He is bitter that he didn’t write those intended books, that his self-proclaimed genius remains unrecognised (we’ll see that AE has not included him in the compendium of Ireland’s new young poets) and that he must create his art in English, the conqueror’s tongue. But those words, linguist though he may be, are the only tools available. Per A Portrait  

“His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”

These were all nets that he, a soul born in Ireland, was supposed to fly high to escape. But he failed. The blue telegram ‘curiosity to show’, called him back from bohemian Paris to his dying mother. The mother who even in the advance stages of cancer and despite their impoverishment, sent him postal orders to cash in Paris which must only enhance his guilt at the role he played in her death. Mulligan of course constantly touches this nerve, as if Stephen could possibly forget it.

The Proteus chapter also sheds light on Stephen’s opinion of his father Simon. Hawkman whose name he bears and whom in consubstantial terms he fears he will replicate; this talented witty man, now a well-liked (outside of his family) but impoverished drunk well known, too well known around the Dublin pubs. Stephen sees this father/son ambivalence not simply in Oedipal terms but before him in bar MacMahon with Kevin and Patrice Egan, in a wider sense in Daedalus and Icarus, Prince and King Hamlet, in Shakespeare and his father (and son) and in Jesus and God.

For me, the most significant characteristic is Stephen’s sense of insulation. He operates like too many of us, in a silo. Most comfortable alone with his own pretty destructive thoughts but when in company, especially if he tries to express such thoughts, is taken to be inadequate, aloof, arrogant bordering on aggressive and simply strange.

If Harvey, we take some of this from Proteus, then when we meet Bloom, we can better understand how he might help Stephen, despite having plenty of problems of his own. I have no doubt that this links to 16th June 1904, a day of huge significance for the 22 year old James Joyce for it is the day he first dated Nora Barnacle. Of what that date comprised depends on who one believes but at any rate it was the day on which for Joyce, the silo started to crumble ‘shattered glass and toppling masonry’ and that there was another human with whom he could relate. Not only this, that his art would be better expressed and enriched by a life shared with others; shared in the true sense.

Stephen recoils at both the live dog and the carcass of the dead dog but will perhaps unknowingly at this point, have registered the empathy that the live dog has for his dead brother and one never knows, by the early hours of 17th June, Stephen’s ‘other me’ may have improved for the better.

Stick with it Harvey.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Milky Way

Post Twenty One

I refer neither to our planet’s little corner of the universe nor to that petite chocolate bar that I used to scoff as a kid and which I see is still going strong. They used to say and maybe still do, that it was the snack one could eat between meals which technically is undeniable. But I am not interested in confectionery here and in fairness, I doubt the protectors of that brand are especially interested in what I have to say nor the product I wish to explore.

We take a break this week at North London Ulysses but on our return to the Proteus episode, shall meet Patrice Egan in a Parisian bar as he laps his warm milk. We are not sure what Stephen drinks, perhaps he sups from the same churn which would link to the milk delivered to the Martello tower and the Nestor cows that Mr. Deasy is so keen to save. But it’s a bit odd going to a bar and ordering milk. What’s going on? Apologies to the lovely folk at North London Ulysses but spoiler alert: it’s not milk.

What it is, is revealed a little later when we meet Patrice’s father Kevin and the reference to ‘froggreen wormwood’ before conclusively, we get the phrase:

“Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white.”

You guessed it, we’re talking Absinthe. The green fairy created from the flowers and leaves of the grand wormwood plant, though Joyce being Joyce it’s just as likely that ‘wormwood’ points to its reputation as to what the fang of the green fairy might do to one’s brain. But is it’s bark worse than it’s bite? The reputation for inducing psychedelic episodes may be why it was so popular among the Bohemians of fin de siècle Paris or it may be that it was this very radical popularity that so scared the Parisienne establishment. Thus the hype as well as the bans emerged. Whether the reputation is overblown and whether psychedelic or not, what is undeniable is it’s indecently high alcohol content which even in today’s over-regulated world lurks between 45 and 75% proof, UK. That’s 90-148 proof US; Wiki says. So if you have it with your morning cornflakes you really should seek professional help.

Which brings us back to milk. Absinthe is naturally green and the diehards like Kevin drink it neat but many including his son Patrice, add a little water and that’s when the magic happens. The chemists call it ‘precipitation’ and I failed my chemistry ‘O’ level so I know what I’m talking about. If you add water to whiskey it just looks like whiskey whereas with absinthe it goes milky-cloudy and unlike oil mixed with water and most other substances, it doesn’t separate again. It just stays milky and this apparently is very rare indeed.

It's a weird molecular thing which would appeal to Stephen who will muse in two hours how our molecular structure constantly renews so that over a five month period we are entirely new. Does that make us different people? Stephen will wonder, only half joking, if he still owes AE (George Russell) that guinea on the basis that the debt is down to Old Stephen but reflecting that he probably does, smiles again as he thinks: ae,iou.

Bloom will also contemplate our molecular structure and as the book progresses, we might think that Blephen or indeed Stoom could be the product of two souls Absinthe and water, that when mixed together refuse to obey the normal rules and do not separate again, they stay cloudy. A little swirly, mixed up and quite possibly unstable as together they slide by the Delta of Cassiopeia and into The Milky Way.

Some say alcohol is mother’s milk for the soul. That’s probably a pretty dangerous message but hey, as Patrice Egan says as he laps it up....schluss.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Year of the Big Wind

Post Twenty

It’s a bit breezy today in the UK. We don’t often get Amber warnings but today they are big and Red! Storm Dudley came and went and we barely noticed but his sister Eunice younger by a few days, means to ensure we sit up and pay attention. We famously underestimated a storm in 1987 when we were assured all would be well only to awaken that morning to the sight of forests flattened. Let’s hope this is not on that scale.

In Telemachus, Buck Mulligan having just expectorated a very rude rhyme concerning the ablutionary habits of Old Mother Grogan and Mrs. Cahill suggested:

“— That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.”

Haines you see was the English chap over from Oxford seeking quaint Irish stories to be promulgated as a collection in a book. In the quote above we see Mulligan in the act of trying to sell him a good story but unable to resist the back-hand insult with the barb that he’ll write five lines of text followed by ten pages of explanatory notes. He then sets the scene with Dundrum and weird sisters and big winds. One assumes that this one of Joyce’s many digs at WB Yeats. His sisters established the Dun Emer Guild at Dundrum around this time which promoted Irish legend arts and crafts and so chimed with much of Yeats’ poetry and the more general Gaelic revival. To call them weird is pretty insulting but is no doubt how Mulligan viewed the more spiritual end of the arts. It also brings to mind the witches in Macbeth so hardly flattering.

The year of the big wind refers to a storm that occurred 6th January 1839 in which hundreds died. It quite devastated the west of Ireland where literacy levels then and for much of the nineteenth century were nothing to write home about (bad pun – sorry) and so then and for subsequent decades time was marked at least apocryphally in the Grogan, the Cahill and many other households by reference to the year of the big wind.

Eunice is very likely an equal opportunity storm and so will no doubt hit Ireland as well as southern Britain and let’s hope that we all remain safe and that 2022 does not follow 1987 or heaven forbid 1839, into folklore.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Maladroit Deshil; the Right Write

Post Nineteen

From Nestor:

“On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. 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. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.”

This passage has troubled me. It comes hot on the heels of Deasy’s tirade against the Jews and whilst Stephen puts up some resistance, in his mind he pictures this scene from his recent experience in Paris. The goldskinned men are strange to him. Exotica. Context pins them as Jews as Stephen so assumes. The Paris stock exchange, a grand building was also known as the temple, based as it was architecturally on the Temple of Vespasian and Titus in Rome and one naturally has in mind the money-lenders expelled by Jesus from the temple in Jerusalem. So this is not a flattering image and tends to dilute Stephen’s resistance to Deasy’s antisemitism. Yet if that’s his recollection then so be it.

These men spoke not in French or Stephen would have understood. The gabble of a strange tongue. They schemed, living on their wits to make money. Thickplotting. We shall be reminded of them shortly and throughout Ulysses as our ‘Jew’ Leopold Bloom shall plot various money-making schemes. These are strangers in a strange French land, like Kevin Egan, though not on the run after blowing up buildings, these fled for their lives after pogroms, grateful to leave with the gems on their fingers but little else to build a new life in whatever sanctuary they landed. Their brethren would have been Virags from Szombathely and my own maternal grandparents from Odessa to the docks of London’s east end.

Sanctuary? In the Paris of February 1904, the Dreyfus storm still raged and France was no sanctuary for Jews. They knew the rancours massed about them and sensed and Stephen sensed, that ‘time surely would scatter all.’ Too right. A mere 18 years after publication of Ulysses, nearly a quarter of all French Jewry would be rounded up and murdered by the Nazis along with the Roma and others. No great sanctuary in Ireland either as the Jews of Limerick found to their cost at ‘this very moment, this very instant’ as Bloom would remark later that day. All of which is fitting to remember in this week of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Maladroit. It’s a very particular choice of word and Joyce was nothing if not particular. Maladroit, not straight, not right. No ‘per vias rectus’ for the likes of these. No straight road to heaven, for as Mr. Deasy tells us, they (we) sinned against the light or to put it less charitably, they (we) killed Jesus and for this they (we) must take the left-hand path which goes way below.

It puts me in mind of a phrase we’ll see at 10.30 that evening and the opening words of Oxen of the Sun episode, set in the Holles Street maternity hospital.

               ‘Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus’

A mix of three words starting according to Gifford, with a corruption of ‘deashil’, an Irish word meaning to go to the right. Turn right for the maternity hospital, right is good, left is bad, bad luck. Left is no start for a new baby. Deasil; is it just me or is that worryingly close to ‘Deasy’? Skip forward those eighteen years or so from ‘22 and standing in the line to the right or the left had wholly different and sinister connotations.

It must be a comfort in life to have certainty. To know that this way is right and that way is wrong. The Jews it seemed are destined to wander; not just Jews, this is the perennial lot of the immigrant and refugee and it is only idiots such as Garrett Deasy that consider this as a negative. Immigrants add to the soul of society. Exotica is the spice of life. As an exhausted but still practical Bloom puts it much later that night:

               “Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History—would you be surprised to learn?—proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who, in other respects, has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so.”

And even later, a belter of a line by Bloom especially for 1 o’clock in the morning as a barb to Little Irishers:

               “The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles, your God was a jew, because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere about in the county Sligo.”

Who’s to say what god is or from where god hails but the county Sligo which I’m sure is otherwise lovely in every respect, seems for this purpose a little.. well, maladroit.

For more Ulysses idle thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Coming of Age: Virus and Vico

Post Eighteen

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Jim and Ulysses, happy birthday to you!

As January peters out, we are merely hours from the 2nd February centenary, sorry I should say #Ulysses100 if I want to get noticed. To say celebrations may be to over-egg a touch but certainly all over the world Joyce fans and scholars are marking the occasion. Even non-Joyceans will do well not to notice the event. Here in our little corner of north London, North London Ulysses will be heading to the Clissold Arms pub in Fortis Green, better known for its Kinks connections than Joycean (but we’re on that case), to chat, to read and to partake of Guinness’s porter and Jameson’s whiskey (other beverages also available).

Turnout may be a little muted for part of our lovely group remains uncomfortable in public gatherings. Vaccined and boosted though the vast majority of us may be in the UK, a jig in a pub remains a little scarry for some and understandably so. This virus is not to be scoffed at. North London Ulysses started reading in mid-January; for some in the pub, for others on zoom and if on the centenary our party allows for the usual reading, we shall finish Nestor. In Ulysses Joyce was prescient in a number of ways; Irish independence, the rise of fascism and even possibly the holocaust, an Irish nod towards Europe but we can’t say that he foresaw Covid. And yet. And yet his reference in Nestor to a virus is indeed noted and not simply because the word appears, that would be silly and trite; bear with while I try to make something of substance.

It is, ironically, the headmaster Mr.Deasy, who draws our attention. Yet not ironic because it is via his ignorance and xenophobic, misogynous myopia that he imparts significant life lessons; for example that Stephen might do better learning than teaching. Deasy is concerned with the foot and mouth disease that is blighting Irish cattle and he has drafted a cliché-ridden letter that he would like Stephen with his newspaper connections, to help get published. Nestor is a chapter in which we wonder what it is to teach, to inspire the next generation and the pressure that imposes upon teachers. The episode opens with Stephen teaching history and so we contemplate how we view history. It’s all too easy and obvious to accept the conventional, ‘this follows that follows this follows that’ as Deasy’s religious orthodoxy would have us believe. It might be something more imaginative as a William Blake or a Kurt Vonnegut may ponder. A history in which an ancient Greek Ulysses might turn up in 1904 as a Leopold Bloom. Mark the phrase ‘Akasic records’ for future reference.

A mind expanding view of history requires glancing at a Neapolitan chap called Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Contrary to Mr. Deasy’s opinion, history says Vico isn’t a linear path leading inexorably into the manifestation of God’s light but rather a circular repetitive spiral starting with the voice of god (whatever that may be) and finishing in the same place. Meantime we trot through autocracy aristocracy, democracy and a descent into chaos before a huge cataclysm returns us to the wrath of god and the cycle repeats. For James Joyce the first world war must have been that cataclysm. I mean, what else? For us inhabiting this part of the twenty-first century (at least those outside of Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Uyghur) the Covid pandemic carries cataclysmic characteristics.  For Deasy the pandemic affected only cattle, which was devastating for farmers but only a matter of time before it percolated through the Irish economy and riddled a meat dependent wider society like marbles of fat on a nice rib-eye.

How is this significant for our book Ulysses? After all this is only episode two and there is maybe one further reference in episode twelve to a meeting to discuss the cattle crisis at the City Arms Hotel. Generally despite Bloom’s empathy, we are not so bothered with the poor cows as we plunder through the book. Until that is episode fourteen Oxen of the Sun, which in some important ways is the key episode. Homeric resonance reminds that Odysseus (Ulysses) is warned not to touch the cattle on the island belonging to Helios, the Sun God. Obviously they do and bad shit happens. In 1904 Ireland the cattle are diseased and the sun is imposing a vengeful drought upon Ireland. In episode fourteen there is a cataclysmic thunderclap bringing torrential fertilizing rain. The cycle resets. It must be significant that this occurs in the episode of the virus-ridden oxen. No spoiler but in significant ways this is a pivotal point in the book.

Joyce is a clever fella but he’s no Cassandra; he did not predict coronavirus. But he did visualise a viral pandemic generating the Vicoan thunderclap, so let’s indulge him credit for that. He is after all, the birthday boy.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Fathoming Fathoms

Post Seventeen

In Ulysses there are at least two references to five fathoms; so one suspects it to be significant and as I’ve never been comfortable with what that significance is, it’s time to get to grips or at least try. A decent starting point is to ascertain just what is a fathom. It transpires that it is an old fashioned measurement of about 6 foot depth of water and generally has been superseded by the metric system. So when in Telemachus the boatman informs the businessman that it’s five fathoms deep out there to the north of the bay, he means a depth of around 30 feet so, more than sufficient for a drowning.

This conversation is overheard by Stephen as he sat with Haines near the forty foot (one assumes over six fathoms) and he recalls it in Proteus where it plays into his fear of drowning.

“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. 

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue.”

Being from Proteus one could create a blog from every line but lets try and pick over the most significant bones and the first bone, the one on which I shall concentrate in this short blog is the extract from Ariel’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

“Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

                                             Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.”

This quite early in the book is already our second reference to The Tempest with Mulligan earlier accusing Stephen of having the rage of Caliban. Here, Ariel suggests that Ferdinand’s father has drowned which is an immediate link to the conversation at the forty-foot and to Stephen’s Icarus-like fear of drowning as he has expressed earlier in the episode and as Mulligan earlier mocked him for washing only once a month. Which actually turns out to be a gross under-exaggeration.

But it’s what happens after death that resonates for us. He changes, he metamorphoses. His bones become coral, his eyes become pearls. Nothing fades it just changes, he undergoes a sea-change; a phrase I also associate with Sirens and greaseabloom though I note it is not actually mentioned there. What happens after death is a question real and raw for Stephen, still reeling from the death of his mother. Moreover, drowning is the phrase he uses in Wandering Rocks to metaphorically describe the fate of his surviving family.

The phrase

               “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain”

is alone worthy of far deeper analysis than this little blog permits and we’ll do it some injustice shortly but first let’s consider other fathom or drowning occurrences.

In Nestor one boy must recite a piece of Milton’s poem Lycidas. It concerned his friend Edward King who had drowned or so Milton heard because the body wasn’t recovered. In Proteus, as well as the God becomes man line above, the sea (triggered by the Swinburn poem quoted in Telemachus) is the mighty mother drawing us back to the womb and when in Paris it was Stephen’s mother’s money that kept head above water, it was also her terminal illness that sucked him back beneath the waves. And Stephen is not good down there, not like Mulligan who saved a drowning man.

Further on; in Hades drowning is considered a pleasant way to go, in Scylla the whirlpool Charybdis will metaphorically suck us to our deaths, In Wandering Rocks Stephen considers his family to be drowning in poverty and in Oxen we have a torrent of rain.

Back to Proteus and god becoming man etc. This smacks of John 1:1:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

and moving to the word becoming flesh in John 1:14 and dwelling among us and then dying, and rising again. The phrase morphing from the resurrection miracle of the believer to the evolution of the non-believer with fish being eaten by geese and all living things eventually becoming part of the landscape. In this case the Featherbeds, hills in the Dublin milieu. And please note, not just any geese but Nora Barnacle geese and further wheels spin in episode eighteen with Bloom on the featherbed mattress with Molly, his Nora. Death it seems is no barrier to life going on, in some way shape or form. And don’t think we didn’t spot that quiver of minnows ejaculating sperm-like from the drowned man’s trouserfly.

Not so different to Ferdinand’s father becoming the coral reef nor to Bloom’s thoughts in Hades and Lestrygonians.

Its all reinforcement of a theme if not the central theme, that the soul can’t be contained by death. The body just morphs into something else and the soul moves on. John Milton believes he will yet see his friend in heaven because he’s a believer. Rational Bloom, we think a non-believer, will feel and arguably see again the soul of Rudi. Stephen a confirmed non-believer, nevertheless wonders just where his mother has gone.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Dusk and the Light Behind Her

Post Sixteen

The latest edition of Blooms & Barnacles, Episode 84 was as ever informative and fun in equal measure. But preoccupied as Kelly and Dermot were with ecclesiastical witticisms - Iron Nails Ran In, the miracle of moving statues (I can’t help but think of that Derry Girls episode) and the assassination by the Invincibles of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, that they skirted over one of my favourite lines in the book.

Honestly I chuckle just to think of it. Its mildly sexist but that’s the least of this book’s issues.

This is the passage in question from Lotus Eaters as Bloom sits in church to pass some time and casually observes the proceedings:

“He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion every morning. This very church. Peter Carey. No, Peter Claver I am thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers, now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope? Yes: under the bridge.”

It starts with him observing the priest’s back and pondering over the meaning of the embroidered letters IHS (it is in fact the Jesuit inscription the Humble Society of Jesus and not the more colloquial interpretations Bloom gives) and ends with his musing on James Carey (he can’t quite recall the name) who lived nearby and attended mass here while contemplating two sins; ratting on his mates (turned queen’s evidence) and murder.

I though am more interested in randy Mr.Bloom. When his mind turns to his clandestine pen pal Martha Clifford (he doubts this is her real name) who authors semi-pornographic letters and who wishes to meet him in church one Sunday after mass. Bloom surveys the women in the room, generally nuns and wonders if she might be one of them. Now, I have never tried Tinder (Mrs.R watches me like a hawk) and suspect all that swiping would confuse me but I expect one of its many occupational hazards to be that “the Date”, once revealed in her or his glorious reality doesn’t live up to the photo. Or in Bloom’s case, his imagination.

The line ‘Dusk and the light behind her’ is from the song “When I Good Friends was Called to the Bar” from the 1875 Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury. In a nutshell, the young barrister is struggling to get briefs when he is given some advice from an unscrupulous experienced lawyer who recalls his own big break many years before:

So I fell in love with a rich attorney's
Elderly, ugly daughter.
Chorus.
………

The rich attorney, he jumped for joy,
And replied to my fond professions:
"You shall reap the reward of your pluck, my boy,
At the Bailey and Middlesex Sessions.
You'll soon get used to her looks," said he,
"And a very nice girl you'll find her!
She may very well pass for forty-three
In the dusk, with a light behind her!"

Oh Mr. Bloom! Naughty, cynical Mr.Bloom! He’s concerned to meet Martha Clifford because he suspects she’ll turn up veiled in poor light but when revealed will disappoint. As I said, a little sexist but pretty funny. Well, it tickles me anyway.

Kelly and Dermot of the B&B podcast revealed that they are soon leaving the US for Ireland and I do hope I shall have opportunity to hop over from London to meet them. I am though getting on in years so might try arriving at dusk with the light behind me.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Chapeau and Hats Off!

Post Fifteen

To call Bloom an ad-man, a Maddison Avenue mad man, is to stretch a point. He’s no Don Draper. He sells a bit of newspaper space to local businesses keen to persuade Dubliners to part with hard earned cash. Yet he thinks like an ad-man, he appraises adverts as he goes through the day and significantly he’s cottoned onto the fact that sex sells, so he may yet have a career in the business; despite Molly’s pleas that he get a steady job. He would no doubt have approved of the natty strapline, If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Hat, which apparently first appeared in the 1940s and has been rolled out on a regular basis ever since.

Bloom of course wears a hat. It might be a bowler we are not sure. At least not as sure as Joseph Strick was for the 1967 movie in which Milo O’Shea models a fine specimen. For at least early on in Calypso and Lotus Eaters we know it simply as a generic hat. As well as protecting Bloom from weather, clement and inclement, it is also a very useful secret repository for hidden notes and business cards.

Stephen’s headgear is rather more illuminated. Mulligan describes it as his ‘Latin quarter hat’ as he flings it to him in Telemachus. In Proteus Stephen thinks of it as his ‘Hamlet hat’ towards which the passing cockle-picker shoots a glance. We assume it to be black with a widish brim that may be manipulated as bohemian style dictates. Buck Mulligan sports a Panama, de rigour summer wear and indicating a more superior style altogether. Dapper too, like Blazes Boylan’s straw boater which in common with Bloom’s hails from John Plasto hatter, of number one, Brunswick Street.

Martin Cunningham and other mourners appropriately adorn silk, heresiarchs flee St. Michael, mitres awry and there’s an interesting phantasmagorical chap in Nighttown, mysterious in his sombrero. But enough of this, its 1904 Dublin, blokes wore hats. No big deal. Emphasis on blokes because this is the male version of the Ulysses Hat Blog; female and androgynous versions remain in gestation.

What might be of interest is what occurs when hats leave heads and I offer a mere four examples for your delectation

1.      Mr. Leopold Bloom wanders into the maternity hospital in Holles Street to enquire of the wellbeing of Mrs. Purefoy now in her third day of labour. Bloom enters; respectful, full of ruth, greets Nurse Callan, also full of ruth. Two decent sympathetic beings. Bloom naturally removes his hat. If we are to believe what Jimmy Joyce wrote in his explanatory letter of this unfathomable Oxen of the Sun episode (and it’s his book so why wouldn’t we?), the hospital is the womb and Bloom entering it represents the ejaculate so he removing his hat allows the sperm unfettered access to do its business. Just why Joyce considered the hospital to be the womb and Bloom the spermatozoon is the whole point of the Oxen of the Sun episode but that explanation with only a sideways glance to hats, is not for now.

2.      Mr. John Henry Menton holds his silk hat inside the gate of Glasnevin cemetery after paying last respects to the buried Paddy Dignam whom he employed in his solicitors office; until he sacked him. The Hades episode has already given us the measure of this nasty bitter man and we are intrigued as Bloom approaches. He points out that he has a crease in his hat probably having sat on it during the service. Some say that this is Bloom asserting some superiority by pointing out this chink in Menton’s armour. I don’t think so, rather Bloom is doing what comes naturally to him, the decent thing though it is accompanied by mischievous thought.

3.      Mr. Stephen Dedalus is punched to the ground by Private Carr. Bloom comes to his aid which includes retrieving Stephen’s Latin quarter/Hamlet hat as it rolls towards the wall. There Bloom sees an eleven year old boy and you know who he is. If you don’t, read the book, you’re in for a treat.

4.      Mr. Charles Stuart Parnell, uncrowned King of Ireland until he wasn’t, also loses his hat. It is knocked off in a scuffle at the offices of the United Ireland newspaper. Again it is Bloom, retriever Bloom, to the rescue and is rewarded with a ‘thank you’ just as some fifteen years later in 1904, Menton squeezes same words through gritted teeth. Parnell’s gratitude is it seems heartfelt, though we only have Bloom’s recollection as evidence of that and decent chap though he may be, he is prone to a little fantasy.

There we have it. No mind-blowing hat busting conclusions but no taking the pith helmet either, just some tall tales for tall hats.

Chapeau.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Post Fourteen

So says Juliet in the famous balcony scene. Stephen and Bloom were hardly lovers; the book is controversial (and that would have been 1904 dynamite) but this is one direction it does not overtly head, though it does covertly. Buck Mulligan is the gay betrayer but not in that sense, at least as I say, not overtly.

Nevertheless, Bloom and Stephen have common ground, something momentous has passed between them during the brief sojourn in Eccles Street and to misquote, they may well be the two people the aftercourse of whose lives were determined by the striking of that Aeolean match. Whether or not friends they are at some level, soulmates. Dante has found his Virgil and one or both of them have found their Beatrice. So when near the end of the book they part, we might expect after all we have gone through, such parting to be a portentous act. A fateful moment in which they look deep into each other’s eyes and convey serious concluding words. After all, this is the final parting of the two main protagonists of the novel of the century.

The moment is captured in Ithaca:

How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.

There we have it. They stood opposite one another and raised arms in vague attempt at a handshake that may or may not reach fulfilment. And last words? Bloom has gestured and said something concerning the awoken Molly whose paraffin lamp casts a nightly glow in the second floor rear window. We don’t know what he said but its characteristics were of subdued affection, admiration and suggestion. They then urinate out there in the rear yard before Stephen departs via the back alley, into the night and out of our story. Twenty-first century obsession with hygiene may make us grateful for no definitive handshake after their urination but one doubts that to be the reason. The sterile accuracy of Ithaca keeps us guessing as to what occurred. It is certainly not the grand denouement for which we may have hoped. The general nods in Molly’s direction paves the way for all manner of conjecture but very little solid ground.

There are times in life when we must part from those important to us and whose absence will leave a gaping hole. Do not waste such occasions with a bit of a nod and a gesture. If there is something on your mind or in your heart, for goodness sake let them know, otherwise they’ll always be guessing. Just as we do regarding 17th June and beyond.  

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Maria Ewing meets West Ham United

Post Thirteen

Not names one naturally associates with a James Joyce Ulysses blog but bear with me.

I was very sad to hear the news on Tuesday morning that Maria Ewing the opera soprano had died aged only 71. I have not followed her career intently and really only know her for her 1986 performance of Salome in the opera of the same name. The Richard Strauss opera is a highly charged one act piece of devastating power; dealing with incest, cruelty, rape, murder, necrophilia antisemitism and blasphemy to name several aspects and may possibly be my favourite opera. The libretto by Oscar Wilde naturally helps.

It pivots on the dance of the seven veils which Salome performs for her step-father King Herod. It’s obviously allegorical for incestual sex and pretty close to non-consensual. I have three versions of the opera and each in its own way exceptional. In two of them (and in all other versions so far as I know) the soprano’s blushes are spared notwithstanding the removal of the veils. Not so for Maria Ewing, she goes full frontal nudity whilst dancing and having dominated every scene thus far with her wonderful singing and acting. Because for her, the part and so the Art demanded it. A cynic might say it was a gimmick to which others did not need to resort or that it was the Director and she simply did what she was told. I don’t buy that though I will say that the other versions I have are just as wonderful despite an undergarment beneath the last veil. But Maria went for it. She strove!

Just as did Icarus. He felt the need to fly higher than his father and too close to the sun. We don’t know why but like Maria and other great artists he felt compelled to put himself out there. To go further. To strive. Here I link Stephen Dedalus. By making him the son of a Dedalus he becomes Icarus and he sets out in A Portrait his strict conditions for good art. But in Ulysses he like Icarus, gets his wings clipped and is told at the end of Scylla to cease to strive. He need not soar so high to achieve greatness; Lapwings are also entitled to a life. Bloom will guide.

We need both Lapwings and Eagles. Artists like Maria who were willing to push the boundaries not for a gimmick but simply to see where that took them.

My football team West Ham United are brilliant and wonderful. Not because they tend to win, though bizarrely at present we are flying high whereas for most of my life my team has been a source of almost constant disappointment. But there it is, we supporters stick by the team through thick and thin. ‘Tis our lot. West Ham’s song sings of bubbles that fly so high, they nearly reach the sky but like our dreams, they fade and die. Yet we still forever blow bubbles. Ultimately Bloom guides us that we need to be practical because life is real and carries real responsibility. But there is a place for Art. Dirty, disrespectful dangerous Art. Where the likes of Icarus, Maria and a braver version of Stephen Dedalus would go that extra mile without caring if they fall off of the edge or who might get a peep of a bit of skin.

Thanks Maria. I am sad but proud to mark your passing and if you see Bobby Moore, give him my best.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Love: Secrets and Lies

Post Twelve

North London Ulysses launches this week. It’s the second cycle of the book for six of us but this time around we are some 60 strong. With these numbers, it will be a mix of in person and on zoom and I feel such interest indicates the insatiable appetite people have to grapple with and get through Ulysses. The surprise that I hope will be in store for people is that instead of the book being a grind it will be an absolute pleasure. I’ve thought long and hard as to how I would introduce our first meeting this Wednesday. How does one introduce to new readers arguably the greatest novel of the last century?

I’m going with the theme of Love. Because when all’s said and done, I’d say we are dealing with a love story. Molly and Bloom love one another or at least they did several years ago and this notwithstanding the shotgun nature of the marriage back in 1888. But now it is flawed and the story before us, for all its intellectual and aesthetic undercurrents is at its heart, the story of two people trying to rediscover the spark in their relationship in the hope that the love that they once had for each other can be re-kindled. So also a mystery; we are on the hunt for Love.

The rot set in eleven years earlier when their son Rudy died aged only eleven days. Since when the intimacy has evaporated from their marriage and for these last nine months even meaningful conversation has ceased. Yet we know from their inner thoughts the fondness they retain for each other but still the flame barely flickers. As Bloom reminisces in Davy Byrne’s pub: ‘Me. And me now.’ How did it come to this?

Relationships. They are not easy and the Blooms’ is not untypical of a 16 year old marriage. Routine becomes routine and what excitement they enjoy is experienced individually not shared. What I mean by that is that they have secrets from each other. This is not unique; all couples, indeed all human beings one suspects, need private space. A dark corner, a quiet corner that is all one’s own and to which even the dearest lover is not allowed access. Yet if this is allowed to fester, if it contains secrets that one cannot share with a life partner one has to ask, why that would be? There should be very little, save serious criminality that a life partner could not understand and forgive and if that is not the case, one might wonder if the relationship is healthy in the long term.

Honesty begins at home and real honesty is facing up to the fact that if one feels one has to keep secrets from a partner, this is not a partner in the true sense. No doubt this is how it is for many couples and they make it work but it’s a sort of half relationship. Our book seeks more and if you think this is an unrealistic expectation, I think it reflects the frankness of Joyce’s relationship with Nora Barnacle. We may be surprised at and even a little disgusted by the brazenness of some of the letters that passed between them (well, Joyce to Nora, we don’t so far as I know, have the benefit of vice versa) but I think they exemplify the laying bare of their devotion. One may to cast doubt, point to Joyce’s infatuation with Marthe Fleischmann but that was later in the relationship, if it starts going wrong after only 5 years (Rudy dies in 1893) it doesn’t bode well.

Leopold and Molly have allowed mistrust to germinate and take hold in their marriage. She with reason, suspects him of seeing prostitutes and loose women and confidently muses that his jacket does not have enough pockets to hide from her, the condoms among the other secrets. Bloom we discover in Ithaca suspects, wrongly as it transpires, that Molly has been unfaithful for years and with half of Dublin. If they cannot bring themselves to bare souls to one another, the marriage is doomed for a relationship built on manipulated trust has no long term future.

Against such a disheartening backdrop is there hope for Molly and Bloom?? Is our quest for Love forlorn? The loss of a baby is cataclysmic and will test the strongest resolve and devotion. We do not really get to know Molly until the end but it’s our knowledge of Bloom and our understanding of his character that drives the novel and this is so uplifting and compelling, that we are in his and so their corner from the off. There will be downs as well as ups and all told, Bloom will have a torrid day but we shall be optimistic. We hunt for Love in the firm belief that we shall find it, that it shall find us and that Molly and Bloom shall once more find each other. Yes.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Locke is the Key?

Post Eleven

In Episode 18 of his Re: Joyce podcast the late Frank Delaney pointed to a phrase that he claimed to be the most important in the entire book. It appears early in in the first episode Telemachus and so that is quite a claim. I hazard a guess that he goes on to accord such honour to words later in the book as to be fair to him, there are many significant phrases. This though, would be right up there so what is the phrase?

Stephen is trying to take Mulligan to task over a recent insult to him. The nature of the insult, though significant for the book is immaterial to the point here.

Mulligan cannot remember specifics because so he says,

“I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?”

Mention of ideas and sensations says Delaney, resonates with the philosopher John Locke who reasoned that we only learn from experience, direct sensory perception as opposed to having innate knowledge as per the hitherto dominant Cartesian (from Rene Descartes – I think therefore I am) school of thought. All above my pay grade but I can see how this anticipates Stephen’s Platonic/Berkeleyan ruminations along Sandymount Strand and the Plato/Aristotle contrast to be explored in Scylla. All of which feed into deeper understanding of the book.

Joyce famously boasted that a destroyed Dublin could be rebuilt from his book yet he describes very little in detail. It’s all touchy-feely as he frees our minds to create impressions of people, buildings etc. from the vague hints he ferments. Ideas and sensations.

And I join the much missed Frank in his amazement that Joyce casually drops this into an easily overlooked conversation in episode one.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Just Falling With Style

Post Ten

Oh Woody! Why’d you have to go and break the spell? Buzz was sure he was flying.

The flying to falling to flying theme undulates through Ulysses (and underpins Finnegans Wake) arguably stemming from Icarus flying too close to the sun on Daedalian wings before crashing to a watery death. He didn’t rise again unless through metempsychosis, so let’s focus on the Fall.

From the moment in Lotus Eaters when Bloom struggles to recall that the speed of a falling body is 32 feet per second, per second, Joyce conflates falling with Original Sin as represented by the number 32. In A Portrait, Stephen resisted the call of Holy Orders as he intuits his to be a different path:

“The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard, and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.”

Let’s consider some of the many examples of falling in Ulysses. The first three explode in expectoration. The plum stones spat from atop Nelson’s Pillar, the graceful arced jet of hay juice as spat by Corny Kelleher, the Red Bank oyster of phlegm expelled to connote racist contempt by the citizen. The financial: a coin dropped from Molly’s outstretched hand from her bedroom window, for the beggar. The cloacal: five urinations - in Proteus, Cyclops and Ithaca (observed), in Lestrygonians and Scylla (unobserved), the faecal plops of Calypso and (currants) Lestrygonians and the menstrual gush of Penelope. The crashing of a shot-putted biscuit tin (another graceful arc) and Stephen’s body semi-conscious onto the hard road outside of Bella Cohen’s.

Flying not falling; the swooping gulls of Lestrygonians, to feed on the fallen manna from Bloom heaven.

Too many for a short blog so let’s focus on where and how a select few falling bodies land because as they teach you in Judo 101, landing well is half way to rising again.

Plum stones and hay juice both seeds of future creation land on the pavement. A harsh barren artificial surface upon which a natural substance will struggle to find any agent to fertilize. The plum stones represent Irish political hopes and dreams and so Stephen’s parable is pessimistic though maybe people need to understand the depths of the problem in order to work on a solution. The hay juice doesn’t fall directly, rather in a graceful arc. Bloom suspects Kelleher to be a police informer which many consider a sin but perhaps the line of travel indicates a more nuanced picture or perhaps insufficient evidence to convict. In any event it too lies lifeless on the stone ground.

I like Molly’s donation for the beggar that she allows to fall from the bedroom window. It plummets straight down as if to confirm both the sin she’s about to commit and its desperation to leave the scene of the crime. Yet while it too falls on barren pavement it is rescued by a passing schoolboy and placed in its intended womb, the beggar’s floor-dwelling cap. What do we make of that? Molly will commit adultery which depending on one’s religious convictions, is at worst a mortal sin and at best not very nice. Yet it helps the beggar so is not all bad just as we may think, Molly’s adultery has its place in a bigger brighter future of the Bloom marriage. Just as Stephen’s fall is precursor to Rudy’s resurrection.

Usually perhaps inevitably, the Fall is part of the Rise which is a cheery thought or as Woody observes, if Buzz cannot actually fly, he does at least fall with style.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Shut Your Eyes and See

Post Nine

This, one of the book’s very famous quotes, appears in that atrociously tricky part of Proteus as Stephen, sense testing, walks along the beach at Sandymount Strand, crunching shells as he goes. His eyes shut, he listens as he crunches and crunches to hear. He wonders; does the world disappear when he cannot see it and will it again exist when he opens his eyes? It will; but this is not as silly as it sounds for can an object exist without a subject to perceive it? Stephen is exploring whether our sensory equipment is to be trusted for when we get down to brass tacks, our senses are our only link to a world beyond our skin (even possibly under our skin). 

This part of the book is replete with symbolism as we skirt philosophy, art and natural sciences but I am more interested here in the conduit of the visible or more to the point lack of it, for both Bloom and Stephen will contemplate blindness as they go through the day. As well as Stephen on his beach walk, Bloom will help a blind chap across the road who will then feature in the Sirens episode and no doubt in Circe; which is a safe bet as everyone appears in Circe. The Homeric blinding of Polyphemus plays out in the Cyclops episode with Bloom politically jousting and let’s say defeating the myopic nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s pub. In Lestrygonians after seeing the blind chap on his way Bloom tries to imagine life through the eyes of the blind. For example he feels his stomach and wonders in what colour the blind visualise flesh which is an interesting example and one wonders if it was prompted by the horribly racist Eugene Stratton poster advert that Bloom notices on the way to Glasnevin cemetery. 

I like how Bloom in a very practical way considers the same concepts Stephen grappled with in Proteus in his impossibly obscure style. 

So what do we read into our blind character? Is he Homer’s Tiresias there to predict Bloom’s future? Before we get excited for clues beyond 17th June, Tiresias’ predictions concerned events within our story not after. Essentially, that if Odysseus harms the sun god’s cattle, things will go very bad back home in Ithaca. Well its hardly Bloom’s fault that there’s a foot and mouth* cattle blight but certainly for him, thing’s aren’t great at home. Does our blind friend predict this? Even if he did, it was hardly news as Bloom knew it via the morning post but the tap tap tapping of his white stick in Sirens is in a kind of counterpoint to Boylan’s ‘jingly jaunty got the horny’ cab ride to Molly’s house and his cock carracarracarra cock knocking on the door once he arrived. 

But why? In a book where everything is volitional and a portal of discovery, why the blind character?  

Did we need him simply to facilitate Bloom’s translation of the ineluctable modality of the visible as suggested above? That feels underwhelming. The blind stripling links in Sirens to Robert Emmet, the whereabouts of whose mortal remains are something of a mystery, as we learn in Hades. So maybe the point of the Blind Stripling shall also remain mysterious and is a matter for the professors. Here’s to the many and full explanations that no doubt exist in whatever passes for reality out there. In here, it’s pretty much the blind leading the blind.

For more idle Ulysses thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

*Apparently Stateside, they say hoof and mouth. Either way, the cows don’t like it.

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Bloom’s Bum Steer to the Nolan

Post Eight

An amusing part of the book takes place in Lestrygonians where Bloom is sat in Davy Byrne’s ‘moral’ pub eating his cheese and mustard sandwich and where his glass of burgundy will provide some respite for his troubled mind. With wine kindling some fire in his veins he recalls the day some sixteen years earlier on which he proposed to and first made love with Molly on Howth Head. Molly as those with even cursory knowledge of the book will know, shall recall the same incident some hours later.

But two flies stuck in drying paint makes him ponder how far he has fallen from that romantic high and in less romantic and quite depressed mindset, Bloom considers the pointlessness of not just humanity but of all essence, even the solar system. All just digestion machines consuming, multiplying, defecating dying and re-kindling to start all over again. He wonders: are the gods any different? The food of the gods he has read is Ambrosia. Do they defecate? Bloom is a logical man and from his discourse on religion and the afterlife we do not expect he believes in Greek gods, unlike Odysseus his former self. But in his depressed state he is reaching blindly for some hope. That somewhere, somehow there is a higher purpose and we are not all just food processors en-route to being another processor’s food.

So he thinks, he’ll check the statues of Juno and Athena at the National Library to see if they have anuses. He’s got to go there anyway. It’s all a bit farfetched and just Bloom on an idle frolic but this is not just some joke about Greek god’s bums; Joyce has him frolicking for a very serious purpose.

Mesial groove is the phrase Mulligan, the medical student, uses in the next episode when he reports seeing Bloom sniffing around the backsides of the statues, staring at their mesial groove. This is a dental term meaning the indented line running through the middle of a tooth and we can imagine what he means in the context of buttocks. Its all very smutty and amusing. All a bit Frankie Howerd and ooh er Mrs. but the serious business is this; as Stephen will waiver between various choices, between Scylla and Charybdis, Bloom is his guide to the middle way. Philosophy students may note the guiding hand of Giordano Bruno of Nola and the coinciding of polar extremes. Bloom is Stephen’s medium to the medium.

So, not just a joke about bums.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Whose Words are they Anyway?

Post Seven

I’d like to credit the U22 podcast (see Post One) with a point that had not occurred to me. One of the most powerful passages in Ulysses is from Aeolus; the speech by John F Taylor as conveyed in our book by Professor McHugh. The group of journalists and hangers on are considering examples of great oratory or rhetoric and this is McHugh’s contender. There is little doubt that it is the winner.

The speech was given at a debate concerning the Irish literary revival and Taylor was speaking in favour of the promotion of the Irish language as against colonial English and I’m given to understand Joyce was in the audience. Whether he was is not crucial but its nice to think. Joyce for several reasons that become apparent in the book, was not generally in favour of any suppression of English. His self-centred reasoning was that English was the tool of his trade and he was not going to happily see it blunted.

The speech concerned the enslaved Israelites in biblical Egypt and the story of the Exodus, a theme that undercurrents the Aeolus episode and how it parallels the Irish experience under the British. What is said is not, for the point I wish to consider, so important. What is interesting is that it was quoted by Joyce if not word for word then apparently pretty close to it. Why would Joyce, such a beautiful writer, feel the need to use the words of another? He could have referred to it and made the point without quoting it so extensively; across some three pages in the Penguin 2000 edition. Its possible that the extract from Dan Dawson’s speech is also a direct quote, though that is not to flatter.

The point raised on the podcast was that whilst Joyce admired the eloquence and effectiveness of Taylor’s oratory he did not wish to write that way. When Bloom makes a cogent point it is subtle without bombast and almost without register (save when Bloom is off on his narcissistic reverie in Circe) . Likewise Stephen in that very episode with the understated power of the Parable of the Plums. Joyce feels no need to pass off another’s words as his own but also seems unfettered and free to use them for his own purpose and giving credit to the author. Another shorter example might be the Leo Taxil extract in Proteus. Joyce liked it, felt he could use it and so it was incorporated.

Another aspect of Taylor’s speech which is interesting to me at any rate, is the conclusion. The part about the light of inspiration shining in his countenance. Taylor is describing Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. Bloom used very similar words as he headed towards the Turkish baths on Leinster Street (is it downhill? – that would be cool) but the gift he has for his people is a racing tip. One might see this as an oblique link between Stephen and Bloom; Stephen hears McHugh’s recitation and Bloom thinks similar words. Of course its also possible that Bloom like Joyce and McHugh was in the room at Trinity College on 24th October 1901 and heard Taylor for himself.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Master Patrick Buries his Grandmother

Post Six

The penultimate vignette of Wandering Rocks is a truly heart wrenching part of the book. Patrick Dignam, one of the Dignam children has been sent to town on the afternoon of his father’s funeral. Ostensibly on an errand but more likely because he was bored and becoming irascible among the mourners in the house. We expect he is about twelve years old, though eleven would be more in keeping with the revivalist essence Joyce ascribes to that number.

He reflects on the funeral.

               ‘Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr. Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.’

Paddy Dignam senior is the third lost parent to feature in the book following Rudolph Virag and May Dedalus among several others mentioned in passing such as Ellen Bloom and Lunita Laredo. Bloom’s reflections upon his father permeate throughout but what strikes me here connects more to Stephen.

The riddle in Nestor seemed nonsensical but there were a few strands of interest.

The cock crew,

The sky was blue:

The bells in heaven

Were striking eleven.

'Tis time for this poor soul

To go to heaven.

The answer to which is ‘the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.’ Cue bewilderment and annoyance among the schoolboys.

Reference to burial at eleven alerts to Dignam’s funeral at this time but perhaps more interesting is Stephen’s subsequent musing while attending to Cyril Sargent:

               ‘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.’

Its not much of a stretch to expect this fox to resonate with Stephen who has recently buried his mother nor considering Stephen’s guilt, to visualise blood on his hands just as it coagulates in the fox’s fur. The fox scrapes. Why? Surely only to dig up the body. Is she dead? Can she be revived? Sadly for the fox and for Stephen, no. Dead is dead, as Bloom will definitively confirm at Dignam’s funeral.

Which brings us back to Master Patrick. Shortly before young Dignam’s poignant thought he was excited by an advert for a boxing match into which event he thought he might sneak, young though he is. But hope is dashed when he realises the advert is historic and like his father, it’s been and gone. He is drawn to something that seemed so real, so near he can almost touch it, almost be there. So close to a time when his father was alive. It would be so easy to sneak into that fight, so easy for the fox to dig up his grandmother. Except for one minor detail, we haven’t figured out how to turn back time.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023