Yes. I am so thankful for the film Joyce's Women, not only did it give a stronger insight into the life of the man, it also gave us a much
more adequate representation of Molly's soliloquy. The other film representations of Joyce's novels lacked an emotional quality that was evident
in this film about his women. The discussion of the cuckolding episode from his return to Ireland illuminates the reason for the emphasis on this
in Ulysses. I was aware of his desire to test Nora, but to see his distress over the jealous words of his never-do-well 'friends' back in
Ireland makes it a more tangible aspect of the plot. A revelation for me was the connection between his daughter and Samuel Beckett, I was
under the persuasion that they were not all that close intellectually and creatively. One of the more important aspects to the soliloquy is Molly's
take on sexuality, which tends to get watered down in most instances, here that was refreshingly not the case. This representation of Molly was
intensely in touch with her sensuality, the Yes was not just an affirmation but a shout in the dark – a goddess, earthly, ripe, and capable of
expressing her own creativity without mediation.
I have enjoyed the singsong ringsound o of Finnegan's Wake, but it is very difficult to follow the action or to observe a plot. When I ran
across the mention of Futhark, it was an "aha!" here is something I can grasp at. And what a discovery to grasp, here is the crux of our language
skills, as well as the beginning of that severance from the animistic world of the archaic. As Charlie pointed out the "all for a bit" is a representation
of Korcybzki's statement, "The map is not the territory". The deeper we go in this linguistic journey the more apparent the fall is for me. Matter
becomes more and more impenetrable, a maze from which even Daedalus couldn't escape. Life gets segmented, split apart, and the rise of Cartesian
mechanism is the only means through which we view our environment and ourselves. The mystery is broken down to maintenance, the winding
of the clock, instead of the indwelling essence which connects us to all the little machines which share this rock hurling through space. And time,
well I just can't stop a moment, it is so terribly hard.
As I pointed out in the Walpurgisnacht journal the connection between the measurement of time as relative to the Moon's cycles and the
Proto-Indo European root *me. I wonder what relation the twenty-eight letter Greek alphabet has to this. The Greeks were one of the first patrifocal
cultures, rewriting the mythic stories of the cultures they interacted with. For example, my daughter's namesake Pallas Athena comes from a
Northern African Goddess of learning and culture who was used in Greek mythology to show, as well as to speak for in the Orestia, the
dominance of the father in the genealogical and legal structures. How does the manifestation of their alphabet represent this evolution, and do
the twenty-eight letters relate to the Moon and measurement in object and not subject oriented cultures? And then there is the gender of words
and their association with the mythological or oral tradition…
The discussion of Tristram and Isolde interested me in that it touches on an aspect of my own research. The idea that the Christians in
the Middle Ages viewed adultery in a sympathetic light if there was a 'love poition' involved, this shows how much the culture was still in touch
with the more archaic traditions of magical possession. Sympathy, as in sympathetic magic(k), is the basis of most ritual practice including the
mass of the Catholic church where the bread and wine are imbued with the metaphysical force of the blood and body of the Christos, setting up
a sympathetic connection between the anointed and the communicant. This is still an operational aspect to most magic(k)al formula, most notably
Voudon, which like Celtic Christianity utilized the template of the Catholic iconography and incorporated their cultures traditional values and
practices into this new 'language' of Christianity; amalgamating and managing to survive the religious conquest.