Alice II
.....`No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict afterwards.'
`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!'
`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
`I won't!' said Alice.
`Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) `You're nothing but a pack of cards!' .....
Each of them is the centre of her own universe. The Queen is at a disadvantage, because she is but one card out of a pack, and she must suffer, guessing at the thin substantiality of her existence. In Alice's case it is the dream: Developing obliquely, gaining size, as it were, through a mental process, of which, finally, there would be no outward sign.
Fortunately for Alice, her dream is already a lingual one, so that to recount it in "after-time", as is envisaged by her sister at the end of the book, is simply a reaffirmation of what she already knows as a child: Development consists of mediating one's encounters with the meaninglessness of the world in a meaningful way.
The Ghost of Shakespeare
From notes by J. Joyce:
"What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners." ...
Ghosts have fixed identities. Even with an identity forever etched into living memory, you may yet turn into a ghost, in which case your identity only serves to have you better framed - as a sketch in a "wanted" - or unwanted - flyer is.
The chapter containing Stephen's causerie on Hamlet seems like the core of Ulysses, as if everything else must have formed itself around it. Nothing less might have been expected of Joyce: to be motivated, through something Shakespeare wrote, to find out what moved Shakespeare to write it, and to create Ulysses in the process!
Said of Whomsoever It Might Concern
His mad flight,
At the perfect hour,
Into the tunnel of light,
Reflects cunning, no matter how dour.
“Back to dreaming!
Never!” - conjectures he;
“The siren’s singing,
Is well expendable, and I will end up free!”
Thus cherished mementoes
Are rendered insignificant
While the chasm grows
Deep into him, master of sincere cant!
A Question of Style
Adolf Eichmann speaking the words below while testifying in his own trial, must have sounded just like any other individual devoid of imagination who's driven by his passion for truth.
When one is rightly or wrongly - doesn't really matter which - accused of or known for committing some act, it becomes imperative that one develop the right style in which to speak about it. This is then what forms the essence of what one becomes in their own mind. It's a way of becoming one with the surface of things.
" .... They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.
I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough ... I can't listen to such things... such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police."
Alice
It may well have been Humpty who asked Alice (though it may just as well have been the other way round) whether it was the king who gave orders to his men or if the guards dictated the law to the king (as well as to the subjects)... To always act the individual, no matter what principle is or isn't at stake, and to dignify your stance with taking the heroic death wish to its logical conclusion! Alice would have been more doubtful, more ironic, and all the more wonder-struck at her own fall.
The Soul of Lead
"I have a soul of lead, so stakes me to the ground I cannot move."
-Romeo and Juliet-
How can a SOUL of lead possibly stake one to this too, too solid ground?
Shakespeare evidently knew how!
Full of Sound & Fury
To stand before the authority on future events in one’s life must be an awesome experience, more so if one’s fate were pronounced as being irrevocably sealed, condemning one to failure and doom, with no possibility of salvation.
It is conceivable to speculate as to what might have been the outcome in the tragedy of Oedipus if at the outset the Oracle could have been differently interpreted, its advice ignored or taken in any selective manner - at, say, particular junctures not necessarily in the same way as is commonly recounted.
Oedipus, the suggestible youth, might still have attempted murder of one parent and incest with the other only so that as a mature man, taking heed of the prophecy (perhaps, in accordance with the text, once it was disclosed to him), he would be driven to make himself faceless in revulsion at his own deeds, or in order to seem unknowing, to feign inconspicuousness.
One could take out the prophecy altogether, focus on the mind of Oedipus as the epicentre of filial trepidations. One could imagine the actual, concrete problem to be the existence of irreconcilable differences between the parents who would be participating in driving their son over a precipice with a forcefulness he could not help but be conquered by. Oedipus, running away from a fading reality, stumbling on the surreal world of parental disaffection and estrangement, then wishing to establish himself as present – having hitherto been absent, and feeling the urge to do so through the sort of knowledge by which riddles are solved, by comprehending and resolving a conflict that was really out of his hands to mediate, would indeed be running a risk of being doomed to a heartrendingly tragic defeat. His choice of method of mediation would be determined by external forces.
When you are caught in the middle of an argument of which neither side is comprehensible or agreeable, you may decide to remove one opponent and appease the other, though you still have to see the conflict through if the whole exercise is to make any sense at all. Thus Oedipus might somehow remove the more fearsome, less comprehensible parent figure, but this would only lead him to identify with the same, to replace the parent he caused to be stranded in the past, and to reclaim the status quo which was so plausibly renounced only to be reinstated and understood once and for all in the present. The only alternative would consist in his retreating into a hiatus and yearning to be reborn in a new, tension-free state of bodily and mental bliss.
The Oracle’s prophecies are invariably fulfilled. Life, considered as a unique experience, as an existence lived and looked at by an individual, even if multiplied, is but a tragic circumstance in space.
Religions proclaim the possibility of salvation for the soul, and their proclamations ultimately ring hollow. Salvation does seem meaningless if there are precise instructions on how it is to be attained. For timeless spiritual unity to come about, it must come as a free gift for all, unannounced, surprising as well by its being shared in an equitable fashion among all, as by the fact of its having always remained and continuing to remain outside the scope of speech. It is contrary to death, the common tragic fate of us all. Death is foretold, reported, discussed, forestalled as much as possible, explored as a process and imagined in its finality or as a metaphor. Yet it surrounds us, not as fulfillment, not even as judgment, but, as the finale to the unique experience of the individual, in utter isolation. Only in this way does it become death, absorbed and absorbing, but outwardly remaining the other’s experience. As far as we know, “there is no such thing as a natural death.”
