Updates to recent posts

[porphyry]

1. The other day A. called out from the back-seat of the car, "I wish they would stop all those weird noises!" "There is nothing weird about Brahms," I told him, imagining he meant the stereo, but he said nothing to that and a moment later came, "And I wish they would stop all those weird voices talking to me all the time!"

"When do you these voices talk to you?" I asked, somewhat alarmed.

"In the morning."

"You mean when you are waking up? You must mean dreams."

"No, I'm not asleep. Its at night and in the morning when I am lying in bed."

"Well, it is a kind of dream. You think you're awake, but you're not. You're between dreaming and waking." I could not resist telling him these are hypnogogic states, but even to him I am sure that made no impression.


2. Here is A.'s latest toy:



(don't ask me why he's not nude)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'd love to see St. Lucia. You know she's the patron saint of poets with bad eye-sight, like Dante (cf. Inferno II, where it's St. Lucia who - nudged by St. Mary - turns Beatrice's attention to Dante's misery; Beatrice doesn't intervene herself either but sends Virgil, what a long chain) and James Joyce (who named his daughter Lucia). (martin here)

[(Anonymous)]

(Still me.) Impaired eye-sight is an important issue in Joyce's life and work. The first page of "A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man" has Stephen's father looking at the boy "through a glass", and on the next page we read:

"His mother said:
- O, Stephen will apologise.
Dante said:
- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes."

(Later little Stephen gets in trouble because he breaks his glasses. "Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye.")

That's just a few examples from that one book. But Joyce was quite obsessed with that topic all through his work.

[(Anonymous)]

(And he goes on and on about it...)

Of course "through a glass" (apart from meaning "monocle") is also a quote from the good book: "For now we see through a glass, darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12), which refers to mirrors and not lenses.

[(Anonymous)]

And also alluded to in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Sandmann" (another text obsessed with eyes):

"Vielleicht wirst Du, o mein Leser! dann glauben, dass nichts wunderlicher und toller sei, als das wirkliche Leben und dass dieses der Dichter doch nur, wie in eines matt geschliffnen Spiegels dunklem Widerschein, auffassen könne."

(Possibly, you, my dear reader!, will come to believe that real life is more singular and more fantastic than anything else and that all a poet can really do is present it as in a glass, darkly.)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I have been meaning to reply to this for days, but it was near the end of the term and I had papers to grade.

I once took a graduate seminar just on James Joyce, and never having had to read so much Joyce altogether, and I was finally able to look at his work more as a whole. I did notice that motif come up--the obsession with sight and vision, etc.

Although I must admit, reading Finnegan's Wake was one assignment I did not get through. It could take me a whole lifetime to get through that.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, is that uncool that I'm replying so quickly. Anyway, I happened to find your reply today and next week I'm off-line for five days, so.

I can never get enough of a book that really interests me. (Like favourite music, like favourite paintings.) So I guess Joyce, Horace and a few others will eventually have taken my whole lifetime. I'm not complaining.

Joyce calls Finnegans Wake "the hardest crux ever" (FW 623). It's without the apostrophe, by the way. Wow, you really didn't get very deep into it, hahaha! (Just kidding.) I wouldn't want to answer any questions on that book in general, I couldn't draw a map so to speak, but I could go on forever about things I found in the underwood. Frightfully fertile ground, that, and a very straining read.