Ulysses is a book which pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time of seven hundred and thirty-five days which all consist in one single and senseless every day of Everyman, the completely irrelevant 16th day of June 1904, in Dublin — a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. The stream beings in the void and ends in the void. Is all of this perhaps one single, immensely long and excessively complicated Strindbergian pronouncement upon the essence of human life, and one which, to the reader’s dismay, is never finished? Perhaps it does touch upon the essence of life; but quite certainly it touches upon life’s ten thousand surfaces and their hundred thousand color gradations. As far as my glance reaches, there are in those seven hundred and thirty-five pages no obvious repetitions and not a single hallowed island where the long-suffering reader may come to rest. There is not a single place where he can seat himself, drunk with memories, and from which he can happily consider the stretch of the road he has covered, be it one hundred pages or even less… But no! The pitiless and uninterrupted stream rolls by, and its velocity or precipitation grows in the last forty pages till it sweeps away even the marks of punctuation. It thus gives cruelest expressions to that emptiness which is both breath taking and stifling, which is under such tension, or is so filled to bursting, as to grow unbearable. This thoroughly hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book. It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness. It is all infernally nugatory."
(-- Carl Jung, writing about James Joyce's Ulysses,)
Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream.
(--1852)
These days (actually just today) I hear the God response to Job 38:41 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38-41) differently. From the Advaita Vedanta point of view, God asks:
Where were you? Have you ever given orders to the morning? Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt? etc etc...I wonder if God is waiting for an answer from Job that is worthy of a new view of being, a new grasp of proper relationality?
Perhaps Job is getting ready (in 2015) to respond to God:
"As long as you were there, I was there. As long as you've done what you've done, I've done it with you. As long as you are, I am!"
Perhaps the bible is unfinished.
Perhaps God smiles at Job’s audacious awakening!
“Ha!” says God.
A Chinese ideogram
shows someone
standing
by his word.
Fidelity. Freedom
consequent
on the accepted
necessity of
walking where
one’s word
leads.
Wherever.
Hebrew prophets and
singers also
struck the theme;
bodies belong
where words
lead
though the com-
mon run of exper-
ience be
that stature
shrinks as
the word
inflates.
The synthesis;
no matter what (or
better) never the less.
(--Daniel Berrigan in, And the Risen Bread: Selected Poems, 1957-1997)Other favorite names emerge in conversation:
William Carlos Williams first said “No ideas but in things,” and it’s no surprise that between Williams and Charles Olson—himself another pillar of the Black Mountain School, along with Eigner—was a mutual admiration for the imagistic projects of both. Around 1950, Olson spent eight months in Yucatan, where he did field work excavating Mayan ruins; it was here that he first encountered hieroglyphs, the ideogrammic qualities unlike anything his own language possessed. He was so struck by this non-alphabetic system of representation that he wrote a letter to Robert Creeley claiming that the approach “on its very face, is verse, the signs so clearly and densely chosen that, cut in stone, they retain the power of the objects of which they are the images.”
William’s quote gets to the heart of the ideogram: something pre-linguistic that captures what language tries to express but which it ends up muddling. Ginsberg makes reference to the Poundian ideogram when he writes “ChineseWritten Character for truth / defined as man standing by his word / Word picture: …” in his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” In this sense, then, the poetic ideogram is a hail to return to the most atomic unit of all artworks: the perceptions of “truth” that precede their creation. Whether or not one “reads” or “looks at” a Chagall, as I mentioned earlier, makes no difference.
(6) man standing by word
(from The Kenyon Review, Of ideogrammar by Andrew David King, February 28, 2012) https://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/02/ideogrammar/
...
Note: (6) The Chinese ideogram Allen Ginsberg mentions in his poem, which Pound found attractive. A note next to the image reads: “Durable Speech (xìn, 信): man (rén, 人) standing by word (yán, 言).”
(--from The Kenyon Review, Of ideogrammar, by Andrew David King, February 28, 2012) https://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/02/ideogrammar/
first light"There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past." ~George Carlin
