No More Learning

Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a
horse.

--Thanks, sir.

Knows I'm a man. Voice.

--Right now? First turn to the left.

The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing
his cane back, feeling again.

Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there?
Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense
of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder
would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of
Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk
in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow
going in to be a priest.

Penrose! That was that chap's name.

Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say.
Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People
ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly's birthday. Hates
sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.

Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched
together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring,
the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can't taste wines with your
eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no
pleasure.

And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have
them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his
mind's eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his
fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair,
for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black.
Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of
white.

Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here
too. Wait. Think over it.

With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt
the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough.
The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick
street. Perhaps to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling
my braces.

Walking by Doran's publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat
and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of
his belly. But I know it's whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to
see.

He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.

Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would
he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being
born that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned
and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration
for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses.
Dear, dear, dear. Pity, of course: but somehow you can't cotton on to
them someway.

Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.
After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking
a magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat
school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose
at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a
dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder's court.
Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their
percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil
on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he's really
what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers
in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.
Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. _The
Messiah_ was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out
there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a
leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.

Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.

Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to
the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too
heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.

Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.
Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

No. Didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.

My heart!

His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas
Deane was the Greek architecture.

Look for something I.

His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded
Agendath Netaim. Where did I?

Busy looking.

He thrust back quick Agendath.

Afternoon she said.

I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. _Freeman. _
Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?

Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.

His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.

Safe!


Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:


--And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of _Wilhelm Meister_.
A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms
against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in
real life.

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.

--Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
gone.

Two left.

--Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.

--Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder's gall, to write _Paradise Lost_ at your dictation? _The Sorrows
of Satan_ he calls it.

Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.

_First he tickled her
Then he patted her
Then he passed the female catheter.
For he was a medical
Jolly old medi. . . _

--I feel you would need one more for _Hamlet. _ Seven is dear to the
mystic mind. The shining seven W. B. calls them.

Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought
the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed
low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.

_Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
Tears such as angels weep.
Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta. _

He holds my follies hostage.

Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.
And one more to hail him: _ave, rabbi_: the Tinahely twelve. In the
shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night
by night. God speed. Good hunting.

Mulligan has my telegram.

Folly. Persist.

--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal
to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a
work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of
Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,
the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal
wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of
schoolboys for schoolboys.

A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!

--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.

--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.

He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who
suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon
the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A. E. , Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K. H. , their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching
to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of
light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the
plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O. P.
must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very
illustrious sister H. P. B. 's elemental.

O, fie! Out on't! _Pfuiteufel! _ You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.

Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with
grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.

John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.

--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the
street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through
spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after
Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a
shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to
the past.

Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

--Haines is gone, he said.

--Is he?

--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht. _ I couldn't bring him in
to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

_Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
To greet the callous public.
Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
In lean unlovely English. _

--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the
living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about
_Hamlet. _ He says: _il se promene, lisant au livre de lui-meme_, don't
you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in
a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

_HAMLET
ou
LE DISTRAIT
Piece de Shakespeare_

He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:

--_Piece de Shakespeare_, don't you know. It's so French. The French
point of view. _Hamlet ou_. . .

--The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

John Eglinton laughed.

--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and
spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.
Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to
shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

_Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared. . . _

Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

--He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said
for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our
flesh creep.

_List! List! O List! _

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

_If thou didst ever. . . _

--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_, returning
to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?

John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

Lifted.

--It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with
a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.

Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the
pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon
has other thoughts.

Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not vanity in
order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
calling him by a name:

_Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,_

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you
are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the
guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.

Art thou there, truepenny?

--Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I
mean when we read the poetry of _King Lear_ what is it to us how the
poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de
l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day,
the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have _King Lear_: and it is
immortal.

Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.

_Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan, Mananaan
MacLir. . . _

How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

Marry, I wanted it.

Take thou this noble.

Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.

Do you intend to pay it back?

O, yes.

When? Now?

Well. . . No.

When, then?