Proteus

Isolation pervades as Stephen contemplates and yearns for connection. Mother, father, lover, and God are interrelated symbolically. It seems that each entity, by itself, goes on to represent all of the other entities at once, or, perhaps, it would be better to say that all represent a sundered connection that is yearned for over a lifetime. This yearning is the reason for mystic monks, sex, romantic and familial love. Stephen laments his isolation from humanity and God, and on page 38, he ponders whether or not he and his father are consubstantial. In this passage, and arguably throughout the rest of this chapter the father represents both the biological father and the heavenly father. Stephen wonders if he shares an essence with another human (his father) and with God.
This creates an interesting dichotomy in this passage. Stephen speaks of how we are all born into the original sin of Eve; it is inescapable and, what dooms us to not ‘be a saint.’ Eve’s body was without the blemish of the navel; Mary was with out the blemish of sex also: Jesus was made not begotten. Stephen declares, perhaps futilely that he, like Jesus, although wombed in sin, was made and not begotten.
“I was made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before ages he willed me and may not will me away ever.”

He is a product of both randomness and the will of God. He exists because his parents copulated. They experienced the isolation and detachment that Stephen is feeling, so they joined with each other to access that “strandentwining cable of all flesh.” Also, in Christian theology, when a couple is married they are united together with God, and this sexual act could express that unity with God; Consequently, Stephen is the product of both the simple fuck that is only a continuation of original sin, body with blemish, but he is also a product of God, made and not begotten, ‘creation from nothing.’
In this passage his mother is referred to as the ghost woman with ashes on her breath. By describing her this way her death truly encompasses eternity; it is the present and the future, but also reaches into the past, a past that is dead; one cannot escape the modality of time and space. This is juxtaposed with the last quoted sentence in this passage, “He willed me and may not will me way ever.” This suggests eternal life, something the Christian god offers humanity in the bible; world without end.
We cannot escape the modality of time and space; we cannot return to time as if it is place. Again, this harkens back to the mutable past that was suggested in Nestor. However, place and objects seem mutable also: “A very short space of time through very short times of space.” Or rather, we are the ones that change in the inescapable modality of perception. Things exist and we try to “knock our sconce about them bodies before they are colored.”
This whole idea of color in the chapter is interesting. It seems that color is something emotive, subjective; it is outside the being or essence of the object; perhaps it is our perception of the object. Therefore, an object exists without color and we give it color. There is this sinking, drowning in all of our perceptions; a rhyme and reason develops: “Rhythm begins, you see.”
But still, all if this is ineluctable. How can we separate the self, the mind, and the ideal, with the external world? Stephen seems to prefer the ideal: “Open your eyes. No. Jesus!” Thought is as visible as anything. This accounts for Stephen’s tension between the ideal and the corporeal. He expresses detachment from his body: “My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs.” His shoes are borrowed from Buck, and perhaps his legs also. He hears the tapping, but feels separated from this. Again, he moves and sinks without his will: the ineluctable modality.
Life and death coexist on the beach. There is a dead dog fondled by a living dog, which also alludes to the Telemachus episode, where Stephen refers to his body, the body he was given, as a dogsbody. Not only does the live dog fondle the dead, Stephen mouths the womb of his dead mother, the sea. “His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb.” The sea’s air is pervasive, inescapable. The sea is his mother and his father and there is a drowned man in the sea. “They are waiting for him now. The truth. Spit it out.” Death is the truth that is hidden in his mother’s womb of the sea, but also his father and God. And the father also become the dead man that the sea must spit out. The dog wants whatever is in that sea and he wants to sniff the death on the beach, but he must be more refined then that. He must be the fox who buries his grandmother. To burry is the right thing to do. But who watches anyway, God?

Nestor

Mr. Deasy seems to be a believer in the accessibility of the past, as if, to use Plato’s metaphor, the mind is a wax tablet receiving an impression of our experiences, as if our brain files these away and we can refer back to the original impression. Deasy has many relics glorifying and legitimizing the past, a past that contains actual events and also a history of mythology (religion): paintings and spoons being one example. He is also a firm believer of the future; all of history moves toward one great goal, which is the manifestation of God.
One of the opening passages contradicts this idea, and speaks, from Stephen’s perspective, of a more mutable past.

“Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it… I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame,” (24).

The frame work of the past slips though time, becoming inaccessible, but yet at the same time, there are ways to access at least an abstraction of it, as the student does when reading Lycidas. But, as soon as the passage is over, the child leans back having just remembered, and the memory slips away seconds after it is recalled, or created. The poem recalls Edward King, walking on the waves; it is a poem with a sort of mythic element about a man who actually lived, a mixture reminiscent of relics in Deasy’s office and of the children begging Stephen to tell them a ghost story during a history lesson.
However, these ideas of Stephen are mutable themselves, and he realizes that even though the past is out of reach, it creates a momentum that thrusts part of it into the future with the potential of giving him a back kick, a future that Deasy helps to create and Stephen works against (to ourselves…new paganism…omphalos…)
What is real then? Stephen ponders. Is it a mother’s love, a mother who has no choice but to love, and if there is no choice, is there value in that love? And either way, if it is of value or not, she can not be there every moment, on the hockey field or after she has died. The fox buries his dead mother.
There are other differences between Deasy and Stephen. Stephen sees humankind in the inescapable clutches of sin at every moment, while Deasy believes we are all born into the original sin of Eve, the sin of woman, and that the grace of the good lord will save us from that. God, to Stephen, is a cry on the soccer field. Deasy also believes in the value of form, money and even words. He can put meaning ‘in a nut shell’ where I don’t think Stephen could so easily trust words, they are mutable, like the past.
Money is something to be kept, to be put away, to Deasy. They are just empty shells in Stephen’s pocket. All of these objects, the spoon, the painting, the books, the money, they are symbols of ‘beauty and power’ to Deasy, but the are just a lump in Stephen’s pocket, symbols tainted by greed and misery.

Telemachus

There is an interesting passage on page 4, just above the middle of the page.

“God, isn’t he dreadful: he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentlemen. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion.”

Its as if Buck is saying that God is dreadful, a Saxon, he thinks your not a gentlemen. Which is interesting, because they are talking about Haines, who seems to be likened to God a few other times in this episode, like on page 18.

"It’s a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again. Eyes pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler firm and prudent. The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smoke plume of the mail boat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking by the Muglins.”

It isn't clear who this passage is describing at first, but I think it has to be Haines. Who else could be the seas ruler? The annotation says that this passage alludes to the song, “Britannia rules the waves,” and also the predominance of Brittan’s navy. So we have Haines being described as the ‘seas’ ruler.
Haines is given god-like qualities in other places to. For example, on the next page, the second rhyme:

If anyone thinks that I’m not divine / He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine.

This could be a reference to not only Jesus, but to Haines, who in this passage, is the one Buck hopes to be the giver of wine. Also, in the very beginning of this episode, Haines just appears out of nowhere. He actually seems to appear right out of the coal smoke and fumes of grease, on page 11. I could never really tell when he was in the room or not.
I don’t know if he likened to divinity for any other reason then him being British. That’s of obvious significance. And his likening to a God like character and the fact that he’s British seems to explain why Stephen is so resistant to him.
He struggles to gain autonomy through out this entire episode, especially from his dead mother. The likening of Stephen to Teleamuchus only strengthns this sentiment. Stephen is referenced as a slave many times over. As he carries buck’s shaving bowl he is reminded of how he carried the incense for the priest, so he’s not only a slave to buck, but also a slave to god, just as the priest is. He makes the comment about Irish art, the cracked looking glass of a slave.
He’s a slave to his mother and begs for her ghost to stop haunting him “Ghoul! Chewer of corpes! No, mother. Let me be and let me live,” Even though he resfused to pray to her God at her death bed, he is not rid of her grip and her God.

The Way / The Gyre

“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.”

Yeats’ system of the gyres and Taoism have astounding commonalities and can be seen as two different systems expressing the same idea; an idea that Carl Jung would say, comes out of the universal unconscious. Although Yeats said nothing of Taoism, his discoveries in A Vision, express Taoist ideas with different terminology. Yeats said, when first talking about A Vision, that it is based on a system made of “a series of unresolved antinomies, which must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting point.” As we know, the symbolic representation of this is two gyres, or interlocked cones, the “apex of each vortex in the middle of the other’s base.” As each gyre diminishes, its opposite increases until each has reached its limit and then begins to decrease in turn.
Taoism has a similar visual representation of this idea, the yin and yang symbol that expresses two antinomies: male and female, soft and hard, cold and hot, etc, that forever are in flux and move in the direction of balance.
In all of Yeats’ poetry, antinomies are expressed, but never do they reach such a level of balance as in his later works. Night is day, day is night; Good is evil, evil is good; Being / birth is death / non-being, non-being/ death is being/ birth. Although, balance is not quite the right word; enantiodromia, which is the word Blackmur borrows from Jung, seems to express this the idea of both the gyres and of the Tao,a bit more efficiently: not only does any force inevitably produce it’s opposite, it is its opposite. In Taoism, the opposites fade, both are apart of ‘the source”.
I first noticed this semblance of antinomies in Parnell’s Funeral. The first lines of the poem evoke daytime by speaking of clouds about the sky, brightness remains, but a brighter star shoots down. Obviously clouds and brightness evoke the day, but he then says, “a brighter star shoots down.” After this, as the poem takes on the characteristics of night, the second stanza describes the scene with the visual clarity of daylight, but in fact, we see this all in the stars. He goes on the say, “An age is the reversal of an age”, which implies timelessness, the specific age of a human being, and a historical age that will soon be repeated: Leda will again open her thighs and birth another Helen. By using the same word implies the inseparability of the two; time and the lack of time are one in the same.
Yeats’ refrain in The Wild Old Wicked Man, seems to express the essence of the gyres and the Tao the most effectively.
Day-break and a candle end.
This simple refrain expresses the unending cycle of the intertwined gyres and the harmonic quality of the balance of the Tao.
“The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.”
Birth and death endlessly flow from one to another and are, in fact, indistinguishable.

2/6/08

The Tower differs greatly from the other selections we have read of Yeats thus far. Instead of battling out the opposition of ideas in his own mind and uncertainty of his own beliefs he seems to express what he knows to be true. He now speaks with the voice of authority; the voice of a man who is under the impression that he has reached some sort of understanding of the meaning of it all, a man who believes in The Vision. Therefore, instead of using the poem to create a tension between the abstract, dream world and the tangible world, for example, he seems to be working with a multitude of symbols, probably derived from The Vision, and attempts to impart on us his wealth of new found wisdom. Sailing to Byzantium seems to be a call to recognize the eternal.
Yeats’ obsession with mortality, however, has not faded in this selection. He seems to have accepted mortality by believing that mortality only exists for the body and not for the soul. Again, in The Tower, Yeats speaks of the decay of the body and expresses the contrast of body and mind, like in The Wild Swans at Coole, but here he expresses a certainty that ,although the body decays, the soul lives on and leaves a legacy, leaves an imprint on what Carl Jung would call the universal unconsciousness, and even more then that, the soul lives on, seeing all: past, present, future, and can still communicate with the living world. (Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Brecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling/ To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;)
He seems to be slightly consumed with the idea that he can leave a glorious imprint on the universal unconsciousness, by creating or expressing great archetypes, just as Homer did.

Bodies and Names

In the collection of The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats again, expresses the tension between the intellect and mysticism. This is especially apparent in The Phases of The Moon.
There is a scholar that sits in the tower and two old men see the dim light from the tower, laughing at the man who reads and finds “mere images”. They tell of the fact that he will never find what he searches for, which is the truth that the old man knows. The only truth is the phases of the moon. The moon is given endless depth in this and all of Yeats poems so far, summoning the mystery of the unknown that exists before it is divided and given image, or names. This is the same idea that Yeats was talking about when he said, “I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words, / For the roads are unending, an there is no place to my mind.” This abstract concept from Seven Woods is stated more explicitly in The Phases of the Moon through the voice of Robartes:

“All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body: that body and that soul
Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,
Too lonely for the traffic of the world:
Body and soul cast out and cast away
Beyond the visible world.”

It seems that he is saying, once this mystic quality is given a body, it becomes immortal and dies. It cannot be delineated with out dying. He says, “all dreams of the soul end in a body.”
Light is used to represent the death untouched knowledge, or the moon. Light is vapid, shallow; it contains nothing but narrowness and ‘heaven is bare.’
This sentiment is expressed in Lines Written in Dejection. This poem creates the sense that there is nothing more haunting then the loss of the moon. He creates a lot of movement and colors in the first five lines, and then takes them all away, creating a haunting silence. This void that later is expressed again, by the ‘embittered sun’ shows us Yeats’ love of the mystic. That which casts light takes away depth.

There is also a lot of talk of the body in this collection, especially in contrast with the mind. No matter how sound and active the mind is, no matter how much valor, strength, and will a person has to live, the body decays: this is inescapable. This as very fitting with the death of the moon, the tao, the nous.
The bodies that Yeats speaks of do not have to contain skin and bones, blood. The body can be a word. As I said in my previous posting, words delineate the abstract, killing the abstract. This is why the old man knows truth and the scholar does not, in The Phases of the Moon. The Old Man never pounded away his ideas, wrote them out, really took them out of abstraction and gave them a body. The body is what dies.