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?