Suspicious to the Core (five / 2)

NOise : Hack the Abstraction!

“For it is not the work of heat to make cold, but the opposite? / Yes. / And it is not the work of what is dry to make things wet, but the opposite. / Certainly.” Plato, The Republic

Invoking the re-emergence of the shakespearean ghost in the trope casting light on the recurring imagery of the constellation of Cassiopeia (Ulysses 575) renders the name of the Bard perceivable at the level of characterization. Although suggestive of a potential symbolic act of “disestablishment,” the metaphoric charge of this narrative maneuvering, in fact, offers a far more complex and nourishing signification. It is provocative, to say the very least. And yet, it invites thinking reverence through the nobility of rebellion. By so doing, it disentangles one of the many seeming knots within its very tissue. Not only does it reconfigure the meaning of the mythical names of Scylla and Charybdis in the context of the novel, but inspires disambiguation of the entrenched perception of uneasy “choices.” Does avoiding one perplexity necessarily imply accepting another? One would highly doubt it.

That ghostly presence of the shakepearean flow brings into the narrative the names of the sons of the novel: Stephen Dedalus and Rudolph Bloom (Ulysses 575). It is the very presence of those sons that is evocative of the looming shadows of their fathers: Simon Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. And it is precisely the elusive characters of each one of them that is suggestive of their infinitely interlaced aspects: crossing, merging, fusing, colliding, separating…distancing…and yet, remaining hybridized in the immortalized image of the birth of the Bard in the interstellar spaces overlooking the mighty water. Like the whisper from the fountain (Ulysses 389). Like hamlet, the sonfather. Like the mutual recognition between the son and the father--womanly man--through the communication channel free of foggy noise, relieved of amalgamation obfuscating the flow – invigorated and cleansed by the power of crystalline signal, by virtue of noise.

Shakespearean presence bears some semblance to the wandering companionship depicted in the imagery of the moon and the parallels Joyce draws between it and the symbolic of woman. Hardly could a description of the dynamic of those convergences and juxtapositions be imagined in a more powerful poetic key than the intersection highly suggestive of the restorative potential of the vacillations between diverse aspects of ambivalence and ambiguity epitomized in antithetical, yet not antagonistic -- colliding, but also resonating -- affliction and elevation,  turbulence and vibrancy, adversary and solace, as presented in Ulysses:

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. (576)

When Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode turns on the faucet in the kitchen of his house, he lifts a valve and the cornucopia of imagery leaks through that tubular device (Ulysses 549). The outpour symbolizing the versatility, quirkiness, elusiveness, and gentleness of water brings to awareness the perplexity of earthly affairs in the shadow of moonlight. The valve opens up the flow perceivable by many, available to all, owned by noone. It sheds light to the particularly salient trope of “satellitic dependence” reflecting the power of meekness embodied in the tricky wording. Just as the silvery companion is dependent on the planet it shadows, so is its impact and power inevitably experienced and mirrored in the pulsation of the orbit it safeguards. Just as the satellitic character defines it, so is the planet characterized as being the host of its satellite. Just as one is characterized by its accompanying attributes, so is the other recognized in the key of being accompanied. How does this dynamic reshift the dependency narrative?

This constancy by virtue of resilience, power by virtue of weakness, stability within fragility is what is integral to the flow connecting Stephen and Bloom in the midst of those unfathomable tribulations, indecisiveness, and bewilderment. There is the flow anchoring those stormy surfaces, anchoring those wandering “Jews,” those wandering rocks. The same anchor that cleanses poor Lear’s agitated heart torn by torrential gushes of guilt. His “faucet” unleashes the purifying shower of tears (1.4.251-264). While he is not entirely willing to repent, his tears speak that what he cannot. Vladimir Nabokov:”We think not in words, but in shadows of words” (Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 30).[1] As they flow, they offer a possibility to recuperate his inner turmoil and cleanse his curse plagued mouth with the appeasing faculty of the friendly presence reconstituting the vitalizing bonding between the parent and the offspring.

Lear learns. So can everyone else. By virtue of humbleness.

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[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions.  1973. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Suspicious to the Core ( five / 1)

The Language-Power Nexus : disenchantment with omnipotence

“Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a  universally valid principle, but, again, applicable only within limitations and even within spatial limits.” – Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Historicizable Ahistorical “Scylla & Charybdis”

“Was it not agreed that the rulers, in telling their subjects what to do, sometimes make a mistake, and miss their own advantage, but whatever the rulers enjoin upon them it is just for their subjects to do?” Plato, The Republic

Eden--torpid and deadly sanitized--is being saturated with a sulfur virus. Rotten odor spreads. Miraculously, its molecules undergo a transformation resulting in consolidation of gaseous masses into crystalline formations. Those, under the impalpable touch of an invisible wand, are being transformed into constituent ingredients of--an apple! The myth has it that the embodiment of rebellion to mark the beginning of eons of attempts to replicate the original revolt was demonstrated in breaching the ban on eating from an epistemological source--the tree of knowledge, the fruit of power. To imagine obedience as ignorance would imply a logical impossibility, i.e., to perceive the counterdemonic as darkness. How, then, is one to reconcile those perplexing paradoxes and figure out the puzzle of the early days of  Genesis, as Judeo-Christian narrative presents it? Is the key to the conundrum in the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle? Are they missing because they are lost? May this quizzical nature of knowledge in the crevices of the tale be part of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667)? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Turmoil at Pandemonium, generated through an accumulation of ill-conceived energies, is suggested through the saturation of the sinister atmosphere with evil forces epitomized in names such as Mammon, Chaos, and Babel. The power of the presence of those names is proportional to the increase in militant aspirations in their midst. They are throne thirsty. They are heights hungry. They might know what they do in a similar way Gonerill in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) does, or, so her sister, Regan, claims (4.2.228). If so, do they know indeed? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Uneasiness exuding from unlikely cohorts soaks each and every foot of Milton’s profoundly insightful and incredibly accurate depiction of inner tension between fluctuations and equilibrium. The intensity of the dynamic is conjured up through the combination of lyricism woven in the epic and the moral dilemma underscoring the verbal tapestry. The narration is steadfastly focused on the quirky antagonism and ethical collisions. It can easily echo the innerness of a Parliamentarian confronting Royalist oppression. It may reflect friction caused by antithesis, ambivalence, and duplicity challenging the heart and the mind of a rebel not averse to orderliness, and yet, highly critical of illogicalities under the disguise of lawfulness.

Milton’s poem, indeed, exceeds the boundaries of the epoch that saw a Stuart ruler -- Charles I -- on the English throne dethroned, a monarchy overthrown, and the civil war ravaging the country. It resonates with the eras preceding  it, when death of the last Tudor monarch --Elizabeth I -- demarcated the turning point in the constellations of dynasties and brought to England a neighboring, yet nevertheless, foreign royalty, thereby inflicting on the subjects a considerable amount of bewilderment, insecurity, and discomfort. It can also be perceived from the modern day  perspective – from Ireland’s struggle for independence to contemporary cultural realities where regal figures are almost reducible to the notion of celebrities within an eerie spectacle of  mindlessly mechanized, indiscriminately legalistic and legalized, overwhelmingly formalistic and formulaic, overregulated anomie.

Those aporias miltonian parliamentarian is confronted with are in the antecedent works manifested in the imagery of enraged nature, as Shakespeare colors the world of  Lear’s reasoning and power obscured by a looming dark cloud of greed, unscrupulousness, moral vacuity, and filial bestiality. So are they depicted in sometimes hardly understandable mismatch within the respective characters of Bloom, a.k.a., “childe Leopold” (Ulysses 317) and Stephen with regard to maturity and stability. Fatherly son…”womanly man” (Ulysses 403)…age defying young surgeon passionately dedicated to his calling (Ulysses 332)…words of encouragement with which Edgar presents his blind father Gloucester:” Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (King Lear 4.5.73-74)…and the edifying power of Cordelia’s affection: Lear learns patience, which he knows and claims to need (2.4.264), as if reflecting Edgar’s words of consolation to his  tormented father:”Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80)…”The wise father knows his own child” (Ulysses 337).

Uncritical, stereotypical, and—above all—reductionist fantasy of the fallen angel presumes a heavenly demand for refraining from knowledge. To say that such blockage of the imagination makes a crude error by premising the Genesis myth on the idea of humans as an ignorant bunch is superfluous. It is also epistemologically flawed. There is no such demand: human capacity to know is by default limited; so is human power. That, however, makes human beings neither bereft of vitality nor deprived of knowledge. It certainly does not threaten freedom. Quite the opposite. By virtue of limitation, by virtue of restraint.

Does this justify oppression by analogously claiming hierarchy based orderliness, thereby perpetuating social  relations thriving on dominance, injustice, and inequities? Certainly not. Should rebellion against tyranny of rule void of authority be articulated in the vocabulary different from that which by being so fraudulent poses a threat to the perception and critique of hypocrisy? One would find it reasonable to believe so.