It is she, Martha, thou lost one (Molly Bloom, disguised comic-opera style as Martha Clifford in the garb of a country servant 16 placeholder) and Bloom’s daughter, Millicent (silly Milly 17 placeholder) the young, the dear, the radiant. The equine portent looms 15 placeholder, vast, over the house of Virgo, a mare leading her fillyfoal, slim shapely haunches (Bloom appreciates handsome women and livestock) a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. Purfoy, who is in her third day of labor. Astronomical images float through Bloom’s worry-laden mind as he sits in on a late-night, booze-fueled confab of Trinity medicals at the lying-in hospital in Holles Street, keeping vigil on poor Mrs. Then there is Professor Joly 14 placeholder of the nearby Dunsink Observatory, whose brain Bloom considers picking some Saturday afternoon on the subject of parallax and other astronomical quandaries. Ball’s “fascinating little book,” The Story of the Heavens, sits on Bloom’s shelf at home alongside The Useful Ready Reckoner, Thoughts From Spinoza and the History of the Russo-Turkish War, Volumes I and II 13 placeholder. Martin Heidegger’s Entzug, “withdrawal” 12 placeholder) of what constantly surrounds us and flees when we pursue it with women. Bloom, of course, associates this glamour and reserve (cf. lambent nature in its rank profusion - and what is most astonishing, disconcerting and alluring about it is our inability to impose law and decorum upon it through any structural grammar or theory of relativity. Despite its lowly Popular Science origins in middle-brow literature, parallax in Ulysses stands for the relativity of language 11 placeholder - a.k.a. In “parallax” astronomy, as usual, stumbles upon interesting problems of relativism, then promptly sweeps them under the rug with its technical facility. It assigns to cosmic bodies their relative positions in a fixed coordinate system. Parallax 10 placeholder is pure relationality. Astronomers float on Bloom’s stream of consciousness during his daylong journey through Dublin: Sir Robert Ball, 9 placeholder for example, Irish Fellow of the Royal Society, vaguely associated in Bloom’s mind with the copper “time ball” atop the port of Dublin Ballast Office, which falls on the hour “worked by an electric wire from Dunsink.” Note the effortless way Bloom’s unconscious mind plays with the “ball” in Ballast and the “sink” in Dunsink - or better yet, the way language ceaselessly plays with us, since the sinking timeball is not, in fact, “wired to Dunsink,” as a chance lexical association leads Bloom to believe. On the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of zodiacal beasts, 8 placeholder driven in ceaseless revolution around the earth by Parallax, god of astronomers, Egyptian mystics and Freemasons. “Did you hear my brain go snap? Polysyllabax!” Virag is basilicogrammate, 7 placeholder royal stenographer at the Egyptian tribunal of the dead and “lord of language” - parody of a distinguished writer, pedant and bibliophile. Lancinating lightnings of the brow later mutate into synaptic misfirings in the Nighttown 6 placeholder chapter of Ulysses where, in the midst of a brainstorm, Bloom’s terrifying dead grandfather Lipoti Virag, guardian of the Talmudic law, suddenly blurts out “Parallax!” with a nervous twitch of his head. Parallax is a byword for both astonishment and consternation in Ulysses. “Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other. 4 placeholder “Waste of time,” says Bloom in a moment of discouragement. Agendath is home to screechowls and the sandblind upupa. “Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions.” 2 placeholder Like Michelangelo’s horned Moses - stern embodiment of the lex talionis 3 placeholder or law of retaliation, his skull deformed with wonder after his encounter with God - Parallax goads a lethargic people through a holyland laid waste by scientific rationalism. James Joyce had a lot of fun with this in Ulysses. He lavished more care on his sci-fi contraptions than on his characters, who are little more than hastily-assembled clockwork toys whose movements are keyed to the movements of the machines they operate. Verne was something of a Leopold Bloom himself, agog at technological marvels. ( Le mot parallaxe semblait les étonner 1 placeholder). Jules Verne, in From the Earth to the Moon, said that cunning mathematical espiègleries like the kind astronomers use to calculate stellar distance based on parallax tend to strike the man in the street (think of Leopold Bloom) with amazement.
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