YOU, JAMES AUGUSTINE JOYCE, OF GREAT AND immeasurable constancy of soul, sailing between the Scylla of musty Protestant Ireland, Lyster, Best, Eglinton, and the Charybdis of the neighbourly jealousy of your compatriot, Buck Mulligan, how much you speak for us. You, the greatest son of Catholic Ireland in seven hundred years, how many things you were to us, how near from our bogland you flew to the sun of truth of life, how like all of us you were searching for the father, Bloom-Shakespeare, hidden in the deep bones to which we long to return. How from the strangled city of the dead you carried your books as testimony of life, how from the decaying streets of your childhood you travelled with your poems, lonely Dubliner, to the sun, to your old father.
   But above all you were speaking of the life which comes from the mind. You speak of the thoughts of house and father and mother and playmates on the road, then the years, of learning your own body and looking and touching the bodies of others to find out that the thoughts of the mind are related to the touchings of the body, then the discovery - Flight No. 1 of the artist - that the mind works for itself, can see by itself, can understand beyond what it sees. And the recognition that the feelings of pleasure of the body are even deeper in the mind, that what you like in the body turns to what you love in the mind.
   Your kingdom of the lonely tower of desire at sixteen. The paradise of desire at eighteen ripening into the earthlight of the hours and flowing with you to the bright faces at parties and pushing you even as far as the pubs. Then the going to college and the finding the world you were brought up for is a farce, that the professors you hear discussed are crooks or at best

nonentities, that the priests surrounding you do not love their neighbour neither do they meditate but they worry about what effect they are having and what the Archbishop is thinking of their activities and how secure is the job and how long to go to a Parish. Where your mind awakens to reality, to the reality of your life now, and to the love which demands at the same time both angelic sublimation and the human tenderness of lusting. This was your smithy as well as mine, the young Dublin air, in which the mind trembles at last to art: the true craft of psychological man, the images of his dreams, of his ties to the earth of his birth. All that talking down the Dublin streets out of which our art begins: art by which you expressed your time and place and opened for us the closed doors of our destiny.
   You, Stephen-Daedalus, preparing in those streets to be an artist of all kinds and or all times, from the cry of your youth against the mob of College gombeens and censors to your end as the apotheosis of the artist as divine figure, the ultimate artificer of the deepest strands of holy life: myth and the dream. The Wake Man of civilization worshipped now where two or three are gathered in your name whether in New York or in the mid-West or at Santa Barbara, California. You are not a sick cult, as is still whispered in your town, but the cultus of the divine figure of the artist-doctor, the doctor who is his own guinea pig, observing his own symptoms with the trained patience of a lifetime, and not only his life but everyone talking, laughing, suffering around him: society his national health list out of which he can only save a few, those who listen to his rhythms, look at his pictures, moralise his messages and endure the parable

of his famine, the eaten-out heart of one man in one place.
   You, James Joyce, artist-doctor with a few as the lucky heirs of your diagnosis, fierce old man of the Paris cafes, toiling over your prescriptions and all the time your patient dying under the microscope, silent warrior cold in the contempt of the shibboleths of your land, fatherpolitics and motherchurch across the narrow sea. You saw the water from the shore, greenbedabbled, and went on cleaning your weapons to scatter for ever the parishes of fat boozey men and crumbling anæmic women, your enemies. You made them all begin to die with Blazes Boylan, Mr. Deasy, Buck Mulligan, Fr. Conmee, the Citizen and all the shadows of the devil-soul of Ireland: you put them into your book and they became satirical caricatures and witches of hate. So you, James Joyce, loving us seriously all the time behind our backs like a father, caring for us as unmarried virgins who might die without kissing life, still walking our pavements from your books and showing us our hypocrisy and timeserving, you, comradeless, hoping as you wrote but telling none that we, in our green isle of only human snakes, should read your armoury of words and begin to live.
    In the library you, Stephen-Joyce, talk about the stupid soul of the nation, of the bum scholarship and bogus renaissance of your fledging time. With the dead musty Protestant soul of -Ireland, Lyster and Eglington [sic for Eglinton], behind the counter whispering in the scared tones of Saintsbury and Dowden and beside you the shifty soul of townland Catholic Ireland, Buck Mulligan, with its student blasphemies and its pretence of classical education: that wild Ireland

which settles down into the professions and makes money and gets bitter when it thinks of its youth and drinks and drinks. You in that library, with all Ireland wrapped around you in phoneyness and lies, and you setting them on the wrong track and making them think you were talking of Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway and whether he was the prince or the ghost but you were flying away, freeing yourself and laughing at them. And laughing most of all at Buck Mulligan the man with the knife between the smiles of his teeth, the mocker you drowned in mockery, the bawdy man you made dirt of until he was forced to turn respectable and call you an obsessive maniac but whose articles in American magazines attacking you had footnotes identifying him as a character in Ulysses. And Best the dusty celibate sleeping with the ideas of his books: something light in the style of Wilde he proposed to your wide soul, genes and genes away from that idiot pansy, the big man of putty who called small boys flowers and caressed them most unwittily, who tried to deflower they who are not flowerlike and who can not be plucked.
   Genes and genes away from that you were in worship of the smiling face of the earth, the body of the woman offered and accepted by the clay of your sweet humble body, away from it in the love of your old father who looked in the bottom of his glass for your face and on the age of your genius for the promise that you would come back and talk to him, and away in the young man you were searching for the friend who would love your secrets and become your other self and cry with you and be about you and protect you, the friend who would hold you back from being shovelled in a coffin, as Paddy Dignam

was, into an earth stinking with Glasnevin corpses, the friend who would tell you his love between the pub and the brothel and would become your angel and marry the other angel your woman waiting for you in the future, your woman who was of the salt of the sea and of the smell of Aran anemones, who became a Princess at your sight in Nassau Street, Nora your bride, the greatest Queen Ireland has ever had, a shining beauty of a woman whom you toasted in a million glasses: Princess, Queen, of the green slagheaps of Ireland and a greater one than Kitty O’Shea or Maud Gonne.
   Your beautiful dream which I tell of in tears weeping over your Odyssey-truth: you listening to the earth, your ear deciphering the medley of sounds beneath the fields and towns, and smiling up at your wife and your friend, walking at dusk the streets of Dublin and looking for your wife and your friend. Your beautiful dream, Joyce, and of the provisions you took for the voyage and your face so peaceful in the storm and your struggle on and on, keening your father and your mother over the rough waves, and always in sight of the promised shelter where you would alight into the arms of your wife and friend. You made your voyage, Irishman, in sight of the ancestral an gels whitening on the far shore uttering strange cries you tried to understand before you went asleep. Young hero, in the light of your chivalrous integrity, you travelled all, the mocking, the driving out, the sun, the sea, the waste, until you came for your evening meal to the house of the angels where your smiling wife and your friend were waiting for you.

And you, Stephen-James Daedalus-Joyce, among the books and the pale faces, sympathetic alien from the persecuted faith of your ancestors, David of the individual thinker against the priests and monopolists of Christ whose religion is the safety of their books and pulpits, clear thinker, descendant of Erugeria,with a hunger for a Platonic absolute compatible with art, using the formulations of the Schoolmen to construct an aesthetic of the word, not the Word made Flesh, but the word made beautiful, the epiphany of the soul, whether of a girl on a strand or the Ballast Office clock the showing forth of the unutterable. You, secret Platonic heretic of the mysteries, pecking on the clever bones of Aristotle and Aquinas to parody the jerry-built mansion Ecclesia has made, you throwing their syllogisims [sic for syllogisms] back in their face speaking with your cruel irony of “the intellect” and “species” but yet wistful for the approval of the old bulldog of Aquina: respectful to the end of the system we are tombed and wombed in.
   But above all you speak of the dissolving universe, the rain on the earth, the river into the sea, the flowing into the ocean, the vision of the soul early in the morning waking and dreaming and talking to itself in the cold light, before clothes are put on, shaving done and the world made everyday for safety: when you tremble near the shivering light in your blue bones: the lights with their heads of gods, the clouds in shapes of women, the fish carved from jewels, and the voice from the recess of your belly telling you to worship. You annotated them and made them into the substance of your all suffering craft, nearer the sun, hawker, you wrote them down, you read the writings on the wall of Heaven which sound mad to educated-dull ears. You fled the nets of sense and learnt the

rhythm of the tongues of God, the sources of language, the dialects of the tribes of Heaven you heard in the distance and you wrote the few you could translate down, fabulous penman. You, James-Joyce, holy word-giver of life. More than any you chose life.
   You endured the stages of growing up, finding out how men live, and guarding yourself against your native vice, bitterness. Mostly you were hurt, human of the human, the insult received and the friend not at home, hurt in your longing for Ireland and her freedom and her ancient example, hurt in the family you had to look after, in the woman whose body you filled with flowers but whose tender flower could not see the light made from the beginning for her through her father, 0 family man whose odyessy was of the routines of meals and arrangements to catch trains, who wrote letters every night in your sleep to your old father and your aunt near Sandymount.
   And the search for your friend, the comrade of your thought, your age, who is of Ireland, you speak of him everywhere, in every page you search for the equal of your soul, the masculine of gender with an equal love. You in that library, in the European situation, the dialectic of Plato and Aristotle, crying with terrible bitterness over your lost friend of your youth, he of Tinahely who left you whom you liked the best. How they all leave you alone on the strand or on the street, how he went from you, how being Irish they all leave you: to be alone, to go abroad with some woman, to be forgotten and damned. How the jackals of college watched their chances to get into the professions, how the jackals of the pubs watched the openings for their jokes, how the educated jackals,

the scarecrows of the library, watched their reputations and their magazines and not you: you, lonely truth-sayer, with no comrade to tell it to, no friend to speak your heart to.
   Only your father-friend, St. Leopold Bloom of everyman and everywoman, is near you, waits for you, crosses you coming from the library, the knight of faith, of compassion of the blossoming earth: he lowers his eyes passing you, the light on the stone, as his heart beats for yours. And you know, you reach our, you a man with his work now cast: to put down everything that was there, what they said to you, what they did to you, what they are. And the one just man, St. Leopold Bloom of the blossoming earth, saves the city from the wrath of your gods, from the marches of your pen, the man who knew no distinctions, St. Leopold Bloom, who forgave everyone in the forgiveness of himself. The outcast, the Jew, the nobody Christ whom the citizens sneered at, waits for you, crossing you on the steps and mocked by Buck Mulligan, waits for you to take you to his house, his wife, his possessions, caring in the dead city of smear-souls to give you his skill at being ordinary, at being extraordinary, at being everyone: man 0 wondrous! woman 0 beautiful! earth how blossoming! You, Jim Joyce, but a few hours away from your father's voice, from the kitchen of the artist-God, the Maker of words, the Delineator of analogies, binding your soul fast to your father on earth at 2 a.m. in Eccles St.
   Now away from the quiet voices of the castrati in libraries, from the stuffed heads of patriots, you have money for a pint of stout, away from them, they have sold everything, their minds, their manhood, their

land. You have been forgotten, Daedalus-Esau, acted on, made to salute them in the street, made to sign their documents, away from looking among them for friends, from thinking you can find a brother among them, there is nothing here: you are the cheated Esau and your birthright has been taken from you and they have given you enough to buy a pint. Away, away.
   You, James Joyce, lonely to-night in Zürich listening to the roar of the lions and hoping perhaps for the sound of children in boats off Killiney strand or for the calls of seagulls around the head of Howth in the early morning. You, artist-father, lonely to-night because you went too early for our love, turning away from us before we could say, Yes, YES