cf. video by Yaroslav Shuraev via Pexels
BERTHA:
Did you think of me last night?ROBERT:
[Comes nearer.] I think of you always—as something beautiful and distant— the moon or some deep music.BERTHA:
[Smiling.] And last night which was I?ROBERT:
I was awake half the night. I could hear your voice. I could see your face in the dark. Your eyes… I want to speak to you. Will you listen to me? May I speak?
— Joyce, Exiles
Photograph by Ioannis Ioannidis via Pixabay
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves…
— from Dubliners, James Joyce
Harold Gilman, Edwardian Interior (c.1907)
Where now?
Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl…
Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.
And no more turn aside and brood.
Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
“…the author fell back on the well-known consultation James Joyce had with Carl Jung with regard to Joyce’s schizophrenically ill daughter. Jung explained about the loosening of associations in the disease, to which Joyce replied that this precisely was what he did in his writing. To which Jung replied, “Yes, but you are swimming in it; your daughter is drowning.”
—Robert W. Rieber and Maurice Green, The psychopathy of everyday life: antisocial behavior and social distress included in The Individual, Communication, and Society: Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson (Robert W. Rieber, Ed.)
John Sapiro 