The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Why do so many readers of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses find Stephen Dedalus unlikable? Michael Chabon thinks him a pill, a hard to take bolus. Bloom is more to his liking now.

Reading it at twenty, I had identified with Stephen Dedalus, a grave mistake. Stephen Dedalus is a pill. Doubtless I was kind of a pill myself at twenty, but that didn’t make Stephen any more appealing even then.

His reading of Bloom is a common sentimental one which does not correspond to the archetype of the violent expulsion of the suitors. The malleable (Mollyable) assent of Molly hardly counts as affirmation.

. Where a bachelor had seen Bloom’s devotion to Molly as pathetic, a husband saw it as noble and, at the same time, as simply her due.

Leaving Bloom aside and focusing on Stephen D. for the moment I see in Joyce’s writing an element of the Ignatian exercises which as a good Jesuit boy he would be familiar with. Visualisation is an important aspect of this spiritual discipline. But why would an unbeliever adopt the M.O. of a medieval priest?

—It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.

Whether he did or not his teachers are saturated in the synaesthesic method with yearly month long retreats. This has formed their minds and this mind they transmit in a perfectly conscious way. Joyce was aware of this so there was no indoctrination in his case. He adopted it in the ‘Portrait’. Consider the First Day of the Third Week:

The first prelude is taken from the his tory: how Christ sent from Bethania to Jerusalem the two Disciples to prepare the Supper, whither Himself also, with the others, afterwards went; and there, after the eating of the Paschal Lamb, and supper finished, He washed all their feet, and gave them His most sacred Body and Blood. Lastly, He preached to them after the departure of Judas, who was about to sell Him.
The second, from the composition of the place, by considering the said way as rough or smooth, short or long, with the other circumstances which might belong to it ; then viewing the place of the Sup per as wide or narrow, plain or adorned, and the like........

The first point will be, to see them that are at supper, and draw something to my profit.
The second, to hear the same, what they are saying, arid thence gather fruit.
The third, to attend to what they are doing, and profit by everything.

Gentle reader for your edification I have abstracted from the ‘composition’ of hell elements which are replicated in the famous sermon of Chapter 3:

The first prelude is here the forming of the place; which is
to set before the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth, and depth of hell.
The second consists in asking for an intimate perception of the punishments which the damned undergo ; that, if at any time I should be forgetful of the love of God, at least the fear of punishment may re strain me from sins.
The first point is, to see by the imagination the vast fires of hell, and the souls inclosed in certain fiery bodies, as it were in dungeons.*
The second, to hear in imagination the lamentations, the howlings, the exclamations, and the blasphemies against Christ and His saints, thence breaking forth.
The third, to perceive by the smell also of the imagination, the smoke, the brim stone, and the stench of a kind of sink or filth, and of putrefaction.
The fourth, to taste in like manner those most bitter things, as the tears, the rot tenness, and the worm of conscience.
The fifth, to touch in a manner those fires by the touch of which the souls themselves are burnt.

Elsewhere the template of the Spiritual Exercises is applied. There is the ‘examen’ (examination of conscience and consciousness), there is the self-abnegation. Dedalus feels himself humiliated and mocked, oppressed by bosthoons (ignorant churls). The girl that he is attracted to flirts with a priest:

 And thus there arise three degrees of perfection ; namely, poverty, self-abasement, and humility; which are diametrically opposed to riches, honour, and pride, and introduce at once to all virtues.

He admires Davin’s rack of well made boots, and is tripped by his broken heel on a grating to the mocking of a ‘young wan’. Done, done, done.

James Joyce and Walter Pater

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [ix] experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

(from the preface to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

When James Joyce followed those strictures of Pater and submitted to beauty all was well but his intellectual pride that would bind by a scholastic formula fought that surrender and left him a victim of arid schemata. The sunny irony of Ulysses was occasionally marred by them, Finnegans Wake entirely botched. When he loses that alert sense of outward things which Pater ascribes to Botticelli his strength goes with it. The vision of his anima embodied in the form of the girl standing in the water on Dollymount strand in the 'Portrait’ is like that of Venus rising from the waves without the strange coolness which Pater notices:

The light is indeed cold—mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But this predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men.

The Pramanas as valid means of knowledge or valid means of cognition

Have you ever wondered why there is such variance as to the number of pramanas? Some say one, some say 2 and and others three and six. Surely we ought to know how many ‘hands’ we have. As possibly a result of the creeping force of the illative I’ve lately begun to notice the different translations for pramana generally as ‘valid means of knowledge’ or ‘valid means of cognition’. Therein may lie the core of variance.

Knowledge it seems to me is part of the established mental store. This is the stuff we are sure of and this very right to claim knowledge is the entry point of the sceptical wedge. This has been the focus of discussion about 'justified true belief’ , Moore’s paradox and so forth. Now Indian epistemology has focused on empirical rules of thumb as it were, which are sound ways of getting to the point where you might claim knowledge but yet prescind from certainly as to whether it is. For example you were using a valid means of cognition or cognising normally when you spotted a coin. However when you bent to pick it up it was only a piece of silver paper. Knowledge evaded you for the moment in one respect but in another you now know that it was just silver paper. A lose/win situation sort of.

Is the reduction of the number of pramanas to just two, perception and inference, the result of two forms of apphension viz. physical and mental. We grasp the particular in the physical and abstract the universal mentally. There seems a basic robust modesty about this view unlil we consider that an important element of the definition of pramana is that it is a means of knowledge that cannot be reduced to any other. Ignoring that is to change the conversation.

Ethan Mills has a note on Dignaga's view:
dignaga

Nigel and the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was reading Lila by Marilynne Robinson and finding it dull and ananda deficient decided to turn towards James Joyce and beat my breast in the house of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There’s leela (playful miracle) for you. Joyce is the Master no question. Irish writers have made him their template standing behind him like the Cavan poultry farmer behind the Japanese chicken sexer not knowing how he does it but somehow learning it. How can you learn what your teacher doesn’t understand? Of course there’s a shadow cast by Joyce but it’s not a gloom. I think of Nigel H. when he was at school.

Nigel was a long time in the confessional and the lads were wondering. Then they heard the shout of the priest -
- What, what, get out you blackguard, get out you scut.
With that cry he jumped out of his central box of audition of the sins of Nigel who had been winding him up like an 8 day clock, blurting his way towards incest and having unordered parcels delivered to members of the higher and the lower clergy. Father MacT. wrenched open the door of the box where Nigel was sitting inside with a straois (canine grin) on him. He easily dodged the lob and fled out under the arm of the priest who chased him up the chapel with his soutane hitched up bunching the berry buttons of it. On the way out through the porch Nigel paused to dip the font and bless himself.

More on the ‘Portrait’ when I’ve re-read it.

Partial Eclipse

Today there was a darkness on the face of the earth. We had a partial eclipse. I was glad when it was over. The greenish dusk that came on from 9A.M. was unpleasant and unlike the natural sinking of the sun. I could easily imagine the eerie power of such fading, without definite extinguishment, on the men working on the Newgrange job. Sacrifices would have to be made and permission to continue sought. Elders that had seen the big one would be consulted, then the work would go on.

In the unprecedented cloudy conditions of this morning there was not perfect viewing but I had an occasional glimpse of the bite. The flares that rise from the surface of the sun were not apparent. A robin thinking it was bed time rested in the fuchsia bush.

Homo Habilis: Improved Buck Saw

What’s improved about that bucksaw? I added a handle to the frame which allows the saw to be presented to the wood at a flat angle instead of the steep one which is inevitable if you grasp the frame. Due to the aggressive nature and extreme sharpness of the peg teeth presented like that there is a tendency of the saw to grab, bounce out of the cut and spoil your tattoos. The handle made out of the same stock (white oak) 1.75"x.75 as the frame is attached with two biscuits. You could also cut a slot in some square stock to fit over the frame and secured in a shallow channel on both sides. The throat of the saw is 8ins. and it weighs 2lbs. Blade length is 24ins. The weight means that you just have to move it back and forward for it to cut in both directions without the need for downward pressure. Very fast and comfortable in use. No bouncey.

Note the curved shoulder of the mortice and tenon which allows the windlass to tension the blade fully. The tenon has rounded ends.

Will and Shall

Eric Winsberg is puzzled:
I should


I've been watching a few episodes of the BBC drama series "Foyle's War." Its a decent show, but what interests me right now is just an expression that the main character, Christopher Foyle, often uses that I had never heard before. It works like this: someone will ask him if he thinks that they ought to ____, or if he wants them to ____, and he replies "I should!"
For example "Do you want me ask all the jewelery stores in town if they've seen this necklace before?"; "I should!" or "Do you think I should check the oil in my car?"; "I should!".

Even Joseph Conrad didn’t quite get the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’. In a nutshell ‘will’ is optative or within the boundary of your own personal wishes; ‘should’ is normative; you are subjecting yourself to a situation or force outside yourself. Foyle as a good cop is prescinding from the personal and allowing the force of external circumstances to dictate his actions. The state of the car is the important factor as is the memory of a particular necklace. He responds to those external forces. Foyle is a righteous man.