Cartomancy, Kismet, and Epiphany: A Tarot deck for Mme Marion Bloom

Why tarot and James Joyce?

Link: Penelope's Guide to Mme Marion Bloom's Tarot

With a name like Penelope...One may assume there to be some artistic pressure for me in The Final Chapter, 18, "The Penelope Chapter". Yes, it is an already much commented on chapter. Yes, it is the stream-of-consciousness female-narrator, having her period, gushing prose chapter. Yes, it has no punctuation save for 8-periods. Yes, it is the chapter in which she responds to her getting her period by directly addresses her creator in the "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh" line . Yes, it is the chapter in which it is argued because her symbol is eight, "he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th", the figure eight of her reclining body symbolizes , and draws the symbol for infinity and all the implications therein. Yes. it is the chapter where every Joyce reader can feel erudite discussing one three-letter word. Yes, my name is Penelope so it is often assumed because my mother went into labour during a Ulysses exam that it is also my origin. Yes, because of all these interpretations, I do feel compelled to do Chapter 18 justice.

Artistically representing this chapter calls for a response as open-ended, intricate, complicated, capricious, convoluted, symbolic, as this chapter's claims on time, experience, epic, and as culmination of my experience with it, a final chapter for Joyce as Lived Experience!

For the first 17 Chapters, I shackled myself to certain artistic manacles when compiling my Ulysses guide. "Buy nothing but tape!" For my fodder/material, I plumbed the depths of recycling bins, coffee shops, garment tags, advertisements, wrappers, everything sent to me by post, and thoroughly investigated the packaging of all consumables for years in order to find images that related to the text, theme, commentary, describing my own imagination, literal and figurative illumination, etc. To highlight Homeric parallels, episodic idiosyncrasies, and (Gilbert/Linati) Schemata each chapter was distinct in tone, image, ink colour, and style. This image treasure hunt, calling out to be met by coincidence, allowing the universe and the intent/content to come to me, was, I've come to believe, a practice of divination. Kismet and magic figure large .

Repurposing Joyce's Reimagined Epic in Epic Proportion

Therefore, for the guide's 18th chapter, had to be "a something more"*, a next step. It necessitated a jumping off the page, and to hurl itself at the timelessness, usefulness, of the Epic form.

Ulysses as a modern epic, or the refiguring of the epic, holds tremendous magical responsibility. According to an authority I admire, Harvard's Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, the ancient Greeks believed that every emotion contained within the human breast, every morality, every answer, and useful yarn for a babe-bounced-on-knee was contained in Homer. I argue that Ulysses fulfills this "whole-education" function.

Epic also colloquially means, "big" and "cool". No pressure there.

(*Greek, from the Greek epithon- "a something more/ something added"; "epithet" from the verb "to add on", epitithenai)

So the the ante in this project's scope and loftiness upped. I had to drop my worm's eye view, and recognized challenges even before I began. For example, Robert Anton Wilson calls the novel"inexhaustible". The "Gifford/Seidman"'s epigram incites, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality." Of course the professors and participants busily discussed James Joyce's "ecretive" artistic mode at the 'Art of James Joyce: The 26th International James Joyce Symposium' in Antwerp; my Joyce response necessitated storytelling as rich as improvisation: (yes) AND!AND! AND! Begging a stratospheric level of mastery, art, expression, and complexity, I needed a medium vast enough to fulfill the drive to create, emulate, and interpret Joyce.

So I became that medium.

Next Steps, First Steps, Millionth Steps

Wales' poet laureate Gwyneth Lewis' deserves credit for her nudge into my 'going-forth-for-the-millionth time' next step. In Bread Loaf Summer Session 2017, not only did she challenge me with "your guide is well and good and pleasurable, but what next?" She also shared, "A teacher of mine would do a tarot reading whenever she had to take a next step." This advice 'tuned in' with the way my artistic drive works; Ulysses is a lived experience, full of archetype, role, and many turns.

Carl Jung, a figure who provides deliciously low-hanging fruit for Joyce Scholarship (his criticism and praise of Joyce may be argued as almost as vast as his own contributions to human flourishing), in his much talked about September 1932 letter, said of the Penelope Chapter, "The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches." Jung, however, championed the use of Tarot Cards, and asserted, "The cards combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” Could correspondences to Ulysses also contribute to the playful development of mankind? Could detritus and trash reveal an object to facilitate that play?

James Joyce themed 52-Card playing card decks were conceived by Anthony Burgess and Richard Ellman.

Seeing clearly for myself the connection between Joyce and Tarot, I felt compelled to learn everything about Tarot as it may or may not relate to James Joyce studies. Immediately, I therefore over-complicated it.

Here's how I commenced on my personal FOOL's journey. Although a renown chiromancer since summer camp, it was my little sister (very featured in the cards) who was card-literate**. I had much to learn. There were explicit connexions and many occult. Initially, I had a borrowed copied of Papus,' "Tarot of the Bohemians" and decided to supplement that very intricate text with ad hoc Hebrew lessons from one of my high school-age students. In the context of 16 June, 1904 Yeats, Joyce and Yeats (both Yeats boys relationship to iconic illustrator Pamela "Pixie" Colman Smith) seemed a good lead. Not only was Pixie Smith the Art Nouveau poster artist for Irish Revival Plays, but her tarot images and illustrations are probably the ones you know. (In tarot deck maker communities and online forums, be prepared to answer if your deck is a Rider-Waite-Smith "clone". Mine is not.) Smith will bring a seeker to the philosophies of Golden Dawn, and how her views differed from W.B.'s. Crowley and Yeats became the next first step, (then a rabbit hole dropped me in Robert Anton Wilson's Tao of Joyce...).

For the sake of additional familiarity, for 18-months, I have been practicing daily tarot readings using primarily Crowley's Thoth deck, and (in no ordinal affiliation) the Irish Revival Poster/centennial Smith tarot deck, the Celtic/ Wild Wood tarot, Goddess Tarot, Happy Tarot, the tarot of Cathars, the tarot of Helen, Tarot of Japanese Fairy tale, and Ulysses again and again.

[Note tarot decks make great gifts; it is a widely held cross-cultural superstition that a reader cannot purchase a deck: the cards will lie.]

I have been awash in interpretation, hoping that this art project may lend itself to daily interpretation and reading Ulysses, albeit in a refigured mode. My hope is to make the cards printable for personal use in the open source gregariousness shown by Dark Tarot. and in artistic revolutionaries like Sal Randolph's FREE CULTURE and FREE WORDS projects.

O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh

Repurposing throwaway: Kismet, Epiphany, Cartomancy, the Final Chapter

FROM THE TEXT (the text that launched a thousand shifts): “God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after that the 10 of spaces for a Journey by land then there was a letter on its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about poetry in it” (U. 18)

******

[Play in the] Garbage Art

Tarot cards that interpret Joyce through collages of disused photography, speaking to the democratization and personalisation of the artistic process and to the self as reader, placing Ulysses’ emphasis on the “you.”

MAJOR ARCANA

Link to Major Arcana just images

The MAGUS: "Come up, Kinch. Come up you fearful Jesuit." (U.1)

Although the fool (including in this very deck ) is numbered 00, the MAGICIAN makes a better Mulligan Introibo/introduction to this deck than the FOOL. I like thinking Stephen's anabasis (Ἀνάβασις) march up to the mercurial mock priest initiates a modern (re-discovered? apocryphal?) Eleusian Mystery set forth in these cards.

I shall post more about the occult signs and meetings, but here is a preliminary sample of the MAJOR ARCANA and COURT CARDS. The SUITS: SWORDS, WANDS, CUPS, and DISKS divide The MINOR ARCANA. Each card's bricolage/discard connects with a passage in Ulysses. I invite enthusiasts, epoptotes*, ecologists, or logists of any stripe, logicians and magicians to argue, embellish, or dialogue with these images.**

Ekphrastic note on throwaway...The text's 'object' throwaway (as opposed to the text's 'character' "Throwaway", the dark horse that no one bets on), the elusive, and recurring 'skiff' "ELIJAH IS COMING", I found very difficult to find literally. End-of-days literature litter's day has come and gone? In substitution, because ELIJAH IS COMING brings to mind Joyce's most active word in the text, "metempsychosis", I've re-figured a solution. YOGA throwaway seems to proliferate in modern spaces. Please accept this translation/adaptation.

*[Participants in mysterion cults] who had attained épopteia (Greek: ἐποπτεία) (English: "contemplation"), who had learned the secrets of the greatest mysteries of Demeter. For further reading, check out Greg Nagy's translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter** Friends have sent "throwaway" from various global loci. Id est, I am indebted to my father for harvesting such sundry from Irish shoppes.

TAROT'S STORY

The MAJOR ARCANA depict the FOOL's journey through various archetypes, roles, and spiritual progresses and regresses. The FOOL's ordinal number is either 00, or 22 to emphasize the tarot's (and FOOL's journey's) cyclical nature. Although various sources believe Tarot's etymology can be traced back to the Italian for "foolishness", Papus and Crowley transpose the letters in anagram: ROTA and emphasize the WHEEL, and roster/dramatis personae aspects of tarot.

Ulysses' Deck FOOL's Identity

We are all the FOOL; Bloom is our everyman. Role/Roll marries nicely with Ulysses' nonlinear, sestina of thoughts and themes which recycle and reoccur without regard to the novel's main narration's chronology.

Pseudoangellos

Bloom as Protagonist and wandering Odysseus figure is not the FOOL

Our deck commences with Bloom's revealing inquiry to Stephen in Chapter 16, "I don't presume to dictate to you...why did you leave your father's house?" (This priggish tone and line of questioning prefigures Chapter 17's catechism-mode, and also establishes a seeker-mystic discourse notably modeled in Shakespeare's Hal-Falstaff diction). Although Bloom is the protagonist of the deck and novel, this transposition of role (Bloom setting off on the journey in the form of the master, not the seeker) should belie expectations. In doing so, it is my hope that this 'dislocation' will be enough to set up what I call "Dedalan reversals" and help the reader to interject his/her own experience into the novel. If the querant can see the cycling of each character into the many Tarot roles, perhaps (s)he may see the transmigration of each reader into each role at varying stations on the novel's journey.

Stephen answers that he has left is father's house not to quench terrestrial/hylic appetites to "seek his fortune", but in the artist's Dedalan Reversal, "To seek [my] misfortune." Goethe's sorrowing Werther would weep for such a wonderful Bildungsroman opening line. It is truly a foolish (and in the novel's timeline) a besotted answer. The wet-brained conceit may also help to throw the reader off balance enough to go into an alternate reading mode.

MAJOR ARCANA: Reverse order (21-00), from completion to potential. I did not necessarily construct them in order. I tried to match the images with the tarot symbology as well as the meaning from the Joyce. Sometimes the image would appear to me, or a symbol and I would have to build the card right then and there. Other times, pieces of the cards would take months to emerge, or the text would best fit under a different archetype/trump card.

XXI. [tout] Le Monde / The WORLD

"The word known to all men." (U.16)

"yes." (U. 18)

XX. JUDGMENT

"Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!" (U. 14)

XIX. The SUN

"—It’s in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the blood of the sun." (U. 16.)

XVIII. The MOON

"What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?" (U. 17.)

SEE POTENTIAL PAPER TOPIC ON THE IDENTITY OF LUNITA LAREDO

XVII. The STAR

"Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows." (U. 10)

XVI. The TOWER

"Height of a tower? No, she can jump me." (U. 4)

XV. The DEVIL

"They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid." (U. XII.)

XIV. TEMPERANCE

"—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant." (U. 1)

"—Are you a strict t.t.? says Joe.

—Not taking anything between drinks, says I." (U.12)

SEE POTENTIAL PAPER TOPIC ON JOYCE/JESUS AND WILDE'S ARTIST

XIII. DEATH

"—Ah, poor dogsbody! (U.1)

" Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body." (U.3)

"Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case." (U.4)

"She knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live." (U.4)

"Poor Dignam!" (U.4)

"Why Ophelia committed suicide. Poor papa!" (U. 6)

"Poor papa! Poor man! I’m glad I didn’t go into the room to look at his face." (U. 6)

"Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are." (U.6)

XII. The HANGED MAN

"—I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless." (U.2)

XI. STRENGTH

"—By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.

By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will." (U. 12)

X. The WHEEL of FORTUNE

"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself." (U. 9)

IX. The HERMIT

"—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

—By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years." (U. 12)

VIII. KARMA (aka JUSTICE)

"I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th then I wrote the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth" (U. 18)

VII. The CHARIOT

"When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him." (U.12)

VI. The LOVERS

"Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me." (U.III)

"Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody." (U. XII.)

V. The HIEROPHANT

"Ignatius Loyola make haste to help me." (U.9)

IV. The EMPEROR

—After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

—Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

—And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

—Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

—The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church." (U.1)

III. The EMPRESS

"Amor matris. Subject and object genitive." (U.2)

II. The PRIESTESS

"She thanked me. Why she me? Fate. Spanishy eyes." (U.11)

00. THE FOOL

"I don’t mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father’s house?

—To seek misfortune, was Stephen’s answer. " (U.17)

THE COURT CARDS

Link to Court Cards Just Images

PRINCESS OF WANDS/ GERTY MACDOWELL

Nostrils, Eyes, Fireworks, Tiger of fear, wedding slipper, tumescence/de-tumescence, dancing muses, positive energy

PRINCESS of WANDS

GERTY MACDOWELL

"Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish." (U.13)

PRINCESS of CUPS

MILLY BLOOM

"O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.

You are my lookingglass from night to morning.

I’d rather have you without a farthing

Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden." (U. 4)

"All dimpled cheeks and curls,

Your head it simply swirls. "

PRINCESS of SWORDS

ZOE HIGGINS

"ZOE: (Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father’s gimlet! (She takes his hand.) Blue eyes beauty I’ll read your hand. (She points to his forehead.) No wit, no wrinkles. (She counts.) Two, three, Mars, that’s courage. (Stephen shakes his head.) No kid." (U.15)

PRINCESS of DISKS

MINA PUREFOY

¨Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.¨ (U.8)

PRINCE of WANDS

BUCK MULLIGAN

"He smiled on all sides equally.

Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:

—Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.

—To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like Synge. " (U.9)

"—Redheaded women buck like goats. " (U.1.)

PRINCE of CUPS

STEPHEN DEDALUS

"She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.

Misery! Misery!" (U.10)

PRINCE of SWORDS

STEPHEN DEDALUS

"—You said, Stephen answered, O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan’s cheek.

—Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?..."

—I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

—Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.

—Of the offence to me, Stephen answered." (U.1)

PRINCE of DISKS

LEOPOLD BLOOM

"Potato I have." (U.4)

QUEEN of WANDS

I'm most fascinated by this card, and the image is obviously a filler so that I may write to my friends, and show some progress. I think QUEEN of WANDS is my favourite in the whole deck; it is the card of the educator. It is the card of compassion as power. I have yet to feel a resonance/ Ulysses parallel. Obviously, from the Odyssey, it is the card of Athene, but not as Mentor, and certainly even in parody not as Mr or Mrs Deasy. It has been quite the intellectual challenge. Stay tuned.

QUEEN of CUPS

MOLLY BLOOM

yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf" (U.18)

QUEEN of SWORDS

LYDIA DOUCE

"—That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.

Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.

—O go away! she said. You’re very simple, I don’t think.

He was.

—Well now I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they christened me simple Simon.

—You must have been a doaty, miss Douce made answer. And what did the doctor order today?

—Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I’ll trouble you for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.

Jingle.

—With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed.

With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and Cochrane’s she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold whisky from her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky fifenotes. " (U.11)

QUEEN of DISKS

MOLLY BLOOM

"Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.

Love’s

Old

Sweet

Song

Comes lo-ove’s old... " (U. 5)

KNIGHT of WANDS

BLAZES BOYLAN

"By the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of My girl’s a Yorkshire girl."

(U.10)

"Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and hailed him:

—See the conquering hero comes. " (U.11)

KNIGHT of CUPS

LEOPOLD BLOOM

"What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. " (U.17)

KNIGHT of SWORDS

DENIS BREEN

¨Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. I thought Alf would split.¨ (U.12)

KNIGHT OF DISKS

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM

"—It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham’s large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare’s face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t broken already." (U.6)

"The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare’s beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.)" (U.15)

**I, like Flaubert and Joyce am proudly the "idiot of the family". (See my Guide's "Nighttown with Sesquipedalians (Joyceans) "/ "Ulysses as lived experience" pp 177-179; "Idiot, from the Greek, "He who plays by himself" like idiosyncrasy, having one's own timeline; Nimrod's punishment in Dante's Inferno is to have a language unto himself. Robert Pinksy discovered Nimrod's words are an anagram for the Jesus-on-the-cross Aramaic "O Lord, Why Have You Forsaken Me?". There is a fine line between esoteric and totally obscure. I hope the tarot conveys the playfulness and foolishness it intends.

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