THE MOON- "What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? " (U.17)
"I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother" (U.18)
Who is Lunita Laredo? (Sung "La" "re" "do" (attributed to Joycean Patrick O'Reilly, Baruch College, CUNY )
Few demigods were raised by fathers and not mothers. Aeneas, whose name means "our little secret" from the Greek (ainoi is the code talk among philoi (near and dear/lovers/siblings, etc)) was the offspring of Venus, and raised by Aeneas' father Anchises, is a notable example. The big reveal at the end of Homer's epic the Odyssey that Athene has been helping Odysseus, not because of her devotion to Odysseus' mind, but her devotion to Odysseus' father, Laertes (Od. Book XXIV). The Ithaca peace hinges on Laertes' relationship to Athene, and I believe in re-figuring the epic, Joyce is giving us a similar reveal in Ulysses, in the Lunita Laredo question.
This story is Ulysses, not the Odyssey. Ireland cannot be, as Buck Mulligan posits, "Hellenized" (a sodomy joke according to Theoharris C. Theoharris). Ireland is too corrupted by its false masters/suitors Rome and England to get back to the classics/Hellenism enjoyed by the continent.
Unravel the Laertes pall, Penelope unweaves. The new Ulysses, a holy new Rome founded in the Penelope chapter by Molly's musing.
18= Life
18= The MOON
Anchises/ Brian Tweedy
Aeneas/Molly Bloom- founding a new republic, the feminine, the infinite, the modern epic
TEMPERANCE: —It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant. U.1
Further reflections on Joyce's artistic mode, the tarot, and my garbage project...
I want to explore the connection between Wilde's "All good ideas are dangerous"; Christ as translated artist, and the Dedalan "cracked lookingglass of a servant."
And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ’s own words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato understood him: that he really said εyω ειμι ο ποιμην ο καλος, that when he thought of the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute expression was καταyαθετε τα κρίνα του αγρου τως αυξανει ου κοπιυ ουδε νηθει, and that his last word when he cried out ‘my life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected,’ was exactly as St. John tells us it was: τετέλεσται—no more.- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis