Page 874 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

ZOE: (Promptly) Your boy’s thinking of you. Tie a
knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides

over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the
curled caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling.
Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to
the front.)
STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance
whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite
is the poet’s rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or
also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible
of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and
mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping
round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’
altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist
about the alrightness of his almightiness. Mais nom de nom,
that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que
jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles,
laughs) Which side is your knowledge bump?
THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen) Bah! It is because it
is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.
Death is the highest form of life. Bah!

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