Oxen Of The Sun

These are just some ideas that I am tinkering with.  Unfortunately, I will not have time to return to this blog for several days, so enjoy the bulk of what I have so far, and I will hopefully have an extended and edited copy of this essay type blog by next week:

Metempsychosis:  the passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal.

            This is the question that I am proposing for this blog: what vessel does the soul choose for safe passage into another body, and what is the tether that exists in-between bodies? 

I suppose it depends on who you ask, of course.  More importantly, a subjective definition of this concept of soul is relevant.  Regardless, for some, metempsychosis occurs in the act of listening to music.  For others, it occurs when gazing at a painting.  And yet, for others the act is more mystical—less definable.  A fleeting sunset perhaps, or a walk through thick woods…sunlight streaming through yellow and crimson foliage. 

I don’t really know what category best suits my preference: however, it does not matter—and the only purpose of this blog is to briefly discuss Joyce’s notion—which occurs in the episode Oxen of the Sun, in his novel Ulysses—that souls are transmitted unconsciously through the very language we sift through every day.  According to Joyce than: the history of language (more specifically the English language) seems to be continually in a state of gestation until the precise moment of utterance.  Therefore, language itself harbors souls from the past.  Before we expand on these concepts let us first consult Eliade for contextual information relating to this topic.

In the second chapter of Myth and Reality, Eliade chronicles the Hawaiian genelogical chant, which is a “recapitulation of the cosmogony, the history of the world, and the history of the tribe.”  In one of my recent blogs, I discussed the homologization of the writers Ovid, and Neruda into the general cosmogony.  In my experience with Joyce, I believe his striving to be remembered is perhaps stronger than both these poets—and his method of securing a place in illo-tempore derives from the omphaloskepsis that the reader experiences in trying to decipher meaning from his text.  What I mean by this last statement is this: Joyce saw the magnitude in a day, and he tried to capture ALL OF IT.  Yet because ideas can only be expressed through language—what is that we actually acquire when learning a language.

 And this is just some of the subject matter that is addressed in this episode.     

Anyway, back to Eliade’s statement above, and why this discussion of ceremony is so relevant when dealing with Joyce’s subject matter.  Eliade makes the point that some new born’s in this tribe are subject to this ceremony.  I think were Joyce departs from Eliade, is that he tries to display the English language as illo tempore, but is a landscape of forgetfulness: all souls and past lives exist in the language, we just need to remember.