Title: Message
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff
| June 16,
2006
In what some see as a mark of respect, and some
Joycean purists consider sacrilege, official commemorations marking Bloomsday,
the single day in 1904 that forms the narrative in James Joyces great novel
Ulysses, have been canceled today in Dublin because they coincide with the
funeral and burial of Charles J. Haughey, Irelands most colorful and
controversial prime minister.
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Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow
dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning
air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
--Introibo ad altare
Dei.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and
then covered the bowl smartly.
--Back to
barracks! he said sternly.
Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
--My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two
dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck
himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out
twenty quid?
He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the
sea to Stephen's face.
--The aunt
thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have
anything to do with you.
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like
fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and
all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the
rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl
where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the
Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the
Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with
my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain
flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he
could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I
said yes I will Yes.
