“An Irishman is not drunk,” Joyce proclaimed dogmatically, “until he can fall down three flights of stairs and the coal chute without hurting himself. I was thinking in fact of the Loch Ness sea serpent. Today’s paper had a story about some Scotsman named the Laird of Boleskine who’s here to climb mountains. Reporters asked him about the monster and he said, ‘Oh, Nessie is quite real. I’ve seen her many times. Practically a household pet.’”
ACTION SOUND
EXTERIOR: CITY STREET. NIGHT. MEDIUM
CLOSE-UP.
SATAN and SIR JOHN Running feet.
BABCOCK confronting each other, BABCOCK terrified. [This shot is held for the minimum possible time to almost register as a distinct image; the audience cannot quite be sure they saw it.]
Q: What did Joyce find most admirable in Einstein?
A: Churchlessness, godlessness, nationlessness, kinglessness, faithlessness.
Q: What did Joyce find least admirable in Einstein?
A: Jewish sentimentality and refusal to drink enough to enter into amusing and instructive alternative states of consciousness.
Q: What did Einstein find most admirable in Joyce?
A: Churchlessness, godlessness, nationlessness, kinglessness, faithlessness.
Q: What did Einstein find least admirable in Joyce?
A: Hibernian irascibility and feckless willingness to drink until arriving at deplorable and bizarre alternative states of consciousness.
Q: What conspicuous differences between Mr. Joyce and Professor Einstein were neither noted nor commented upon by either or both of them?
A: Joyce had escaped from the normal constrictions of ego by pondering deeply what it feels like to be a woman; Einstein had escaped from the normal constrictions of ego by pondering deeply what it feels like to be a photon. Joyce approached art with the methodology of a scientist; Einstein practiced science with the intuition of an artist. Joyce was living happily in sin with a mistress, Nora Barnacle; Einstein was living unhappily in marriage with a wife, Mileva Einstein.
ACTION SOUND
EXTERIOR. SCOTS FARMLAND, DUSK. MEDIUM
SHOT.
Little MURDOCH FERGUSON, age 10, walking across a cornfield. Voice of Rev. Charles Verey [over]: “Then, in 1912, came the appalling case of the Ferguson boy—young Murdoch Ferguson, age 10, who was quite literally frightened out of his wits, returning home around twilight.”
EXTERIOR. SAME. CLOSE-UP.
MURDOCH stops in his tracks and stares with horror at something off-camera. Verey’s voice [over]: “I fear you might smile at what the lad claims he saw….”
“And what is our sense of choice?” Joyce demanded. “Inescapable, I admit, but therefore doubly to be suspected.”
Einstein smiled. “Thinking about thinking about thinking puts us in a strange box,” he said. “Let me show you how strange that box is.” He sketched a box neatly with quick fingers on a napkin and wrote rapidly within it. “Here,” he said, offering his Talmudic trap to Joyce:
We have to believe in our free will:
We have no choice in the matter.
Joyce laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “Now let me show you how we get out of the box.” And he sketched and wrote on the other side of the napkin:
What is inside the box is known:
What is outside the box is unknown:
Who made the box?
“We were talking about socialism when I went to the bar,” Einstein remarked, “and now we are flying perilously close to the clouds of solipsism. Jeem, at once now, no cheating: What do you really believe is real?”
“Dog shit in the street,” Joyce answered promptly. “It’s rich yellowbrown and clings to your boot like an unpaid landlord. No man is a solipsist while he stands at the curb trying to scrape it off.” Le bon mot de Canbronne.
“Another quantum jump,” Einstein pronounced, beginning to laugh. “Well, Freud and Jung are studying these discontinuities of consciousness scientifically.”
Nora, Stanislaus: Did they? Don’t think. Judas, patron saint of brothers and lovers. They did. I know they did.
The crypt at St. Giles: How does that go again?
The accordionist started a new tune: Die Lorelei. Joyce watched dim shadows ambiguously move, fleeing across the walls starkly as foolish laughter erupted at a nearby table. “I probably never would have met you anywhere but here,” he commented softly. “Distinguished professors from the University of Zürich do not move in the same circles with part-time language teachers from Signor Berlitz’s adult kindergarten in Trieste. Not unless they both detest bourgeois society and have a liking for low bars. I acquired most of my real education from cheap bars and bawdy houses, like Villon.”
The accordionist’s friends began drunkenly to sing:
Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten …
“My mother loved that song,” Einstein said softly, as the singers created the image, from childhood, of the Lorelei, beauty and death in her dank embrace.
Overnight, overnight, overnight.
“The last time I was in Zürich,” Joyce said, following his own flight of thought, “was eight or nine years ago. Nora and I stayed at the Gasthaus Hoffnung and the name cheered me. I needed a House of Hope that year. Now we’re staying there again, on vacation, and it’s changed its name for some inexplicable reason to Gasthaus Doeblin—my hometown, you see, Dublin … Is that not an omen or something of the sort?”
From deep neath the crypt of St. Giles. And something and something for miles. They did. My brother’s keeper.
“Nora is your wife?” Einstein asked.
“In every sense,” Joyce pronounced with unction, “except the narrowly legalistic and the archaically ecclesiastical.” They did: I know they did. Fucking like a jenny in heat. I know. I think I know.
Q: Locate Bahnhofstrasse precisely in time-space.
A: Bahnhofstrasse was part of the city of Zürich: which was part of the canton of Zürich: which was part of the Democratic Republic of Switzerland: which was part of Europe: which was part of a 41/2-billion-year-old planet, Terra: which completes one rotation upon its polar axis in relation to the sun in every diurnal-nocturnal 24-hour cycle and 1 revolution about a type-G star called Sol in 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds: which is part of the solar system of nine planets and myriads of asteroids: which is moving together with Sol toward the constellation of Hercules at about 20,000 kilometers per hour: which is part of the galaxy popularly named the Milky Way: which is rotating on its own axis every 8 billion years: which is part of a family of many billion galaxies: which make up the known universe: which Professor Einstein is beginning to suspect is both finite and unbounded, being curved back upon itself four-dimensionally: so that one with infinite energy traveling forever would pass through galaxy after galaxy in a vast space-time orbit coming back eventually to the origin of such an expedition: so that such a one would eventually find again the Milky Way galaxy, the type-G star called Sol, the planet Terra, the continent of Europe, the nation of Switzerland, the canton of Zürich, the city of Zürich, the street called Bahnhofstrasse, the Lorelei Rathskeller: where such thoughts were conceived in the mind of Albert Einstein.
Q: How long had James Joyce and Nora Barnacle been lovers?
A: Ten years and ten days.
Q: How many times had James Joyce suspected Nora Barnacle of infidelity?
A: Three thouand six hundred sixty times.
Q: With what regularity did these suspicions occur?
A: Usually at about midnight; occasionally earlier in the evening if Mr. Joyce had started drinking in the afternoon.
Q: What actions usually resulted from these suspicions?
A: None.
Q: Were there any exceptions to this otherwise consistent pattern of inaction?
A: Yes. In 1909, Joyce had expressed the suspicions with all the eloquence and fury of a great master of English prose. When persuaded that he was wrong on that occasion, he subsided once more into his pattern o
f silent distrust.
Q: Explain the motivations of this passivity.
A: Desire for peace and quiet in which to pursue literary work; morbid self-insight into the probably phantasmal origin of said suspicions; devout and baffled love for the object of both his concupiscence and his paranoia; democratic sense of belonging to the largest fraternal order in Europe, the cuckolds.
The debate between Albert Einstein (Prof. Physik) and James Joyce (Div. Scep.) in the charming old Lorelei Rathskeller on that memorable evening as the Föhn wind began to blow across Zürich covered diverse and most marvelous topics in epistemology, ontology, eschatology, semiotic, neurology, psychology, physiology, relativity, quantum theory, political science, sociology, anthropology, epidemiology and (due to Mr. Joyce’s unfortunate tendency to dwell upon the unwholesome) more-than-liberal scatology. In epistemology, Joyce stood foursquare behind Aristotle, the Master Of Those Who Know, but Einstein betrayed a greater allegiance to David Hume, the Master Of Those Who Don’t Know; while in ontology, Einstein leaned dangerously close to the ultra-skepticism which he was later to denounce when it was propounded more boldly by Dr. Niels Bohr as the Copenhagen Interpretation (viz: the universe known to us is the product of our brains and instruments and thus one remove from the actual universe), but Joyce, with cavalier disregard for both consistency and common sense, went even beyond the Copenhagen Interpretation to ultimate agnosticism, attempting to combine the Aristotelian position that A is A with the non-Aristotelian criticism that A is only A so long as you don’t look close enough to see it turning into B. In eschatology, Einstein held stubbornly to the humanist position that science and reason were making the world significantly better for the greater part of the species Homo Sap., whilst Joyce mordantly suggested that all work in progress was always followed by work in regress. The great ideas of Bruno and Huxley, Zeno and Bacon, Plato and Spinoza, Machiavelli and Mach bounced back and forth across the table like ideological Ping-Pong balls as each became increasingly impressed by the verbal backhand of the other, recognized a mind of distinctly superior quality, and realized that ultimate agreement between two such divergent temperaments was as unlikely as the immanentization of the Gnostic eschaton next Tuesday after lunch. The workers who overheard bits of this ontological guerrilla warfare decided that both men were awfully smart guys, but the Russian gent from the train, had he been there, would have pronounced them both contemptible examples of petite-bourgeoisie subjectivism, decadent Imperialistic idealism and pre-dialectical empirio-criticism.
ACTION SOUND
EXTERIOR. LONG SHOT: BAHNHOFSTRASSE.
BABCOCK running. Heavy breathing.
INTERIOR. MEN’S TOILET. CLOSE-UP.
EINSTEIN standing before urinal, looking at graffito in German: NUR DER WAHNSINNIGE IST SICH ABSOLUT SICHER. FNORD? Heavy breathing, running feet.
Dass kommst mir nicht aus dem Sinn …
The voices of the workers invoked in Joyce his image of Lorelei: eboneyed, fish-tailed, barnacled. Like old Homer’s Sirens. She combs her pale yellow hair, demure and virginal above the waist: below, the sulphurous pit. They sail toward the rocks, songseduced, musicmaddened. A crash, a slopping sluchkluchk, screams: then nothing. A whirlpool turning, turning: emptiness. A gull flipflapping in a compassionless sky.
And the Serpents head rising from the Loch: Eat and ye shall be as gods.
Considering each step, dim eyes aided by the walking-stick, Joyce with dignity approached the bar, signaling for another beer. Gravely he beheld, in the mirror, himself; above it, a bronze eagle.
Almost got it now. From deep neath the crypt of St. Giles/Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles. And something and something said Brother Ignatius. Oh, hell. Wait.
Windows rattling: Föhn wind starting to blow.
When will Einstein get back from the water closet? Bladder: a complicated funnel. If the medical student lives on in me, so does the priest and the musician. St. James of Dublin, patron of chalices, catheters and cantatas. Why, my prose always comes out musical, liturgical and clinical at once.
Ah: Einstein’s green sweater.
“Well, Jeem,” Einstein said, not re-seating himself, “I believe I’ve had enough for one evening.”
“One more beer?” Joyce prompted hopefully. “Ein stein, Einstein?”
Einstein shook his head sadly. “Classes in the morning,” he murmured.
“I hope we will meet again,” Joyce said, rising formally if unsteadily. “I will always remember you for giving me the concept of quantum language. It may be the key to this impossible novel I’m trying to get started …”
“I don’t understand how quantum physics can be applied to language,” Einstein said, “but if I’ve helped you, I’m glad. This has been a stimulating conversation both ways.”
An explosion of energy cast awry the slow-swinging street door, and Joyce stepped back nimbly to avoid collision. Silt.
The figure that staggered into the shadow-dark Rathskeller was that of a handsome but wretched youth whose pallid skin and demented eyes revealed at once a hideous history of some cosmic and monstrous horror that the feeble mind of man could scarce endure. All were instantaneously frozen with terror and copious chills ran abundantly up and down every spine, whilst many admitted later that their hairs stood on end, their flesh crept and their souls within them trembled. The stranger, although dressed in the best clothing of the English upper class, carried a meager straw traveling case, which might contain deadly poison, venomous cobras or human heads to judge by the eldritch laugh which broke from his lips as he fought—visibly to all—to restrain an outright collapse into hysteria. An aura of almost visible fright had subtly entered the previously happy booze emporium, and the one-eyed accordionist ceased to play, the instrument lying as dead in his hands. What can such an intrusion forebode? was the thought in every mind; and the dreadful answer came unbidden to each: Only the madman is absolutely sure. Unhallowed and timeless secrets of forbidden aeons and the dark backward abyss of blasphemous necromancy seemed to move stealthily in every stark shadow haunting the dank and ancient Rathskeller, and still the door tossed in the wind like a spirit in torment: sllt sllt sllt. Inchoate noise rustled imperceptibly.
Bond Street look: an Englishman.
Joyce watched with wide blue eyes as the haggard girl-faced figure stumbled toward the bar. Dorian Gray at the end of his rope. True fear.
“Whiskey,” the young Englishman said in his own language, absently adding, “bitte …”
This his eyes went all out of focus, amoeboid, and he seemed to be floating almost as he sank in a dead faint to crash loudly, shaking the room as he hit the floor.
The night I fell drunk on Tyrone Street and Hunter helped: the same anew.
Joyce set his walkingstick by the bar and knelt, ear to the Englishman’s heart. Medical school: not entirely wasted. Counting, listening: the heart not too fast. Pulse: fast also, not abnormal, though. A blue funk.
Wait: coming around.
The Englishman’s wild tormented eyes looked up into Joyce’s.
“Mein herr,” he gasped. “Ich, um …”
“Just rest,” Joyce said quickly. “I speak English.”
Einstein’s boots clumped thump on wood heavy as ox hooves: Joyce turned. “What is it with this one?” Einstein asked. “Serious?”
“Just a bad fright,” Joyce said.
The Englishman trembled. “All the way from Loch Ness,” he said hoarsely. “All across Europe to this very door.”
“Just rest,” Joyce urged again. Loch Ness. Coincidence?
“It has pursued me to this very door,” the Englishman went on. “It is outside … waiting …”
“You’ve had a fright,” Joyce said judiciously. “Your wits are muddled. Rest another minute, sir.”
“You don’t understand,” the Englishman said wildly. “Right around the corner … by the railroad tracks …”
“What’s right outside this bar?” Joyce asked, remembering Gogarty�
�s medical manner: soothing, reasonable, unfrightened.
The Englishman trembled. “You’re Irish,” he said. “Another Englishman would say I’m mad. Perhaps you have the imagination to know better.”
Celtic twilight: merde.
“Yes,” Joyce said patiently. “Tell me.”
“There is a demon from Hell right outside that door, on Bahnhofstrasse.”
The one-eyed accordionist knelt beside them. “Can I help?” he asked in German.
“Yes,” said Joyce. “Help him to a chair now. He can sit up. I’m going outside.”
“Was he attacked by ruffians?” the worker asked. “Two or three of us could go with you….”
“No,” Joyce said. “I believe he was attacked by his own imagination. But my friend and I shall go outside and have a look.”
Bahnhofstrasse, in the feeble yellow glow of gas jets, was nearly deserted at that hour. A half-block away: a horseless carriage: automobile, the Italians call them. Italian model, indeed: FIAT: Fabrica Italiana Automobile Torino. The Latin love of codes and acronyms. MAFIA: Morte Aile Franconia Italia Anela. And INRI: mystery of mysteries.
The Föhn was blowing more heavily now: hot, nasty, clammy wind like a ghoul’s kiss. Joyce scanned Bahnhofstrasse with weak eyes. On one side the great Gothic-faced banks: rulers of the paper that rules continents. World capital of usury, Tucker would say. On the other side, the railroad tracks that gave the street its name: parallel lines meeting by the trick of perspective in theoretical infinity. Joyce peered, squinting, in both directions, then jumped, involuntarily, as thunder crashed. A scrubbed, empty street. Clean as the Swiss temperament, devoid of answers. The Englishman’s demon was of the mind only.
But wait: by the arc light. Joyce stepped forward, knelt again, and picked up the slightly fluorescent object. It was a plastic mask, for a theatrical production or a masquerade ball: the face of Satan, red-horned, bearded, goatish.
Masks of the Illuminati Page 2