10:03 pm
Surah 1132: السردين، والخبز، والبيرة.
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. 1. Proclaim! Eat ye and drink ye To your heart’s content: For that ye worked (Righteousness). 2. And among His Signs He shows you the lighting, By way both of fear And of hope. 3. Enter houses Through the proper doors. And fear Allah: That ye may prosper. 4. And Dixon shall bestow On him, of bread and sardines, Anything he shall desire. 5. And thy Lord taught the Bee To sting in men’s habitations. 6. O ye who believe! Sayeth she, Approach not prayers with a mind befogged. Listen in silence So that you might be graced With God’s mercy. 7. But they shall there exchange, One poured into another, A (loving) cup Free of frivolity, Free of all witness Of ill. 8. And on the third day When the pains of childbirth Drove her to the trunk Of a palm tree: She cried (in her anguish): Ah! I expect each moment To be my next! 9. And behold! Bloom’s hand, Soft under a hen. 10. But closer draws unto men Buck Mulligan: And yet they remain Stubbornly heedless Of his approach. 11 And Stephen With a mind The most befogged.
ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ وَرَحْمَةُ ٱللَّٰهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ
I really love Ulysses and I love the Qur’an even more and I want to understand the line you’ve titled this piece. Could I get a bit more explicit a clue?
The title comes from a section of Oxen of the Sun styled after Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. The scene is a maternity hospital and a woman is about to give birth while a group of loud medical students, plus Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are getting drunk. A nurse has just begged them to stop drinking and be quiet. She does this in a passage just before the one which is styled after The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which gives a pretty fantastical account of travels through the middle east and Asia. The reference they make to “Mahound” in this paragraph prompted me to write this piece in the voice of the Qur’an and quote it for the image caption. The title line for this piece comes fom the Morte d’Arthur paragraph which comes just after, and this sentence is saying that even though he’d like to leave, Leopold Bloom is sticking with Stephen Dedalus right now out of compassion because Stephen is blind stinking drunk and needs somebody to look after him.