Thursday, 17 November 2016

The group has started episode 17, also referred to as “Ithaca”, and stopped at: “a wooden revolving roller” (17.235)

Catherine Meyer, although wary of the episode's foregrounded form – questions-and-answers, geometry, maths – was still curious to dwell on the opening lines, “What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”, to try a response in image. She writes:

For the start Joyce chose a complicated term in the sense of maths, art and daily life. In mathematics, lines are parallel if they are always at the same distance from each other. They never meet. In art, you have a vanishing point where all parallel lines meet. So, the further away a track is the smaller it appears. And in daily life, “parallel” can also mean: more than one event happening at the same time.

My painting shows parallel lines depicting water in its universality, the kitchen in Bloom's home and, figuratively, the question-and-answer form of the catechism in the blue water's light and dark colours. Technique: watercolour.

Catherine Meyer © Zürich 2016