skip to main |
skip to sidebar
FiftyFive ~ # 47
"Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man, You flew! Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, Steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing Icarus, Paiter ait. Sebedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he..." James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and the Ovid, Icarus, Daedalus link has long been speculated on. And the connections cannot be ignored for there is plenty to link them together. But this is my blog and I was making a connection of my own, in remembering being a younger man than I am now. When I was a student (and particularly when I was writing my PhD) we, my friends and I, used to travel Newhaven to Dieppe once a month. P. would do so because he smoked Gauloise cigarettes and with a foot passenger crossing costing less than a packet we would cross the Channel for him to stock up. And the memory of those trips linger. And even though it was so close to England it was real France and a real idea of being in France and we spoke French as much as we could, "Besoin d'une préssion s'il vous plait." On the way over we worked, reading, taking notes or reading each other's papers/chapters/ideas in our PhDs, me on Scottish philosophy, Davie Hume and such; him on Chaucer and Bahktin. Funny how Icarus should drop by just as I was thinking about the ferry crossing. P. lives in Istanbul now and me, I am still in Brighton. Newhaven is close by, but I haven't been to Dieppe in a long while. I should go, eat oysters on the quayside, drink Chablis to wash down a side dish of langoustines and mayonnaise, finally quaff a beer to rinse the palette then sip coffee while the ferry slides back into port to ship me home. Nostalgia is a return to a place that never existed in the first place - I guess, but hey, I am allowed to remember what I want and to leave out the rest. Tonight I will raise a glass to Dieppe - and if I see Icarus waving I will wave back, just like the starlings waving in the picture above. This clip is not of starlings but of water and flying and birds and love...
"Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man, You flew! Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, Steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing Icarus, Paiter ait. Sebedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he..." James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and the Ovid, Icarus, Daedalus link has long been speculated on. And the connections cannot be ignored for there is plenty to link them together. But this is my blog and I was making a connection of my own, in remembering being a younger man than I am now. When I was a student (and particularly when I was writing my PhD) we, my friends and I, used to travel Newhaven to Dieppe once a month. P. would do so because he smoked Gauloise cigarettes and with a foot passenger crossing costing less than a packet we would cross the Channel for him to stock up. And the memory of those trips linger. And even though it was so close to England it was real France and a real idea of being in France and we spoke French as much as we could, "Besoin d'une préssion s'il vous plait." On the way over we worked, reading, taking notes or reading each other's papers/chapters/ideas in our PhDs, me on Scottish philosophy, Davie Hume and such; him on Chaucer and Bahktin. Funny how Icarus should drop by just as I was thinking about the ferry crossing. P. lives in Istanbul now and me, I am still in Brighton. Newhaven is close by, but I haven't been to Dieppe in a long while. I should go, eat oysters on the quayside, drink Chablis to wash down a side dish of langoustines and mayonnaise, finally quaff a beer to rinse the palette then sip coffee while the ferry slides back into port to ship me home. Nostalgia is a return to a place that never existed in the first place - I guess, but hey, I am allowed to remember what I want and to leave out the rest. Tonight I will raise a glass to Dieppe - and if I see Icarus waving I will wave back, just like the starlings waving in the picture above. This clip is not of starlings but of water and flying and birds and love... 
