Ulysses Essay 37 (53:39)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 8

“Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth.”

As Bloom walks home, the sunny June sky suddenly clouds over, causing his upbeat contemplation of the olive groves and citrus orchards of the Agendath Netaim Zionist agricultural colonies to give way to a dark and depressing meditation on the desolate barrenness of the Dead Sea, a symbol in his mind of the dismal and unending saga of Jewish wandering, captivity and exile. A bent old alcoholic woman who crosses his path leads him to characterize the sterile Dead Sea as “the grey sunken cunt of the world”:

“A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom, all dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead. An old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket, he turned into Eccles Street, hurrying homeward.

Joyce’s penchant for allowing Bloom to indulge in unbased scientific, theological and historical trivia (“bloomisms”) somewhat alleviates the otherwise unremitting despair of this truly incomparable rumination that likens the fate of the Jews to the Dead Sea, thus adding a typically Joycean ironic twist to the unending tragedy of the Wandering Jew. For instance, Bloom erroneously terms the Dead Sea a “vulcanic lake” (the word “volcanic” probably intentionally mis-spelled by Joyce though some consider it a typo) since although during the nineteenth century the Dead Sea was indeed assumed to be the crater of an inactive volcano, by 1903 geologists had (according to Gifford) confirmed that this was not the case. Also in recalling the “cities of the plain” of the Dead Sea on which, according to Genesis 19:24, God rained down sulphurous “brimstone and fire”), Bloom errs in mentioning three such towns:  Sodom and Gomorrah (recalled correctly) and “Edom” (incorrectly). Edom (“redness”) is not the name of a city but refers to the biblical country, also known as “Se’ir” (“hairiness” or “roughness”), occupied by a range of mountains running from east of the Dead Sea southwards along the Aravah section of the Great Rift Valley to end east of the northern extremity of the Gulf of Aqabah (known in Israel as the Gulf of Eilat), one of the northern prongs of the Red Sea, the other being the Gulf of Suez. The word “Edom” probably derives from the distinctly red hue of the mountains of Edom, although the Tanach suggests that the name is associated with the fact that the territory was occupied by the hairy (“sa’ir”) and reddish (“adom”) Esau, Isaac’s elder son, a gift from God in lieu of the birthright wheedled out of him by Jacob, his younger twin brother: see Genesis 36:8 (“And Esau dwelt in the mountain-land of Se’ir –  Esau is Edom”) and Joshua 24:4 (“To Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. And I gave Mount Se’ir to Esau to inherit it; and Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt”).  Edom, like Esau (see Essay 12 “Redheaded women”), does not have a good press in Jewish tradition: the Roman Catholic Church, whose imperial pagan forebears destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E. ending Jewish independence in Judea for two millennia and which itself was responsible for so much persecution of the Jews in medieval times, is often referred to in medieval Jewish rabbinical sources (and occasionally even in the liturgy) as being the biological heir of biblical Edom (ostensibly proved by a rather convoluted genealogical connection), notwithstanding the fact that according to Josephus twenty thousand Edomites allied themselves with the Judean forces in the unwinnable war against the Roman Empire.at the time of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, The Christian Church too has its own issue with Edom: King Herod the Great who was responsible for the “Massacre of the Innocents” in Bethlehem at the time of the birth of Jesus was nominally a Jew, but in fact was descended from a family of Edomites who had been forcefully converted to Judaism some generations back in the wake of the conquest of the Edomite territories by the Jewish Maccabean dynasty that ruled over Judea following the successful Hasmonean revolt against Grecian Syria in 167-160 B.C.E.

The Dead Sea (in Hebrew “Yam Ha’Melach”– “The Salt Sea”) – whose shores are located at the lowest point on the dry land surface of the earth (1,411 feet below sea level) and whose water is so saline that no living organism (“no fish, weedless”) can survive in it – is now indeed “old and dying”, adding prophetic vision to Bloom’s ruminations. Until the 1960s, evaporation of the Dead Sea water was equaled by inflow from the Jordan River, but since then hydrological diversion projects by Israel, Syria and Jordan have been pumping out water from the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers (the latter a northeastern tributary of the Jordan), and as evaporation overtakes inflow the Dead Sea is shrinking with its shoreline receding by about three feet per year. This phenomenon is not only cosmetic but has engendered an alarming geological development: as the briny water recedes, fresh groundwater wells up, dissolving the large layers of salt and creating huge underground  cavities that cause deep sinkholes to open up suddenly and dangerously, potentially swallowing up people and even vehicles. There are already three hundred of these hard to identify sinkholes scattered around the western shore of the Dead Sea: in Joyce’s provocative prose they are indeed “grey, sunken cunt[s].”

But one Israeli artist has shown that the [water]melons of Agendath Netaim can  nonetheless coexist with “a dead sea, grey and old.” In 2004 Sigalit Landau made a now famous video (“Dead See”)  showing herself floating naked in the Dead Sea, while embedded in concentric circles of hundreds of tied-together watermelons. My interpretation of this magnificent work of art is as follows: just as the sterile Dead Sea is shown undergoing a process of rejuvenation symbolized by the young naked woman lying amid the dense seed-packed melons so by analogy can  “the oldest people” be reborn even if it “wandered far away over the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere… Dead.” No longer dead.