From swerve of shore to bend of bay
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Jump to navigationJump to search- swerve of shore → Swords on shore → Swords (from Irish: Sord Cholm Cille): A small suburb just north of Dublin Bay
- bend of bey → bay of Bray: Bray: (Irish: Bré, formerly Brí Chualann): A town situated 20 km south of Dublin on the east coast
- swerve of shore ... bend of bay → these two expressions both can refer to the curving shoreline of Dublin Bay, seen from two different points of view: that of the embattled native on the shore and that of the foreign invader (or returning exile) at sea → cf. Giordano Bruno's coincidentia oppositorum ("identity of opposites")
- Schwert: (German) sword; hence "swerve of shore" → sword offshore rarr; foreign invader
- from swerve of shore to bend of bay: One can see an allusion to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire: swerve of shore → sword of shore (Romulus and Remus twins, sons of Mars, the god of war) → the city of Rome; bend of bay → Constantinople built on the banks of Golden Horn bay in Asia Minor; "bay" and "bey" phonetical equivalence implies the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks
- Zosimus, Historia Nova, about the foundation of Constantinople: "The city stands on a rising ground, which is part of the isthmus inclosed on each side by the Ceras and Propontis, two arms of the sea."
- swerve off sure: if "Eve and Adam's" can refer to "even atoms" in the Epicurean sense, the word "swerve" can refer to what the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus calls the clinamen, or the "swerve" ever so slightly from a true plumb line as atoms fall perpetually downward through the void; this is the principle that animates the universe. Hence "swerve of shore" → "swerve off sure" (sure = true, straight, plumb). See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things"), Book II, lines 216-224: "And this, too, understand: when bodies thus / Are borne sheer down through void by their own weight, / At times and points of space unfixed, they swerve / A little from their line, just so much as / That you can mark the change. If 'twere not so / They all would fall just like the drops of rain / Straight through the void: there would have been no clash, / No blow inflicted on the seeds, and so / Had nature ne'er begotten autht at all." For clinamen, see the Latin text: Book II, line 292.
- door → Joyce's artificial rhyming slang, referring to the door of HCE's bedroom? → the 4th of 7 elements in a circuit of the bedroom
