Fabled by the Daughters of Memory — Part Two
Oh Terpsichore, muse of dance and of chorus, mother of the Sirens …
‘ … ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos, yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego …’
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 1939
Tumult the whirling Dervish: in Islam Dervish refers generally to members of a Sufi fraternity, or more particularly to a religious mendicant, who opts for or acquiesces in a state of material poverty. They concentrate primarily upon the universal values of love and serving, abandoning the deceptions and misconceptions of ego in order to reach God (so whether ‘self exiled in upon his ego’ is meant to be ironic by Joyce, well, maybe). And so that they may reach God in the majority of Sufi orders a dervish will practice the devotional acts of dhikr through physical exertions or religious proceedings to attain to the necessary ecstatic trance. Sama is a common form of worship among them, a Sufi ceremony which is performed as dhikr; sama means listening, dhikr means remembering. Such performances would frequently include singing, performing on musical instruments, poetry recitals, saying prayers, wearing symbolic accoutrements; and the terpsichorean art also features of course, alongside other rituals.
There are several verses in the Quran that stress the importance of remembering the will of God through the utterance of expressions such as God willing, God knows best, if it is your will. Upon such a ground dhikr is based, and anyone forgetful enough to neglect to say God willing should instantly remember God with the utterance maybe my Lord will guide me to something more akin to rectitude than this. And there are other verses besides, O you who have faith! Remember Allah with frequent remembrance, those who have faith, and whose hearts find rest in the remembrance of Allah. Look! The hearts find rest in Allah’s remembrance! There is no deity but God. All praise is due to God. And for Sufis dhikr is one of the best ways to enter the more elevated level of Heaven and to exalt the monotheistic oneness of God; it is perceived as a means whereby spiritual enlightenment and union or annihilation in God are attained. Individual rosaries are approved as a method of meditation, the objective of which is to achieve a feeling of peace, a departure from worldly values and, in general, a bolstering of faith.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, (1207–1273), was a Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic, noteworthy for the Sufi dance sama ceremony that is Sufi whirling, a kind of physically active meditation and which continues to be practiced by Sufi dervishes of particular orders. It is an established meditation practice enacted within a ceremony of worship, through which dervishes endeavour to attain to the source of all perfection, which is sought through abandoning their ego or personal desires by heeding to the music, by concentrating upon God, by spinning the body in repetitive circles, a practice which has been interpreted as a symbolic representation, an imitation of the planets in the Solar System that are orbiting the sun.
The rituals of the Whirling Dervishes are amongst the most enduring as well as the most especially fine and charming ceremonies of spirituality, for such ritual whirling of the dervishes is an act of love and a drama of faith, possessing a decidedly structured form within which the gentle turns become increasingly dynamic as the individual dervishes strive to attain to a state of transformation. The music that accompanies the whirling from beginning to the end extends from the grave and serious to the ecstactically expressive; its effect is intended to be hypnotically enthralling. Chanting of poetry, rhythmic rotation, and incessant music produce a synthesis that, according to the faithful, induces a feeling of soaring, of ecstasy, of mystical flight.
There are some interesting issues raised here with regard to the philosophy of dance and in particular dance ontology, that is, the matter, form, and mode in which dance exists. Works of art in general are socially constructed by virtue of the fact that they are not natural kinds but rather human creations, and the way one categorizes art works depends upon one’s interests, and in that respect ontology is not so easily detached from sociological or ideological considerations. What is the nature of dance as art? Dance is necessarily expressive and transitive action, and in the case of the Whirling Dervishes it is looked upon as both activity and as experiential phenomena, akin to a phenomenological kind of philosophy that looks upon lived experience, die Erlebnisse, including bodily experience, as something that is able to deliver legitimate descriptive or causal evidence for philosophical postulates. And then there is a class of philosophical problems that focus upon identifying what the artistic product of dance might be, that is to say, whether or not it is an object or a structure of some kind, or a more readily changing and flowing process or event. Philosophers of dance disagree upon which aspect of dance as art should occupy a primary place for the purposes of ontology. Perhaps were one committed to the structure of the work of dance and of repeatability then the relevant feature of dance from an artistic point of view would be its abstract structure, in which case the focus of interest would be upon a score intended for guidance, an actual one or a one in principle, whether or not one subscribes to the view that this amounts to discovering a true definition or essence of dance in Platonic manner. Hence for one school of thought there must at least be an object of appreciation that can be evaluated independently of any particular subjective experience or perspective laid upon it, and by this means the expectation is then to be able to determine something true about dance as art that is subject to the sort of rational evaluation and breaking down and reassembling that analytic philosophy likes to amuse itself with.
Art, according to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), is the sensuous expression of freedom, human and divine, and yet he has very little to say about dance:
‘When in Germany young people light St. John’s fire [fires lit on hill-tops to celebrate St. John the Baptist’s Day, 24 June] in the summer-time or gambol elsewhere or throw things at windows, this is a purely external usage in which the proper meaning has been relegated to the background, just as it has been too in the case of the festal dances of Greek youths and maidens where the interlacings of the dance and their figures imitate the criss-cross movements of the planets, [like the Whirling Dervishes! — my note] as the twists and turns of a labyrinth do also. We do not dance in order to think about what we are doing; interest is restricted to the dance and the tasteful and charming solemnity of its beautiful movement. The whole meaning which was the original basis of the thing, and the portrayal of which for imagination and sense-perception was of a symbolic character, therefore becomes an imaginative idea in general, the details of which we can accept with pleasure as we accept a fairy-tale or as we accept in historiography a specific action in the external world of time and space; and in these cases we can only say ‘It is said, so the tale goes’ or ‘It is so’, etc. The interest of art can therefore only consist in picking out one aspect of this material which has become something positive and external, and making out of it something which sets the gods before our eyes as concrete living individuals and still carries no more than echoes of a deeper meaning’.
- ‘Aesthetics’, Vol. 1
‘If gestures are carried artistically to such a degree of expression that words can be dispensed with, then we have pantomime which, in that case, turns the rhythmic movement of poetry into a rhythmic and pictorial movement of limbs. In this plastic music of bodily posture and movement the peaceful and cold work of sculpture is ensouled and animated into a dance, and music and plastic art are in this way unified’.
- ‘Aesthetics’, Vol. 2
Echoes of a deeper meaning? A degree of expression whereby words can be dispensed with? How does that accord with what has been said about the Sufi whirl? Dance is performance, dance is action, dance is embodied in a physical, intentional event by virtue of which it most assuredly should be construed in terms of structures of action rather than some kind of eternal types, which raises a problem for its analysis under Plato’s, (428/7 BCE — 348/7 BCE), ontology of art whereby the structure of the work of art is an object of discovery rather than a created one. Platonism on the matter of works of art can best be understood as the contention that some or even all works of art are abstract entities that are without spatiotemporal location, but then what of the art forms of music and literature and painting, not to mention dance, where a physical presence of something is involved? And then the well known objections to Platonism, in dance ontology in this case, raise their heads. With the postulation of abstract objects comes the evocation of an infinite regress, that is to say, through the relation between the universal facets of dance and the particular instantiated manifestations of dance the consequence is an infinite regress, or if one denies the regress it remains nonetheless incomprehensible. Furthermore, were one to accept all or even some of the postulations concerning abstract objects of the kind that are amenable to being known, nonetheless the issue remains as to whether or not dance works could possibly be satisfactorily categorized as such.
Platonism runs into special difficulties with regard to music and so consider music and dance together and maybe some other art form in the mix too. After all, making connections and associations is what we do, something that the Wake takes to extremes, and if the occurrence of a sound and the listening to a sound are spatiotemporal events, and if a piece of music is an abstract type denied any spatiotemporal location and with the being of it independent of any particular performance of it, the question arises as to how in any literal sense it could possibly be said of a musical work that it is composed of just these particular sounds. It would not be so surprising however were there a Platonist who took the plunge and declared a musical work in its strictest sense to be incapable of being heard. And furthermore, as with dance, there is the relation between a performance and an abstract object of which it is a performance to consider, for if a piece of music is an abstract object and a fully determinate one at that it is difficult to see how an interpretative performance of such an object could be necessary for an appreciation of said object.
So what of the Gesamtkunstwerk? A total work of art, an extravagant awe-inspiring aesthetic odyssey, a complete artistic creation which, through colossal efforts, embraces visuals, experience (about which more later) and performance.
‘Wickedgapers, I appeal against the light! A nexistence of vividence! Panto, boys, is on a looser inloss; ballet, girls, suppline thrown tights. I have wanted to thank you such a long time so much now. Thank you’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
‘The Swan’
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
This labouring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,
is like the awkward walking of the swan.
And dying-to let go, no longer feel
the solid ground we stand on every day-
is like anxious letting himself fall
into waters, which receive him gently
and which, as though with reverence and joy,
draw back past him in streams on either side;
while, infinitely silent and aware,
in his full majesty and ever more
indifferent, he condescends to glide.
Abstract objects, one would have thought, cannot be created. Or perhaps they can. Or perhaps a work of art, again in the strictest sense, can come into being and go out of being. And yet both musical works and dance performances are repeatable and these days can be recorded. And what of aleatoric art? That is, art that exploits chance techniques. John Cage, (1912–1992), for instance, with his ‘Music of Changes’, 1951, a musical composition that uses chance throughout, or rather, utilises the I Ching, a Chinese text the purpose of which is for divination, a system of symbols with which to set about identifying order in chance events.
‘I feel spirits of itchery out-ching out from all over me … ’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
Perhaps a dance in itself is an abstract type that is authentically produced by the dancer. Or like music, given its choreography, is a kind of abstract artefact meriting recognition as an authentic creation. Or perhaps it is a quasi-abstract set of configurations akin to numbers in being non-physical and non-psychological, but that are bound, through the actions of agents, to a temporal and a historical context. Or perhaps dance is a sequence of produced universals that are concretely embodied through the intentional activities of dancers (shades of Hegelian concrete universals). Or perhaps only a seeming mystery is here originating through inappropriate assumptions concerning types, and that authentic artistic production is compatible with a continuous or staged model of works and o performances. Or perhaps dance works are in themselves created types.
All of which neglects the Whirling Dervishes and their dancing art as it is experienced. But what is it to experience something?
According to John Dewey, (1859–1952), ‘the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience’:
‘While the theory of aesthetics put forth by a philosopher is incidentally a test of the capacity of its author to have the experience that is the subject-matter of his analysis, it is also much more than that. It is a test of the capacity of the system he puts forth to grasp the nature of experience itself. There is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as its treatment of art and aesthetic experience. Imaginative vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art, making a whole out of them in all their variety. Yet all the elements of our being that are displayed in special emphases and partial realizations in other experiences are merged in aesthetic experience. And they are so completely merged in the immediate wholeness of the experience that each is submerged:- it does not present itself in consciousness as a distinct element. Yet philosophies of aesthetics have often set out from one factor that plays a part in the constitution of experience, and have attempted to interpret or ‘explain’ the aesthetic experience by a single element; in terms of sense, emotion, reason, of activity; imagination itself is viewed not as that which holds all other elements in solution but as a special faculty. The philosophies of aesthetics are many and diverse. It is impossible to give even a resume of them in a chapter. But criticism has a clew that, if it is followed, furnishes a sure guide through the labyrinth. We can ask what element, in the formation of experience, each system has taken as central and characteristic. If we start from this point, we find that theories fall of themselves into certain types, and that the particular strand of experience that is offered reveals, when it is placed in contrast with aesthetic experience itself, the weakness of the theory. For it is shown that the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing aesthetic experience to tell its own tale’.
- John Dewey, ‘Art as Experience’
That is to say, one must move the understanding of what is essential and characteristic about the dance process (though Dewey doesn’t discuss dance in particular) from its physical appearances in an object of expression, the dance performance, to the dance process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material dance performance but rather the development of an experience of dancing. Indeed, experience is something that personally impinges upon a person’s life.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (1908–1961), also brought out the importance of considering a work of art as an experience, though he has painting primarily in mind here (and let us remember our muse that is presiding over us at present through part two of this series, Terpsichore. I have not yet brought up the all important subject of inspiration):
‘We speak of ‘inspiration’, and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted. It can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, inside the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth. In paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy of vision — its iconography, perhaps’.
- ‘Eye and Mind’
An iconography, yes, as the Whirling Dervishes seek symbolic representation of planetary motion through dance.
Michel Foucault, (1926–1984), as is well known, was to turn his back upon phenomenology and hence the treatment of dance as an experience. In his view a subject is oriented in history whereas the subject of phenomenology is not (in his view) and hence not amenable to scientific analysis. Human experience, including bodily experience, is thoroughly historicized as the phrasing has it, historically situated, and priority is to be granted, in the face of discontinuities of past events and the inherent tendency of narrative to under-represent such discontinuities, to relationships between the present and the past. You may wonder what giving unqualified priority to forms of analysis that foreground historical phenomena and historical processes has to do with a philosophical analysis of dance. Well, dance, together with its choreography, has historical, temporally infused dimensions. And furthermore it is through the historical aspects of dance and choreography that critical insight into them is to be garnered.
That which is definitively emergent or categorically ahistorical in choreographic performance is of no concern to Foucault, rather, the immanent and the manifesting, as well as the implied or suggested relations of dance, are significant only as they bear upon histories of the present, and as they might make critically conceivable possible futures of the present. Dance-making typically involves the embodiment of creative, imaginary, and even otherwise unactualizable events and processes of being, and one may wonder how the replacement of a phenomenological with a thoroughly historicized subjectivity that seemingly precludes inquiry into the more radically creative is helpful. Well, such an enticing, for Foucault, alternative to phenomenology lies in the stress that is now placed upon the logic of concepts as opposed to lived experience as the motor spurring on human thinking. The concept is rendered the central object of the inquiry.
The essential distinction between the approaches in dance analysis here seems to be that of a philosophy that is oriented by the activity of living intelligently through events, processes, places, subjects, and objects, a good deal of them being human, and a philosophy oriented by general ideas and conceptuality, albeit a conceptuality that cannot escape from material aspects of its own. The modern empirical subject defined in terms of birth and death and otherwise incapable of proceeding intelligently other than through various forma of enunciatable reasoning be they gentle or severe barbaric or modern punitive or honorary is replaced with the living, moving human body could regarded as nothing of significance other than a materiality that manifested intelligent forces other than its own. It could be analyzed, at least in modern contexts, as a finite keeper of a soul born wholly out ‘of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint’ as Foucault puts it, (he had an obsession with punishment), a conceptualist definition of the empirical embodied human being.
The difference seems to be whether or not an identifiable agentive identity with respect to the performance of epistemic or knowledge constituting processes enacts performatively this constitution of knowledge or whether knowledge constitutes them. The linguistic as well as the unconscious dimensions of scientific thought in history is brought to the fore. The turning away from phenomenology ultimately amounts to replacing the customary subject/object centred question about what it means to think with a linguistic centre question about what it means to speak (or express oneself through the language of dance). Thinking is thereby left to the conceptual domain and the centrality of an experienced, embodied, but object-oriented consciousness is replaced by that of a historicized conceptualised one. The move away from phenomenology to a conceptualist perspective impacts upon dance inquiry through a departure from its dancing subjects, its living, experiencing embodied beings, in order to maintain an relation that is intellectual with regard to them. It must deny recognition of any non-articulated, embodied, intelligently performative presence in order to chase after critical, interpretive analyses.
Good luck with that. Terpsichore let us not forget is a daughter of Memory, which is the theme of this series, why Memory is appropriately the mother of the Muses. And so it seems the most illuminating exposition of the dance is to be found in Hegel after all, though he says little concerning the Terpsichorean art specifically, for recollection is crucial to his philosophical system. And in Hegel we have the lived experience (a la Dewey) and the logic of concepts (a la Foucault) together. Imagination is to be viewed as a special faculty holding together the elements of an aesthetic experience, according to Dewey, but this misses out the role of recollection. Reason, in partnership with imagination, creates its associations and connections because of the faculty of recollection, in particular given their propensity to react at a profound level with affective states and attitudes that in turn have been instigated by an array of associated remembered affective states and attitudes; and upon being subjected to their influence similar affective states and attitudes are also recollected; recollecting is thus in this manner an experience. Recall that Dewey said that it is a test of the capacity of the aesthetic system that a philosopher puts forth to grasp the nature of experience itself, and this Hegel’s system does exceedingly well.
Habitual successions of feelings and notions rapidly follow one upon the other while assuming their subjective forms and while no longer experienced as complex disparate elements but as states of a unified whole. A dance work like any work of art can in this way mislead one into supposing that the feelings it engenders, be they aesthetic, or ethical, or whatever they may be, are an experience of a unified whole; whereas in truth the actual process is of recollection as manifested in representational form, the dance performance, as the Whirling Dervishes symbolically represent the orbiting planets for instance. Through recollection the aesthetic experience tells its own tale, and telling its own tale is the Dewey requirement for any adequate theory of aesthetic experience.
Hegel, as it happens, does represent the descriptive or causal evidence for his philosophical postulates through the image of a dance:
‘Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is ‘in itself’ [i.e. subsists intrinsically ], and constitutes the .actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The·True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that recollects itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
To partake in the knowledge delivered by his philosophical (which of course incorporates his aesthetic) system is to partake in the Bacchanalian revel of Absolute Knowing. The Phenomenology itself will conclude with Absolute Spirit grasping its infinitude by drinking from a ceremonial chalice, as he quotes (or rather slightly misquotes) Friedrich Schiller, (1759–1805):
[only] from the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams forth for Him his own infinitude.
Hegel’s Bacchanalian revelry professes a necessity to negate one’s own consciousness, and lose oneself in an intoxicated flow of Absolute Knowing, just as an experience of reading the Wake is akin to a kind of intoxication. Absolute Knowing requires that the subjective spirit partake in the revelry of truth, through philosophy once it has achieved the annulment of time. From the very start the Bacchanalian revel appears to be a dance characterized by negation, the negation of time, a dance of eternity, a liberation from the opposition of consciousness in the drunken revelry of the Bacchic mysteries of Absolute Knowing that permit for us admission to the eternal essence of the world in its being prior to the natural world and to temporal existence, the logic of the Absolute.
Nonetheless, a dance that annuls time returns to the position of itself because of recollection:
‘Becoming presents a slow moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which , endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly Just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the nigh t of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start·afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the inwardizing, or that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance’.
The dance is the dance of the Absolute’s self-return to itself in its knowledge; its communion with its own eternal essence, and its dwelling within itself. It returns to itself insofar as our Absolute Knowing is the communion of the Absolute, of Absolute Spirit, with itself. A Bacchic dance (were this article not already too long I would make mention of Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), his Dionysian revelry that Hegel anticipates, and his frequent references to dancing) can be understood in terms of the eternity that it seeks to partake in, much like the Whirling Dervishes for whom remembrances are so significant in their rituals. Hegelian revelry relates to temporality negatively through an annulment of it, and in doing so, knowledge is acquired of an eternity beyond the temporality of the natural world in which we have our being. Time is no longer a source of our social or epistemic or knowledge constituting alienation as the eternity of the Absolute is accessed through the dance.
Tanzen wir!
‘I cannot dance upon my Toes’
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1836)
I cannot dance upon my Toes —
No Man instructed me —
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,
That had I Ballet knowledge —
Would put itself abroad
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe —
Or lay a Prima, mad,
And though I had no Gown of Gauze —
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences — like Birds,
One Claw upon the Air,
Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so —
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention — easy — Here —
Nor any Placard boast me —
It’s full as Opera —
Coming up in Part Three:
Thalia, muse of comedy and pastoral poetry.
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’:
1. oui (French) = yes.
2. si (Italian) = yes.
3. ja (German) = yes.
4. jo (Swedish) = yes.
5. già (Italian) = yes.
6. ney (Greek) = yes.
7. tá (Irish) — yes.
8. breakage = the action or fact of breaking; the results of breaking; Music.The change in the quality of the voice in passing from one ‘register’ to another.
9. upheaval = a state of violent disturbance and disorder; Geological. A rise of land to a higher elevation.
10. distortion = twisting out of natural or regular shape; an optical phenomenon resulting from the failure of a lens or mirror to produce a good image.
11. inversion = a turning upside down; reversal of the order of words; Music. The action of inverting an interval, chord, phrase, or subject.
12. chamber music = that class of music specially fitted for performance in a private room, as distinguished from a concert-room, church, etc.
13. stand a fair chance = to be likely to meet with some (specified or implied) piece of fortune, some good or ill luck.
14. grain = the smallest possible quantity; ‘with a grain of goodwill’, cf. Stefan Czarnowki, ‘Le culte des héros et ses conditions sociales : Saint Patrick, héros national de l’Irlande’, 1919. ‘Although the Irish had the notion of being a nation and although one can with some good will, see in them the rudiments of a state, they did not constitute in reality but a vast confederation of clans, tuatha’.
15. There is one outstanding example of pure dance: that of the whirling dervishes, an art that has been practiced for more than seven centuries. The procedure is part of a Muslim ceremony called the dhikr, the purpose of which is to glorify God and seek spiritual perfection. Not all dervish orders dance; some simply stand on one foot and move the other foot to music. Those who dance or, rather, whirl are the Mawlawi dervishes, an order that was founded by the Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi at Konya, in Anatolia, in the 13th century. The performance, for which all of the participants don tall, brown, conical hats and black mantles, takes place in a large hall in the tekke, the building in which the dervishes live. The dervishes sit in a circle listening to music. Then, rising slowly, they move to greet the shaykh, or master, and cast off the black coat to emerge in white shirts and waistcoats. They keep their individual places with respect to one another and begin to revolve rhythmically. They throw back their heads and raise the palms of their right hands, keeping their left hands down, a symbol of giving and taking. The rhythm accelerates, and they whirl faster and faster. In this way they enter a trance in an attempt to lose their personal identities and to attain union with the Almighty. Later they may sit, pray, and begin all over again. The dhikr ceremony always ends with a prayer and a procession; and Madame Blavatsky, ’Isis Unveiled’, 1877: ‘Dervishes, or the ‘whirling charmers’… the Mohammedan devotee… will never reach beyond his second class of occult manifestations’.
16 tumult = great disturbance or agitation of mind or feeling; confused and violent emotion; and as Christ called James and John Boanerges: ‘And James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder’. (‘Mark, 3.17).
17. selfexiled = exiled by one’s own wish or decision; and Joyce’s note: ‘self exiled’ = ’Irish Statesman’ 2 Feb 1924, 664/1: ‘Gossip of an Irish Book Lover’: ‘George Evans Bruce… plaintiff in a famous suit for libel… rather than pay… he self-exiled himself to Brussels and never returned’.
