Today is Bloom’s Day, or Blooms’ Day if you want to
commemorate Molly as well as Poldy—fitting, as we’re posting about a song Kate
Bush wrote that was intended to incorporate lines taken directly from Molly
Bloom’s “soliloquy” at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a chapter that occurs
after June 16th, somewhere in the wee hours of June 17th. But I’m one who
believes “a day” (for a person) lasts from rising to sleeping, no matter how
far into the next day it may be before that happens. As it happens, Molly
remains awake (she was awakened by her husband’s return and wasn’t awake all
night) until the cock crows for dawn.
Kate Bush was denied use of the words from Ulysses back in
the late Eighties when she recorded “The Sensual World” for her album of that name,
released in 1989. She substituted references to the scene Molly is recalling—as
well as some flights of her own, including her lover “rescuing” something if it
should fall between her breasts. Mention of Molly’s breasts features
prominently in Ulysses, prominent as the appendages themselves no doubt are.
But Kate’s lyric on the original release isn’t too coherent. Not that you mind,
what with that sultry vocal and those Irish pipes creating that hypnotic sound.
The chorus, “stepping out of the page into the sensual world,” seemed to be all
about a woman’s sexual awakening, one of those Paolo and Francesca moments as
in Dante—“and that day we read no more.” They found something more
involving to do.
In 2011 Kate Bush released a new version of the song,
retitled “Flower of the Mountain”—a line from Ulysses—and incorporating the
passages she initially wanted to use. I don’t know if it’s a better song than “The
Sensual World” because, for one thing, Kate’s voice has deepened and lost some
of that pixie-ish elasticity that made her songs so immediately recognizable.
There’s much more liveliness in the original, and the lyrics present the
speaker as something of a cock-tease: “And his spark took life in my hand”
followed by “I said, mmh yes, but not yet.” Ouch. And Kate also has her girl thinking about Machiavellian girls which might make us think of a certain chanteuse's
evocation of “material girls.” Yep, this chick is weighing all the options.
Molly, of course, is very cunning and very canny all through
her long monologue, but the passages Kate incorporates are all about the very
sensual feeling of deep kisses and recognizing, in a certain man’s longing and
hunger for her own body, just how exciting that body can be. So that “Stepping out
of the page into the sensual world” is still about a moment of awakening, but,
with the use of such readily identifiable text, the song also seems to allude
to the kind of stirring that might occur when reading racy lit and deciding to
go off and get some o’ that. Of course, the legal decree that declared Ulysses
was not obscene for U.S. purposes—12 years after the book was initially
published—held that the book would not stir sexual desire and salacious
thoughts. That’s as may be, but if Molly’s comments don’t stir you a little—either
to recall some great sensual moments of your own or to make you make a note of
seeking out the same at some not so remote juncture—then I wonder about you,
frankly.
Anyway, the latter-day Kate has a deeper voice and maybe
that suits this material even better than her voice in 1989 would have. She’s
more appreciably a woman looking back on all that palpitating heart business
and she still manages some great phrasing in bits like “so he could feel my
breasts all perfume”—listen to how she sounds a bit intoxicated by that perfume
herself, and I really like the pause before it to make an internal rhyme: “drew
him down to me / so he / could feel . . .” And her final “yes I said yes I will
Yes” is shorn of all that coy “not yet” stuff. In the book, Molly is remembering when she
surrendered for the first time, “under the Moorish wall” in Gibraltar, and also
the moment when she accepted the marriage proposal of her husband (of 16 years)
in a field on Howth outside Dublin. So, no, she’s not refusing either event and
is rather merging them as two landmark moments in her erotic life. Moments when
she realizes her power to make a man do something for her and to her.
Kate begins with the Howth head recollection (which her
husband has rapturously recalled earlier on June 16, 1904, the day the book is
set on) of “I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth”—these two are
sharing not just saliva but saliva in foodstuffs. And it was a leap year which,
by the tradition, means that a woman can propose to a man. Instead she preps
the memory of the seedcake with “I got him to propose to me,” so we know she
didn’t actually have to pop the question herself. And the long kiss makes her
lose her breath and then the compliment that sticks with her and is the title
of Kate’s song: “he said I was a flower of the mountain.”
Next Kate takes us to the bit where Molly remembers Mulvey,
her first real beau who gave her her first real kiss, “and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another.” Well,
somebody’s got to be first, doesn’t he? (I like in the video, at this part, as
the woman swings around the man’s body while their lips are glued. Nice trick.)
Then Molly quickly segues into the proposal—“and then I
asked him with my eyes to ask again yes” and her answer is to pull him down to
her breasts “all perfume” to feel “his heart was going like mad”—one of those
great little Joycean touches—leading to the big Yes to it all. To sex and
marriage and 16 years of suffering the life together with what pleasures there
may be in that there sensual world. (The video blows that entirely, giving us
the typical male superior bit with the female passive when what Joyce intends
is that we see her put her arms around him and draw him down. It’s the body and
breasts as offertory, a surrender, yes, but also a willful directing of his
attention to her breasts and not in a maternal way, though of course that's
there too. All that “earth mother” stuff. Fortunately such is not in Molly’s
mind nor in Kate’s delivery.) She’s flowering and, indeed, given her married
name, she’s blooming. Yes.
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