Tempo Changes
finding energy in variation
The thirteenth, “Nausicaa,” section of Ulysses, builds to a literal climax as Leopold Bloom masturbates to the vision of Gerty MacDowell reclining on the beach. In the sticky aftermath, once Gerty limps off to join Cissy and Edy and her children, we’re left to languish in the falling dusk and meandering eddies of Bloom’s mind while bats and bugs fly past. The following section could well get a bit sleepy, given that it covers Bloom by himself as he dozes off, “exhausted [by] that female.” But Joyce keeps us awake a while longer with some linguistic pyrotechnics that rival the fireworks show just finished. The striking variations in sentence length in the following paragraph impart energy to the prose. Longer sentences with more complex structures are regularly punctuated by others of just one, two or three words, and several extended sentences are built entirely of single syllable words.
Ba. Who knows what they’re always flying for. Insects? That bee last week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might be the one bit me, come back to see. Birds too. Never find out. Or what they say. Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have to fly over the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph wires. Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. Faugh a ballagh! Out of that, bloody curse to you! Others in vessels, bit of a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy winds do blow. Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the earth somewhere. No ends really because it’s round. Wife in every port they say. She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching home again. If ever he does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can they like the sea? Yet they do. The anchor’s weighed. Off he sails with a scapular or a medal on him for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what’s this they call it poor papa’s father had on his door to touch. That brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage. Something in all those superstitions because when you go out never know what dangers. Hanging on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life, lifebelt round him, gulping salt water, and that’s the last of his nibs till the sharks catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?
PROMPT: Return to any passage you’re concerned may be sluggish and revise it to introduce (or increase) variety in syllable, sentence and paragraph length as well as syntax. Perhaps an interjection or a bit of onomotapoiea, too? Can you create some rhythms here, alternating long and short, or multiple and single syllable words, terms with Latin roots versus Greek or German?