It’s a good few decades since I first read
the opening lines of the “Proteus” chapter in Ulysses, the chapter in which Stephen Dedalus
walks along Sandymount Strand. I read the words "Ineluctable modality of
the visible," reached for the dictionary and looked up the meaning both of
ineluctable and modality, and I think I was at least very slightly wiser
afterwards.
Now I know, or at least I’m
given to understand, that this is a reference to Aristotelian notions of form and
substance, that what the eye sees is not inherent
in the thing seen. At one point Stephen
closes his eyes and wonders if the world still exists, to which the all too
obvious answer is “Duh.”
At the very least I
suppose those words mean that we can’t escape the visual, though I’m not sure
why we’d want to.
And of course there’s a double
bluff going on here, in that Joyce’s novel is transforming a visual experience (though
obviously not only a visual
experience) into a verbal one, into a text.
And I often think, as I walk in the world, that the separation between
the verbal and the visual is largely a false one.
I’m a writer and I love
words, but a lot of the time I write about what I see. And occasionally I take
a photograph to capture details that I might otherwise forget, even as I accept
that taking the photograph changes the nature of forgetting and remembering.
But the fact is, the world I see when I’m
walking is full of language, visible language, words in a landscape. Cities seem to be full of
fragmented poetry and prose, right there on the wall or the floor, and very
occasionally up in the sky.
This isn’t why I walk, but it definitely makes the
experience of walking all the more worthwhile.
Sometimes I wonder if language is ineluctable.
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