Still in early chapters of Moev book on Dante mentioned previously. Also reading Russian novel by Vasily Grossman, Life & Fate. In english.

Moev's book hinges on the argument that Dante's (& medieval) conception of reality differs fundamentally from modern, & we need to try to grasp that conception if we want to make sense of Divina Commedia. His description of the Platonic-Aristotelian-Dantean world-picture reminded me of George Berkeley's writings. Matter is not a "thing". It is substantial, but not in our materialist sense of a solid substratum. Matter is not any where or what : it is an expression of a (dramatic?) concept. The substance of reality originates in the creative act of the divine mind.

We do find this world-view extremely remote, hard to comprehend. Yet some would argue it's closer to the quantum-relativity cosmos of contemporary science, as opposed to traditional-modern materialist notions.

In the chapter of Stubborn Grew called "Once in Paradise", I tried to ground that narrative in something similar, by playing with the story of George Berkeley's 3-yr residence in the "Paradise" section of Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 18th century.

Here are a couple relevant passages :

*

Irish iconoclast, waiting for the money to come through 
under his cardboard loans, waving his good arm 
toward Bermuda; heeling to leeward on charm 
only – the world can understand.  Sand fills his shoe.

 
English, French, European, utilitarian, 
rationing out creation, one coffeespoon, one puff 
of philosophical smoke – and it's enough
for the Modern Diner – these eggs are vegetarian!

 
Queue up for the doubledecker sandwich island,
individuals!  Invisible hands prepare your steaks –
Chicago machine-made diesel-chuckle-X shakes! 
Lock the white sex bullpen – key's in your hand...

 
etc.
Berkeley was a chip off the old wayward block. 
Yahwehward – subject to Johnsonian hard knock. 
Yet stone synecdoche the builders reject

 
becomes a wander in RI.
Chip, chip, chip away... yet chippewater will 
return – a continuous whippoorwill
in marginal field. Aye.

 
16

 
Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth, 
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

 
You have your materialist peasants 
nattering pedantically along with your 
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O 
London – and this jovial pleasant

 
noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean 
waves the Vico key in your face.  And waits. 
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates –
your doubloon that never comes – keening,

 
why have you forsaken me?  In RI?  Heaven's 
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential – and recreational!
A dream, again! – again! – Bermudian!

Am busy these days trying to set up a lecture series for church on some of these basic issues of "worldview". Going to invite various scholars & religious people & atheists etc. "God for Beginners" "Intro to God 101". something like that. & don't worry : there will be a section on civil liberties, freedom of conscience, separation of church & state, etc. This is Rhode Island, after all. If I can figure out how to podcast the lectures, I will.

Tom Clark wrote me once to tell me that this was his favorite passage from Stubborn Grew :

Causes you malingerin luster glimmerstill inna shadow. 
An miss th'marrowed missers an misters, foes ever.
An this bodily weak by weakerness seam to sever 
th'po from th'opuss an th'bit o'honey from th'O-bow.

 
An the po thing – the lil figurino in muh hand –
the lil man o'flush – the lil piss biscuit –
the lil foolghoul – the lil fiery missit –
the lil wastrelily – the lil white dry dachshund –

 
getta blame for blame, an lame for lame –
the peepers needa close call on some body other 
wise no body node the how-to trouble-eye mother 
forkin crybooby gonna fine the pad to came

 
an gone all ready to travail an labor updown a gain
O nuns O lossa marriageers ovum the privateers an 
weed all rank the general woe buttween them tears 
inna sheets inna draindrop drown byenbyenbyebyears.

(I think he was putting me down.)

Here we go again, another

Read-Along with Rest Note.

Poem # 12 :

12.1 : "I heard some crickets..." - sometimes the poem drops the masks - the Teddy Roosevelt, Hobo, Lazarus, Oblomov, etc. "Soo Line" - an old midwestern freight train line.

12.3 : "a mask of gravity" - that is, the cricket sound stimulates memory, penetrates layers of past time, so time suddenly feels heavy, material, present.

12.4 : "railroad's ruthlessness" - refers to 19th cent. tension between small farmers, on the one hand, and railroad/mercantile interests on the other. "edict in the heart" - echo of TR's messages to wife "Edith" in previous poems.

12.5 : "peevish king" - allusion to Shakespeare's Richard II, figured variously in this part of Rest Note. "yon imperturbable" - God, divine providence. "shuffles the weights" - again, the oft-repeated motif (pervasive theme here) of balance, see-saw, polarity, swingset, between two dimensions of reality : heaven/earth, time/eternity, etc.

12.6 : "swingset... formula" - back, forth, life, dream... the polarity again. An architecture of reality - an old way of looking at things - coming back again, somewhat, somehow.

Curious how Rest Note is developing, in a sense, out of the final stanza of an important little section appearing early in that poem of several years ago, Stubborn Grew :

It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers – reflective rim 
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing. 
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

& here's a little goofiness from Stubborn Grew for St. Paddy's Day:

Well it wall began, he huhouuyynmphhed – it began –
are yall rhodey for this exclamornation? – it all
began with our W.  Deep springs the steep, and tall
falls small, so the lil rig-V'd rocket wwwwrrrrhhed... ran!

 
Oh my did the kids collect their stubs an head for there! 
Refugerators, specterspanulators, adopterators, even
some taters!  Canonicus an co. plowed eleven-steven 
buck for shot an fish for fool an a fair fare is square,

 
but they went under the impressurfdom of beastonian 
stiffrottenness almound furnever, knaves –
it were a yurt caddie that still saves
gulf bowls and weary ware sharded long ago, abodian

 
freefar SW where Cautantowwit preserve my speech 
rains over the deserveret and the undeserted and 
whippoorwills protect the flowers, understand –
Bluejay was theirs.  But we can steal tray to reach

 
that wet sound over the pure pile a pinetree scraps 
an violent bows that ever purrcollate an rockabye 
by the rectorious and the unmarzipanious.  Try! 
It'll opinion up hour by hour hysteria, perhaps!

 
H coffed a lil fleming and belgian some gastronomy now. 
Here's Mars, he lectchurned on.  The wars was unwise 
because why's the reason, fellas?  Shoe-size?
Make the gal squeeze an cries?  Ho-ho, and how!

 
How?  Rifle through the drayhorse for some key rationale, 
and starve the shlep over the rockets until you fries! 
That's warcome!  Your very warcome, guys!
Quaker node in nudepart walkin through beans – hell,

 
they fileted Em fur that!  So she up an refuged to list 
another minute clam to that pilasterful of plastered saints! 
That's what the narrow rhody for – imaginary isle it ain't –
see why ol Rog jet to capitalize anglandin – communist?

 
No, jest a plainpreachin manx talkin to the native tongs,
the ironic ore knot in ever won a gist all odysseus, come again? 
No, jest a covertent – hope his anchor, an his cankersore – H 
read about it an clucked it away for safecheepin, songs.

I'd be surprised if many blog-readers are bothering to follow the obscure dull intricacies of these posts of late.

Reading G. Mazzotta (Cosmopoiesis) on Ariosto. The Stoic philosophy of the passions (via Seneca) which informs Orlando Furioso (contra Machiavelli). Love & poetry are among the "furies", passions, which drive people crazy.

In the very beginning of Stubborn Grew, "Henry" is in the backyard, reading Ariosto, listening to a bluejay yodeling. This is where the narrative journey starts.

Would be curious if Ariosto provides the (self-)criticism - the distance - which I need to escape the solipsistic labyrinth of my own (romantic) poetizing.

Henry Furioso

... in the last pages of Stubborn, the "voice" of "Henry's father" suddenly breaks in for the first time. He talks about "going to his chamber" in Jerusalem.

Now this is a nod toward a very famous scene in Shakespeare, which you will have to hunt down for yourself. Happy Candlemas Day.

Curious evening of synchronicity. I spent all day (secretly, at work) feverishly formatting Stubborn Grew - from a scanned glob into a text-glob, in Microsoft. Took me a long time to figure it out. Took me a longer time to edit.

This afternoon I reached the halfway point, where Bluejay & Henry finally emerge, at last, from the abandoned railroad tunnel under the East Side (smelling of bat manure, etc.), beside the Carrie Tower (up the street from where I was doing this work, at the library), across from the HP Lovecraft memorial stone. The whole thing is a take-off on Dante & Virgil's descensus.

Now Sarah had been reading The Dante Club, a mystery set in 19th-cent. Boston - Longfellow & pals. It got her interested in Longfellow's translation of Divine Comedy. So I got v. 1 for her - Inferno - out of the library today.

& I got home after a long day of reliving Bluejay/Hen's catabasis, sat down with a glass of cheap chianti (from Siena) & opened up the Providence Journal. & there was this picture:



& here's how the story (by Projo reporter Mark Arsenault) opens:

"The video feed from the bottom of the shaft could have come from Fellini's most abstract and mind-numbing movie: a 30-foot gray wall of shale and sandstone that, on occasion, emitted small puffs of dust. The accompanying soundtrack was a racket like ball bearings being sucked into a Shop-Vac.

The story lay behind the wall of shale, at the bottom of a sewage overflow shaft 260 feet below Calverley Street, not far from Providence Place mall.

For more than a year, a 690-ton tunnel-boring machine had been heading toward the construction site at Calverley and Okie streets, cutting its way underground through solid bedrock from Field's Point as part of a 22-year sewer overflow control project."

Two RI senators & other luminaries were on hand to celebrate the big breakthrough. & I really felt a part of it all.

Sarah down with stomach bug. We watched video, Joe Gould's Secret. I had to go & read the book (by Joseph Mitchell), which we happened to have in the house, since it was a favorite of Sarah's father (born in Manhattan) (Up in the Old Hotel).

Gould is definitely a relative, though I can't seem to trace him on Google genealogy. He told Mitchell his family settled near Boston in 1635 (likewise); "the Goulds were the Goulds when the Cabots & the Lodges were clamdiggers."

Interesting Mitchell/Joyce connections (Mitchell's fascination with bars, and with Finnegans Wake, which according to the intro, he read "at least six times").

I recognize a number of personality traits. Both in Joe Gould, & in the Gould world (New England crusty) he left behind.

His phantom Oral History. Much of local Stubborn Grew grew out of, & refers to, an oral history project I did in the old Af-Am section of Providence, along Benefit St. (the first thing oral history prof. Allen Smith asked me was, "are you related to Joe Gould?")

Bluejay leads Henry there, as part of their catabasis.

& the bookends in FW, basically.

Pound mentioned Gould as an unknown "native hickory". He was a friend of EE Cummings & Aaron Siskind. Apparently Siskind's Village studio was one of the repositories for Gould's strange notebooks.

It's got me wondering whether Siskind allowed a photo of his to grace my first book (Stone) because of my name.

p.s. Is McSorley's Ale House still in business?

Odd (or just repetitive) how plot of both Stubborn Grew & long dream-poem "Grain Elevator" pivot on a "spirit guide" of some kind (Bluejay, my grandfather's ghost) leading narrator Henry through & into a painting (30s prairie storm picture in the latter; Renaissance Magdalen miniature in former).

See also 2nd "chapter" of Stubborn ("Ancient Light") : the whole thing is about interaction between people & artworks (in London).

         "Leave it for lost!  It's gone for good!
 Come on, come with me!  Move, move
 And walk – walk through the phony frame!"

Letter killeth. Cabala : sacred text is "literally" true.

href="http://www.lulu.com/content/884878 signifies the "death", the sloughing-off, of "Henry", student of Pound, "epic poet", sinner-man. The poem, completed on early morning of Good Friday, begins where it ends:

Stub born
grew the
rose.

and

Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.

Blackstone puts dab of ash on forehead.

Interesting article in Science NY Times on origins of language, here.

Among other things is noted the possibly key role of a single gene called FOXP2 in the evolution of language capacity, & the differentiation of hominids from apes.

This is funny to me because Stubborn Grew plots a journey across Providence to the harbor neighborhood of Fox Point. The narrator scribbles at the coffeetable, "Fox Point, fixed point, faux point. . ." The "point", in the story, is the crux of split-up which the poem mourns/interprets, ending with a take-off on the Song of Songs, "Catch us the little foxes..." Anyway, I remember getting a letter from the poet Kristen Prevallet, in which she described Stubborn Grew as a human genome project. Maybe there's more to that than I realized.

You go to "Shakespeare's Head" for originality, for origination, for rosy-fingered Dawn : since all the world's a stage, and all the men & women merely players, acting out their roles taken from the influential Gibbon-Ecco Introduction to History (666th ed.).

Investigativeness in Stubborn Grew:

you could argue it's not there.

the poem relates quite a lot of local history. it moves from "lyric I" notations at the beginning, to a third-person fiction about "Henry & Bluejay", to a mock-epic disintegration of Poundian poetics (the latter half of the book narrating an epic journey over the space of about 10 blocks in Providence as taking place in the mind of the narrator at a coffee shop in Fox Point).

But the "investigative" or reportorial is wrapped in layers of the "literary" and shaped by a geometry of person-as-microcosm, stumbling & falling (from Wm Blackstone, the 1st settler, to Henry; from Christmas to Good Friday).

Layers of literary, like "Shakespeare's Head" (the building in Prov. where the history begins - but also Shakespeare's microcosmic globe, thematized in the 2nd chapter's trip to London - "I think he will carry this island home in his pocket & give it to his son for an apple"). Or like the Orpheus myth & Dante's Inferno retold through a NW Coast Indian journey-to-the-dead tale ("Bluejay"). Or the fact that the 2nd half of Stubborn is bracketed by parodies of Pound & Joyce respectively (in the Pound section, American & RI history are viewed through the lens of Ignatius Donnelly - populist politician, Shakespeare cryptographer, Atlantis theorist - Pound-Donnelly's "Atlantis" tying back into another literary frame for the poem's overall style, Hart Crane).

But few in the "post-avant" community seem interested in my literary strategies, or a perspective on history which colors it with fiction and local context, rather than with irony-via-juxtaposition, the prevalent collage technique. This technique is what I parodied in the Ig. Donnelly section of Stubborn - historico-political snippets & fragments, framed through the bifocals of a populist Shakespeare/Atlantis crackpot, set into rhymed quatrains.

I guess I'm on the wheel of carpitude this morning myself.

Reading Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column. about architecture.

He writes that mimesis to the Greeks didn't mean "imitation" as in reflection in a mirror. More like construction on the pattern or in the manner of nature. Aristotle said art (in the widest sense) & nature operate toward goals in the same manner. Poiesis meant "making" in general : architecture, ship-building, poetry.

Maybe the estrangement of poets has something to do with the fact that they are undertaking a constructive project, a fabulative building. It's not rhetorical in essence (designed to sway others, influence others) : it's model-building. In order to stand it has to have an integrity or autonomy or center of gravity, a wholeness. Makes me think of the old (medieval) term for the guilds or craft skills : the skills of the carpenter, etc. were a particular "mystery".

This is odd because language is so outward-oriented, so oriented toward rhetoric & active purpose, toward moving to action. Poetic speech is aimed more at a contemplative telos, like music : music contains all kinds of emotive triggers, but its end is to be a pleasing/moving whole - an end in itself.

Dangerous to the polis because language is so powerful - creating an alternate world-view or whole - the way Shakespeare's "Globe" (the sum of his plays) stood there in sort of ambiguous relation to the actual royals & Macchiavellis he was entertaining.

More from Rykwert : "canon" comes from rule, measure. Leonardo da Vinci provided a kind of quintessence of "canon" in his drawing of a man arms outstretched squaring the circle. It wasn't a new idea at all, but his drawing brought it to a new precision & finesse. The canon of design based on the proportions of the human body as microcosm.

What did Emily Dickinson say about "my purpose[?] is circumference"? wish I could remember the exact wording.

Physiognomy. The globe of "Shakespeare's Head" (building in Providence) making a circuit of cosmos. Epigraph to chapter 2 of Stubborn Grew (from Tempest): "I think he will take this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple"

Reading 3rd vol. of Eric Pankey, Cenotaph. Also checked his 1st 2 vols at downtown Public today (For the New Year - no apparent reference to Auden - & Heartland). Something happened with 3rd vol (Apocrypha). First 2 are standard boilerplate MFA style (except better - subdued & careful - makes the simple phrases sound without excess. Both his parents were accountants (like GG?)). Poetry & money.

But Apocrypha was a leap forward. Weight of Stevens & Donne & Bible & Shakespeare - and he was EQUAL TO IT : the wit & design & language all in balance, quite extraordinary. Models of excellence.

Then something happened : some personal trouble or reaching some limit of inspiration. These 2 books following Apocrypha read like a record of spiritual impasse. The response was uneven : confession, slackness, backing & filling, occasional successes, depression & some despair. Hard to read without feeling pity & sadness, because he's honest, he doesn't fake (though he repeats himself sometimes), but the meditations are dry, angst-ridden. I feel like I'm looking at the limit of orthodox US expression here.

Curious to read the latest vol. (which crossed my desk & got me started on him), Oracle Figures.

EP. Exemplary initials . . .
See insane peroration of Bluejay in Stubborn Grew, pp. 87-91. Here the Ojibwa outcast casts Amurrcan Litachore in the shadow of the aesthetic Ass of the Providence Atheneum, a neo-classical private library where the most famous photo of EP (Edgar Poe, not Ezra Pound) was taken, not long before his death, when he came (drunk & disorderly) to Providence to woo & snake-oil local poetess Sarah Helen Whitman into marriage & a new American Literary Arsistocracy. The subtext is Notebooks of Arthur Gordon Pym, which pivots on race war fear & the Peter & Paul Islands in mid-Atlantic; meanwhile (1848) Thomas Dorr was in RI prison for inciting the Dorr War, a miniature figurine RI constitutional re-revolution over extension of the franchise - but only to immigrant workers, not to African-Americans (so same supported the anti-Dorr faction, the South County landowners & aristocracy). Bluejay rhymes Poe's racist southern snobbery with Pound's pecking orders in a general condemnation of elitist "Greek" slavery:

"O.K. Now lookee here carefully, now. De cussin
blasted shippin outa hell lands at Desolation
Island, see? Dem duded white pengoons all dressy

wit de alba trapses onna trapeezes widda net, see?
Anna black doorman o backdoor man, see
he holdin up the whole thing wid one pinky -
an it ain't even yarn. Odd, man - lamby-pamby!

- an he crost Atlantic belowdicks, chain up to a T.
Na square dat wid dem rocksaglory, right -
P an P, sturdy an steady inna middle ova tight
sea - upright, man! Like Pizza Polevaulter, key!

Heavin an whole inna earth, alright! Y'follow?
So hey I sieze you got deez double dabblin upside-
arse-o-cats, real hep, man! Formula Tide,
like washin oeuvre everthin wid words t'swallow

aplenty! So soak dis formula, Hen:
Q2 (-E2 - P2) = -J2.
See, you got yo EP an yo EP, both ovum laird
o' th'Catkills. But even they gotta peepee, man!

An they gotta drop they shots an tiss inth toilet
juss like you an me! You with me?
We talkin catshit! Iz all kinda murmuree,
lowdown, muddy an mutteree, backassed - an wet!"

Bizarre as may be, this should be understood in the narrative context of a Henry/Bluejay - Dante/Virgil catabasis or descent into Hell, in search of Henry's lost black cat, Pushkin, stolen on Halloween - the analogy being Dante's emergence from (a literary) Hell into Purgatory through Satan's ass (figured locally in Stubborn as the abandoned railway tunnel under the Atheneum & the RISD art museum).

"Time was I ain't shot my wad inta Yoi yet either.
But iz comin, man. We down among the trainin' ground,
the jailbait. There's Dorr down there, soundin
mighty low below the courthouse, a mere nether-

unworldly goose he is, too. An here come his whiteface
double, po ol' Poe! 1848 slidin like a dyin worm
down Benefit, shoes achin, head achin widda storm
a Whitman onna brain - yeah, the coal lady in lace!

Burnin coal, waitin by the window, lookin down
from the broken wall - one helluva Helen firin him!
Afloat in his mind he wander up to th'Atheneum,
get his blacknwhite ticklelily icon taken

with a crown to his brow an his eyes awry, forever
an ever. He was damned an good at them posterior
analytics - helluva chilly mathematical germcarrier,
Poe. Black n white everthing goes t'him - steer

for the po-po-Pole, amen! I mean, Dorr's dyin
bloated an blighted down in jail fo the franchise,
an Poe's upstairs brushin his teeth, realize -
dig Helen in the whitey semperequal sepulcryin

shame, man! She comin back like a ghost,
lil muddy, but o'clay! Cistern in the grounsoon!
Yeah, he play one limpin aristocat, that one -
that only lonely Poe, po man - evbody get lost."

Again this has to be understood in the context of the Orpheus story which frames Stubborn, & the Poe obsession with the "dead lady", and the fact that Dorr was being held in prison in a basement cell only a couple of blocks from where Poe was reeling insanely up & down Benefit St, & the fact that Rhode Island was deeply & centrally engaged in the slave trade from the beginning, & the fact that the "Dorr War" was riven by racism & Napoleonism (Dorr was often likened physically & politically to little Nappy), and the fact that the only RI fatality of the farcical Dorr War (a Massachusetts carpenter was also shot by mistake, standing in his doorway) was a bystander named Gould (one of my relatives). Politics is local.

Here's part of the passage from Stubborn. Do you reckon the infinite-dimensional continuum? Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

There was a line - so that the generations live.
The perpendicular of purple death.
A parallaxal pyramid - wrath
(raging) rearified, in the infinitive: to give.

The source of all the rivets of the domes
of Justinian - True Cross,
Hellenic, Palestinian - the Jews,
the jotted Giotto-ghettos of a million Romes.

The line (an X, a circle)
- wonder of synecdoche.
One left-out gypsy -
solitary - oracle.

Bends against love-bubbles in the clay -
a pen-cone pinecone - equable
through fearful Hell.
De materialibus ad immaterialia.

Thinking about the Cantorian infinite-dimensional line, come to think of it, there's quite a bit along those lines in the 3rd chapter of Stubborn Grew ("Once in Paradise"). It's a chapter about painting, perspective, Berkeleyan-Romantic vision, etc. Wish I had the book here, various stanzas. . .

There was a line, so that the generations live.
Source of all the. . .onion domes,
.. . million ghetto'd Romes.
. . . of the infinitive : to give.

*

A point. Then a line to the end of the.
Forms frame for all the others.
The other colors.
De materialibus ad immaterialia.

*

The point is in the line now, Dino.

De-materialize a bus ad?

(I know I'm mixing this up. Will post corrections when I can.)

& then Henry wrote a fictional Providence microcosm [concluding in a Finneganesque infinity on Good Friday] about a character named "Henry" who was begotten in the orgone box of John Berryman, who jumped off the bridge down the road from the house his (Henry's) grandfather built, on River Road, by the Mississippi (John H. Ravlin, who was born on January 6 (Epiphany), the day that Georg Cantor died).

Last Sunday was Kurt Godel's birthday (Cantor's successor).
[correction : Monday. April 28. The day I was posting about Faith & Reason to Anastasios. At 1:32 pm, same time as this post. 132 : the number of Stubborn Grew. (Why? Long story. I used to live at 132 6th St. It's the number of a waltz (a 1-3-2. . .). It's the number of Beethoven's most beautiful quartet. It's the number of rooms in the White House. It's the number of acres in N. Main Cemetery. It's the # of square ft in Grace Church, downtown Providence. Add "one" and it's the secretive number of Finnegans Wake (1132).]

Creation like a mobius strip, because:
there exists no set which contains everything (since a subset of this set would be the set itself, and it would take a yet larger set to contain the set which contains everything). Cantor equated this vanishing pt. with God, the Absolute.

Poor Cantor ended his days in an asylum, alternating between the riddle of transfinite numbers, and trying to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. Maybe he was reading Ignatius Donnelly, who also turned to the Shakespeare puzzle when his career (politician, in this case) was hitting the rocks. Great orgone boxes think alike.

Mysteries of the infinite continua of the line.

((Rudy. Georg Cantor, a persecuted Jewish mathematician, who showed that infinite dimensions were contained in a 1-dimensional line, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named Rudy :: Leopold Bloom, a persecuted Jewish Irish fictional character, contained within the lines of a microcosmic verbal Dublin, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named))