Ballad of Joking Jesus

The Ballad of Joking Jesus

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. THAT BEETLES O'ER HIS BASE INTO THE SEA, ISN'T IT?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly. for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheapdusty mourning between their gay attires.

--It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail tacking by the Muglins.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother's a Jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
So here's to disciples and calvary.

He held up a forefinger of warning.

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.

He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

Goodby, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Diek and Harry I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy ... Goodbye, now, goodbye!

He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said:

--We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

--O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

--Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

--You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.

--There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.