A woman's hand writing

Full disclosure: I haven't finished "Ithaca" yet. Partly because I just finished a screening of a brutal little movie,"The Celebration", about incest, suicide, and family gatherings which I can't get my head around it, and partly because I want this chapter to last a little longer. Also because I'm graduating in 2 weeks.

I'll post again on this chapter, but what's stuck with me in the first 30 pages or so is an image of a woman's hand writing. It first appears in answer to the question "Were their views on some points divergent". Stephen attributes the strange day to the "reapparition of a matutinal (def: of, relating to, or occuring in the morning) cloud...at first no bigger than a woman's hand".

The hand reappears in Stephen's reaction to Bloom's viral ad campaign of having two women write in a carriage drawn through the streets, when Stephen imagines a woman's hand writing "Queen's Hotel", the hotel where Bloom's father killed himself. The image occurs again in the list of Molly's shortcomings; she leaves a pen in the ink jar after writing letters.

The image is mysterious and haunting, and finally indecipherable. There are some connections to be made: it works as a bridge to the next chapter, Molly's monologue; the letters written by Milly and Martha; and as an image of creativity, feminine (like the metaphor in "Oxen of the Sun").

But at this point in the chapter it seems mostly discrete from the motifs and themes raised previously, and more powerful because of it. There are so many lines to draw between like things in Ulysses, that at times I felt like the novel could almost be "solved", interpreted satisfactorily, like an equation. The strange image of the woman's hand cannot; it exists on its own terms.