It’s Sunday. It’s autumn. Geese honk, the dogwood bronzes, the sun rises through rattling maple leaves.
Time for a sermon!
Our opening text is this YouTube, in which a wise woman reads Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation, by Stanley Kunitz. She weaves her life into her reading, recognizing in the doomed-to-grub worm her own earth-bound condition, and in the worm’s passive gestation of “parasitic flies” her sense of herself as a mere carrier of other beings’ vitality.
All her life she’s dreamt of uplift, transformation into a free, illuminated realm; but now she’s in her sixties, and she sees in the Kunitz poem a truth: “Maybe not.”
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Stephen Dedalus transforms.
His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.
When we next encounter Dedalus, in Ulysses, he’s a worm again.
Does ripe fruit never fall? asks the woman in Sunday Morning.
Change me, change me! says The Woman at the Washington Zoo.
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Primed for epiphany, we wait. We hate Philip Larkin’s dour, self-accepting useful to get that learnt. It’s Mr Ted Heathcliff Hughes who makes our heart race …
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Why not conceive of epiphany more calmly? The terminus of our insistence on transformation is Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note, with its petulant rejection of a world that doesn’t soar with meaning. After nearly drinking himself to death, Stephen Dedalus begins to perceive, in Leopold Bloom, a modulated form of epiphany, a digging in to the world as it is that is not a wormy digging but a human one — having traits like the love of earthly beauty, a capacity to forgive, and pleasure from the play of the mind…