Joyce was able, through literature, to sublimate his psychic wound into a brilliant episode that securely places man's pedestrian maneuverings among the stars. Bloom's entrance into 7 Eccles St. sees him "move freely in space," as he jumps two feet and ten inches (a fact that he later thinks is acrobatic). Joyce's description of water (while Bloom is in the kitchen with Stephen) is not merely a tour de force, but it is an attempt by Joyce to again use one of his "catalogues" to compress, as it were, all the world into Ulysses. Bloom's and Stephen's common perception of the "incertitude of the void" is communicated by an intuitive (though transient) oneness that they share during a few moments in this chapter, and as Joyce says, the oneness is: "Not verbally. [but] Substantially." And the vision that occurs just before Stephen's departure, his Ascension into Heaven, is the "heaventree of stars"; it parallels Bloom's own Ascent at the end of "The Cyclops." After Stephen leaves, Bloom, now alone, feels the "cold of interstellar space. . . ." Here, his perception matches that of Gabriel Conroy in a story from Dubliners, "The Dead," when Gabriel learns that when his wife, Gretta, was very young, she was in love with a young man who died for her; in the short story, snow covers all of Ireland, and it becomes another symbol of universality. It may be that it is this terrible chill which Bloom feels, this prescience of death, that leads him to return to his wife's bed, to the Womb of the great Earth Mother Gea-Tellus, and to resume the position of a halfcomic, half-pathetic, but in some ways heroic, reverse Buddha.
Another dimension is added to the Ithaca Eisode's catechetical structure by the vast amount of religious imagery which Joyce uses in the episode, even though the references do not form a strict pattern. On one level, the religious symbolism takes the form of numbers; particularly, the 3's and 9's found in the chapter are ultimately suggestive of the Trinity; in addition, Bloom's first poem, written when he was eleven years old (the age which Rudy would be on December 29, had he lived), was composed in response to the Shamrock's offering of "three [emphasis added] prizes"; and here, one recalls St. Patrick's apocryphal demonstration of the feasibility of the Trinity by illustrating its three-in-one nature with a shamrock. Also, in Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are loosely coalescing together for the third time in their lives. Also, Bloom was baptized three times, the third time in the same church and by the same priest as Stephen; and in this arithmetical chapter, the 3's (as noted) are often transmuted into 9's. Reinforcing this religious number symbolism is Joyce's use of many terms that can be read on a literal, as well as on a theological, level: crosslaid sticks, lucifer matches, host, mass, and so forth.
