No scholarly consensus has been reached regarding the precise
identity of the Homeric plant consumed by the Lotus-eaters for
food and pleasure. The Ziziphus lotus is the most common
association, but the blue lotus, an Egyptian water lily
related to the lotus common to Asian culture and myth, and
which contains psychotropic properties, is another contender.
Bloom has thought of water lilies at the beginning of the
episode: "Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants.
Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the
air."
In Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, the lotus flower
is a versatile symbol, most apparently for rising above the
murk and confusion of material reality ruled by fear and
desire into spiritual enlightenment. The lotus, rooted in the
mud while floating cleanly on the water’s surface, symbolizes
the relationship between the carnal and the divine. It seems
that Joyce may be drawing on this familiar symbolism, since
Bloom's imagination of what his naked body will look like
stretched out in the bath is sparked by thinking, "This is my body." His phrase
echoes Christ's words at the Last Supper, used in the
sacrament of Communion to announce the miracle of
transubstantiation. The Eucharist is emblematic of matter
becoming infused with spirit, and symbolic of the greater
miracle of Incarnation: the divine Word becoming flesh in the
human person of Jesus.
Bloom's thoughts of his corpse submerged within the deeply
spiritual symbol of water emphasize that mental and spiritual
influences, far from possessing anything like independent
substantial realities, must reside as some aspect of
materiality. Throughout Ulysses, Joyce seems to
refuse to take sides in the battle between mind and matter,
letting his two main characters represent the value in each:
Stephen as a champion of reason and intellect and Bloom as a
man of sensory aesthetics and lusty appetites. In Lotus
Eaters Bloom champions Joyce’s middle-path immanentist
ontology through an enhanced materialism that has no use for
religion or spiritualism, but which is nevertheless
overflowing with curiosity, mystical speculation, and an
emphasis on the imaginative aspect of experience. From this
visionary bath scene arises the co-reliance between mind and
matter.
Just before thinking of the bath, Bloom has meditated on
transience: "Won't last. Always passing, the stream of
life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than
them all." He superimposes this image on the bath:
"clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid
stream. This is my body." The body floating on the
stream is a transient phenomenon, but it cheats death by
procreating itself. The penis/lotus' thread from airy surface
to soiled roots becomes a kind of highway driving souls from
body to body, connecting unborn thousands to their limp father
in an endless chain of umbilical
cords and transmigrations. The paradox is that this
eternal thread of transmigration can be sustained only via
unsustainable corporeal reality.
Bloom’s “limp father of thousands” becomes an emphatic image
for reverse engineering spiritual dualism to demonstrate the
soul’s total dependence upon the physical. Because he is so
comfortable in his own body he focuses on the ways spiritual
and material realities are inextricably connected, and
suggests a single substance ontology giving rise to the
illusion of duality through a relationship with itself
(through the mediums of space and/or time). In such a system
the spiritual is merely a dynamic of physical processes.
Without the birth and dissolution of material bodies that
"won’t last," and are "always passing," there can be no
eternal/spiritual reality. From Christ to Zeus, even gods
betray a pathological desperation to inhabit a vessel.
Aristotle’s forms are always abstractions from the particular.
And a disembodied soul is deader than a corpse.
