Weave the wind

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Gifford cites two possible sources of the phrase "all them that weave the wind," one seemingly more plausible than the other. The book of Isaiah says that "they that weave networks shall be confounded" (19:9), but a song in The Devil's Law Case, an early 17th century play by John Webster, combines wind with the image of nets: "Vain the ambition of kings / Who seek by trophies and dead things / To leave a living name behind, / And weave but nets to catch the wind." Slote cites only the second of Gifford's texts and offers a paraphrase: "That is, to have one's words and deeds be ineffectual." This does seem to be the general sense of the expression, but the particulars of the metaphor also require some comment. Stephen is thinking about theologians––people who construct elaborate intellectual edifices purporting to explain the central purposes of the universe. Picturing them as weavers who attempt to catch the wind in a net implies a fundamental disengagement from reality, a failure to deal with substantial, grounding truths.

In Nestor, after pursuing some abstruse and ultimately frustrating Aristotelian speculations, Stephen applies the image to himself: "Weave, weaver of the wind." For some reason, this repetition of the motif has prompted further casting of nets from commentators. Thornton notes that in Jerusalem Blake writes that "the Daughters of Albion Weave the Web / Of Ages and Generations," but he confesses, "I feel however that there is some other more specific source for the weaving allusions which I have not found." Gifford notes that "In ancient Irish tradition weaving is connected with the art of prophecy"—a connection which promises only a tenuous connection to Stephen's dismal, claustrophic thoughts about history and his futile efforts to make theoretical sense of it. Neither of these texts says anything about wind.

Since Stephen's language has not changed one whit, it makes more sense to assume that he is still using Webster's image to think about constructing intellectual systems. Here the system is his own Blakean and Aristotelian historiography rather than theology, but it is entirely characteristic of him to make that leap, using Christian models for his own evolving aethetic theory and practice. Indeed, he brings the image back to theology slightly later in Nestor when he thinks of Jesus's dark sayings being "woven and woven on the church's looms." The image here describes the elaboration of a gnomic utterance into a coherent religious system.

In Telemachus the doctrine which the heretical theologians failed to incorporate, dooming their systems to irrelevance, was the consubstantiality of Father and Son. Stephen is still beating that drum in Scylla and Charybdis: "Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood."

In these sentences the church is imagined as a structure "founded" not upon the rock of St. Peter but upon the doctrine of consubstantiality, which is a "void" because Father and Son are not obviously the same in any way. This is a good, productive void, unlike the one referenced in Telemachus: "the void awaits surely all them that weave the wind." One other verbal detail appears to link the two passages. Unlike people who wove the wind, the theologians of the true church constructed an enduring structure. They built on the solid ground of Father-Son unity, and Ulysses will be built on the same mysterious ground, finding unifying consubstantiality in two people who to all appearances have almost nothing in common.

In addition to Webster, commentators have identified one more text that features the image of weaving the wind. In T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion the speaker says, “Vacant shuttles / Weave the wind.” But if there was borrowing it seems more likely to have been practiced by Eliot, who was reading Ulysses in the years leading up to its publication, and who maintained that "Bad poets borrow. Good poets steal." Eliot began working on Gerontion in 1917, two years after Joyce substantially completed Telemachus, and he did not publish the poem until 1920. In 1917 Joyce wrote out a fair copy manuscript of Telemachus that included the sentence about weaving the wind, and it was printed in the Little Review in 1918.