The Feast of the Epiphany is upon us on the 6th of January—a time of reflection, celebration, and resolution. In his achingly blue short story, “The Dead,” James Joyce uses the Twelfth Night as the gateway to consider the access that we have to those who are no longer in our lives, and they to us, in this solemn season. Joyce’s protagonist, Gabriel, slips through this gateway at the end of the story: “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world; the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.” This soon gets imaginatively projected outward in the story’s famous last lines, exploded onto the image of snow falling on a graveyard: “It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” In this week’s episode, we are reflecting on what such blue epiphanies await us, with distant music from Bianca Scout, Laryssa Kim, and Lauren Duffus.

CLOACA is Vashon-based DJ / artist, Delphine Tress Morrow. She keeps the faith that music shared is a public service, a liturgy.