both seem to have formed their great themes by fixating and on certain primal , archetypal aspects of humanity and nature : metaphorical sleeping and waking ; memory and forgetting ; cycles of time ; hearing language as opposed to merely seeing or reading it ; compost heaps , hills , and mountains ; sacks and bags and metaphorical containers ( which are often associated with the feminine ) ; fabulous creatures who live underground and under mounds ; the dead rising and personas returning in altered forms , sometimes as mythic avatars ; and lastlymost of allwater ( for joyce it is rivers ; for kealey , floods ) .