You’re invited to Finnegans Wake
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 7:24 pmThis is from my email, shortened a little by me. This is a friend of mine talking to another correspondent about lessons from deep study of Finnegans Wake (fw). Very briefly for those unfamiliar, mentioned below is HCE, the father, shem and shaun are his sons, twin brothers, but opposites. (anna livia plurabelle is the mother in this book, and there is a sister, too.) JJ is james joyce, author of fw and of Ulysses, the earlier book also mentioned in this mail. Fw is extremely densely written…as a hologram…is a dream and “morphs” as dreams do. It begins in the middle of the same sentence it ends with. jj created language for fw, and drew from more than 60 languages. He was, in my opinion, a greatest genius and talent, and fw may well be the most important book ever written: it has digested all great books before it. it is the book about everything. (however, there is nothing else like it, and I don’t recommend trying to read it without making use of the trails that have been blazed already.)<br><br>I share this for your enjoyment, thinking some here might find it very interesting. Just like the book fw itself, I thought there might be something in this mail for everyone, and it’s quite unnecessary to understand it all in order to enjoy it.<br><br>oh, and my friend refers to page numbers in fw, and to his book titled “again”, which he wrote about this deep study of fw he has done for decades. <br><br>From my mail:<br><br>as far as the spiritual aspects of fw, it is understandable that people with no spiritual experience avoid it - jj did signal the mystical aspects by describing fw as 'the dark night of the soul' - i have been double fortunate in this life to have encountered not only jj but also a great spiritual teacher - there is so much false spiritual experience around - so many people padding out their egos with a bit of 'spirituality', so many 'teachers' pandering to this - it is also understandable that in the present climate of rejection of religion [largely healthy rejection of pseudo-religion] that people are throwing out the baby with the bathwater - one of the reasons i loved jj was his efforts to commit the unforgivable sin in order to 'get outside the outermost rim of catholicism' - but fw is his efforts to rescue the baby from going down the plughole - one of his great contributions to knowledge and wisdom is his creation of a language mode that enables mysticism to be down to earth and scientific - i try and show that jj shows that mysticism is just the higher levels of the legitimate process of abstraction <br><br>cavafy said, 'may the road to ithaca be long' - i dont think jj intended the road to the fw ithaca to be infinitely long - although if it hadnt been for the hologrammatic structure that means the whole book is in each paragraph [each paragraph a new shake of the kaleidescope, same pieces, different pieces to the fore, but all present, as indeed they must be when all is shown to be one, concepts not referring to distinct things but to a seamless continuum of existence] the number of pages would be far more than one person could do in a lifetime - but, hey, fw is a scientific proof that we have infinite lives, that we are not just alive, but lifeforce itself<br>[the green fuse that drives the flower]<br><br>the lovedeath or egodeath that long suffering the darkness of fw induces [and one only suffers that darkness as long as one is picking away at it] 'concentrates the mind wonderfully' and one begins to see the obvious simple great things - eg the following symbolism of the circle - the circle implies the marriage of finity and infinity, because a finite line [the circumference] goes on forever - the circle also implies the interdependence of finity and infinity - the circle encloses a finity, and that finity creates the unenclosed infinity outside the circle - everything recognised thru its opposite - [i had some help here from the sumer-aryan meanings of bar - noels bar, 594.30ish]<br><br>the missing intelligence that it was jj's life-mission [successful] to give, is the holistic intelligence - the intellectual aesthetic grasp of life as a whole, as a marriage of many and one, as a tree - the tree of life - human intelligence starts from leaves and goes smaller - fw leads the deep reader gently from leaves to trunk - is a broken vase a vase? - a complete set of parts for a car is zero experience of car - a picture cut up into a million pieces is not the picture at all - and leaves of life are dead quantity not everliving quality - we are trapped by words [our chopping life up into all the concepts in the dictionaries] into quantity of life - which is death of life - a mental vivisection - undoing the knit of life - fw is the rescue<br><br>i think i have shown, more or less, that fw is structured on the chi-rho page - not like other books, structured of parts making up a whole that is but a part of life, but of wholes within wholes within wholes within wholes - adding up to the reiteration of the eternal patterns of life, and adding up to the extremely energetic eternal spin of life - the spirt of spirit, partyparty<br><br>another reason for nonunderstanding is that man has slipped from parnassus during the 20th c - the faith and strength of a darwin, a fraser, a muller to conquer and subdue quantity to quality was lost in two world wars - <br><br>with help from the patterns we learned from paragraph 300, ie the paragraph that starts on fw300, the whole sense of this page is already beginning to shape up: shem attains completion and manhood by embracing his opposite brother [fw301: shem says to shaun: sure, you could wright any pippap passage] - shem's feminine side gaining balance from taking up something from the excessive yang of kevin-shaun [stanislaus-shaun hates his father john joyce because he is yang, like his father, and like repels - shem-james loves his father because shem-james shares his mother's chemistry and opposites attract] - this enables shem to go on up to becoming tristan-tristram-hce, and marrying iseult [=also, attaining wisdom, knowledge] - shaun-yawn is 'ever their quarrel' because of the problem of shaun attaining manhood when his nature is to hate his brother/the female and to fail to embrace 'his feminine side', so that he can attain the balance necessary before marrying and becoming fertile and alive - the oppressing classes need to embrace the female/oppressed/shem/lowerclasses in order to bring order - shaun invocates the auster, a dry hot ie yang wind to catch vixens - not a good strategy - and oysters [viagra] to 'meet' the feminine - again a bad strategy - merely increasing his yang - women want more cuddling - how is shaun to be redeemed? - as the rich rob the poor, the establishment robs the shems, by appropriating art and wisdom to their ambitions, the engorgement of the ego, the foodbolting of pigs<br><br>shaun-yawn is ever their quarrel because shaun-yawn-set-seth is division, separation, dualising, polarising, pluralising - judging, distinguishing, finding difference, prejudice, bigotry, accusation, condemnation - paradoxically, shaun is linked to creation - for creation is by separation of the uncreation unity/quality into duality/plurality/world/quantity/disorder - thus shaun is worldly, materialistic, spatialist, specialist - creation of world, of matter, is sin ['existence is sin' koran - and why hce is guiltridden] - shem is love, the return to unity by love, the destruction of world/matter/materialism/plurality/separation - when swift says that we have enough religion to hate one another, that is shaun-set - true religion is shem-cathar-love-freelove-troubadour-courtoflove-greatmother/mary etc - but evil shaun [ondt=evil] is good, in that unity, reunion, love, finding god/tao/energy/spirit is absolutely dependent on a separation, the loss, the wasteland - 'there cannot be a reconciliation where there has not been a sundering' stephen says in the national library - acknowledging the essential contribution of the shaun-side of god/man - unity and plurality is a perfect system - love, reconciliation, the divine return, re-ligio, yoga is impossible without the sin of separation - hence felix culpa - <br><br>thus in the waterloo-museyroom, war [killing] and sex [birthing] are oned - or twone<br><br>this is a much better solution to the problem of evil than the medieval attempt to solve it by saying evil is merely negative, an absence of good - jj's solution is sublime, divine, perfect as poignant pain can be! ['the pink of punk perfection']<br><br>the intrusion of gould into the scene of west-irish foxhunting seems to be disjunctive, but it is shem reconciliation/enlargement of world from quantity to quality - the artist perceiving sameness under the different - the existence of metaphor/simile proves the existence of sameness under difference - by crossing anglo-irish oppressing classes and gould wealth, it enlarges jj's abstract meaning from particular towards universal - it drives us to larger abstraction which reunifies, just as crossing clydesdale and shetland brings us to the larger idea of horse - unlike plato, philosophy and mysticism-language, jj does not turn his back on the particular, the divided, the manyness, but marries it to the universal in the multiword, which brings forth the oneness without trying to lose the manyness - <br><br>similarly, jj corrects the greek-socratic error of making god only good, by adopting the jewish god who is good and evil - 'i create good and i create evil' isaiah, 45,7 - the socratic idea is divisive, setting up an opposition between god and man - creating guilt, as nietzsche says that socrates does; - by going to the jewish good-bad [and male-female] god, shem-jj destroys guilt - we are not fallen and ungodly, rather god is fallen and identical to us, love and hate are symbiotic, ultimately identical, as shem and shaun are identical twins - jesus was influenced by the greek-socratic attitude if he said 'why do you call me good, only god is good' - nicholas of cusa: god is the identity of opposites - <br><br>this great view is summed up in the letter Y and the yinyang symbol and the two-one word twone [fw3] - the ultimate identity/unseparation/unity/perfection of one and polarity/division/many [the true meaning of the trinity - the three arms of the Y which are one - the tree of life is just the repetition of the Y]; - as everything is recognised thru its opposite, good exists only thanks to evil, unity exists only by grace of plurality, religio/yoga/reunion/mercy/forgiveness is created by sin-seth-shaun-judging-separating-hating<br><br>the church is divisive and hateful when it tries to make us only good, only loving, pursuing a malicious idealism which breeds hope/despair, indulging itself in an arrogant, patronising, condescending superiority towards its flock instead of a loving realism that accepts us [ourselves] as we/god are - the jewish way is more loving, giving more confidence - the jew talks to god as a fellow - the jewish selfacceptance is perhaps the deep reason for christian envy of jewish culture; - hence bloom, who is, above all other things, selfaccepting; - and is thus at home - and thus accepting of molly's nature, and of boylan's nature - and that is why molly countersigns bloom's passport to eternity<br><br>the great truth does not need to be said - we-all must know it somewhere within - else we would have nothing to do with war<br><br>these things perhaps do not need to be pointed out - we sense them and put ulysses in first place among novels without having analysed our recognition of its soul-rightness<br><br>this heterodoxy [yet as orthodox as the truth of the prodigal son] is less palatable in abstract language as i use here - in the particularity/trivia/manyness of fw, it is easier to 'recognise'/realise<br><br>curious coincidence that diana [great mother] is called trivia - meaning threeways - the twone or Y again<br><br>and why are macro and micro so similar in form? - and why are yang and yin as similar/different as shem and shaun? - because they express in their form the similarity-difference, identity-oppositeness of life<br><br>one could read in a liberal education at the greatest universities for a lifetime without getting an overview as good as this<br><br>it must have been tough for jj to know himself to be one of the rarest minds of all time - he was cunning enough to find subtle ways to boast - like calling himself dedalus - and in the end he couldnt resist a whine: 'a hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?'<br><br>ah, what a great story it is!<br><br><br><br><br><br>---AnnaLivia says: it wouldn’t be fair of me to leave off the ever-present signature of my friend’s mail, so I’m leaving it on:<br><br>if a govt took most income off most people and gave it to a very few, everyone in the world would be confident that everyone in the world would think this a wholly negative idea, would know it would cause extreme protest, ructions, and miseries, would know that everyone would be very much better off without the idiotic idea, that the conflict would escalate endlessly as long as the idea was in fact - we have this idiotic state of affairs, so we all know that it causes extreme ructions and miseries, and that its removal will cause the cessation of endless extreme escalating ructions and miseries for all - yet we do nothing, see nothing, know nothing about it - therefore we humans are intellectually derelict or indifferent to happiness, [that is, perverted] - yet we seem to be neither intellectually derelict nor indifferent to happiness - read www.globalhappiness.org <br><br> <p></p><i></i>