Subject: GODDESS NAMED "EMAIL"
From: Riverend Sterling
Date: 8/30/97 6:39 PM

What can anyone share about the Celtic goddess known as Email?  The
locale and time of her veneration, the attributes
associated with her, the pronunciation of her name . . . ?
     I once saw in a book a picture of her carved in stone.  Her name
was give with no further information.  Might the "m" be devolved from
"mh"/"v" indicating a possible cog. with ewa/Ava/Eve?  Is she or a
discernible derivative adrift anywhere in the Wake?
     Since this is the first e-mail I've ever sent, other than that
needed to join you, it seems worthwhile to invoke a proper muse.  Thank
you for letting me,

            The Seldom Right Riverend Sterling.



Subject: FW: [410.23; et al.] "Emailia" From: Riverend Sterling Date: 8/31/97 9:49 PM Dear Mikio, Thank you for your warm and prompt reply. I am as yet without a copy of R. McHugh/'91, and was gratified to find that there is an apparent cameo by the goddess in question. There is amusing serendipity in [410.21] the same paragraph's ref. to "franking machines," as my attempts to grapple with e-mail are so far centered around my poor command of computer keyboardology, & I must apologize for my horrid formatting. I was also in a terrible hurry when I wrote to you, and made mistakes the "franking machines" have nothing to do with, such as confusing direct and indirect object cases in ref. to "Os," but the good news is that "os" is operable in either case in Spanish. RE/[410.20-23]: My read of the letter theme in FW is different than any exegesis I've read in that I believe the letter is to be primarily understood as a single and specific letter of the alphabet, i.e. the first letter. There is of course much play upon the sense of a missive/epistle as well. In Latin, the word cog. with "letter" is used with interesting and significant nuances lost in English. As I recall, one does not send someone a "letter." That would imply receiving a single alphabetic character. So even a single missive is ref. to in Latin as "letters." All this would be "so what" unless we remind ourselves that the central character of FW is ALP, and ALP is the Semitic alphabet character aleph, rendered in Eng./Gk. as alpha. When we realize that the very word "alphabet" is Eng.>Lt.>Gk.>NW Sem. for bull/house, the first two alphabetic characters, it becomes all clear -- or an insane muddle. Add to that that aleph in Semitic alphabets is the glottal stop, an indication of a technique of breathing, and it is time to cf. with [249.6-20]: ". . . house of breathings . . ." the phonetic alphabet; " . . . all fairness." ALP/ALPh(P & Ph are the same letter in NW Sem)/all f{airness}; Read: In the alphabet, we find the letter "A." Now follow numerous esoteric resonant reinforcements: The "elf" in "elfinbone"; the "Tyr" in "Tyrian"; "fairness" linked to "milk"; the ref. to consonants & vowels; "abaseth." The list of words in lines 16 & 17 are quite remarkable. Each is the name of a Semitic letter. "Window," forinstance, is the fifth letter, "Heh." Furthermore, Joyce reveals some knowledge of basic Hebrew grammar, because the particular letters chosen form some groupings, such as the gutturals, and he has furthermore played around with some subtle distortions and graphic puns. The letter "Peh" has three forms in Hebrew: there is the P/Ph dichotomy ref. to by me already, and a third form is used when peh ends a word. Et voila: "paypaypay," a ref. to the three forms. Joyce seems more concerned to have his game deciphered than usual because he even tosses in: "And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated!" I.e.: "There it is in old NW Semitic, just as simple as ABC, because it is the ABC's!" And Joyce has even been kind enough to leave us crossreferent bookmarks, because the ref. to Emailia is followed also by a citation of pat/patly/(St. Patrick) [410.24]; and in [410.25] we find the beautiful ref. to the phonetic alphabet as the house of breathings reduced to the crude and humorous "gumpower." Another crossreferent of notice is from "Speak to us of Emailia" to the famous [196.1-3] "O tell me about Anna Livia." I will expand on my read of "last door on the left, ladies," some other time, as right now I have to go there myself. Again, all my best to you. The Rarely Right Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: Email/ Eimher & Paoncoque/allacook From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/1/97 7:16 AM Ross Chambers wrote: > Riverend Stirling wrote: > > <<What can anyone share about the Celtic goddess known as Email? The > locale and time of her veneration, the attributes > associated with her, the pronunciation of her name . . . ?>> > > The closest I can find is Eimher, wife of Cu Chulainn, which Kenneth > Jackson in A Celtic Miscellany says is pronounced "ever." (sorry- can't > duplicate the phonetic spelling) > > Re FW the word 'email' (acute accent on the e) occurs at 575.16 > and Emailia at 410.23. > > McHugh glosses as 'French: enamel' in both cases. > > Regards - Ross Chambers > -- > ====================================================== > > Ross Chambers Sydney Australia > > "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday- > > but never jam to-day" The White Queen. > > ======================================================== Dear Ross, thank you for your quick and informative response. I am very new to all things of the computer, so here's hoping you receive this! I am bereft of research materials where I am, but a friend's "French for Travelers" does indeed have "email" (with the accent you mentioned) as "enamel," so you've provided a nice insight. But now you've got me wondering what is "vair" of [575.16]? "Paoncoque" [575.16-17] must be, among who knows what else, the good saint ref. to in [214.23] (I'm counting lines on my own, so . . . ) as "marthared mary allacook" (paon/pan/all; coque/cook.) So now I'm trying to remember the saint's real name. Mary Margaret Allacoque, or something to that effect? And is she venerated for establishing the Feast of . . . ? Not lemon-cream pie, I dare say. Obviously one must get one of these McHughs, and quit pestering everybody. But you were also kind enough to trace the Eimher/ever/(eve) path for me in the Celtic Misc. I like your address & signature. The Occasionally Right Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: GODDESS NAMED "EMAIL" & ALP From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/1/97 8:29 PM Mikio Fuse wrote: > Reverend, > > How about Aoibheall? [pronounced like 'ee-vul'] > > AIOBHEALL: Otherworld lady and protectress of the Da/l gCais sept in Co > Clare. The name meant 'sparkling' or 'bright', and reflects a common > attribute of goddesses in ancient Irish culture. . . > [Da/ith/ O/ hO/ga/in, _Myth, Legend & Romance: An Encyclopaedia of the > Irish Folk Tradition_, p. 38] > > Anyway I'm curious to see the picture of her (Email or Aoibheall). Can > you give us even the slightest clue where you saw her (I mean her > engraving). > > -- > Mikio Fuse > ... 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 DEAR MIKIO, Why bless you, I think you may have tracked her down. Or a close relative. But I have to be a Henry O'Higgins and ask, "Why can't the Irish spell their own language?" I was expecting Email to have derived from Emhail/pron. evail. But who could guess Aoibheall/pron. eevul? Of course vowels are barely worth noticing in historical linguistics in either pronunciation or orthography. And its worth noting that, since "l" & "r," as the liquid semivowels, can be interchanged by time or speakers, that Ross Chamber's citation of Cu Chulainn's wife, Eimher/pron. ever, could be cognate as well! And of course Joyce would chuckle over the progression of Aoibheall/eevul/evil/Eve with its handy reinforcement of the hellfire interpretation of Genesis, just as early Church Fathers delighted in making us think Eve wrecked everything by eating an apple, a fruit not actually specified in the text, so they could have a pun on the two pronunciations of malus in Latin, with the long or short "a" making the difference between "evil" and "apple" . . . I forget which is which. I suppose Eve did too. More later. Thanks again for your correspondence and help. Yours, The First Door On The Right Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: some galley oddities, FW51-3 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/3/97 4:33 AM bill cadbury wrote: > > 51.16: This is a nice little mystery which I don't have a solution for, but some facts. It concerns the countup (by which I mean the opposite of countdown!) from "ya" to "nine", added at Level 10 (the second FW galley proofs, galley 28, JJA49.363)[ . . . .] > One would think that it must have been intended to precede some form of "ten" [ . . . ] > Dear Bill, As you know, most alphanumeric games of the "fun, blue, ski, thor . . . " type end with a mutation of ten be it a "wren," or whatever. The conceit, of course, need not be rhyming as in my simple-minded example . . . nor need their be a conceit at all, part of the fun being that the count-up is based on a pattern so engrained that virtually anything will do by four as long as one-two-three are fairly obvious. But as you also know, a numeric place-system need not be decimal at all. The minimum is two digits, as in the binary code our computer is speaking to itself, or the 8 base some programming uses. A calculation-addict such as Joyce would be familiar with theosophic reduction, sometimes called "casting out nines." Theosophic reduction is not primarily mathematic but mystical; but the computer language analogy at least provides us with an anchor on board before we leave the harbor of what most view as common sense. The goal of "tr" is to assign a quality to each numeric digit from 1 through 9. The Indic-Arabic zero is not used, and I believe tr predates the intro. of the zero into the West in the early years of our soon to end millenium. My best to you on what appears an intense and highly devoted project, The Possibly Right Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: some galley oddities, FW51-3 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/3/97 7:20 PM bill cadbury wrote: > [ . . . ] > a nice little mystery . . . concerns the countup from "ya" to "nine", added at Level 10 (the second FW galley proofs, galley 28, JJA49.363)[ . . . . ]it must have been intended to precede some form of "ten"] > [ . . . ][51.16] Dear Bill, Staring at my response of "WED, 03 SEP 1997 01:33:52 -0700" in the hot sober light of noon, I find the admirable brevity of its gloss to slight its accuracy. While elements of theosophic reduction predate the introduction of European usage of the cipher, many of its applications incorporate the decimal system while providing a means to 1) reduce numbers of more than the value of nine to a whole integer in the 1-9 set; & 2) to open an interface from numeric quantity to spiritual/psycological/divinatory qualities. One of the most common applications is to 1) recreate an alphanumeric system recalling the good old days when alphabet and numeral characters were identical, as in classical Greek and Hebrew (a=1, b=2, etc.) and there is an inherent "9-ness dealing with 10-ness" in these systems, especially in one of Hebrew's main variants in which the first nine letters have their cardinal values equal to their ordinal values; the tenth letter appears to follow suit until the 11th arrives with a value assigned of "20," the 12th being "30," and so on; thus we have a set of nine letters for 1-9, and a second set of nine letters for 10-90; the 19th letter is assigned a vallue of "100," and the 22nd & final letter of the Hebrew alphabet becomes "400"; the third set of the "hundreds" is finished by assigning the remaining values required to variations-in-form used when certain Hebrew letters end a word, so we now have a third set of 100-900; the value of "1000" is placed in a final set of its own, you will be relieved to hear, and assigned to a variation in pronunciation of the first letter (for Wakers needing a place to stop for a moment, recall that the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, <'alef> {with the apostrophe indicating the glottal stop} is spelled in standard transliteration ALP); & 2) theosophic reduction procedes to simplify this alphanumerism to a single set of 1-9 by repeatedly adding place-digits until a single digit is achieved. And we can certainly all be happy about that. Examples: 1) a two digit # is reduced to one digit} (a.) 14 becomes (b.) 1 + 4 = (c.) 5; 2) " 3 " " " " " " " } 100 > 1 + 0 + 0 = 1; 3) " " " " " " " " " } 875 > 8 + 7 + 5 = 20 > 2 + 0 = 2. Theosophic reduction is also ref. to as "casting out nines" because "9," as the set-base, now has a value of "0"; because we're interfacing a 9 base with a 10 base, "0" also retains the value of zero. Either can be scratched out before the additive reduction begins. Examples: 1) 11 > 1 + 1 = 2; 1001 > 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 2; ergo, 1001 = 11 = 2; 2) 191> 1 + 9 + 1 = 11 > 1 + 1 = 2; ergo, 1001 = 191 = 11 = 2. So, 3) 1001 or 191 or 10099091 > 1 + 1 = 2. We thus arrive at what is, believe it or not, an extremely simplified form of gematria; -- and some insight as to why no one is allowed to refer to himself as a Qabalist until at least the age of forty. Using theosophic reduction, any word or number may be given a one digit value, and each of those digits will generally have some preset meaning for the practicioner. "Bill" = (B/2) + (I/9) + (L/12) + (L/12). The practicioner knows that 9=0, and throws the 9 out; 12 = 1 + 2 = 3, so the practioner's initial read of "Bill" is 2 + 3 + 3 = 8. It would, of course, be inappropriate in this context to dwell on how that might be interpreted . . . but you'll be happy to know that there are no bad numbers in theosophic reduction. And one can see just by looking at the figure 8, with its marvelous depiction of infinite fluid recirculation, that it's a fine number for a Wake scholar. Since our rational footing is firm, it will do us no harm to peek over the railing. Why? Because it was of interest to Joyce. The influence on Joyce of his rejected call to the cloth by the Jesuits is much better accepted as a key to his work than the at least equally important rejection by him of the invitation by George Russell to the Order of the Golden Dawn, a Celto- Qabalistic organization of great influence on members as diverse as W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker. Joyce uses Golden Dawn motifs throughout his work with the same verve and skill as the Catholic ones. A few hints from the page [51] on the table: 1)[51.4] -- . . . (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one . . . -- The ref. to Scheherezade is patent enough, and as a master storyteller, she belongs in the Wake. But there's a Qabalistic subtest as well. And we'll keep the "s," thank you. Aramaic and classical Hebrew have no orthography for vowels. Masoretic vowel points were added to the subtext (there) in the several centuries preceding our current millenium. When we write that the transliteration for the first letter of the Semitic alphabet is ALP, the A does not indicate the Anglo-Roman A, but rather the glottal stop. Therefore, the two pronunciations of ALP, being 'alef (one) and 'elef (1000) are both transliterated as ALP. Thus ALP + ALP = 1001. We see her die, but we see her reapppear again. The stories go on and keep her alive. Low visiblity identifies the individual (51.4 & 6), who must eventually be lost in the nightmare of history, but she lives on in the universality of the regattable oxeter (51.7)(the word for each Hebrew letter is not only also a number, but as well a simple meaning of common parlance -- ALP is most often translated as "ox," but the more awkward "bovine creature" should be held in mind so images of "bull" and "cow" are to hand). 2)[51.16] -- Ya . . . The root document of Sephardic Qabalism is the Sefer Yetzirah, a small treatise on esoteric correspondences dated by scholars, in its original form, from somewhere between, say, the second or third centuries to . . . sometime later. It begins with a very intense statement on how Ya (along with El/ Ela/Elohim the root-god of Genesis as in Yaweh/Yahu/Jehovah) manifested the universe out of the Semitic alphabet and the decimal numeric system. Now we are tied back to 1001, because that is the number of character spaces Joyce allots for the Viconian god to speak through the 10 thunderclaps in FW -- i.e, NINE times 100 + a clap composed of 101 letters. There is also a pun on Joyce's initials, JAJ or JAAJ as the case may be, for as a Latin skollard, he knew that I/J/Y are one letter in Latin, so Ya is me & da's me dad, & tra-la-la. P. S. The Golden Dawn counts through the Hebrew alphabet with a Tarotic system ending with 21 (as in "21?" [?]) because their ordination starts with zero, i. e., ALP = 0. This has roots in Midrash. When God asks each letter why it should be given the honor of starting the alphabet (& hence the universe), only ALP (being the glottal stop which is really a pause & not a sound, like the hyphen in "oh-oh") has the humility to say "I am nothing." The rest is history. Ta, The Thunder on the Right Reverend Sterling.
Subject: POMME GRANITE & Email{ia} From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/5/97 6:24 AM THANK YOU, SAM. I am as bereft of research materials, at least of the "treeware" sort, where I am, as Roger Bacon was after he crossed St.Bonaventure. So your connection of the pomegranate as Eve's tree, which I assume to be the pomme granite or seeded apple, was helpful. Your address indicates you should know, as the pomegranate and palm are the two trees of heaven according to some, are they not? In Qabala the pomegranate is identified with the womb and the palm with the phallus, so it all seems to fit in with the Eve legend. Israel Regardie has published a book on Tarotic correspondences of the Order of the Golden Dawn's version of Qabalah, or at least one version, called A Garden of Pomegranates. MIKIO, to address your several questions to me: 1) I saw a picture of Email in a trade-size paperback book which I purchased second hand about five or six months ago. The subject of the book was things Celtic of the British Isles. The photo did not even state which island, nor give a date, and the good lady-in-stone did not appear in the text anywhere. I got a 500-1000 A.D. feel. The book is packed far away but perhaps in several months I can resurface it. I can't remember the title or author. [410.23] 2) I have an unfortunate habit of speaking and writing in intellectual shorthand. When I referred to "lost/last door on the left" as a euphemism for a restroom, I meant it fit the form of a recognizable generic body of phrases: "2nd door to the right," "third bush from the tree," "take it to the nurse at the end of the hall," and such. I think the "ladies" at the end reinforces and gives a tourguide feel recalling the "museyroom" episode earlier. [54.11] [8.9 & 10.22] EMALIA is apparently the common word for e-mail/electronic mail in Finland I found out by a search-engine entry. It also gave an URL for a website called "Speak to us of Emalia . . . " but I couldn't receive it from my server. The URL is <http://www.microserve.net/-thequail/libyrinth/joyce. list.html>. I found the URL from Lycos Services at <www.lycos.com/>. Blessings on all, The downRight Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Tim & Hic From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/7/97 4:41 PM CHARLES CAVE WROTE, 1997 SEP 06 [22:55 + 1000]: "FINNEGAN, Tim "Note from Adaline Glasheen's third census of Finnegans Wake" . . . "The relation of Finn-Finnegan to H. C. Earwicker (q.v.) has not been established . . . " Dear Charles, There is an apparently obscure but significant relation. It revolves around the fact that throughout most of the ballad called "Finnegan's Wake" the character Tim Finnegan is considered to be dead. As you point out, his sudden recovery due to the magical effects of a topical application of spirit (sadly uneffective for Admiral Nelson, whose corpse was brought to Gibraltar in a cask of brandy; -- and indeed counterproductive for the Duke of Clarence) are marvelously tied into the Viconian scheme of historic cyclicity, and thence to all myths of regeneration. The tie between the "corpse" of Tim Finnegan and HCE is this: in the now little-recalled formalities of inscriptive Latin abbreviations, HCE was once commonly recognized as standing for Hic Conditor Est, given in English as "Here is the author." While on one hand the constant "HCE's" allow Joyce to carve reference to himself all over the text, "author" should be understood more broadly than "writer"; try "creator, founder"; -- so it is as well a reference to the Prime Mover whose reflection in each facet of existence appears as a unique individual. HCE could occasionally be engraved in cornerstones, but HCE was most generally recognized as a gravestone/mausoleum abbreviation, the rough equivalent of the English "RIP." The casualness of what would seem translatable as "here the guy is" was somewhat ameliorated by HCE being understood as shorthand for a longer platitude of seven words, the first three of which are Hic Conditor Est. I can't recall the whole phrase, but it's something to do with now being ashes. Some form of cinere is one of the other four words, cognate with the English word incinerator, not to put too fine a point on it. Even though HCE is terrible busy throughout Finnegans Wake performing the roles of God, man, and Joyce, he finds time throughout also to be Tim Finnegan's headstone. HCE is thus, as we already knew, the universal being within which each individual arises and within which each of us is buried; the rock round which the river flows. Now I will share a rather unique insight of a very specific experience of having played the role of Tim Finnegan in a drama class one-act adaption of the ballad when I was 16. Rehearsals were held in a standard-size classroom at the head of which was placed a cafeteria table upon which I had to lie in state for 45 minutes or so one period a day for several weeks. Most of my classmates weren't in the piece, and would mill about. I had the title-role, but since I was a corpse, my lines were not very impressive and my business nonexistent. What this spawned was a rather bizarre contest in which a coterie of girls in the glass began conducting quite spicy conversations featuring a great deal of double entendre and innuendo, all within my ear's range, but cleverly masked by the magic elvin mist of children from any adults present. The intent was to try to awaken in my prone and immobile profile, helplessly on display for all, a certain visible change of a bulgelike nature. This would, of course, provoke an hysteria of mirth, but abrogate my responsiblities to our instructor, Miss Bernstein, whose only directorial command to me was that I "not move a muscle" during my performance. We shall not offend the canons of good taste by elaborating on what levels of success such a misled but imaginative coterie achieved. But we must give some small credit to these young ladies for an interesting if evanescent puddle seen briefly through the brush as we float down the mainstream of Joycean criticism. Charles, toward the end of your mail, you quote Joyce citing Miss Weaver (and is Adaline still in the loop as well?) and invoking the name of Catherine O'Shea. How many were, or are about to be, as amazed as I was several years ago to learn that Kitty O'Shea and Annie Besant were close cousins? That in fact Mrs. Besant, who introduced birth control to the center burner of public controversey 50 years before Margaret Sanger, organized the London matchgirls, was jailed and had her children taken away, went on to executive positions in the Theosophical Society, the Fabian Society, and the revolutionary National Congress of India (I am probably not getting all these august bodies' names in proper form), discovered and raised the philosopher Krishnamurti, wrote who knows how many books, explored and mapped the astral planes, and owned a newspaper in southern California . . . how many realize she attributed all her visionary qualities to being 3/4's Irish? While both these women played prominent public roles in the childhood of Joyce, Kitty as Parnell's helpmate and Annie as, for one thing, a proto-word play name, being dubbed by Stanislaus Joyce as Any Bee's Aunt, it strikes me as well on this day when the lives of Diana Spencer and Mother Teresa are so fresh in our minds, that the two pairsof women have a further Joycean resonance in that they closed the two centuries in which he lived by standing up against similar forces with similar courage, and Joyce is our greatest writer on the variations of eternal reappearance. Thank you for sharing your informative notes, and my best to you, The throwing his best Right Riverend Sterling. P.S. I'm still struggling to grasp the basic protocol of e-mail keyboard formatting and such, so I apologize if I accidentally sent two copies of this. It's that darn cyclic regeneration thing! With luck at least one will be more legible than several recent attempts I've perpetrated.
Subject: BRUNO/VICO From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/9/97 10:14 AM TERENCE RITCHIE WROTE ON 1997 SEP 8 (13:14 -1400) ON THE SUBJECT . . . BRUNO/VICO/JOYCE: " . . . Beckett states ' . . . Vico's exposition of the ineluctable circular progression of Society was completely new, although the germ of it was contained in Giordano Bruno's treatment of identified contraries .' . . . is it possible that Vico's theoretical structure is built on a 'Brunonian' foundation (or is it possible that Joyce INTERPRETED Vico that way)?" Dear Terence, Gee I'm glad you asked me that. Farther San Browne has led you even farther astray than is his normal wont, as I hardly know him other than as the frightening black belt worn by Texas Rangers. But this is my just desserts for writing about Latin inscriptions recently, and such things. I know about Hic Conditor Est not because I am a Latin scholar (I had a headache that term), but because I was poking about specifically on an HCE path. But your letter is so intriguing and well-constructed and erudite, that I shall stick my foot in merely in hopes of opening the door for someone else who can address your quest better. Joyce uses complex scholastic themes in his writing as musical motifs. He uses them in a brilliant and informed way, but rather than development of intellectual argument or exposition, Joyce is seeking thematic lyricism of an invocative/evocative cadence in which his raw material is a group of sounds, people, places, ideas, whatever the mind can hold and then let go , which are constantly reappearing and dissolving into one another in a sensual but frustrating kaleidoscope which apes reality. In modern musical terms, Joyce is riffing. Bruno il Nolano is to the creator of Finnegans Wake what a certain low sax tone which lent itself well to brash overtones when its octave split might be to John Coltrane. Once mastered such a startling sound could be worked into a hundred arrangements, and never sound the same. It would appear in various keys, modes, tempos, durations, and against a changing background of other musicians and other instruments. And the more Coltrane embedded it to his will, the more he would tinker with minor internal distortions of the tone. This refusal to allow a pattern to ever remain static separates a master from a skilled craftsman, because it is more alive. And more dangerous. The split octave will get you kicked out of a school band. And with some cause. A master must convince others he or she is breaking rules which he could easily follow if desired. Picasso put it very well when he said, "People say any five year old child can paint the way I do. It's true, but I am the only adult who can." So when I say Joyce is playing with Bruno, it's important to realize that Bruno is enjoying playing, because Bruno knows Joyce understands him. Both were scholarly but rebellious, both wandered all over western Europe, and both were persecuted by people who did not enjoy feeling their minds grow. But Joyce is nevertheless riffing, and it is as interesting to him that Bruno of Nola can be associated by mere sound with the name of a Dublin publisher as that the Neopolitan genius seems to have anticipated the work of Edwin Hubble by some 350 years. And Joyce knew as well, which apparently Beckett didn't, that Bruno was "riffing" on themes handed down from ages past. Philolaus and Hicetas are credited with a quasi heliocentric theory developed independently in the 5th c. B.C. Aristarchus had the actual mechanics down by 200 years later. As to "identified contraries," Joyce rightly attributes these on the page previous to your citation (50.17) to Nicholas of Cusa (49.{-3}) [sorry -- I don't have a line text, so I'm counting from the bottom in this case.] "Micholas de Cusack calls them . . . by the coincidance of their contraries . . . that identity of undiscernibles . . . " Except for turning the Rhineland papal delegate into a Norman Irishman, and tossing in a few split octaves along the way, Joyce doesn't even distort Cusae, other than to render coincidentia oppositorum into English. And again, Nicholas of Cusa was blowing a tune he probably picked up from his travels to the levant from the Arabs who in turn had read their Empedocles of Acragas who tried to resolve in the Golden Age of Greek Philosophy the argument started by Heracleitus over which of the basic elements dominated by proposing that it was the constant interplay of opposing forces which created the dynamics of existence. In our own scientific age, the scientists tell us with no apparent sense of irony that it is in fact THEY who've figured out the definitive version of reality, and that everyone before them was pretty dumb. But the old four elements and two forces keep getting regurgitated in quasi new form. Biologists will have it be Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Carbon on a scale of organization vs. entropy; for physicists, its mass, time, space, and charge -- or no, it's the weak force, the strong force, gravity, and magnetism on a field of atomic vs. subatomic -- oh, forget it. Galaxies, diatoms, they're all still kinda circular. Which brings us by a commodius swerve back to Giambatista Vico. Vico may have been a parochial schoolmaster, but you may assume, as one should with Joyce, that he read anything possible until proven otherwise. Remember, one of the groundbreaking steps by which he is acredited with founding modern ethnology is that he dared suggest that it might be wise to listen carefully to people who weren't gentile. And for Joyce's purposes, again, Vico's mastery of history was no more important than the fact that in his youth he took a nasty fall, as did Adam and Earwicker and the rest of us . . .and you can bet it was just as important to Vico at the time! And wasn't Vico climbing to reach a book in his father's library? I am trying to do this out of my poor little head for the most part, so such questions are not rhetorical. As to Joyce disguised as Beckett . . . they say that Beckett tried so hard for a while to emulate Joyce that he hurt his feet trying to wear Joyce's shoe size. Of course, I pay no attention to such egregious gossip. I can't recall seeing the cover of Kircher's Ars Magnus Lucis et Umbrae, but Cusae uses an intriguing black - and -white-reappearing -in- each -other "gif," a sort of scholastic yin/yang, and that's the point: half of everything is holy. God has promised that in the depths of hell, we shall still be able to see Him (and within the doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum is that Him should not be construed as excluding an equal opportunity for a Her). The problem is that in hell, God looks like the devil, so its best to avoid the place unless you're there doing research and have a good handle on the way back and a blind bisexual for a guide (again, Tiresias is a metaphor for the identity of opposites, i.e., that hot defines cold, not that hot is cold, although the whole concept keeps telescoping into itself, which is why we now prefer to use thermometers.) A teacher of mine said, "You don't have to quote Dante to say, 'It's hotter than hell." But it's fun. One reason Joyce admired Nicholas of Cusa, from whom he adapted "God is a voice crying in the street," is that Cusae was a relaxati who felt that complex metaphysical problems can be conquered by realizing that we're all too stupid to figure them out. I feel my response to your spirited query has been an excellent demonstration of the relaxati school's position. Thank you, and all my best wishes to you on your path, The way out of Right(field) Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: Who & wherefor art-eye? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/10/97 4:02 PM ... wrote: > Dear Right-on Riverend Sterling, > > There are many excellent writers to the FWake list but YOU are > something else! Your posts are ALWAYS informative and amusing. > Would you be so kind as to identify yourself with a short "bio"? > > I, myself, am a physicist fascinated with the two GREAT mysteries > of English Literature: > 1) Who wrote Shakespeare? & > 2) What was Joyce talking about? > I believe these issues to be interrelated. > > ------------------------------------------------- > > One complaint though: > >> In our own scientific age, the scientists tell us with no >> apparent sense of irony that it is in fact THEY who've figured out the >> definitive version of reality, and that everyone before them was pretty >> dumb. > This is a little harsh. Scientists have figured out the only "testable" > version of reality and try to limit themselves to this fruitful avenue > of gaining knowledge. They generally show great respect for the wisdom > of their predecessors. Measurement units and craters on the moon & Mars > are named for earlier scientists while the craters on Mercury are named > for famous philosophers, authors & composers. As for Quarks... > -------------------------------------------------- > > Your fan in Maryland, > > Arthur C. Neuendorffer > NESDIS Office of Research and Applications > Climate Research & Applications Division > NOAA, Camp Springs, Maryland, USA > 20746 Dear Arthur, thank you for your kind comments. They are most enheartening, especially in view of your rather gently but well stated complaint with which I agree one hundred per cent. Were I rewriting for any usage whatsoever, the silly statement about scientists whould be expunged immediately. I wrote my reply to Mr. Ritchie very rapidly, and sometimes to fuel myself I adopt personae that are embarrassing to view the morning after . . . but such is e-mail, a new world to me, and one made possible by a long chain of dedicated scientists from who knows how far back to the present. It's always wrong to toss off blanket attacks, and they are only lazy writing, cheap tricks. It's hard to remember what I even thought my point was, but ironically it was I who lost my sense of irony, because I think my point was that the entire chain of scientists should be honored as such. The chap who (thought he ) discovered phlogiston made an important step forward because he handed Joseph Priestly something to disprove. And it harks to the coincidence of contraries again. Although phlogiston doesn't exist, it defined the next move in the search for the unknown of oxygen, because you can't drive in a perfect straight line and your hand is constantly adjusting the wheel. So it's unfair that I can't recall the poor man's name. But maybe phlogiston will come back. Anyway, you nailed me righteously with "quark." As to bio, its a bit late at night for thinking of anything but slipping away, but since I see you are in NOAA, I will say that one thing I am is a Disaster Services volunteer for the Red Cross, so am greatly aware of the immense lifesaving contribution you folks perform. Dang it, Arthur, you got me twice. But in such a graceful manner. I want to send this to the List to make up some for my gaff, but it's a FW List, so I'll justify by throwing in this path which may or not have been looked at previously: QUARK (preJoycean/preGell-Mann for the cry of a seabird) > ANAS (Latin for duck) > ANNA (the spirit of the Liffey River) > ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE (heroine of FW whose flow unites beginning to end to beginning [for a sidestream, check a Latin dictionary's "an . . . " section for cognate words for ring and year {hence "annual=the year as a revolving ring with Viconian resonances"} + "old woman"] > BARNACLE > a North Sea goose capable of traversing Ireland shore to shore > BARNACLE > the maiden name of Joyce's wife, Nora, who traversed Ireland coast from coast [Galway to Dublin] to be found by him > NORA (the heroine of "A Doll's House," by Ibsen, the writer Joyce considered had linked Joyce to the chain of great writers of history similar to the chain of scientists mentioned above; and from a play about a woman who flees her socially preordained life for the insecurity of freedom, and which in a not altogether impossible manner may have in some partial way made it just a tad easier for the young Nora Barnacle to run away from Galway, and then with Joyce from Dublin, because when Nora in "Doll's House" leaves her husband and the moral vapidity for which he stood, it was said that her slamming of their door on her exit created a vast loud sound which reverberated all across Europe) > QUARK (the cry of a seabird). But I'm just riffing. Yours most humbly, The (scientists are) Right(-on) Riverend Sterling
Subject: NOAA & NORA From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/10/97 4:43 PM When I sent this an hour past, it came unwrapped at the end. Don't know what others received, by mine looked really bad, so I'm trying again. Sorry to take up so much of your screens, but you know how to delete, and this sure beats learning Windows by typing the business letter forms in my textbook. Here goes . . . Riv. ... wrote: > Dear Right-on Riverend Sterling, > > There are many excellent writers to the FWake list but YOU are > something else! Your posts are ALWAYS informative and amusing. > Would you be so kind as to identify yourself with a short "bio"? > > I, myself, am a physicist fascinated with the two GREAT mysteries > of English Literature: > 1) Who wrote Shakespeare? & > 2) What was Joyce talking about? > I believe these issues to be interrelated. > > ------------------------------------------------- > > One complaint though: > >> In our own scientific age, the scientists tell us with no >> apparent sense of irony that it is in fact THEY who've figured out the >> definitive version of reality, and that everyone before them was pretty >> dumb. > This is a little harsh. Scientists have figured out the only "testable" > version of reality and try to limit themselves to this fruitful avenue > of gaining knowledge. They generally show great respect for the wisdom > of their predecessors. Measurement units and craters on the moon & Mars > are named for earlier scientists while the craters on Mercury are named > for famous philosophers, authors & composers. As for Quarks... > -------------------------------------------------- > > Your fan in Maryland, > > Arthur C. Neuendorffer > NESDIS Office of Research and Applications > Climate Research & Applications Division > NOAA, Camp Springs, Maryland, USA > 20746 Dear Arthur, thank you for your kind comments. They are most enheartening, especially in view of your rather gently but well stated complaint with which I agree one hundred per cent. Were I rewriting for any usage whatsoever, the silly statement about scientists whould be expunged immediately. I wrote my reply to Mr. Ritchie very rapidly, and sometimes to fuel myself I adopt personae that are embarrassing to view the morning after . . . but such is e-mail, a new world to me, and one made possible by a long chain of dedicated scientists from who knows how far back to the present. It's always wrong to toss off blanket attacks, and they are only lazy writing, cheap tricks. It's hard to remember what I even thought my point was, but ironically it was I who lost my sense of irony, because I think my point was that the entire chain of scientists should be honored as such. The chap who (thought he ) discovered phlogiston made an important step forward because he handed Joseph Priestly something to disprove. And it harks to the coincidence of contraries again. Although phlogiston doesn't exist, it defined the next move in the search for the unknown of oxygen, because you can't drive in a perfect straight line and your hand is constantly adjusting the wheel. So it's unfair that I can't recall the poor man's name. But maybe phlogiston will come back. Anyway, you nailed me righteously with "quark." As to bio, its a bit late at night for thinking of anything but slipping away, but since I see you are in NOAA, I will say that one thing I am is a Disaster Services volunteer for the Red Cross, so am greatly aware of the immense lifesaving contribution you folks perform. Dang it, Arthur, you got me twice. But in such a graceful manner. I want to send this to the List to make up some for my gaff, but it's a FW List, so I'll justify by throwing in this path which may or not have been looked at previously: QUARK (preJoycean/preGell-Mann for the cry of a seabird) > ANAS (Latin for duck) > ANNA (the spirit of the Liffey River) > ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE (heroine of FW whose flow unites beginning to end to beginning [for a sidestream, check a Latin dictionary's "an . . . " section for cognate words for ring and year {hence "annual=the year as a revolving ring with Viconian resonances"} + "old woman"] > BARNACLE > a North Sea goose capable of traversing Ireland shore to shore > BARNACLE > the maiden name of Joyce's wife, Nora, who traversed Ireland coast from coast [Galway to Dublin] to be found by him > NORA (the heroine of "A Doll's House," by Ibsen, the writer Joyce considered had linked Joyce to the chain of great writers of history similar to the chain of scientists mentioned above; and from a play about a woman who flees her socially preordained life for the insecurity of freedom, and which in a not altogether impossible manner may have in some partial way made it just a tad easier for the young Nora Barnacle to run away from Galway, and then with Joyce from Dublin, because when Nora in "Doll's House" leaves her husband and the moral vapidity for which he stood, it was said that her slamming of their door on her exit created a vast loud sound which reverberated all across Europe) > QUARK (the cry of a seabird). But I'm just riffing. Yours most humbly, The (scientists are) Right(-on) Riverend Sterling Oh yeah: quarks [383.1]
Subject: Heisenberg &Void From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/11/97 4:41 PM sam wrote: >> her slamming of their door on > her exit created a vast loud sound which reverberated all across Europe) > QUARK (the cry of a seabird). > > Also thunder. > > And regarding the "scientific view of the universe", perhaps my info is > outdated or superceded but are Heisenberg and Schroedinger and even > Godel still relevant? And don't they suggest that even in scientific > terms reality is hardly monolithic? > > And I don't think it would be difficult to plunk heraclitus, Vico, or > Bruno into this maelstrom without their swimming quite well. Joyce too, > of course; great swimmer of maelstroms, Sailor of the Void. Dear sam, since my knowledge of calculus is equal to the variable of a constant, I have to have my Heisenberg in those nice user-friendly regurgitations by Paul Davies, & his sort. So maybe this is his Heisenberg "golden sentence," as Vico would say: "An area of certainty can never be reduced to zero." Seems like a good motto for FW folks. The too tired to make up a play on Right Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: Dada & Joyce? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/11/97 5:21 PM sam wrote: > And Pere Ubu? Apollinaire's "Aviator", Mallarme's "Coup de Die", and all > the predecessors of Dada , and Picabia and DuChamps, etc. I am sure all > these things are somehow immanent in the Wake. > > Also I am sure they have been discussed before I joined the group, > right? Dear Sam, this is as good a place as any to break the news that my mail to you of several minutes past should have read (RE/Heisenberg for the Equation- Challenged): "An area of uncertainty can never be reduced to zero." Anyhoo, about the gifs on FW p. 308: the nosethumb gesture pops up sometimes in some Dada I've seen. Duchamps & the New York crowd published a magazine (2 issues, pretty good run for Dada journals) called The Blindman around 1917, and one issue had a blindman walking a dog & thumbing his nose on the cover. Around the same time the submission of the urinal "readymade" was rejected by an art show Duchamp had helped found with Arensberg & Picabia, a Blindman's Ball was thrown as a protest & fundraiser. The poster for the event featured a prancing stickfigure thumbing its nose drawn by Duchamps' close friend, Beatrice Wood, whose painting of a bathing woman with a 3D soapbar glommed on to her tenders was accepted into the show, and I supposed helped paved the way for such later works as Dali's one-copy edition of the Book of Revelations with the thick sculpted swirls of gold & jewels wrapping the upper surface into which he crammed a bent kitchen fork. Being of the New York branch, I doubt Beatrice could divulge much inside info about the Zurich-based crowd and whether JJ & Nora ever dropped by Cafe Voltaire for coffee & a little "noisemusic," (hard to imagine, somehow), but her phone-number is (USA area code: 805) 646-3381. She goes by the nickname Beato, & at a 104, is beginning to experience some health problems and may not wish to take a call herself, though her staff should, because she's getting busier than ever with her production of tres cher ceramics and mucho editions of her memoirs. The nosethumber appears on her 1st volume, I Shock Myself. Yrs, & best, the what's Left of the Right Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: Trane's teeth, JJ's eyes From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/11/97 6:11 PM Ross Chambers wrote: > I would be interested to read speculation of parallels re JJ's eye > afflictions and Trane's decaying teeth, and the effect of these ailments > on their art. Riverend Stirling? > > Please pardon the flippancy, I do like the Riverend's analogy. > > Kind regards - Ross Chambers > > -- > ====================================================== > > Ross Chambers Sydney Australia > > "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday- > > but never jam to-day" The White Queen. > > ======================================================== Dear Ross, I don't think your interest is all that flippant. The parallel #1 is just pain's pain, which also sounds flip but is not. I am not familiar with Coltrane's dental problems, but have some knowledge personally which I'll spare everyone. As far as that goes, Joyce had a full-mouth extraction when only, I think, in his forties, partly in hopes it might help abate his iritis to escape what was apparently a serious source of ongoing infection. I suspect even the gods have an occasional dental horror-story. As to affecting art -- believe it or not, those split octave harmonics can temporarily blow a little pain out of one's head by the reverse osmosis of vibration. Perhaps Joyce was drifting toward a "visually impaired" perspective already in Portrait when he glosses over the Thomistic values of accuracy and beauty, qualities associated with clear sight, in his preference of "claritas," which he stresses is a warm inner form of light imparted by the artist and giving the pleasurable impression of a fading coal in the dark. Returning your kind regards, The Good-for-something Riverend Sterling
Subject: 1132 A.D./BRIDGET From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/16/97 5:21 AM >From the genius who placed the portmanteau word among the stars comes (inevitably) the portmanteau number (saints preserve us). So in reaching into the 1132 sachel, I want to emphasize that what I pull out in no way contradicts the other interesting interpretations extant. It should only reinforce them and Joyce's awesome skill at making words and numbers reverberate. The sense cited recently of a particular cycle of religious expression coming to an end of term is particulary felicitous. But there is a "smoking gun" significance for 1132 which is most difficult to find (I tracked it for seven years to do so) but worth the effort as Joyce's clues clearly (at least within the Heisenberg parameters) affirm the root meaning once known. What we know quickly from the text is worth reviewing at this point. Most germane is that Joyce wants us to realize that 1132 is a date, a year. Surveying what might be called the 1132 section of FW (pp. 387-420), we note references to " . . . the year of the flood 1132" (387.23), " . . . the freebutter year of Notre Dame 1132" (388.20), " . . . around about the year of buy in disgrace 1132" (391.2), " . . . old year's eve 1132" (397.30), and in the final page of 1132 (as a numeral anyway), we have what seems the denouement: not only the year (of what we may not know ), but a specific day in history, " . . . 31 Jan. 1132 A.D." The other 1132 entries in this section of FW largely involve plays on the numeral as part of a street address, by which we are instructed that not only is a specific time in mind, but perhaps a specific place as well. If we take time and space as the vertical and horizontal planes of a Cartesian grid, then the intersection marks some particular event. But what? And again, it's worth reiterating that hints abound, but their value is mostly post facto, i.e., they are esoteric and encrypted to the extent that we are as in a dark room and signs pointing to the light switch are of little use. But even after the light becomes present, the signs must be in a language we know, and this means escaping from the wind of my extended metaphor to a much more pleasant focus of discussion, and that is the patron saint of Ireland, St. Bridget, so respected as to be called the Mary of the Gael. One should like to spend a great long time on the subject of St. Bridget, but she still would not be done justice by such meager skills as I muster, and I suspect she will pardon me for appearing crass in bringing to the table only a handful of knowledge chosen because it applies to our search: a) yes, Ireland is blessed to have three patron saints in all, including (with Bridget), Patrick and Columba; b) yes, some scholars within and without the pales of the Church are disturbed by the fact that she reappears in various guises in various times and seems part historic, part mythic/part Christian, part pagan/part here, part there, and so on -- but that is no problem for Joyceans and other such simple-hearted souls of the laity; c) one of her dualities is that she is herself; -- but also an incarnate representative of Mary; d) as a saint, she is the protectress of dairymaids; as a Celtic "supernatural lady," her associates are the cow and lamb; e) as a saint, her day is February 1; as a Celtic "supernatural lady," she is associated with February 2, lambing day (one of the four primary Gaelic holy days, and the least now known, Imbolc, or "butterwomb"); f) as a saint, she founded the Church of the Oak (Cell Dara/Kill-dara/Kildare), which I think (therefore I am probably wrong) is not too far from the Liffey headwaters; as an ancient Celtic goddess and representative of the Bona Dea, she has never left us and is capable of appearing anywhere anytime in any guise; g) as the first abbess of Kildare, she was followed by an unbroken line of abbesses who commanded great respect from the people and were responsible through their order for maintaining by precise ritualistic means a continuous fire which had burned since being ignited by St. Bridget before her death in ca. 522. In 1132, a truly horrid and disgusting event occurred which one does not care to have to relate, but it must be confronted, and that is the rape of the Abbess of Kildare by the troops of Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster, ordered by him, for the purpose of destroying her sanctity to render her unfit for her office, to the end that MacMurrough might enhance his power by imposing in her place a kinswoman of his own. This travesty was enhanced by much of the monastery being destroyed. The rape of the Abbess of Kildare is an especially disturbing instance of that aspect of Irish politics (and we know not only of Irish politics) which Joyce naturally despised. It evoked for him the issue which awoke in childhood his passionate disdain for the banality of evil, and that was the verbal rape of Catherine O'Shea by the clergy through which the political power of Parnell was broken. It was not only the old sow eating her farrow again, but an act which presaged and set the stage for the Norman invasion of Ireland against a divided house which has not healed to this day. And it was brought home most personally to Joyce who was intensely proud of being born on February 2, lambing day, that is on Imbolc, which in the old reckoning has as good claim to being St. Bridget's Day as February 1 for reasons we must gloss in this amount of space, but which include the fact that the Celtic day was measured in a lunar manner like the extant Semitic calendar , so that a calendar day begins at sunset, not midnight. Joyce considered St. Bridget to be his muse. She is invoked in all post-Chamber Music work. She is Maria in "Clay," the moocow in Portrait, the old milk woman in Ulysses, the maid in Exiles (and don't miss the milk truck), the broken branch in "Tilly," (the only means allowed to keep the sacred fire alive at Kildare was to wave air over it with a branch), and a thousand references to milk and things bovine in FW. Bridget was born herself, by the way, by manifesting in a bucket of milk being carried out a door by her mother, a milkmaid. And the Irish Catholic Church, before it came under the foot or aegis, as you will, of the Roman Catholic Church, baptised in milk rather than water. So the real reason Joyce tried to have his works first issued on February 2 is in honour of his muse, the good Saint Bridget. For those still with me, we return to the clues, among which are: 1) p. 388 -- freebutter refers to St. Bridget's dairy attributes and to Imbolc (butterwomb), which is 1 & 2 Feb./Notre Dame, Our Lady, points to her as Mary of the Gael/" . . . 1132 Brian or Bride street" cites her nickname, Bride or Bridey or Biddy, as well as her biographer, Brian O'Naillgusa/and as always, interminable portmanteaus we must largely pass over, such as "Lacytynant" (Latin cum French cum Joyce for "having milk"); 2) p. 389 -- numerous plays on the Kill (church) of Kill-dara, and upon Mary through an apparition, Fatima, and Jesus (Fitzmary = son of Mary); 3) p. 391 -- the ref. to 1132 as the year of disgrace, and the capital letters on Her Worship his Mother (and don't miss the appearance of the villain, MacMurrough, on the facing page (390.9), as "Mahmullagh," followed by the poignant "The good go and the wicked is left over" (lines 29 & 30 if I'm counting right); 4) p. 397 -- the important clarification (line 30) that we are to analyze the date (when we come to it fully) by the "old style" (the Celtic moon-based calendar) which begins a day from sunset (" . . . old year's eve . . . "), blurring our modern distinction between any two of our current "days"; and now, with the light on, we return to the denouement, 5) p. 420 -- " 31 Jan. 1132 A.D." is now seen clearly as a finger pointing to the awful rape of the Abbess of Kildare, recorded as occuring in that year (1132) to a woman charged with perpetuating the spirit and ritual and facility and order of the saint whose day is 1 Feb. (an extension of the eve of 31 Jan., by the "old style," and whose eve in turn by the old style begins our 2 Feb., Joyce's birthday). Although the Riverend is on record as requesting no followers, I sincerely thank you for attending his discourse to this juncture, and apologize for its length. Meanwhile, the top of the morning to you, a phrase, by the way, which refers to the cream which rises to the top of a dairy bucket just as did once the infant St. Bridget. Oh Lord, don't get me started again . . . Yours in Her Grace's watch, The Roving and Riverend Sterling.
Subject: 1132 & DUBLING From: Riverend Sterling Date: 9/17/97 3:57 AM Dear Will, Your swift response to my mail of this same day has caught me quite pleasantly in surprise. I have been studying Joyce and particularly the Wake for 10+ years in an off & on manner, and am presently in a situation where I have for the first time a computer and the internet at my disposal, but also I am not able to access my books or notes. So it's all very interesting. I found an online concordance for the Wake, which I suppose you know, at www.qinpalace.com, but your mail has confirmed what I thought must be true -- that it cannot be exhaustive. A search for "1132" provided 11 entries, none of which were were citations on pp. 13 & 14. Of course we know there are wordplay forms of 1132 in FW, and those would be impossible to search through any machine, but it was startling for me to see, thanks to you, that 1132 comes up so early in FW, and is associated, through its 1/2 counterpart, 566, with an act of rape associated with war. My information on the rape of the abbess of Kildare is sketchy, and I would appreciate any references you could direct me toward. You probably are aware that MacMurrough was at war at the time of the rape. The sexual association of rape and war you refer to started me thinking, and brought up the very early set-up of that [1.6] by the phrase "penisolate war." So I've that to thank you for as well. As to the placement of rape in 566 rather than 1132 on pp. 13 & 14: if these are indeed Viconian (a la Joycean) in nature, then we must expect to see what occurs in one age played out in some disorted but recognizable form in another. This clued me into another insight you've led me to (I hope) understand, and that is why there are references to Dublin associated with these years. You cite, forinstance, on p. 14 in regard to 566, "Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeagh-bally," which is a wild but certainly Irish-looking spelling of the Gaelic name for Dublin, Baile-Atha-Cliath . . . subject to typical FW funhouse mirror effects, naturally. On the 1132 page of 388, there is a Dublin street mentioned, Bride. On what I've called the denouement page for 1132, page 420, Baile-Atha-Cliath is there plain as all life. And back to page 14, the 1132 area of text ends with a distorted version of the ending of the 566 sections on the same page, with "Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeag-bally" turning into "Blotty words for Dublin," by which I believe Joyce wants to show how the old things will reappear in a form which seems more mundane to us as it nears us in time. It was then I remembered the page one entry of Dublin as "doublin" in "doublin their mumper," which I've read interpreted as "doubling their funds." Anyway, there is an obvious opportunity given by Joyce to associate Dublin with doubling, and that is exactly what occurs from 566 to 1132 -- a doubling. Never a dull moment in the old Wake, eh? Yours, grateful for your knowledge and perception, Riverend Sterling. P.S. Pp. 13 & 14 also double the doubling, because there are two citations each for 566 and 1132; and the first pair also end with forms of Dublin, first a play upon the Latin name for the town, and then an English translation of Baile-Atha-Cliath, as annotated in R. McHugh '80/'91 (yes, my order for one arrived today . . . hooray! . . . what a masterwork). Will Miller had written: > " The Abbess theory fits in well with the role of rape/sexual politics in FW > in general. However I take 1132 as part of the time scheme announced as the > four eternally recurring events in Book I (pp 13-14). Most of the other > references to this year can be sourced back to the events announced in the > schematic. The rape occurs in the schema at 566A.D (although I wouldn't want > to say that all references to rapes must occur in the year 566!): > > 566 A.D. At this time it fell out that a brazenlockt damsel grieved > (sobralasolas!) because that Puppette her minion was ravisht-of > her > by the ogre Puropeus Pious. Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeagh- > bally " > > > >
Subject: Re: my two cents on Rose's 4-parter, and a little Wake stuff From: Riverend Sterling Date: 11/7/97 9:56 PM Dear Bill, As much as one would like to respond in kind to your postings with something intelligent and helpful, you have sailed far beyond my harbour, and I can but stand on the shore and study your work with a fascinated appreciation. Since I cannot own or access first editions of Joyce, let alone study drafts, I occasionally pickup some peripheral ephemera when possible. I will share (for better or worse) with you and the group knowledge of the existence of two editions of Ulysses in wraps I located in used bookstores, and along with the humour, you will see how wild "mucking" can be. 1) a bootleg edition published some years ago in Los Angeles which ends, once Molly's makes her "yes," with a hearty number of illustrated pages forming a cataloug of sexual appliances; 2) the UNcorrected edition of Gabler's Corrected Edition (I forget if it's a galley-proof final, or an early release for reviewers, or what -- but it's given with the title pretty much as above, and thus a personal favorite --). Again, with thanks to both you and Bill Butler, The Roving and Riverend Sterling. bill cadbury wrote: > First Bill Buttler: "However, I think the world needs (and Joyce > deserves) better editions of both works than the ugly paperbacks which > seem to be all that is available in general bookshops. These are such > important works that they should be available in a quality hardback > format - dare I say it? - similar to the Readers' Edition.... FW is > another matter. The problems are obvious; how can an editor separate > genuine from deliberate "errors"? There are places where we would > probably all agree that a mistake has crept in, and others where the > agreement might not be so general. In any case, I for one don't know > what Rose means by a "Four-part Critical Edition", and whether it has > anything to do with the "Readers' Edition" approach or not. I notice > that Rose has written several critical works on parts of FW, so I expect > he has something useful to add, and for this reason I remain open in my > expectations of the "Critical Edition"." > > My recollection of the facts (or some of them, since I've forgotten > details) is that Danis Rose (and quite possibly John O'Hanlon, that's > something I've forgotten) invented the notation system for genetic > representations which (probably somewhat modified — that fact I never > did know) Gabler and his team used for the "synoptic" part of the > *Ulysses* edition. Rose invented it for an edition of the Wake, which > involved, like the *Ulysses*, a full genetics (establishing what Gabler > came to call the "continuous manuscript text" — whether or not that > phrase is Rose's I don't know) and an edition based on it, i.e., > something like the recto "Critical" and verso "Synoptic" editions of the > 3-volume Gabler :the one-volume *Ulysses: the Corrected Text* reprints > the rectos (recti?) of the 3-volume: I *think* [correction welcome] that > "Critical Edition" and "Corrected Edition" are supposed to refer to the > same thing, though of course the connotations are wildly different, a > fact not without consequences. > > [ . . . ] the > James Joyce Estate (which is now either principally or exclusively > Stephen Joyce and Sean Sweeney) was very unhappy with the Gabler > *Ulysses*, on grounds that the way it was presented made it seem as if > Joyce had made mistakes that needed correcting, and (as the reviews came > in) that a lot of the "corrections" were in fact more like suggestions > that if Joyce had only known what he was doing this is the way he would > have done it. So the Estate blocked publication of the Wake edition. In > Zurich in 1996, at a panel where I gave some of my genetics stuff, > Gabler said to Sean Sweeney (quoting roughly) "Isn't it time that you > released the rights to publish the Wake edition?", to which Mr. Sweeney > replied (and this is precise) "Once bitten twice shy." A lot of us heard > there, and have heard elsewhere, Stephen Joyce say, again roughly (as > Wayne Morse used to say, "I paraphrase but accurately"), "The Wake my > grandfather wanted you to read was the one he published, and I don't > want anybody mucking about in the text". And there is of course a > substantial justification for saying that about the Wake, because > (unlike *Ulysses*) there has been only essentially the one edition, with > its incorporated Corrections done by Joyce himself for printings after > the first half dozen or so, so there just isn't any doubt whatever that > Joyce authorized the Wake we all read, and there are absolutely no > reasons to think he wanted or would have put up with anybody else going > and making any more corrections than he made. > > [ . . . ] > > > > Bill Cadbury > ...
Subject: Re: Musical artificial language & Colors From: Riverend Sterling Date: 11/7/97 10:38 PM Dear Charles, How exactly did you derive your correspondences between the tones of colors and musical pitches? They basically match, if memory serves, those of the Order of the Golden Dawn, (or at least a branch thereof), a Celto-Qabalistic group which had some interest to Joyce, though not of the sort it had for its sometime leader, Yeats. Most such lists of correspondences associate color and pitch by frequency harmonics, in which case (again, about my mind . . . ) C = green, and so on up. The Golden Dawn-derived list I recall is seemingly distinct in assigning pitches to the complementary colors, so that C=red, as in your posting. Since C is the first scale most people learn, and red is the lowest frequency color, this system has a more comfortable feel symbolically than the more directly derived one. Tertiary colors are added to fill out a chromatic (literally) 12 tone scale, e.g. C# becomes red-orange. This results in B = red-violet, and some other minor vari- ations. If mastered, you could theoretically read a sunset on the piano, I suppose. What is the phrase in the ALP section, (I'm in an internet cafe with no books): every tone has a hue, and every hue a differing cry? Something like that. My thanks to you, Douglas, and Jeroen, The Roving and Riverend Sterling. Charles Sullivan wrote: > Douglas Jenkins originally wrote in response to Jeroen van Ameijde: > >> This has potential to relate to the wake directly too-- I learned >> somewhere that solresol could be represented not only in terms of the >> musical notes but also as hand symbols and anything that had 7 in it-- >> e.g. the colors of the rainbow. >> ....... >> .......Has anyone found any >> evidence of Joyce using HCE as a musical term or progression of notes? >> Perhaps in relation to one of Wagner's Leitmotiven or whatever? (By HCE >> as a musical term, i mean H is equatable with B-natural and B-natural as >> B-flat and thus, HCE would be a BCE progression in popular terms and Ti Do >> Me in solfege. Tee Doo Mee -- it has a nice ring. . . >> or Violet-Red-Yellow, I think, in terms of rainbow solresol-- i think. >> VRY doesnt sound like anything in the wake to me, but it might mean a word >> in solresol >> ..... > This is a tentative stab from the opening of the book: > > Sir Tristram, violer d'amores - Violet > nor avoice from afire bellowsed - Yellow > rory end to the regginbrow - Red > > Admittedly VYR is not VRY, and 'afire bellowsed' is a stretch for yellow. > > I've only recently begun reading FW, so I apologize if this (related) > question has been treated previously ad nauseam: Are all seven colors of the > rainbow supposed to be in the second paragraph? I can't find them. > > P.S. I had to write this stuff on a piece of paper to compensate for my > short attention span - maybe this will save some others a minute: > > 1 : do : C : red > 2 : re : D : orange > 3 : mi : E : yellow > 4 : fa : F : green > 5 : sol : G : blue > 6 : la : A : indigo > 7 : ti : B / H : violet > > Also, as I'm sure everyone knows, Bach incorporated his name as the motif > BACH in Art of Fugue; that's another reason perhaps why something similar > might have crossed Joyce's mind. > > Charles Sullivan > ...
Subject: FW: PANEL AND PERFORMANCE From: Riverend Sterling Date: 11/9/97 12:57 AM Today at the University of California at Santa Barbara, as part of a three day annual conference called VISUALIZING CULTURE, a 2+ hr. presentation was given in the afternoon under the title LITERATURE IN PICTURES/FINNEGANS WAKE: A CASE STUDY. I shall take it upon myself to review it for the list, while fresh in mind, as I don't know how it is in YOUR town, but when anything at all Wakean is presented to the public around here, its newsworthy . . . and as far as that goes, this was a worldworthy presentation. And namebadges indicating origins were quite global, Denmark, Australia, Canada, to name some. Let me get one thing out of the way. The formatting was very amateurish to the point of flawing what could have been even better than it was. Held in a stark ballet studio by what seemed inexperienced, rude, and unprepared student aides, the MC'ing was very unmasterful and totally unceremonial. Shame on UCSB for that, because the panelists, performers, and audience deserved much better. This is only mentioned because it so noticeably impacted the quality of the experience. The lack of panache by whoever these officious inepts were was the exact equi- valent of the teenage helpers at fastfood restaurants who find it acceptable to slosh moploads of dirty water and toxic solvents around your feet during a meal, with no sense of any social grace and no priority beyond their own meager tasks. They visibly rushed panelists, cut the keynote speaker off, discouraged any audience participation against the panelists' wishes, blabbed crass notices out of nowhere, and thereby created a needless unplanned 45 minute deficit by the end with no apology or sense of irony. The Riverend realizes that in other areas of their lives they no doubt emit an admirable light, but MC'ing is a specific skill and should be assigned to those with a suitable mix of flair and restraint and especially warmth. OK, enough. This was a great event otherwise, and just because it seemed to be considered a throway in the threeday extravaganza by some middlefolk who couldn't even provide a microphone for the panel, many people left sincerely and deeply moved to see the words of Joyce given a fine dose of life by scholars and artists of the highest order. The first speaker was Margot Norris of UC Irvine Eng/Lit, the author of JOYCE'S WEB & THE DECENTERED UNIVERSE . . ., two books well known to readers of this list. She chose as her topic THE MIME OF MICK, NICK, AND THE MAGGIES. Speaking with the gentle but rapid clarity we wish for in every teacher, she tied this episode in Book II, Ch. I in terms of Joyce's iritis and Freudian sexuality theory. Early on she mentioned that Joyce had told Harry Levin that he (Joyce) expected permanent blindness to result from an eye operation planned for sometime in 1932, and I thought of that possible reinforcing his interest in the year 1132, but the point Norris was leading to was that Joyce had explained in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver that the Mime was based on a childhood game called both "Devil's and Angels" and "Colours," in either case a child's guessing game involving visuality and its absence. In the Mime, the object is to guess the colours of the rainbow girls underpants. From this she extrapolated the larger view that to children, the entire adult world is opaque. Just as naughty boys try to catch a sight of girls' panties, children in general try to see through the veil by which adults seek to protect their sexual privacy. Then she really blew the audience's mind by citing a theory of Freud's that adults who are research-oriented (that's right -- US!) develop from children who took longer than average to figure out adult sexuality, thereby developing their first research project. The "Birds and Bees" approach thus breeds both senses of metaphor and scepticism in the formative minds of future scholars. Man, she hit home. Then she mentioned something about starting from scratch, and sat down. Wow. Next came Harry Reese of the UCSB Art Studio, the man whom we had to thank for seeing to it that FW was snuck into the conference, and my previous remarks not with- standing (what does that mean?), I express those thanks quite sincerely. Reese began by giving his own thanks to both Eric and Marshall McLuhan for their two generation contri- bution to Wake scholarship, crediting them for the perception that new technologies turn old technologies into new art forms. This elicited a pleasant aahhhh from the audience. Reese then showed slides on two of his works. The first involved a landscape architecture done outside the recently rebuilt City Library of Los Angeles, a series of stairgroups along a broad paved walkway featuring a flowing pool. He'd arranged with a cohort to depict a booklike visuality where each of the four stairgroups represented a phase of reading evolution, being 1) the pictographic; 2) writing; 3) printing; & 4) the modern return to the pictograph, including graphic user interface ikons. The appealing symbols were etched and enameled on various metallic media, with the very first and last steps blank for the unknown reaches of past and future. Personally, I found this very Wakean, as I support the McLuhanesque premise that abecedeism is very germane to Joycean criticism. Reese ended with slides showing several pages of his limited edition (300, I believe) of his book FUNAGAINSTAWAKE, each leaf uniting an original print of an abstract symbol negatively etched against a watercoloury flat background above one of the thunderwords of the Wake. The leaves are bound with wire-edging, making this the ultimate coffeetable prize for any Joycean . . . but you wouldn't dare put any coffee near it! Reese finished by saying that he did media ecology, defining that as "trying to wake up in the process." Eric McLuhan of the University of Toronto, author of THE ROLE OF THE THUNDER, then closed the panel section of the program. With the warm charm of an academic John Carridine, whom he somewhat resembles in a goateed version, he immediately challenged the somewhat stiff-seeming audience to come to terms with the fact that reading the Wake is meant to be fun! That we try ignoring the scholarly industry, and emphasize rather the refrain "Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake!" He was, in effect, asking us to deflate himself, a classic yet daring oratorical manuever worthy of one of those mythic Southern country attorneys secretly steeped in Cicero. This is where a properly respectful ambience created by the event producers would have enhanced the experience, for such techniques appear broad, but are dependent on considerable subtlety. Unfortunately, the poor lighting and acoustics detracted from the natural drama Mr. McLuhan was suddenly injecting into the conference, and the audience had to strain to make up for it. But we did so, and were well rewarded, for Mr. McLuhan's improvisatory delivery quickly revealed a profound substratum. After recom- mending that we read passages of the Wake aloud, he explained that the practice of silent read is quite new in history, citing a view that Mark Twain was one of the first to read for readers who did not as a matter of course read aloud. (I personally find this the single most useful key to tying the Wake together -- I suggest recording yourself reading a page, then listen to it over and over against a soft musical background until you can hear its motifs echoed in any other page). McLuhan mentioned largely forgotten works in Latin similar to the Wake from the 4th and 12th centuries! (And will he please gives us the titles and authors here on the list?) He further explained that the overemphasis is our times on visuality is a product of the alphabet, with its intense involvement if linear interpretation separating the knower from the known, and distorting our natural sense of sound with the illusion that consonants and vowels are sparate entities. Acoustic space, in contrast, he described as relatively spherical and unraveled, and having a mobile diffuse effect. It is, of course, a space Joyce knew well, tragically as one with severely impaired vision, magnificently as one of Ireland's finest tenors. And having taken the rapt audience into this beautiful simple sphere, he was about to open the entire affair up for participation when summarily terminated with a lassolike gesture by some self-important stagehand. It was a magnificent and stirring illustration of exactly what he was addressing, the modern undeclared war between the linear rush from some poorly defined point A to some nobetter B versus the embrace of the present of the present . . . but it should not have been allowed. Where were these bossy children's supervisors? So I was in no mood for a bunch of interpretive dancers, mind you, hogging the dusty stage. And by God, by the end of their piece, I was letting the big tear fall in appreciation, and that is what true art can do. Conceived and choreographed by Jerry Pearson, Director of the Santa Barbara Dance Theatre, Finnegans Wake was danced by four couples and amazingly, it worked. Joyce translated Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppisitorum as the "coincidance of contrarities," if I recall right, and now that coincidance has come to life. The bar I'm typing this in has just told me they've decided abrubtly to close an hour early for their own convenience, so I'm getting smashed by these linear types for the second time! Sorry. Wrap-up: Dance theme: "We feel. We fall." Big audience laugh when Pearson, being HCE, superimposed his shadow across a slide projection of a map of Dublin from Howth Head to Phoenix Park. Big cheers for Faline England's many tiered portrayal of Anna Livia. We let her, and she done her best. Magnificent work. Eric McLuhan emphasised that the Wake refreshes the sense and the senses, how after a reading the conversations overheard in street gain meaning. I'm there, dude. Yours, the Roving and Riverend Sterling.
Subject: '28' & IRISH POETICS From: Riverend Sterling Date: 11/9/97 5:14 PM In response to the noble project of catalouging Wakean numbers (by Charles Cave, I believe?): somewhere on the net are our archives, no doubt, and September should have my postings on "1001" & "1132." On request, I shall snailmail the treeware, including a brief paper once sent to the Chudnovsky brothers on Joycean resonances of pi. Now, new pompatus on "28": Wellknown are the calendrics of 28. 28 days form the sidereal lunar month, the time for the moon's terrestrial orbit to cause it to occlude a given star twice. This is a more sophisticated lunar month than the synoptic, which means "looks the same," that is, from a given lunar phase to its repeat, especially one new moon to the next, a 29 day period. There are fractions involved in both the 28 day sidereal period and the 29 day synoptic one, but they are not relevant to this discussion, though of great importance to the ancients and the study of "epacts." It is the 28/29 duality of Issy and the girls, pointing of course to the month of Joyce's birth, February, which is most prevalent in the Wake and its exegetics. What I would like to examine is very tentative in terms of the Wake, but may justify itself independently for involving medieval Irish poetics. I. Richter, Michael. "Medieval Ireland, & the Enduring Tradition." St. Martin's Press: NY, '95. Pp. 138/9. " . . . the emergence of the "filid" as the Bardic Order in the course of the late 11th & the 12th centuries {there's that 1132 era again - RS} should be mentioned. There had been poets, "filid," in Ireland from prehistoric times, but in the course of the 12th c. new forms of poetry were developed, forms that were to persist for the next 5 centuries. The new methods of composition were so strict and were observed so closely that experts find it near impossible to determine on the basis of language when or where a particular poem was written. Bardic poetry is characterized by lines with 7 syllables & stanzas of 4 lines, with a break after the second line." II. RS -- It seems a best guess that 4 lines of 7 syllables with a midway break is designed to replicate the ancient obsession with the lunar month, in this case the sidereal lunar month. The 7 syllables would be the days of the week, associated with the 7 moveable visible heavenly bodies. The 4 lines thence reflect the 4 weeks of the sidereal month, Joyce's beloved February, with the midway break being the culmination of the full moon (traditional lunar months always begin and end with the new moon). 7 days times 4 weeks = 28 days; 7 syllables times 4 lines = 28 syllables. One would guess as well that this was wellknown to Joyce, but whether he utilized it in a detectable manner . . ., well, aye, it is very much like a whale. A cautionary note from another work gives more background: III. "The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics." Eds. Preminger & Brogan. P.U. P.: New Jersey, '93. Pp. 412/3: ' "Fili" (pl. "filid[h], Modern Ir. "file," pl. "fili" {2nd vowel has acute accent - RS}) has always been the Irish word for poet, and it is unfortunate that a considerable body of Irish poetry, ("filidheacht," "filiocht," {2nd word's 2nd "i" with acute accent -RS}) is called in Eng. "bardic" poetry, with the misleading suggestion that it is the work of the Irish "bard" . . . the word "fili" is cognate with the Welsh "gwel(-ed)" ("to see") . . . he was at all times distinguished from the bard . . . ' John Ellis Cherwyn Williams. (Robert Graves stresses this as well, considering bards as relatively sycophantic, while the priestly filidh were powerful on their own, often druidic in early times -- RS). Anything cognate with "sight" or "to see" increases its Joycean potential, of course. IV. FW; 213.14: "Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? [15] It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh." ? ? ? If gwel and fil are cognate, which is hard to grasp itself, did Joyce conciously connect "filou" with "eye" & "saw" . . . beats me. Yet we at least know "fili" was meant to connote "seer" (see-er) as well as poet. V. Atherton, James S. "the Books at the Wake." '59/'74. P. 49: "It would be in [Arthur] Symons's "The Symbolist Movement" that Joyce found the formula, first laid down by Mallarme, which he was to use in writing 'Finnegans Wake': 'To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of language, without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be rather than to express.'" It has perhaps gone hitherto unnoticed that Mallarme wrote a poem which merges the Petrarchan sonnet form with the formula of the filidh. In "Une dentelle s'abolit . . . ," (A lace becomes abolished . . . ), Mallarme uses 14 lines of 7 syllables, a fortnight's worth by our calendric interpretation made above, on the following scheme: abba abba ccd ede. In what may or may not be coincidence, the terminal line begins with the syllable "fil": "Filial, on aurait pu naitre." (As a child, one could've been born.) VI. Apologizing for skating out thin again, I cite a marvelous quote by Valery which Eric McLuhan uses to preface his new book. Not having it before me, I shall try to paraphrase and translate by memory: " If it doesn't sound wierd, it can't be right." Blessings, Riverend Sterling.
Subject: '28' & IRISH POETICS From: Riverend Sterling Date: 11/10/97 8:41 PM Histerve (Sun, 09 Nov 1997), I sent out some ramblings and excerpts based on the above subject, partly hoping to clear the slate after the wildly unproofed review I posted on Sat 08, and it did look neater. On returning home and reading it, however, I couldn't help noticing that every thing written on my own appeared wrong. To wit, Paragraph 3: "synoptic" was meant to be "synodic." The really frightening part is that while my mind was unable to notice the original mistake, it was somehow alert enough in its devious imagination to invent an almost plausible explanation of why the socalled "synoptic month" was socalled! Anyway, the 29 (closer actually to 29.5) day lunar month is, of course, the synodic month refererred to as a "lunation." Para. 4: greater clarity should be present in noting that there are TWO dualities of 28/29 involving calendrics. One is specific to February, and is the leapyear situation. The 28 day sidereal lunar month versus the 29 day synodic lunar month (again, fractions essential for real astronomical computation are being ignored here to enable whole number symbology) form an intertwining duality which repeats throughout the year, and is independent from the calendar months. This caused centuries of frustration for ancient astronomers who felt the lunar months should form a neat solar year, but they don't. Julius Caesar finally declared the long search to resolve lunar cycles with solar cycles over, and declared the solar year to be the winner, and we are still basically operating within that calendar plus the Gregorian finetuning introduced over the last 400 years. An interesting piece of Joycean "trivia": by the Julian calendar, James Joyce died on the final day of the year, 31 December 1940. There are other calendrics of Joyceana with appealing resonances. James Joyce was born on Imbolc, 2 Feb., first of the four cardinal holy days of the Celtic year. Mrs. James Joyce, nee Nora Barnacle, was born on the first of the four cardinal holy days of the astronomical year, 21 March, the Spring Equinox. Their daughter, Lucia, was given the name of a Winter Solstice Saint. Lucia is of course cognate with Lux, Latin for Light, and 21/22 December, new style (Gregorian), is traditionally considered, being the longest night of the year, as the time when the light needed for the next year is reborn. In late old style (Julian) times, the Winter Solstice had slipped back to 13 December, which is still called St. Lucy's day. Meanwhile, back at 28/29. The clarification I wanted to make before I drifted was that while the February connotation of Issy and the Floras is obvious, I don't personally know of any reinforcement for a subtext of sidereal month/synodic month for 28/29 in FW; just tossing it out in case anybody else wants to play a little handball with it. Now we get to where I got even stranger, and that is my feeble attempts to pretend I know anything about Mallarme and/or French poetics . . . or virtually anything else, for that matter. In describing "Une dentelle s'abolit . . . " as having seven syllable lines, I forgot to mention that I do not know how to scan French verse, and am not even sure if anyone can. I have read that French verse is 1) spoken with archaic stylization involving the sounding of normally silent syllables, and 2) that it tends to follow patterns of French singing more than French speaking, and that those styles changes from century to century. It's obvious reading a sonnet by Baudelaire that more looseness in scansion is occuring, in relation to a formal sonnet in English or Italian, than can be simply ascribed to the Alexandrian line, but now I'm getting myself into even more trouble than before. Maybe someone can help. So let's call it a "sevenish" line until then? There's still a good case for the "four lines of seven syllables each stanza" (28 syllables in all) developed by the Irish poets of the filidh being meant to reflect the 28 days of the sidereal lunar month, but once more, no evidence I can put on the table for that being worked into the Wake. But there's an even better gaffe in my brief email career as a Mallarme expert. Originally I meant to say that the octet of the poem, being eight lines of "sevenish" syllabification, formed two stanzas of the sort ascribed to the Irish filidh, and then the sestet pulled the poem into an Italian sonnet structure minus the iambic pentameter. You'd think such a pretentious and probably pointless statement would have been enough, but I topped it by getting it wrong and stating that . . . OK, let's just drop back ten yards and kick (fortunately, nobody but you and I are reading this anymore) - - Scratch: " . . . a fortnight's worth by our calendric interpretation made above . . . " An incorrect computation based an a tentative surmise. In more encouraging news: I found the Paul Valery citation from the preface of Eric McLuhan's "The Role of The Thunder": "Tout vue des chose qui n'est pas etrange est fausse." (Any view of things which isn't strange is false ((?))) Assuming I didn't blow that trans. as well, I am still within Valery's parameters, if no others. Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: Who's Issy? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 12/30/97 5:53 AM Dear Mike, You are going to get some very good replies to your inquiry on the character and role of Issy from folks on our list, replies which I also look forward to reading, as she is a central and charming persona, and you are correct in her having taken a backseat to her parents. I am unfortunately guilty of this in my own scrapings on the surface of the Wake. Since recently joining the list myself, I've been shamed/inspired to begin delving into "mainstream Wakean criticism," a bit of an oxymoron at first glance perhaps, but acceptable if we portmanteau (pardon the Haigism) "mainstream" to include Anna Liffey -- and a friend once told me that the true mainstream is much deeper than often thought. Previously I tended to follow certain lines of research based on things which caught my interest without a clear overview of the book. Very helpful in my attempt to begin rectifying this (so that a major figure like Issy isn't slighted by me) has been reading two books which present fairly detailed but not burdensome chapter surveys with some entertaining exegesis. These books, chosen from a list sent me by a very nice person on the list (a list originally generated by Bill Cadbury, I believe) are: Gordon, John (a list member himself). Finnegans Wake, a Plot Summary. 1986. Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake. 1969. As of 1996, both are published by Syracuse University Press, so I've inevitably taken to referring to Gordon and Tindall as "the boys from Syracuse," for which I apologize to them, not to mention mssr. Rodgers and Hart. But this came from reading the two books in tandem, two chapters at a time, so once I was a chapter ahead in Gordon, I'd catch up in Tindall and get a chapter ahead of Gordon. To cap it all off, there had to be a copy of the Wake close by, of course, and another treasure new to me, Roland McHugh's Annotations to FW (John Hopkins U. Press, 1980/91), so a good time was had by all, except those expecting a Christmas present or phone call from me. But I'm one Tindall chapter away from finishing this project, have paid off my bookstore accounts, and may catch up eventually on the slights to relatives and other friends. Some of what comes to mind, thanks to these authors, is that as ALP has at times to play the role of Everywoman, so her daughter Issy, as an aspect of ALP, symbolizes at times Everygirl (" . . . I'm only any girl . . . " is ascribed to Isabel/Issy in FW p.146.5-6 in Tindall, pp. 116/7). This can place her in some competion with her mother, and considerable reference is made to her seductive impact on her notoriously imperfect father, HCE. And fairly or not, in order to be Everygirl as percieved by the adult world, at times she is portrayed as a bit of a diaphonous mothbrain. Yet there is a legitimate appeal to her, and some very pretty (though of course on one level self-satirical) passages inspired by her. Issy also is given the task of representing some very awesome women. One seems to be Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice In Wonderland. Another is the Egyptian gooddess Isis, central to the Wakean theme of eternal reappearance for having gathered for regeneration the pieces of her brother's body. Less attention has been paid to her as an ikon for the Order of Saint Bridget of Ireland, founded very roughly at around 500 AD (see FW p. 220.3-4, with the same page in McHugh). This subject is far too complex and important to do justice to in this space. Let us mention en passant that St. Bridget founded an order for nuns of a specific numbering, and a school of art as well. The numbering is, if I recall right, 19+1 (the one being at first St. Bridget, then later a string of abbesses). Joyce has expanded this to 28+1 to represent the month of February with its periodic leapyear. This is the month traditionally reserved for Purification, the process preceding the earth's rebirth in March, as well as the month introduced by Bridget's feastday and Joyce's birthday in quick succession. The art school is perhaps somewhat behind the association of The Floras from St. Bride's Finishing Establishment (again, p.220) with colors. "Bride" and "Bridey" are Irish nicknames derived from "Bridget." And in a sense, the unlikely Issy represents the good saint herself, who was not only a young girl once, but according to folklore, always (or at least at will), for Bridget according to folklore had the impressive if disconcerting habit of being young on one side of her face while old on the other. This sounds scary, but Bridget is always kind, and the story displays her power and universality, not any ogreness . . . though her clear relation to ancient Celtiana has resulted in her disavowall by recent Churchmen. An especially strong and moving case for Issy's centrality is made by Professor Gordon beginning on p. 75 of his work referred to above: " . . . Issy is the Wake's occasion, theme, reason for existence, prime mover - the one for whom and because of whom the dream is dreamed (p.76)." Be sure to catch as well Gordon's read on p. 26 of the merged personae of Issy with both ALP and Nora Joyce. In the not impossible event that all goes well with my attempt to transfer an extant file I made somewhere else, I'll toss in an Issy page with some of its references by the scholars herein mentioned. Thanks for the cool question, Yours, The Riverend Sterling. night by silentsailing night while infantina Isobel (who will be blushing all day to be, when she growed up one Sunday Saint Holy and Saint Ivory, when she took the veil, the beautiful presentation nun, so barely twenty, in her pure coif, sister Isobel, and next Sunday, Mistlemas, when she looked a peach, the beautiful Samaritan, still as beautiful and still in her teens, nurse Saintette Isabelle, with stiffstarched cuffs but on Holiday, Christmas, Easter mornings when she wore a wreath, the wonderful widow of eighteen springs, Madame Isa Veuve La Belle, so sad but lucksome in her boyblue's long black with orange blossoming weeper's veil) for she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way that night that we first met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her april cot, within her singachamer, with her greengaugeflavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wilwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves and mosses and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me! deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping; FINNEGANS WAKE. James Joyce. P. 556. (rhythm of Byrd's "Woods So Wild" -cf. .16) s The Holly & the Ivy Presentation Order of nuns Michaelmas mistletoe HCE s She Wore a Wreath of Roses the Night That First We Met F veuve Isa Bowman, friend of Lewis Carroll, played title role in Alice In Wonderland adaption Isolde la Belle lissom nr Little Boy Blue buxom (orange blossom for weddding) s O Song of Songs: "Do you recall the night that we first met" s Sally in our Alley: "She is the darling of my heart" apricot chamber Da seng: bed (stuck) William Byrd: s "Shall I go walk the woods so wild, Wand"ring, wand'ring here & there, As I was once full sore beguiled, Alas! for love! I die with woe." daffodils daphne: kind of laurel, bay s (anon.) I sing of a maiden that is makeless: "He came al so stille" (Viconian cycle) Annotations to FW. R. McHugh. P. 556. ' . . . the old Sackersonian figure . . . is the . . . seagoing signal-sender who had throughout been telegraphically seducing Issy with spondees of the sort (" 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me") [556.21] FW, a Plot Summary. John Gordon. P. 255. " . . . 'Saintette Isabelle' [556.07] is sans tete . . . " A Reader's Guide to FW. W. T. Tindall. P. 287. If cited passages are longer than is considered appropriate for email or legal reasons, I apologize and would appreciate being so-informed. They fall within proper reviewing limits, though perhaps at the limits of such quantitatively undefined limits, due to the ephemeral nature of reviewing and copyright criteria for encouraging the arts, but email I don't know so well -- RS.
Subject: MAMA & DATA From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/3/98 8:26 AM Dear Terence, Having just read with fascinated appreciation your webpost RE/the ineluctable modality of the interface between "prime matter" -- which seems to include mass, energy, space, and time -- on one side with (the very point being we cannot really say) what might be on the other side, because the contact zone is itself immaterial . . . As you know, you've nailed up a big root question generating most other metaphysical inquiries from 1) chicken vs. egg (two entities referred to ad nauseum in the Wake) & 2) where do people come from, mommy, to 3) is life after death possible & 4) how independent is the mind from the brain. You have not trivialized this question with an answer, and the question indeed seems preloaded to stay a jump ahead of us always, so a thinking person gets a good bit of exercise from it with proper pacing. I certainly enjoyed the thought - provoking you generated. So I'll just proceed on with no plans for cohesion or development. When Jesus appears after death to his disciples within a locked room (last chapters of Luke & John), the New Testament takes care to show that Jesus is at that point a material being. His wounds can be felt, he breathes, and he eats. Yet he has seemingly passed through walls to be present . . . become material within the room from an immaterial state. The modern analogy might be if a character on our TV suddenly asked for something from the frig, and then managed to swallow whatever we brought! The analogy goes through interesting permutations when extended. At first we say the TV image is not real, so it can't really swallow what we bring. But the TV image is real, it is just not what it appears to be when we are in a state of "suspended disbelief" needed to watch the show. We were pretending the image was a living being in order to care about a story being shown. Really we understand that a cathode ray tube is being bombarded by an electron gun, and in that sense, the image is "real." As far as that goes, somewhere there is/was a real person captured on camera to make the image. An image itself is real, it's a real image -- as a dream is a real dream, so to that extent we cannot say dreams are not real. We may even speak of something so evanescent as the memory of a dream as real or false. But the false memory of the dream is also real. All fall within the jurisdiction of the primary matter to which you refer. If we hallucinate that the TV actually eats dinner with us, we are certainly having a real hallucination,and few will argue the point with us. But Modern Physics assures us of something which cannot be real: that the manifest universe arose from an unmanifest nothing, and Qabala can only add that it is always developing from an unmanifestation, while Hinduism has it that the Great Zero reappears cyclically. Only the Hubble Constant knows for sure. Now for my read on Vico: questions on things God does are not understandable by humans, but things humans do are. Since language is so human, it makes an excellent playing field for these insolubilities. We thereby substitute an understanding for an answer, if you will. My grandmother said you take what you can because the rest doesn't matter. "Matter" is cognate with the word known to all men: "ma." Ma appears in "mass," but goes beyond because we have agreed to lump space, time, and charge as forms of a primary matter. So matter is our mother. What we are seeking is our father, insofar as this linguistic metaphor goes. Ma is MAnifest. We appear from within her MAtrix. Dad is this secondary discovery, and as Joyce said, we never know for sure who our father really is. DNA testing's recent appearance only emphasizes that Joyce's statement should be recognized as metaphysical: the search for the "fifth essence" is not going to end at some future date. DNA tells who your MAterial father is. You still don't know where you really came from, because in the mythopoeic realm, we have two fathers just as did Ulysses (Laertes and Hermes). And Jesus has two fathers, one on earth and one in heaven. But the heavenly one created earth, and the earthly one now resides in heaven! Coincidentia oppisitorum! Along the same lines, our natural parents are created by our supernatural parents, Mother Earth and the All Father -- and sexists of all sexes note: it takes both to create either. We know the word "ma" mimics the action of nursing lips. Father words -- pa, da, ba -- tend toward more outward mouthing. We engage the breast with "ma," and disengage with "pa." Both are initially oral motions we associate with the nipple which for our poetic young minds is a synedoche for our mother. So pa starts off as a phase of ma. Joyce has lots of fun with this (" He had buckgoat paps on him . . ." FW 215.27-8, etc.), having noticed in his linguistic ramblings the tie in various languages between father words and nipple words, including the English oxymoron "pap." Thus the search for a true realm of the immaterial has become our desire to know who this pap might be. Please keep up the good work, and thank you for the several references to mine you've made. Yours, the Riverend Sterling. "The thing I like about art, there's no rules." Miles Davis.
Subject: Re: Deconstructing JJ From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/4/98 9:07 PM Dear Allen, Your report on the statement by Mr. Nilsen of the Arizona Republic is disturbing, and you deserve the gratitude of the list for alerting us to what appears a very cavalier attitude toward a family's right to responsible coverage. I do not know what Mr. Nilsen has heard or read, or what he perhaps thinks he has heard or read, but for my part I've neither heard nor read any such thing. My reading on the Joyces is hardly exhaustive, but substantial. A fairly close family member of my own was a sometime member of the 1930's Paris crowd, and in my younger days I overheard many garrulous sessions of gossip between him and his cohorts, both reminiscence and updating, and the Joyces were not completely spared. But never any hint of Mr. Nilsen's allegation was spoken, and this was not the sort of subject that would necessarily be excluded. The onus is clearly on Mr. Nilsen to retract his statement if he wishes to be considered a serious responsible writer, but for the rest of the world, we shall be content if we simply hear no more from him at all. He has already hoisted himself up by his own petard by refering to his target in one sentence as "recently accused," and then veering wildly in the next to speaking of a "final proof" which "may not be available." I should think not, given we have no initial proof. And in the same breath, Nilsen lets out that " . . . it is widely accepted as fact." How can any recent accusation be any such thing, short of course of tabloids or the TV talk show circuit. This is very bad form on Mr. Nilsen's part if he is professional, and plain poor writing if not. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempts the forging of a megamythology radiating out from his own life to everyone's. The Earwicker family are every family so they are the only family. Perhaps Mr. Nilsen or someone beneath whose influence he's fallen has mistaken an artist's literary creation for an autobiography? Impossible to do with a surrealistic montage? Not if you are familiar only with second hand scraps of information. The improprieties of Mr. Nilsen might be acceptable once from a freshman, but would be shocking in a sophomore. And of course I say that with love. Yours, the roving and Riverend Sterling.
Subject: Re: from a newcomer's messonge book From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/12/98 5:35 AM Dear Ramiro, Thank you for sending us the Borges sonnet "James Joyce" in Spanish and English. En un dia del hombre estan todos los dias . . . In the man's one day are all the days . . . A good intro. for Joyce to anyone, isn't it? Desde la noche veo/From the night I see One blind poet singing to another of Milton's chaos and eternal night amid the daily and Homeric struggle to rise once more above it. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING "The thing I like about art, there's no rules." Miles Davis.
Subject: 1941 Jan 13 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/12/98 6:56 PM An URL featuring the info that Joyce's death of 1941 Jan 13, New Style (Gregorian) falls on the last day of year, Old Style (Julian): www.cs.washington.edu/homes/dougz/perldate/date.pl?date=13+Jan+1941
Subject: Re: Cuir sioda ar ghabhar agus is gabhar i gconai e. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/14/98 8:22 PM Shae of CELTIC-L list sent the above Gaelic proverb with the pron. of "Kwir sheeoda air gowar agus iss gowar i goany ey (as in 'Hey')" and the rendering of "literally: put silk on a goat and it will always be a goat." I.e., still be one. RE: 75.12 -- can anyone give the meaning of the word "sioda?" -- is "sioda" cognate with "skeowsha?" -- and the meaning of "cuir?"
Subject: Cuir sioda - correction to page/line citation From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/14/98 10:37 PM As corrected: Cuir sioda ar ghabhar agus is gabhar i gconai e. Shae of CELTIC-L list sent the above Gaelic proverb with the pron. of "Kwir sheeoda air gowar agus iss gowar i goany ey (as in 'Hey')" and the rendering of "literally: put silk on a goat and it will always be a goat." I.e., still be one. RE: 215.12 -- can anyone give the meaning of the word "sioda?" -- is "sioda" cognate with "skeowsha?" -- and the meaning of "cuir?" I.e., 215.12, not 75.12, has our cuir skeowsha. (I'm still just a lurker on CELTIC-L) -- & it's Joyce.
Subject: Re: cogito ergo somebody?????????? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/16/98 11:27 PM Dear Mr. Spicer, P. 304., lines 27 & 31 of Finnegans Wake and McHugh's Annotations (I don't do well on these line counts -- they should get you close): line 27 refers to cogito ergo sum's creator, Rene Descartes (as you know) by the English trans. of his last name: "of the cards"; line 31 contains: "cog it out, here goes a sum" I recorded some of Cage's Finnegans Wake of the radio once, but it has yet to grab me. The Wake seemed to form snippets of backdrop to some rather aleatoric noise music but I've no doubt just Cage fans running to the racks . . .
Subject: cog it out, here goes some From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/17/98 12:07 AM Dear Mr. Spicer, of course my post should have read OFF the radio, & just SENT Cage fans . . . I like your "reading the wake . . . is able to bring one into a newer unrealized sense of being . . . too simple to be profound" (sorry about the ellipses . . . I realize I've crunched two of your thoughts into one) Eric McLuhan spoke on this at a panel discussion on FW last fall, stating that reading a wakean paragraph (he didn't mention Peter Paragraph specifically ((mid p. 438))) can add to your appreciation of talk overheard in a cafe, the puns we make by will or by sigmund, the funny bursts of stately cliches used by newspapers and public speakers, and such, and that FW, according to its namesake song, is made to be lots of fun. Speaking of, do you know Ambrose Bierce's cogito cogito ergo cogito sum? (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
Subject: Finnegans Wake Concordex From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/19/98 2:46 AM I've just been going to the crazypage concordance for its expanding contexts and big print, and then to Bob Williams' son's NEWER concordance for the right pages and the chance to crosslink with Ulysses if wanted. If you don't have that hyperlink, it should be in my latest posting on FWRead, "And now live from the Whiteharse." I should acknowledge your request for my snailmail on some previous FW math homework, but once I find such, where should I mail it? And thanks for asking. RS.
Subject: Re: cog it out, here goes some From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/19/98 3:01 AM Dear Mr Spicer, The Roaratorio (thanks Judith Harrington for the name) I recorded off a PBS station was broadcast from a preexistent recording which I THINK was from the BBC. Someone will know more, but if I find my cassette, I'll listen to see if there's any intro info with or on it. RS.
Subject: Roaratorio (reprint of 12/02/97 post) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/19/98 6:10 AM Dear Mr. Spicer, Try the hyperlink in the posting below. Then scroll down to the Cage link. You can eventually scroll and link through quite a bit on Roaratorio, and that includes info on a 2 CD recording including other relevant Cageiana: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx check out my John Cage/Joyce page on The Brazen Head: www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/joyce/joyce.music.html There are several Joyce/music links there, one to Cage. It has some information on Cage's work, liner notes to ROARATORIO, and links to Cage sites. Take care! --Allen Ruch xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: was it you, glazy cheeks? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/19/98 10:44 PM Is anyone familiar with the Anna Livia Executive Lounge at the airport in Dublin? It came up on an Irish search engine, along with the website of a public radio station named for that same Lady of the River which had a button you could click on stating: "Tell me about Anna Livia."
Subject: still breathing From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/20/98 3:40 AM -----Original Message----- From: James Collins ... Date: Monday, January 19, 1998 8:34 PM About the thunderworld: something there for the PEA and PEH (Pa/Da)association? PEH operates the location of Tarot Key 16, The Tower, struck by lightning(roasted martellows). "Grace and Sin, or Beauty and Ugliness, are the pair of opposites attributed by Qabalists to the letter PEH, because the issues of life, directed by human speech, result in one or the other. Sin, or missing the mark (sign of community), results in maladjustment and ugliness (lack of decorum?) Hitting the mark (victim/sign) in right(eous) action results in the manefestation of beauty(consensus/style/taste)."P. Case (The Riverend footnotes): Dear Shamus, The toughlove administered by Grandfather Dillon has payed off for us. The list slueth has ID'd the opening of Ulysses as replicating one of the 22 Major Arcana, that is, a card from the core deck of the Tarot. The Tower portrays a couple being violently thrown from something very like the Martello Tower from which Stephen is driven. We must also give some credit to the finest of teachers, Mr Paul Foster Case, whose Understanding the Tarot is quoted. Anyone who acquires this, and possibly Case's Book of Tokens along with Understanding the Tarot, will find the singlemost clear, thorough, and sane approach to the field, and a key specifically into the ordination of character development arrived at by the Order of the Golden Dawn, that is the Yeats crowd and so on. A Joycean goldmine. And more!
Subject: Re: Anna Livia Executive Lounge From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/20/98 7:18 PM Dear Arye, For me, this would depend on whether I can get in without the Priority Pass. I imagine it's meant to reflect well on Mr. Joyce, in his home town and all that. Much thanks and such detail! -----Original Message----- From: list . Arye Kendi, Jerusalem ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Tuesday, January 20, 1998 9:58 AM Subject: Re: Anna Livia Executive Lounge > According to my Priority Pass Lounge Directory the Anna Livia > Executive Lounge is at Dublin International on the 2nd floor of > Boarding Area B. It's open daily form 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed > on Dec. 25. Alcoholic drinks are limited to two per person. > > I hope this vital piece of information will greatly enhance the > Wake research. >
Subject: P. 75.08 Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! HellOOO . . . From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/20/98 11:14 PM Question posed by Mikio I believe to be: Are we meant to hear an allusion to Exodus 3:14 in the Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! of 75.08? The tie is that Zijn appears in the Dutch Bible in Exodus 3:14 when Moses asks for God's name, and is told "Ik zijn" for "I am" in the phrase known best in English as I AM THAT I AM. We have from Professor Gordon that zijnzijn can if nothing more (unlikely in FW) be the Earwickers' doorbell. Here's all I can come up with for my side of it. 1. The Eerdmans Bible Dict. Rev. Ed. A. C. Myers. 1987. (Bijbelse Encyclopedie. Ed. W. H. Gispen, Netherlands, 1975). P. 511. "I AM WHO I AM (Heb. 'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh) An expression used to explain Yaweh, the covenant name of the God of Israel, given to Moses when he encountered the burning bush (Ex. 3:14). It is also rendered "I will be what I will be" or perhaps correctly, 'I create what(ever) I create.' See YAWEH." Well . . . actually in the Hebrew text, it isn't given out to be YAWEH in the burning bush, but the elohim, the mysterious goddessmen, but we're advised to not be overly literal about that . . . 'ehyeh or 'eheye, the doubling word, is I AM, the Hebrew connoting pronoun and verb both. 'asher is a particle with relative pronoun functions, with some of the causative as well, just as "that" in the English "He drank THAT he might live." The verb is one of being, but also of becoming. So boom, a thousand camels enter the courtyard. "I AM WHO I BECOME," "I BECOME SO THAT I MAY BE," "I AM WHAT COMES TO PASS," no one knows how best to translate it, though the mood seems aggressively passive. In case Moshe thinks God doesn't mean I AM as a name, the Elohim toss(es) it in once more in Ex. 3:14. "Tell them I AM sent you." And God also speaks the name of Moses twice in a row when they first meet in 3:4: " . . . God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses." Zijnzijn seems to only need the Dutch context to be God, and does not in fact seem to have any reinforcing from Latin or Hebrew texts beyond they all agree in some way to double the verb. The pronoun "I" of I AM THAT I AM" is not an independent word in the Hebrew text, but the verbs are separated by a relative particle for THAT. In Latin, the Vulgate uses the pronoun before the first verb, and not the second (ego sum qui sum). In English and Dutch, both verb and pronoun double. IF Joyce had burning bush's name in mind at 75.08, then there would be resonance with the introductory motif of the Nile and what some of us perceive as birthing things through the allusion to Moshe/Moses, whose name means "pulled up" (out of the water by the Pharoah's daughter). The chamermissies thence would be the ladies-in-waiting with Pharoah's daughter. The infant Moses was placed in a floating coffin like someone is (I read) on page 76. (Joyce by the way came very near to having his remains thrown in whatever lake is at Zurich due to a policy at his cemetery.) The little floating baby besieged bedreamt, and protected by his innocence, knew not the dreadful watchers who were the true treacherous waters in his little boat's wake, and if this is true, then the lion who is remembering all this from from afar in the future is Moses. We know the lion has to be at least a little of Leopold Bloom, the castrated king of the jungle, and Moses and Leopold take turns with Joyce playing various essences of Judaica and Dublin. A lion remembering nenuphars is a Leo remembering Blooms is Moses remembering his resting place among the lilies and reeds and bare legs of youth where he came to shore just so niceums and Zeepyzoepy that day (what luck!) at the palace ladies' favorite hole when . . .well, wouldn't you know it, that damned doorbell! And I was having such a swell dream in the old days. Yes, I'm . . . It's WHO? WHO? I'm sorry, you'll have to repeat that. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING "Holy Scamander, I sar it again! . . . Is that the Poolbeg flasher"
Subject: Fw: Bob's son's new concordance of contrarities From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/21/98 3:19 AM -----Original Message----- From: Riverend Sterling To: Allen Mahan ...; FW Read Listserv <FWREAD@lists.colorado.edu> Date: Tuesday, January 20, 1998 11:58 PM Subject: Bob's son's new concordance of contrarities > -----Original Message----- > From: Riverend Sterling > To: FW READ MAIL <fwread@lists.colorado.edu> > Date: Sunday, January 18, 1998 9:57 PM > Subject: And now live from the Whiteharse . . . > > > This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan > http://qinpalace.com/cgi-local/search.cgi > thanks to: Bob Williams' son). > > But also: > > In his middle-age, the angry younger god we heard shouting his selfhood from > some magical brushfire has settled for installing a doorbell. > > YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, > THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING > > "Things are more the way they are now than they have ever been before." > President Eisenhower. > > >
Subject: JAAJ & Qabala From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/23/98 8:38 PM George Russell (AE) is considered Joyce's main Golden Dawn contact, and if I recall right, it was Joyce's "transmutation" of Russell's invitation to join the Order that launched Joyce's career as a creative writer in that Joyce is held to have said he would not be interested in joining but asked Russell instead to publish Joyce's short stories in Russell's paper, The Irish Homestead, and the rest is history. When we contemplate that even Maude Gonne was coerced to join the Order of the Golden Dawn, we realize how adept was Joyce at joining nothing . . . making all the more remarkable his early leadership of the Sodality of Mary. Among other influential names associated with Golden Dawn are Charles Williams, whose display of ritual recorded by a coed are perhaps worth a look amongst his biographia; Dion Fortune, a pioneer in the giant New Age publishing industry; and Bram Stoker whose Celtic gift for the word put Dracula where he is today. Annie Besant (whose name to the Joyce brothers, Any Bee's Aunt, is, I believe, cited by Stanislaus as among first of the Joycean portmanteau words), while not a Dawner, must be counted among the same sort of influences on Joyce's concepts of the Celto-Qabala, and the rejection by the young Krishnamurti of the leadership of the Order of the Star of East, founded by Besant and Leadbeater as the vehicle by which Krishnamurti would assume the Messiahship of a new and improved earth, made a favorable impression on the bohemian intelligentsia of Europe in the late 20's. Jiddu Krishnamurti is likely the source of the ref on 472.15 to "Our Chris-na-murti!" McHugh seems to cite another Krishnamurti, it's a generic name after all, but still, to most people there is one certain Elvis above all others, and ditto for Krishnamurti, though this may have been less the case during the writing of the Wake. I doubt it, though. The rejection by its sought-for-leader of a readymade state-of-the- art worldwide cult was, is, and should be quite newsworthy . . . and apt to get a favourable nod from an out-of-the-closet outsider as our James Joyce -- and whoever is being referred to on 472 is certainly getting an unusual amount of unmitigated praise by Wakean terms. And several refs which follow on 472 (lucerne;cantons) bring to mind that, also as with Joyce, Krishnamurti lived off and on in Switzerland. That is speculation, but a general and significant impact on Joyce by the schools spawned by Madame Blavatsky through her adherents, Besant and Yeats, is not; -- nor should our eyebrows go too far past where we can pull them back down quickly. It's easy to portray the teachings of their orders as a lastgasp backlash against the Michelson-Morley experiment, nocturnal fairygold which will turn to floorsweepings in daylight, that is until we remember that W. B. Yeats and Annie Besant were groundfloor executives in the administrations of two new revolutionary modern nations, Ireland and India. Then we must ask what your and my oh-so- sane political leaders have recently accomplished for us (or rather let's not and say we did). YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING "I am offering you the sun, and you ask me for a candle." Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Subject: "cute synchronicity of pagination" From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/25/98 4:50 AM J. W. Pickett continues placing very cogent dishes upon our table. In response especially to his latest posting: the Egyptians had a golden sentence, "Anyone who has enough leisure may become wise." Geniuses as diverse as Descartes and John Lennon have reiterated this (" . . . if Newton hadn't been daydreaming under the apple tree, he never would have discovered gravity" JL). As wierd as the oeuvre of Theosophy and its offshoots appears, the stated goal is simply to create a more open climate for research into reality in the idealistic hope that a wider brotherhood of man will result. If a spawn within its wake is found to include mumbo-jumbo cults run by perverts and egomaniacs, well, what else is new. The true understanding of Original Sin, that is, that we are born into a world in which there is already so much gone wrong that we have no choice but to be less than perfect ourselves, gives us some acceptance of the inevitability that any act of creation will result in both good and bad repercussions. A Constitutional Democracy with A Free Press are wonderful concepts, but people are people, and sooner or later you wind up with months of communal conciousness devoted to the President's genitalia, and you are begging for a Ricorso (didn't Vico on the eve of the worldwide people's revolution in whose aftermath we find ourselves warn that Democracy would lead to each person wanting the life of a king, and that the end result would be a society which revolved around constant litigation as each little mini-dictator sued every other little mini-dictator to secure his own particular divine rights?). Of course, after awhile running about on all fours searching for roots and berries is tiresome, so we accept the rule of angry gods, and start lobbying for reform within that context . . . but back to the subject I hadn't got to yet. The esoterotica of Qabala is largely discoverable on one's own, because it revolves around logical conclusions based on objective analyses of simple data described in highly imaginative imagery. Joyce had early exposure to Jesuitical dialectics, followed by academic training in his chosen field of linguistics, and the native gift for obsessive memory required of the traditional Irish poet- priests called the Fili, but above all, a pregnant imagination. So given a teaspoonful of hints, he was able to make a rather full- bodied cup of Celto-Qabala. And the young Mr. Joyce spent a great deal more time in libraries than we see Stephen Dedalus doing. The thought that either would seek initiation into mysteries by bowing down and kissing any modern Knights of the Templar's anything is so beyond the pale as to make our ho heads haul. Just as Joyce was too Catholic to attend church, he was far too Celto-Qabalistic to join the Golden Dawn. The mind which Qabala attempts to develop is the opposite of anything we think of as cultistic (and it is time to define our Qabala as that derived from the Sephardic tradition of medieval Spain stemming from dialectics among Jews, Islamic Moors, and Christians regarding documents of intellectual hermeneutics stemming from the Sefer Yetzirah -- there is cross-pollination with Hasidic Qabala, but that is a very exclusively Jewish Qabala, and it would be disrespectful to confuse Hasidism and its goal of becoming ever more Jewish, with Sephardic-based Qabalism, which is relatively speculative, intellectual, and ecumenic), and there is forinstance a Qabalism that a prayer should always be improvisitorial and unique in its wording, and never a rote ritualism (but a true Qabalist will at this point go "Really? Is that true? Why? Where does that lead? What else is written in this regard?" And the Riverend tries not to leave home without his walletsize portrait of Mary, on the back of which the imprimatur has allowed the handy invocation I give you verbatim as "Hail Mary, etc."). To the chase: all the Solomon rigamarole relates to formulae for the construction of the Temple. Solomon actually hired the job out to an Irish construction contractor named Hiram. At that time the Irish were one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the only one to migrate from one tribal area to another, and that is the Dan. The Dan had been in Egypt for some time doing pyramid work (that's right, hod-carrying!) and had gotten friendly there with the Jews, who said come up and see us sometime. That is why the Dan are valued but not fully trusted by the other tribes, and seen moving from the southwest to the northeast (Jor-dan = flowing down from the Danic people's area). The Dan then moved to Greece (the Danae) but never quite established a permanent foothold, although they left a great folk-hero, that clever outsider Odysseus. Then they tried Spain for awhile (the Celto-Iberians), but were still treated as interlopers. Finally they found this remote island of Eire, and after a series of rebuffs by the Firbolgs, Formorians, or whoever was previously indigenous, settled where history eventually finds them. Conventional academia consider the above scenario as pure poppycock invented by the Irish to soothe their inferiority complex for not having a real classical history due to their bad taste in not being enslaved by the Romans. That does not lower the myth's value for Joyceans or Viconians. Vico would have it that a myth, being invented by humans, might even tell us more than the comparitively random events of history. As for Joyce, he based much of Ulysses around the myth. Leopold Bloom, Jewish; Stephen Dedalus, Greek; Marion Bloom, Spanish -- these are human creations chosen for a specific purpose by their creator to delineate the traditional history of the pre-Eire Irish. And behind all of them, the dreams of Egypt referred to on p. 75 of the Wake. For all of Qabalism's frightening panoply of mystical symbology, it essentially devolves to that source of so much intelligence, arrested development. In first grade, when Mrs. Kay taught us that the first letter of the alphabet is "A," by the time she got to "B," the little proto-Qabalists in the class were lost in internal (if they were smart) dialectics. Why is "A" first? Why does "A" look the way it does? Why is it called "A?" Where did "A" come from? And so on. You remember that aggravating little twerp in row 2. It was probably you. If you are still making a really concerted effort to master the ABC's in your forties, you qualify to be a Qabalist. The rest of us aren't reading this anyway, so let us proceed with gay, straight, and even celibate abandon. In describing the specs for the Temple of Solomon, Kings I gives somewhere the most primitive equation for pi, which is three over one. But around the same time as the alphabet was invented, and it appears out of nowhere so does seem an invention by societal scum of the Levant being worked in mountain mines of Sinai and the Jordan, followers of the old goddess Ela who devised a way for anyone to learn quickly to write without being a highly trained professional scribe, around this same time the first recording of the two basic irrational constants appears. We refer to pi as 22 over 7 (3.14) (no, FWRead listers, not Exodus 3.14, just 3.14), and the square root of two as 10 over 7 (1.4). If you don't have some way to deal with these two constants, you can't understand the math relating curves to straight lines, and you're going to have a lot of trouble converting Solomon's blueprints into a huge finished Temple for the Ages. (Didn't Joyce write to Miss Weaver that in writing FW, he was trying to design a square wheel? At any rate, the squaring of the circle is a root problem of esoteric and exoteric math history . . . even Einstein had to approach curves and lines separately, hence the General versus the Specialized Theory of Relativity). OK, I had to walk my dogs. We were . . . I got it, the answer to the great unasked question. Why are there 22 letters in the original NW (northwestern) Semitic alphabet? First, let's state why it's being referred to here as such. We know the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are of 22 letters, if we counts groups of variants as units. But they derive from an older root alphabet used by the Caananites and Phoenicians, considered hill and coast branches of one people, and from them it spread into its various forms of Aramaic, Moabitic, and eventually Hebraic characters . . . but basically the NW Semitic alphabet of 22 letters has changed remarkably little since its overnight debut some 3600+ years back. So we exchange Hebrew and NW Semitic and Phoenician more loosely than we perhaps should in speaking of the alphabet, and shall continue so doing. All have 22 letters, and even the Roman/English mix of majuscule and miniscule you are looking at is amazingly close to the original alphabet. No change in the history of writing compares to the watershed between before/after the first appearance of the 22 original phonetic ikons. Why 22? Because the alphabet did not evolve, it was invented. It is a work of art by someone. Part of that artist or artists' concept was to weave from the symbols a portmanteau of significances showing a depth of mastery. 22 was chosen for the number of characters because 22 is the number for pi, the division of a circumference by its diameter. The first character, 'alef (our current "A" inverted) is a stylized head of a bovine creature we know, but again, why? One of the circles, the main circle, alluded to by having 22 letters, is the Grand Circle, the Platonic Year, i.e., the Precession of Equinoxes. If this sounds wildly esoteric to us, its because we've been off the farm too long. It's astronomy, not astrology. The earth has wobbles. One wobble causes the north pole to point to various parts of the sky in a circular description of a 26,000 year (approximately) period. Therefore the stars which WE see rising at 21 March 1998, while virtually identical to what rises in '97 or '99, are not the stars which rise 21 March several thousand years before or after. BUT people 26,000 years ago saw (approximately) the same stars on the same day's same hour as us, and so will whoever's looking 26,0000 years in the future. No one knew this until the invention of writing, because it requires hundreds of years of accurate recording of nightsky observation to realize it's not always the same -- not to mention figuring out that it rhythmically and regularly returns to being (more or less) the same. When we first got wind of this precession, the spring equinox occurred when the sun was against the stars of the constellation Taurus, the Bull. The figure we know as "A" is a schematic line representation of the path of the ecliptic, the sun's annual path against the background of the stars, as it crosses the prominent "V"-shaped asterism which forms the Bull's head (remember, you have to turn our modern "A" upside-down, the only basic difference in the 3600+ years history of the letter). You in the back with your hand up, of course you may be excused for a minute. It's only Email. Back? Good. Your trust is gratifying, and I shall be faithful. Let's make a couple of big breakouts. First, counters on the table, please. 1) "alphabet" is Greek/ English/Roman from the Hebrew 'alef-beth; 2) "beth" is house, dwelling -- 'alef is bovine creature, e.g. bull (usually given in Hebrew in the plural form 'elef, also thence herd, community, myriad); 3) the alphabet begins with "A" to reflect a time when the year began with the sun in Taurus, the Bull; 4) the shape of 'alef is our current "A" upside down, showing the "V" of the central asterism (stargroup) in Taurus intersected by an imaginary line representing the intersection of the path of the sun (ecliptic) through Taurus which once (and will again) denote the Spring Equinox (Nora Joyce's birthday); 5) the said intersecting lines of the Hydra-Taurean "V" and the ecliptic form a triangle still existing to this day in the figure "A," upside down or not, along with the subtending extensions which are to us the character's "legs" but to the ancients were it's horns; 6) in modern astronomical nomenclature, stars are named by assigning a Greek letter (until they run out) before a three letter abbreviation of the relevant constellation, and most often the letter alpha is assigned to the lucida (brightest star), so that the lucida of Taurus, a magnificent red star called Aldeberan said to be the bull's eye as it is in the triangle of the head, is (pretend the next letter is Greek miniscule) "a Tau," that is "alpha Taurus"; so that in the unlikely event some poor fool can both discover this and hold it together in the mind while shivering halfdrunk at graveyardthirty of a Dublin night, why that person could combine all the above points linking the constellation Taurus with the origin of the alphabet and think: 7) (the envelope please), " . . . interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till after a myriad of metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus." Ulysses. 14.1107-9. And all this time we thought that referred to the logo for Bass Ale. (It does). Well, it goes on for river, but let's do a wrap on pi and be on. A list member who I hope will step forward and be credited (I am roving from computer to computer and just learning how to save to floppy) recently gave us the great insight that somehow (by coincidence or plan, equally amazing) the pagination in the Wake ends with page 628, which is RAD in trigonometry(?), that is, a circle's circumference divided by its radius (RAD being the chiclets-key symbol on a calculator for radians) which is two times pi (2 x pi x r = circumf.)(but rads are often thought of mainly in terms of the angle subtended by a length of circumference equal to the radius -- one more step and the ice gives way for the Riverend). (Also we are viewing both pi and RAD without the decimal point). Anyhoo, we have it from a source other than I that the number of pages in the Wake, 628, is 2 times pi. Therefore the Riverend (back now on the shore where his footing is more steady) points out that Finnegans Wake is Dublin' Pie! (Well, why didn't he just come out and say so to begin with.) To cap off, let's return to Joyce's profound jocularity to Harriet Shaw Weaver that in Finnegans Wake he would attempt to design a square wheel. The classical problem was to describe a circle and a square which contained exactly equal areas. No math equation yet devised can do it, because it plays off two irrational numbers against each other, pi (the relation of a circle's circumference with a line drawn from one edge to another through the center) and the square root of two (being the relation of the side of a square with a line drawn from one corner to the kitty-corner). It doesn't help that actually we can't express the area of a circle algebraically to begin with, because pi has no numerical coefficient . . . just a Greek letter -- at least the square root of 2 has the 2. The last time I looked (1992) the computers had extended the decimal places in pi into the billions without finding a clue to any pattern indicating anything. All we can do is tell which values are not pi, and whether they are too big or too small. Joyce, of course, was referring to literature not math. The problem then becomes: can you combine the linearality of standard narration (the path of words from "once upon a time" to "they lived happily ever after") with the spherical ambience of life as it is experienced. Can an author on 314 leaves of paper merge storytime with dreamtime, where we generally have little in the way of openings and endings, but simply find ourselves in various middles which keep fading into one another. Well?
Subject: to error From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/25/98 5:26 AM It's like this, see. I cursored up to hit "save," but Outlook Express in its infinite wisdom has placed "save" one centimeter above "send." I shot over to "close," and was asked if I wanted to send mail stuck in "Outbox," and I swear I clicked "No," but when I returned to Outlook, the posting whose subject is "cute synchronicity of pagination" was listed as "sent." Now I can pretend it would have been much shorter and correctly formatted, and not had a new number written "26,0000." You will hear no more until Word 97 is learned.
Subject: ooooooOOOOOOooooo From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/25/98 4:43 PM Perhaps Mr. Joyce's policy on ghosts was not too different from that explained in my Catholic Dictionary. "Nothing in the Church's official doctrine precludes the existence of ghosts." Phew, glad we got that straightened out. Or James Baldwin's "To the extent that I am an adult, I do not believe in ghosts; to the extent that I am a child, of course I believe in them." Personally, I'm not going to deny the existence of something I've never even seen.
Subject: Predicate. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/25/98 7:28 PM List to the Right, List to the Left, Yoko Ono (from Grapefruit via memory), "Have some friends over. Bring out your dirty laundry and show each piece, explaining how it became soiled." The whole cell wall structure of my Emailia has collapsed. "My sights are swimming thicker on me . . . I sow home slowly now." As far as I can tell is not very far, but what I get is that parts of the posting labeled "cute synchronicity of pagination" made it to and through the list server, while other fragments are stuck in my hard-drive's 0001101010110. Sorry. Here's the giant embarrassing floppy version: The Egyptians had a golden sentence, "Anyone who has enough leisure may become wise." Geniuses as diverse as Descartes and John Lennon have reiterated this (" . . . if Newton hadn't been daydreaming under the apple tree, he never would have discovered gravity" JL). As wierd as the oeuvre of Theosophy and its offshoots appears, the stated goal is simply to create a more open climate for research into reality in the idealistic hope that a wider brotherhood of man will result. If a spawn within its wake is found to include mumbo-jumbo cults run by perverts and egomaniacs, well, what else is new. The true understanding of Original Sin, that is, that we are born into a world in which there is already so much gone wrong that we have no choice but to be less than perfect ourselves, gives us some acceptance of the inevitability that any act of creation will result in both good and bad repercussions. A Constitutional Democracy with A Free Press are wonderful concepts, but people are people, and sooner or later you wind up with months of communal conciousness devoted to the President's genitalia, and you are begging for a Ricorso (didn't Vico on the eve of the worldwide people's revolution in whose aftermath we find ourselves warn that Democracy would lead to each person wanting the life of a king, and that the end result would be a society which revolved around constant litigation as each little mini-dictator sued every other little mini-dictator to secure his own particular divine rights?). Of course, after awhile running about on all fours searching for roots and berries is tiresome, so we accept the rule of angry gods, and start lobbying for reform within that context . . . but back to the subject I hadn't got to yet. The esoterotica of Qabala is largely discoverable on one's own, because it revolves around logical conclusions based on objective analyses of simple data described in highly imaginative imagery. Joyce had early exposure to Jesuitical dialectics, followed by academic training in his chosen field of linguistics, and the native gift for obsessive memory required of the traditional Irish poet- priests called the Fili, but above all, a pregnant imagination. So given a teaspoonful of hints, he was able to make a rather full- bodied cup of Celto-Qabala. And the young Mr. Joyce spent a great deal more time in libraries than we see Stephen Dedalus doing. The thought that either would seek initiation into mysteries by bowing down and kissing any modern Knights of the Templar's anything is so beyond the pale as to make our ho heads haul. Just as Joyce was too Catholic to attend church, he was far too Celto-Qabalistic to join the Golden Dawn. The mind which Qabala attempts to develop is the opposite of anything we think of as cultistic (and it is time to define our Qabala as that derived from the Sephardic tradition of medieval Spain stemming from dialectics among Jews, Islamic Moors, and Christians regarding documents of intellectual hermeneutics stemming from the Sefer Yetzirah -- there is cross-pollination with Hasidic Qabala, but that is a very exclusively Jewish Qabala, and it would be disrespectful to confuse Hasidism and its goal of becoming ever more Jewish, with Sephardic-based Qabalism, which is relatively speculative, intellectual, and ecumenic), and there is forinstance a Qabalism that a prayer should always be improvisitorial and unique in its wording, and never a rote ritualism (but a true Qabalist will at this point go "Really? Is that true? Why? Where does that lead? What else is written in this regard?" And the Riverend tries not to leave home without his walletsize portrait of Mary, on the back of which the imprimatur has allowed the handy invocation I give you verbatim as "Hail Mary, etc."). To the chase: all the Solomon rigamarole relates to formulae for the construction of the Temple. Solomon actually hired the job out to an Irish construction contractor named Hiram. At that time the Irish were one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the only one to migrate from one tribal area to another, and that is the Dan. The Dan had been in Egypt for some time doing pyramid work (that's right, hod-carrying!) and had gotten friendly there with the Jews, who said come up and see us sometime. That is why the Dan are valued but not fully trusted by the other tribes, and seen moving from the southwest to the northeast (Jor-dan = flowing down from the Danic people's area). The Dan then moved to Greece (the Danae) but never quite established a permanent foothold, although they left a great folk-hero, that clever outsider Odysseus. Then they tried Spain for awhile (the Celto-Iberians), but were still treated as interlopers. Finally they found this remote island of Eire, and after a series of rebuffs by the Firbolgs, Formorians, or whoever was previously indigenous, settled where history eventually finds them. Conventional academia consider the above scenario as pure poppycock invented by the Irish to soothe their inferiority complex for not having a real classical history due to their bad taste in not being enslaved by the Romans. That does not lower the myth's value for Joyceans or Viconians. Vico would have it that a myth, being invented by humans, might even tell us more than the comparitively random events of history. As for Joyce, he based much of Ulysses around the myth. Leopold Bloom, Jewish; Stephen Dedalus, Greek; Marion Bloom, Spanish -- these are human creations chosen for a specific purpose by their creator to delineate the traditional history of the pre-Eire Irish. And behind all of them, the dreams of Egypt referred to on p. 75 of the Wake. For all of Qabalism's frightening panoply of mystical symbology, it essentially devolves to that source of so much intelligence, arrested development. In first grade, when Mrs. Kay taught us that the first letter of the alphabet is "A," by the time she got to "B," the little proto-Qabalists in the class were lost in internal (if they were smart) dialectics. Why is "A" first? Why does "A" look the way it does? Why is it called "A?" Where did "A" come from? And so on. You remember that aggravating little twerp in row 2. It was probably you. If you are still making a really concerted effort to master the ABC's in your forties, you qualify to be a Qabalist. The rest aren't reading this anyway. In describing the specs for the Temple of Solomon, Kings I gives somewhere the most primitive equation for pi, which is three over one. But around the same time as the alphabet was invented, and it appears out of nowhere so does seem an invention by societal scum of the Levant being worked in mountain mines of Sinai and the Jordan, followers of the old goddess Ela who devised a way for anyone to learn quickly to write without being a highly trained professional scribe -- around this same time the first recording of the two basic irrational constants appears. We mean here pi as 22 over 7 (3.14) and the square root of two as 10 over 7 (1.4). If you don't have some way to deal with these two constants, you can't understand the math relating curves to straight lines, and you're going to have a lot of trouble converting Solomon's blueprints into a huge finished Temple for the Ages. (Didn't Joyce write to Miss Weaver that in writing FW, he was trying to design a square wheel? At any rate, the squaring of the circle is a root problem of esoteric and exoteric math history . . . even Einstein had to approach curves and lines separately, hence the General versus the Specialized Theory of Relativity). OK, I had to walk my dogs. We were . . . I got it, the answer to the great unasked question. Why are there 22 letters in the original NW (northwestern) Semitic alphabet? First, let's state why it's being referred to here as such. We know the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are of 22 letters, if we count groups of variants as units. But they derive from an older root alphabet used by the Caananites and Phoenicians, considered hill and coast branches of one people, and from them it spread into its various forms of Aramaic, Moabitic, and eventually Hebraic characters . . . but basically the NW Semitic alphabet of 22 letters has changed remarkably little since its overnight debut some 3600+ years back. So we exchange Hebrew and NW Semitic and Phoenician more loosely than we perhaps should in speaking of the alphabet, and shall continue so doing. All have 22 letters, and even the Roman/English mix of majuscule and miniscule you are looking at is amazingly close to the original alphabet. No change in the history of writing compares to the watershed between before/after the first appearance of the 22 original phonetic ikons. Why 22? Because the alphabet did not evolve, it was invented. It is a work of art by someone. Part of that artist or artists' concept was to weave from the symbols a portmanteau of significances showing a depth of mastery. 22 was chosen for the number of characters because 22 is the number for pi, the division of a circumference by its diameter. The first character, 'alef (our current "A" inverted) is a stylized head of a bovine creature we know, but again, why? One of the circles, the main circle, alluded to by having 22 letters, is the Grand Circle, the Platonic Year, i.e., the Precession of Equinoxes. If this sounds wildly esoteric to us, it's because we've been off the farm too long. It's astronomy, not astrology. The earth has wobbles. One wobble causes the north pole to point to various parts of the sky in a circular description of a 26,000 year (approximately) period. Therefore the stars which WE see rising at 21 March 1998, while virtually identical to what rises in '97 or '99, are not the stars which rise 21 March several thousand years before or after. BUT people 26,000 years ago saw (approximately) the same stars on the same day's same hour as us, and so will whoever's looking 26,000 years in the future. No one knew this until the invention of writing, because it requires hundreds of years of accurate recording of nightsky observation to realize it's not always the same -- not to mention figuring out that it rhythmically and regularly returns to being (more or less) the same. When we first got wind of this precession, the spring equinox occurred when the sun was against the stars of the constellation Taurus, the Bull. The figure we know as "A" is a schematic line representation of the path of the ecliptic, the sun's annual path against the background of the stars, as it crosses the prominent "V"-shaped asterism which forms the Bull's head (remember, you have to turn our modern "A" upside-down, the only basic difference in the 3600+ years history of the letter). You in the back with your hand up, of course you may be excused for a minute. It's only Email. Back? Good. Your trust is gratifying, and I shall be faithful. Let's make a couple of big breakouts. First, counters on the table, please. 1) "alphabet" is Greek/ English/Roman from the Hebrew 'alef-beth; 2) "beth" is house, dwelling -- 'alef is bovine creature, e.g. bull (usually given in Hebrew in the plural form 'elef, also thence herd, community, myriad); 3) the alphabet begins with "A" to reflect a time when the year began with the sun in Taurus, the Bull; 4) the shape of 'alef is our current "A" upside down, showing the "V" of the central asterism (stargroup) in Taurus intersected by an imaginary line representing the intersection of the path of the sun (ecliptic) through Taurus which once did (and will again) denote the Spring Equinox (Nora Joyce's birthday); 5) the said intersecting lines of the Hydra-Taurean "V" and the ecliptic form a triangle still existing to this day in the figure "A," upside down or not, along with the subtending extensions which are to us the character's "legs" but to the ancients were it's horns; 6) in modern astronomical nomenclature, stars are named by assigning a Greek letter (until they run out) before a three letter abbreviation of the relevant constellation, and most often the letter alpha is assigned to the lucida (brightest star), so that the lucida of Taurus (a magnificent red star called Aldeberan said to be the bull's eye as it is in the triangle of the head) is (pretend the next letter is Greek miniscule) "a Tau," that is "alpha Taurus"; so that in the unlikely event some poor fool can both discover this and hold it together in the mind while shivering halfdrunk at graveyardthirty of a Dublin night, why that person could combine all the above points linking the constellation Taurus with the origin of the alphabet and think: 7) (the envelope please), " . . . interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till after a myriad of metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus." Ulysses. 14.1107-9. And all this time we thought that referred to the logo for Bass Ale. (It does). Well, it goes on for river, but let's do a wrap on pi and be on. A list member who I hope will step forward and be credited (I am roving from computer to computer and just learning how to save to floppy) recently gave us the great insight that somehow (by coincidence or plan, equally amazing) the pagination in the Wake ends with page 628, which is RAD in trigonometry, that is, a circle's circumference divided by its radius (RAD being the chiclets-key symbol on a calculator for radians) which is two times pi (2 x pi x r = circumf.) (but rads are often thought of mainly in terms of the angle subtended by a length of circumference equal to the radius -- one more step and the ice gives way for the Riverend). (Also we are viewing both pi and RAD without the decimal point). Anyhoo, we have it from a source other than I that the number of pages in the Wake, 628, is 2 times pi. Therefore the Riverend (back now on the shore where his footing is more steady) points out that Finnegans Wake is Dublin' Pie! (Well, why didn't he just come out and say so to begin with.) To cap off, let's return to Joyce's profound jocularity to Harriet Shaw Weaver that in Finnegans Wake he would attempt to design a square wheel. The classical problem was to describe a circle and a square which contained exactly equal areas. No math equation yet devised can do it, because it plays two irrational numbers against each other, pi (the relation of a circle's circumference with a line drawn from one edge to another through the center) and the square root of two (being the relation of the side of a square with a line drawn from one corner to the kitty-corner). It doesn't help that actually we can't express the area of a circle algebraically to begin with, because pi has no numerical coefficient . . . just a Greek letter -- at least the square root of 2 has the 2. The last time I looked (1992) the computers had extended the decimal places in pi into the billions without finding a clue to any pattern indicating anything. All we can do is tell which values are not pi, and whether they are too big or too small. Joyce, of course, was referring to literature not math. The problem then becomes: can you combine the linearality of standard narration (the path of words from "once upon a time" to "they lived happily ever after") with the spherical ambience of life as it is experienced. Can an author on 314 leaves of paper merge storytime with dreamtime, where we generally have little in the way of openings and endings, but simply find ourselves in various middles which keep fading into one another. Well? Yours in Her Grace's Watch, The Roving and Riverend Sterling. "Only what's-his-name can make a tree." Originally sent as Email to FWAKE-L, 1998 Jan 25.
Subject: HCE From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/26/98 9:18 PM And while the old Qabalistic horse is possibly still saddled, we can add to what's below that the "Trigrammaton " of HCE and the Tetragrammaton of YHVH have this in common: a standard exercise for Qabalists is to draw tables of permutations showing all possible rearranged combinations of the letters in the Tetragrammaton. This of course does not explain why Joyce chose the three letters HCE, but it does link all the permutating with an old tradition; and perhaps it's worth noting that the Tetragrammaton itself while consisting of four letterplaces, is, as with HCE, formed of only three different letters of the alphabet. If nothing else, Mr. Joyce is prompting us to the same obsession with names which he seems to have shared with the Qabalists. From: Will Miller ... Date: Monday, January 26, 1998 7:08 AM I wonder whether the changing start point of the HCE,ECH letters has something to do with the dominance of one particular element of the Wakean trinity - father, son and other dark son/combination ghost. It might relate to Old, Testament, New Testament, No (or echoes of) Testaments....of Christianity.
Subject: a round ,,, sumuminarumdrum From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/27/98 11:16 PM Dear Art, Excellent! Thank you. This is what I love about being a listservant, the instant flow of publication and feedback, especially when one gets your sort of expanding corrections. I have played somewhat loosely with some of my math in favor of metaphor, and in other cases just been flat wrong. What you've written in response takes the whole thing to another level. I did pretty well in algebra, but the Riverend had to take geometry four times before he finally passed a college remedial version, hence his affection for the theory that arrested development is a sign of intelligence. The 314(leaves).16(last line) equals pi(times 100) is pretty amazing, not to mention the cool spotting of a thunderword on page 314. This got me going, so I counted pages from (& incl.) p. 293 where FW features the Greek letter pi (this alone shows Joyce in close contact with his printer, believe me . . . they hate inserting graphics and symbols into text), and there are 22 pages from the symbol pi to thunderword number 7, and, yup: 22/7 = 3.14 = pi. My ho heads hauls even farther! I stopped right there, because I won't do two shows a day anymore, babe, I just won't do it. To get testicle about it, "describe a circle . . . " means draw it (as in inscribe, circumscribe), but what's important is your point that it be done with barebones Euclidean tools. Your Greek and French reads on diagonal and cater-corner are appreciated. What I had in mind (and very shakily indeed) with the square root of two and pi was that they are compatible in reality, and only incompatible in that, 1) as you imply, the former's irrationality can be made to "disappear" through the use of several steps in algebra, but that of pi cannot since, as you continued, unlike 10/7 (I don't think you can send a square root sign through standard email, so I'm using the 10/7 for square root of 2) pi is a transcendental number. But it is well you brought out that pi and 10/7 are both real numbers, we just cannot reach any end to them in decimal expression, and have no end in sight. What I may have been trying to say by stating there was no discernible pattern yet was (and I am sincere in desiring any form of correction and refinement in these things) there seems to be no known formulae to explain or predict why the next descending decimal number is or will be what it is or will be. This then all ties into the introduction of the zero into European math which has so impacted our soon to end millenium; again the tentmaker/astronomer Omar via Fitz.'s "Dawn of Nothing" is portrayed in symbology of the Major Arcana, and emphasized in the Golden Dawn versions particularly, and Joyce could've stumbled upon this through any number of ways. The 1992 source alluded to was a long article in the New Yorker on the work of the Chudnovsky (sp?) brothers at Cornell. Could our man at Cornell tell us if they are still associated with Cornell? I am under the impression that the pi extension search has since gone more toward work being done in Japan. The number crunches you end with are indeed elegant to see, and the Riverend will have to calm and concentrate his rather sloppy brain to grok them. And probably get out his college math books, for which he thanks you in humble sincerity. You are no doubt familiar with the golden sentence brought back from the Arabs by Nicholas of Cusa as a result of his forays into Islam for the Pope: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Now to justify all this being on a Joyce list, we must scurry over to the FW Concordance of Jon Williams. The word I ran through was "round." Lots of rounds in Quinnigan's Quake, surprise, surprise. Incl.: 132.1 (that cute but kinda scary synchronicity of pagination again, permutating 1132, on which more later, but we're to assume that for all these coincidences there are many more "anticoincidences," although the New Yorker article on the Chudnovskys' work, which has an amazing Joyce ref. by the way, speculates on whether there is a decimal place in pi for each electron in the universe, which could be the final interface between a random and/or predetermined reality, but back at the ranch) the whole phrase starts in the bottom two lines of p. 131, "he's as globeful (RS: and are you the Earl of Oxford man?) as a gasometer of lithium and luridity and he was thrice ten anular years before he wallowed round Raggiant Circos; the cabalstone at the coping of his cavin is a canine constant . . . " Of course what caught my eye was "cabalstone" (possibly the Qabalistic Cube of Space); "constant" (pi=22/7=Qabalistic root statement beginning the Sefer Yetzirah that Ya, blessed be his name, created the universe using (among several components) the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet including the seven letters which have double pronunciations and which the Golden Dawn assigns to the seven classical travelers, that is, the sun, moon, and five planets identifiable as such to the pre-Galilean naked eye; and "anular" and "Circos," all of which indicate that, at least in this instance, Joyce is concious of using the word "round" as a mathematical and Orphic entity simultaneously, what one sees referred to as "sacred geometry." The thirty years referred to is the traditional age at which Jesus began his ministry, which boosts the sacred part -- the geometry aspect is relatively obvious. (See also 559.22 starting with "looking round" and ending with "parralleliped" -- again "round" as a more general word summoning a specifically mathematical word). 255.34 "twentynine ditties round the wishful waistress, thirtyseven alsos" To begin, the concordance pulls a really scary trick here in the synchronicity-of-pagination-line area by giving this line as "255.29" which would mean that line 29 of 37 is in a frame of the words "twentynine" and "thirtyseven" so you can bet I counted for myself along with getting out Mr. McHugh. Moving on. 29 is the mantissa-free version of the number of days in the lunar synodic month (you'll correct me here, of course, since we are not dealing with a log. - - but how often do I get to use an Etruscan word like mantissa? Anyhoo, there are really about 29.5 days.) 37 is (again my version of mantissa-free, i.e., without the numbers to the right of the decimal point) the years in two Metonic cycles, or two times the Saros. As I recall there are three lunar cyles that are 18+ years, precessions involving the period of years after which the moon begins replicating its pattern of when eclipses occur. There are reasons why often the two cycle period is preferred. So we see two lunar periods in 29/37, not to mention the enrollment in St. Bride's finishing school and number of lines on most pages of the wake. The cabalstone on which Mr. Joyce has founded his church, that is Peter Paragraph, in this instance begins with crediting the producer, one John Baptister Vickar, so there is the Jesus factor again, as well as a bow by the Circleking, our Vico, who is sortof cited in the next line (255.30) "round the answer to everything." In case we have any questions. With her two days so dear and near, Feb 1 & 2, we should also note that the Christianization of the circle, which I don't understand but see, is reinforced by some appearances together of St. Brigid and the word "round." 388.14-15. "round about the freebutter year of/Notre Dame 1132" Along with its reference to the rape of St. Brigid's spiritual and administrative descendant, the Abbess of Kildare (which I posted on last Sept.) by the number 1132 (the year in which the rape occurred), there is "freebutter." St. Brigid was greatly loved for, among many other things, her magical manifestation of free butter for everyone in her jurisdiction. 438.08. "the round globe and the white milk" Milk is sacred to Brigid, who manifested from a bucket of milk carried over a threshold by her mother. 510.33. "either, invitem kappines all round. But the right reverend priest" OK, no ref. to Brigid, but mayhap you can see why I . . . never mind. (Oh, Brigid is in the next line, ib.34, "and the reverent bride . . " "Bride" is the common nickname for Brigid in Scotland and Ireland.) 562.10-11. " . . . common marygales that/romp round brigidschool . . ." OK, you get the drift -- these are not coincidences, all this round/brigid, though what is Mr Joyce's intent I know not. Brigid's most common Christian appellation is "The Mary of the Gael." Her school was an art school. Her order always maintained the same number of nuns, 19 plus the Abbess. In Joyce of course its 28 plus Issy. "Isobel . . . took the veil, the beautiful presentation nun, so barely twenty" on page 556 is an instance where the original number of women in St. Brigid's Order has an allusion. Oh, throw the cobwebs from your eyes. This longtime lack of interest by Joyceans in his patron saint, well, is she just too gentle for our century or what? 621.14 "round" with dairy products again . . . I still don't know why. But its herself, I promise. In Python's "Life of Brian," an obvious allusion to the Irish saviour, Brian Boru (just kidding), we experience the Sermon On The Mount from the back row of the audience. "What did he say?" asks one man to another. "He said, 'Blessed are the cheesemakers." "Well," says the first man, "what's so special about them?" "These chaps speak in parables," is the answer, "it could be any dairy product." I think it's a profound movie. May February bring us all the blessings of Brigid. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING "You can hear the nightwatchman click his flashlight, and ask himself if it's him or them that's insane." Visions of Johanna, by Bob Dylan. PS/ Did you happen to catch Mikio Fuse's neat simile of irrational numbers (surds) with Joyce's attitude toward ghosts on the jjoyce/utah list? Neuendorffer <-----Original Message----- From...> Date: Tuesday, January 27, 1998 3:17 PM: To be precise, the book ends on the back of the 314th leaf on the 16th LINE! pi ~ 3.1416 This is probably no accident since there is a "thunderword" (page 314) at the back of the 157th leaf on the 8th line! pi/2 ~ 1.5708 314.8: Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrum- strumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup ! Pi has many elegant mathematical "sumuminarumdrum" patterns: pi = 4*(1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - 1/15 + 1/17 -...] or pi = sqrt[8+8/9+8/25+8/49+8/81+8/121+8/169+8/225+8/289+8/361+8/441+.....] For finite N number of terms a good approximation is: pi~sqrt[8+8/9+8/25+8/49+8/81+8/121+8/169+8/225+8/289+8/361+8/441+..... +2/N] pi ~ sqrt[8+8/9+8/25+8/49+8/81+8/121+8/169+8/225+8/289+8/361 +2/10] N=10 ~3.14162 ~ sqrt[8+8/9+8/25+8/49+8/81 +2/5] N=5 ~3.1418 ~ sqrt[8+8/9+8/25 +2/3] N=3 ~3.1425 ~ sqrt[8+8/9 +2/2] N=2 ~3.145 ~ sqrt[8 + 2/1] = sqrt(10) N=1 ~3.16 it is just that pi is incompatible with decimal notation.
Subject: Clinton, His Erumpence From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/28/98 5:01 AM Right on. The feeding frenzy for Clinton is disgusting because it focuses on petty, irrelevant, and unproven issues (such as semen), when it should focus on Janet Reno remaining in office and his refusal to carry out his promise to reform health insurance, and his dismissal of the surgeon general for saying for saying the word "masturbation." Bet he wishes he'd taken her advice now! What did Joyce say, "The amazing availability of it." -----Original Message----- From: Ross Chambers ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Tuesday, January 27, 1998 10:30 AM Subject: Clinton > I wonder how many saw the independently produced American television > documentary which told the story of the seriously retarded black > prisoner in Arkansas whose execution Clinton approved before his first > presidential candidacy, in an effort to prove that he was "not soft on > crime" ? And the world pauses on another Middle Eastern and Asian brink > while America sweats on what he has been doing with his dick! > > Attacks on the brutality and inhumanity of such phenomena as capital > punishment pervade Joyce's work. > > Not with a bang, but a whisper. > > Ross
Subject: Re: Surd From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/29/98 10:38 PM Our Shamus continues to pound the streets of Dawn, and they speak their Golden secrets to him. The surd as the irrational dominates the "O" card of Golden Dawn Tarots (though the meaning of surd as "unsounded is present as well, because of the association with the glottal stop.) Not only Joyce adapted the Dawn-style deck for literary allusion. (Eliot's "Wasteland," the title itself an allusion to the Celtic body of myth used by the Golden Dawn to "Celtify" the Tarot, has quite overt Tarot in it, including specific Dawnery.) The Fool himself portrayed on the card is irrational. Across the Fool's shoulder is the diagonal line, in the form of a pole, which since Babylonian cuneiform homework, has stood for the (SQRT)2 surd. The bag dangling from the end of the diagonal pole is a bag which P. F. Case explains as carrying the residual memories of former existences, itself an irrational thought by conventional standards. The Fool card is both the beginning and end of the circular inner deck of the 22 Major Arcana (ROTA TARO ORAT . . . ) just as leaf 314 (a pi number) in the Wake is both the beginning and end of the Wake. The number 22 represents the circle also, because 22/7 is pi (3.14). Like Finnegan and Earwicker, the Fool is living in a dream, about to step off a precipice while gazing at the sky with a happy grin. The bag of residue from previous existences dangling from the diagonal pole is thus also the remainder left at the end of every decimal extension of pi and the (SQRT)2 which so frightened many European schoolmen when the Indo-Arabic numeral system began drifting into Europe in the 12th century. As Art pointed out recently, irrationals are fairly tame in classical geometry, but once the zero appears making place-values and decimalization possible, the eggshell starts radiating a network of tiny cracks which eventually open into modern science. You had to be careful. You know what happened to Roger Bacon. Hence Case's premise that the simultaneous appearance of the Tarot was to encode esoteric knowledge for protective purposes as well as illustrative. A tidbit for Joyceans: what does Case point out in the background of the card? Yup, the ALPs, a portmanteau graphic, because the card is tied with the Hebrew letter ALP, that is 'alef, but the Hittitic word "alpas" derives from some very old word for cloud, hence a factor in the Joycean cloudery, especially with Issy as Nuvoleta (little cloud), and thence into many European words including the Greek "alphos" ("white"), "alps" as mountains (where the clouds are), and the white grain barley which Graves runs a mile with in The White Goddess. RIVEREND (& a tip of me cap to the little cloud that is the Riverstart) Sterling. -----Original Message----- From: James Collins ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Thursday, January 29, 1998 5:41 PM Subject: Re: Surd > The word SURD is of interest to the Fool. Key 0. From the Latin, SURDUS, > meaning deaf, silent, stupid. SURD, indistinct, especially in math for > inexpressible in rational numbers, ABSURD, incongruous, lacking sense. Also >from the Latin, SUSURRUS, we get, humming, murmuring, rustling, and > whispering. Partridge suggests the connection of SUSURRUS to English By way > of Old Norse, SVARMR, SWARM, a vast number of bees, a hive, a crowd, a mob. > And from Sanskrit, SVARATI, it resounds, and SVARA, a sound, a noise. > Absurd, silent, inexpressible, incongruous, a hive, a mob. The secret of > the world is carried on the shoulder of fools. The Pope wears a hive his > head. > > Shamus >
Subject: Seventeen, 29, & 37 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/29/98 11:31 PM Thanks again, Art. Both for new info. and corrections of mine. So much for the old Saros theory. What are the other two 18+ year lunar cycles? Maybe one of them will double to 37, if I'm lucky. No books where I am. I think one of the cycles figures in old Celtic stone markers, being the time from which the moon sets at its most northern point until it does so again. The Saros is the precession of ecliptic nodes? Maybe the third is when the pattern of apses starts to repeat? Getting past knowing what I'm even saying. But here's a pretty good lunar 37. In an 1880's dictionary pub. in Paris, "blue-moon" in English is defined as "37th moon" in French. I've discussed this on several occasions with the archaeoastromer Dr. E. C. Krupp, and he seems to think the French got it wrong, that blue-moon doesn't have that meaning in English. But it's a big standard dictionary Joyce could easily have come across (I did), or simply have heard the thing on his own. The explanation I gave Krupp for the French he does endorse as likely, and it's this. As we know, the lunar and solar periods don't coincide. After twelve lunar months, there's almost 11 days until the end of the solar year. In three years, this adds up to over a full lunar month (speaking here of synodic lunations) so that while in a three year period there are 36 mos. by the Roman solar calendar we use, there are 37 actual lunar months of the older lunar calendar, and hence 37 new moons (modern people would tend to pay more attention to the 37 full moons of course.) So the first very rough appearance of a period seeming to begin a new replication of a merged solar and lunar periodicity is 37 moons long. I have found this alluded to in Native American mythology, which is the actual frame in which I have worked, not the astronomy, which is why I went to Krupp, but he says he'll back me up if I ever get off my rear to publish it, i.e., as most likely scenario for the song-cycles, it will always have to have a speculative qualification . . . and I haven't spoken with him about Joyce's mentioning 29 and 37 in the same line, or having 37 line pages. But again, "round the answer to everything." 29+ days = the moon goes round its cycle of phases; 37 lunar cycles = the earth goes round the sun 3 times, appearing in roughly (within about 3+ days?) the same phase in which it began. These are rough figures, not astronomically precise, but the folkloric use might appeal to Joyce. And again, in at least one dictionary he could easily have seen it. My read on the 24 chptrs. of the two Homeric works is that the chptr. divisions were not made by Homer, but added later when his epics were first committed to written form, and the divisions were made in a Protean manner to equal the number of letters in the Greek alphabet. Why the Greeks eventually settled on 24 letters is another question. We may have to get Mikio to send the surds/ghost piece directly, looking without luck so far. It's brief and well-worth a cross-listing, though I know we are trying not to overdo that. Riverend Sterling. -----Original Message----- From: Neuendorffer ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Thursday, January 29, 1998 2:19 PM Subject: Seventeen > RIVEREND STERLING wrote: > >> The 314(leaves).16(last line) equals pi(times 100) is pretty amazing, not to >> mention the cool spotting of a thunderword on page 314. This got me going, >> so I counted pages from (& incl.) p. 293 where FW features the Greek letter >> pi (this alone shows Joyce in close contact with his printer, believe me .
Subject: A Musical Key From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/30/98 6:13 AM Another side trip to il Triviato, the creator of the system of musical notation under discussion, Guido d'Arezzo, is listed as a gateway along the avenue of heroes at 260.13, a gateway leading to the old circlemaster himself, Vico.
Subject: Catch 22/7 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/31/98 5:37 AM Dear Art, Gregory, etc. (usual gang of suspects), Musical "rounds" include: 252.27: So sing they sequent the assent of man. Till they go round . . . 513.22: trippudiating round the aria ((tons of musical stuff on this page)) McHugh gives portmanteaus for "trippudiating" = sacred dance for joy, and on the next line Joyce mentions "fiftytwo heirs of age" with McH. reading "heirs" as years . . . thus 52 years -- 52 years is a very basic and important time period in Mayan calendrics, but there's got to be SOME limit to Joyce's knowledge . . . (still, if I know that, why not he?) Some lines with "round" have the chromatic scale number "12,' but just as "52" can be the "one trip round the sun" from weeks (annual comes from the latin word for ring -- with the fringe benefit of "Anna" echoing), "12" has the same with months. But if the chromatic scale is also implied, we know that's fine with Joyce. 389.03 round their twelve tables 497.02 exagmination round his factification we know of the special importance of this line as the title for the collection of (13?) essays which Joyce guided to set criticism of FW on the right road -- thirteen is one of Joyce's favorite numbers, appearing as a title for the poem "Tilly," forinstance, that being the thirteenth bun in a baker's dozen -- but it is also the beginning of the chromatic scale's second octave, and as such emphasizes the mystery that as one ascends any scale one somehow returns to where one started though higher so that there is a circle that does not somehow seem circular, hence the emphasis in the Golden Dawn (sorry) on the spiral, an ascending/descending circularity -- the reason that all cultures no matter how "primitive" have recognized the musical interval of the octave is that it is physically impossible to hear a pure musical tone, even if generated by the most sophisticated synthesizer with oscilliscopic metering, etc. The reason is this: the octave is the dublin' of a frequency. If we speak of the old concert pitch A of 440 beats per second, then its octave up will be 880 hertz and its octave down will be 220 hertz and so ad infinitum and they will all be heard as "A's," to the extent that if they are sounded simultaneously, it will be nearly impossible to distinguish them and you will tend to hear one tone. The reason is: the octave is the first and dominant overtone harmonic and sound rattles whatever it strikes and if the medium it strikes is tense and simple, the sympathetic vibrations which result will amplify the tone through constructive interference. Conversely, if the soundwaves rattle a limp or complex medium, destructive interference will result and the sound will die. When sound strikes clothing in a concert hall, the clothing is so loose and complex that the many waves the sound creates are canceled. If the soundwaves strike a plywood wall, the wall being tense and simple may begin to resonate and carry the vibration and if someone is trying to sleep on the other side, the bass vibes will be expecially disturbing. The human earworks are designed to carry and amplify soundwaves until they can be digitalized into electric signals for the medulla oblongata to transmit into the mind. (Shamus, are you into the portrayal of the lobster as medulla oblongata crawling from the pool up into the subconcious in Key 18 of the Case Tarot . . . that's what I thought.) What happens is that however pure and flute-like a tone may enter the ear, the earworks will add the octave overtones as it transmits the vibration. It is not possible to hear a pure tone physically. We can hear relatively pure tones and separate them subjectively from tones which feature more rich and complex sympathetic vibrations of harmonic overtones . . . thus almost anyone can tell in the dark that 440 hertz "A" as to whether (pardon my English) it is sung by a baritone, sustained on a flute, or whistled by a train. Each may have 440 beats a second as its root tone, but the baritone will have more overtones in his voice, 5ths, 3rds, etc.; the train whistle even more; the flute the least (this assumes also that we are listening to the middle of the tone's duration -- each medium will also have a distinct method of beginning and ending the tone ((attack and decay)) which will give it away. I forgot my point. OK, thank heaven for scrolling! The point is the octave is universally recognized in all musical cultures as the root interval between any two tones, because it doubles or halves other octaves, and this means it is the ultimate reinforcing rattle to the root rattling so to speak. Technically, if you draw a sine wave graph (sound waves are transverse, but the graph will work schematically) the higher frequency will superimpose itself in a manner over the lower frequency such that every second node of the higher tone will land on the lower tone's primary nodes. If you've ever tried a punching bag, it's not all that dissimilar of a meter. Learning to post when riding a horse is another example. You have to make your impact with your fist or fanny at the exact right moment to be in synchronicity with the force you are trying to get in harmony with. If you hit the bag to soon, that is destructive interference, and you slow the bag down instead of amplifying its motion. If you contact the saddle before it's about to descend anyway . . . never mind. But that's why almost everyone will hear a low "A" and a high "A" as an "A" of some kind, though they may not think of it so. It's quite amazing to realize your ear and brain can count frequencies of 440 and 880 beats a second simultaneously. Some better than others, of course, but if you can hear at all, you can hear octaves. This is why the 13th tone of a chromatic scale has the same name as the first. Why there are twelve tones to get there is much more arbitrary, involving various other overtones for the 7 tones of the diatonic, and considerations in constructing keyboard instruments which merged the formerly distinct flat and sharp coloring tones which Bach reduced to the current accidental tones allowing for any tone to begin a key, etc. I love it. The other person we owe this systemizing of musical notation to is Guido d'Arezzo of 260.13. Otherwise the history of notation in music is very ad hoc and sloppy and out of control. 498.26-27 a dozen and one by one tilly tallows round in ring-/campf, circumasssembled same thing, lunar months of which there are 12 plus a partial epact to make a solar year, the chromatic scale of 12 tones whose 13th tone (the tilly) will be (the same) one with the first tone (the root or tonic) It goes on and on, which I suppose is the point, but that's more than goodle-and-poodlenty for now. . . the main thing is: 255.36-37: round the beginning of hap-/piness ((But Art . . . look at that paragraph! and thanks for thunderword on 113.)) Keep up the good work, fellers. You are opening many gateways for me and others. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE ROVING AND RIVEREND STERLING "round answer to everything" JAAJoyce.
Subject: Re: On the Evolution of the Alpha From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/31/98 7:56 AM I don't suppose I can wiggle out of this by claiming that the alphabet evolved before and after it was invented? The alphabet incorporates Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian and Hittittic and Ugaritic elements and influences and it was the magic mix of the Levant that made it needed and possible. But it appears in the 22 letter form in which it's largely remained as a substratum for variation since in a rather sudden mysterious fashion. Then it went into the evolutions you describe. Remember, the alphabet was hundreds of years old before the Greeks grabbed it and added the magic vowels for the first time. There are some tricky "define your terms" things going on here. Eric McLuhan and I locked horns on this until we realized we were talking apples and oranges when we said "alphabet." He says the alphabet fractured the Western mind by separating vowels from consonants, and considers the Hebrew script as syllabic. My read was that in Hebrew there was no indication of the vowel at all, you were just suppose to know what it was. And yakety blah until we realized our definitions were different. Anyhoo . . . these inscriptions suddenly appear carved on mine entrances and on drinking vessels in the hills above the Jordan River and in the Sinai Penninsula, and nobody really knows the origin, so my posit of an inventor or inventors is hypothetical, and you may well be correct in supposing a more evolutionary unfolding. But it happened way before the Greeks. Strangely the same day I talked with McLuhan I ran into a book by a man who claims the Greek adaption was done by one man specifically for the purpose of committing Homer to text. I haven't read it yet: Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet by Barry B. Powell, '91/'96. My theory for an invention process is that I perceive careful thoughtful crafting, especially the choice of 22 letters to represent the number pi. But time and the river can craft smooth things too. -----Original Message----- From: ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, January 30, 1998 9:15 AM Subject: On the Evolution of the Alpha > On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Ross Chambers wrote: > >> The Riverend rhetorically asked: >> >> <<Why 22? Because the alphabet did not evolve, it was invented.> > (Mahan) But it DID "evolve," and not neccessarily as "art," but as a more > practical means of conveying "meaning" in "writing" (not just verbally). > It was how MEN communicated with their fellow hunters. What was the > first "most important thing"? FOOD! Thus; "A"=alpha=aleph=OX=food: > \/ > an OX O----/ men "yoked" the animal: \-/ (an > /\ /\ upside-down "A") > > Romans (after conquring the Greeks and stealing thier alphbet) carved > language into stone, so, for "strength," they turned the "yoked \-/" > upside-down into "A") > > The next "most important thing" was SHELTER! "B"=beta=beth=HOUSE > > a HOUSE -^^- (a "B" tilted on its left side) > > On and on..."D"=delta=daleth=DOOR; "G"=gamma=gimel=CAMEL; > "H"=HHHH=FENCES, &c. > > We also can see that the evolution of "our" (the English) alphabet > contains many cultures, races, and languages; not solely Arabic, Greek, > and Roman, but African, Phoenician, Latin, et. al. > > Moreover, when the Romans "stole" the Greek's alphabet, they had no use > for the letter "Z" ("zed" "Z"=zeda=SHIELD) but they needed it to > spell/pronounce certain Greek words. "Z"/zeda was/is the 6th letter in > the Greek alphabet. Since the Romans "needed" the letter, and since > they'd already carved "their" alphabet in stone (pun intended), they > placed the letter "Z" at the very end of the "new" alphabet, where it's > remained low these many centuries . . . > > Now, for the Spanish alphabet... > > amm . . . >
Subject: 22 letters and/or paths From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/31/98 8:34 AM Depends on who you talk to and believe. According to the Sefer Yetzirah, Ya, blessed be his name, wove the whole shebang from 32 threads, which being the 22 letters of the alphabet and the ten numbers of the fingers. There are four trees of life, one in each of the four worlds. So if there are 22 paths in each, that would be 88 paths. The letters remain the same on the varying world's paths, but their colors change. Interestingly, the writing system which finally sets the stage for the 22 letter alphabet historically is Ugaritic, which had 32 characters. 32 is the maximum number of electrons which the universe allows in the orbital shells of atoms . . . or something like that. -----Original Message----- From: Ross Chambers ...; To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, January 30, 1998 6:57 AM Subject: 22 letters and/or paths > The Riverend rhetorically asked: > > <<Why 22? Because the alphabet did not evolve, it was invented. It is > a > work of art by someone. Part of that artist or artists' concept was to > weave from the symbols a portmanteau of significances showing a > depth of mastery. 22 was chosen for the number of characters because > 22 is the number for pi>> > > *************************************************** > > Did the 22 paths (chicken) of the Qabalistic tree of life precede the 22 > (egg) letters of the invented alphabet? Or both spring forth > simultaneously, fully formed, from somewhere in the Ain Soph Aur? > > Regards - Ross Chambers > -- > =================================================================== > Ross Chambers Sydney Australia ... > > "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." > G.K. Chesterton > > =================================================================== >
Subject: O rally (593.03-04) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 1/31/98 11:12 PM Nice, Art, I love words, I guess we all do on this list -- big trouble if we don't -- I'm trying to disengage and take a break and ever'thing people are contributing is too darn interesting -- On the circle of 5ths thread: 224.36 Mi, O la! >From "mi" to "la" is a perfect fifth, e.g., in the key of "C," "mi" = "E" & "la" = "B" -- from "E" to "B" is the interval of a perfect 5th -- what we find between the mi and la on p. 224.36 is "O," the circle, so that it seems near certain that "Mi, O la!" reads "Circle of 5th," added to which McHugh sees it followed by ref. to John McCormack via "thong off his art" being the 1930 movie "Song o' My Heart," and Joyce perhaps with some reason held that McCormack had bested Joyce as a superior tenor not by vocal quality but because Joyce lost a voice competion on the grounds that Joyce could not sight read musical notation! "round ((is)) the answer to everything" (255.35) is echoed at the line of rather interesting numeration: 333.03: K? An o. ((Que? is the Spanish interrogative "What?" The word "que?" in Spanish is pronounced just as the letter "K" in English. See in this regard as well the "why, O why, O why?" on 123.02.)). Of course, 196.01, ad inf. -- possible ref. in a sonnet of ressurection by Donne to the "square wheel," to the effect of "round the earth's four corners blow your trumpet . . . " -- -- on your "17" thread: the climax of affirmation and friendship in Ulysses occurs on June 17 -- -- the letter associated in Hebrew with "O" is Ayin, defined in the Langenscheidt as "16th letter; numeral 70; the eye; eye of the mind; look, appearance, sight, face, surface; the sparkling or bead of wine; fountain, spring." Pretty.
Subject: Dada Mama of Topatopa From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/5/98 4:29 AM One of the prominent Dadaists of the New York school, Beatrice Wood, will turn 105 on 4 March. She was in the Marcel Duchamp inner circle and was and is an important artist, particulary as a ceramicist and writer. A Net search of her name will yield many sites. Her address and phone are found in a site including "Ojai," the town where she has lived since the 30's. She still works a disciplined schedule the last I heard. Her main biographical work, I SHOCK MYSELF, includes her 1917 icon poster for The Blindman's Ball, with historical back- ground. Wakers will wish to cf. it w. p. 308's (FW) doodle. To wish her a happy birthday, write to: Beatrice Wood 8560 Hwy 150 Ojai CA 93023 USA Phone: (805) 646-3381 A website with her address is at: http://www.ojai.org/wood.htm I SHOCK MYSELF is published by Chronicle Books of San Francisco, '85/rev. '88/rpt. '92; ISBN: 0-87701-498.1 "Topatopa" is the mountain behind her home.
Subject: Numbers and music From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/5/98 4:43 AM -----Original Message----- From: Mr Spicer ... Mr. But(t)ler, Bravo. Your point is well taken. I am reminded by two poems. Both of which I will paraphrase. (RS snips great stuff here/there) The first is off Aeschylus: pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of god (RS adds "After a great sadness, a formal feeling comes." Emily Dickinson.) (Mr. Spicer asks, like the rest of his unnumbed countryfolk:) Am I mad? Am I a simpleton? And how does a mad yank go about working in Oz? (RS quotes again: "How can you convince people who are insane that you are not? Dr. Ashleigh Brilliant.)
Subject: Numbers and music From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/5/98 5:26 AM Dear Bill and Mr. Spicer, I suspect/hope that a good deal of the wild-eyed numerology recently exploding on our list is motivated by exactly the question you pose: how could it be? I think it should be viewed at its firmest as hypothetical musings, some of which may lead to theory, or not. How can a book which prides itself so overtly on circularity end with an essential circle number and so on. Much such speculation has been difficult to introduce to the mainstream Joycean critics to critique and have on record, but many readers, as was Joyce, are fascinated with such aracana, be they coincidental or planned. In some ways, the Wake is a vast highly thought-out idea generator, and if we find ideas not speci- fically engineered by Joyce, it is one of the ways Finnegans Wake is lot's of fun. I like to think that as a sight-impaired genius, Joyce was particularly able to provide us a vast innerscape whose Celtic knotlike labyrinths may lead to the light here, a blind alley there, but Joyce's blind alleys are a thousand times more interesting and rewarding than most author's main thoroughfares. Some of the numerical and occult surmisings will brand us no doubt as pioneers in brave imbecility; others will go done with future analysts as breakthroughs involving years of thought, cross-disciplinary study, and sheer moxie of intuition. And not necessarily divided correctly! Joyce gave us 300 years to pour over it in a scholarly manner, and we are scarcely then out the gate. The instant uncensored access to the net is creating a new widened field for Joycean debate that he would certainly support. At the same time, without the guidance you're giving it would become a meaningless churn of foam. Above all we must not proselytize, and if we do, you must continue to rein us over so more level heads may pass. The temptation to discover that everything is actually everything else must be avoided at all costs, for it is sophomoric metaphysics -- true, longknown, virtually meaningless. In these regards, your points are golden. In balance, the observation that Joyce spent infinite time working complex and coherent subtexts of a codelike nature into the Wake are as patent as our acceptance that many of the subtexts are little catalogued or overlooked. Atherton and others make a well-documented case for Joyce's mega-integrated sprinkling of numerous types of hints for us to follow thank goodness, such as the recently cited "of the cards" shortly before his Wakestyle quote of Descartes. Ultimately I always return to the central beauty which you cite, however, the lovely musicality, the playing upon the mind as a harp. PLEASE continue to keep us all within handy reach of that as a Wakean homepage, and we shall go no madder than we are required from time to time. The Rambling and Riverend Sterling. -----Original Message----- From: Bill Buttler (Ozemail) ... I don't want to discourage *any* line of explication which might enhance our understanding of the Wake. However, before spending time (and bandwidth) exploring the possibilities engendered in numbers of lines on pages, ratio of page numbers etc, someone needs to explain how the semi-blind Joyce managed to count the said numbers and plan ahead (well before the age of computer-aided type-setting) without leaving any trace in his notebooks or in the memories of his "helpers".
Subject: 33 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/5/98 5:45 AM And Art, there's always the mode of beginning ordinations with 0, in which case the 33's shift to the even more seminal 32. (As Lao-Tze said, "Don't blame me for these things, blame Nature.") It looks silly to do such perhaps, but it gives a precalculus fluidity to whole numbers, as rather than a "one," we start feeling "one arising from zero and becoming two," etc.
Subject: Rain, snow, hail, and farewell From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/5/98 7:35 AM Dear Everybody-Loves-Saturday-Night, Cross-posting is not a nice habit, unless worn by Sister Adaire, of course, in which case we'll cheer her on, but when you see what a harried saint I wish you to believe me, not to mention that I must unsubscribe for a time, a few may cheer me as well. We are in the middle of a weather disaster here on the US West Coast, not as bad yet anyway as what they've had on the eastern coast of the continent, but we west coasters are a wimpy lot when we can be, or so we're told, and the Red Cross, apparently due to some of you telling about my quasi bottomless gift for blarney, have conscripted me. They've hung a cell-phone on one side of my belt, a tool I know not but assume it's to do with ancient contemplative Celtic monks, and a pager on the other which would seem to relate more to the palace. They are shoving me toward the flood with the title of Human and Government Liason. I've always dreamed of being a translative interface between humans and the government, and shall bear myself with a jaunty white hardhat into the fray for several weeks. S'sad to unsubscribe because the threads just grow more interesting, but also more prolific, and as it is I'm getting about a hundred posts a day, and could not stand to delete thousands when I get back to the old ray tube. I know you were all about to ask me questions by which I would radiate wisdom, or something anyhoo, but we'll just have to not and say I did. Blessings to all, I may have to crack the Red Cross's spreadsheets to get advice from Neil and Jaeza on Celtic-L, Neil can tell me how to shout "HELP" in good Gaelige, and Jaeza can continue giving me moral and practical advice on how best to deal with Neil otherwise. I hope all my friends and teachers on the Joyce lists realize how essential studying the world's most arcane and complex and surrealistic and scholarly and silly and difficult writer is to be able to master Red Cross paperwork. Said with love for both and all. As we say in California, mucho slainte, and continue expanding your personal creative spaces until my return. The Rambling and Riverend Sterling. "Tutti fratelli." Henri Dunant. (Please wait til I get off to correct my spellings).
Subject: Annals of Ulster -- Query From: Riverend Sterling Date: 2/27/98 5:15 AM Poking around in amazon.com, I found listed: Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). 1) What ARE the Annals of Ulster? 2) Do they actually end in 1131? 3) If so, why? And if so: 4) Any thoughts on how this might resonate with the 1132 motives in the Wake? YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING
Subject: Re: FWREAD From: thouart Date: 3/6/98 3:47 PM Dear Ronald (AKA HCEarwig), This is my guess: send: SUBSCRIBE FWREAD Ronald Prowse to: listproc@lists.colorado.edu and welcome, YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING -----Original Message----- From: [Ronald Prowse] ...; To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, March 06, 1998 12:30 PM Subject: Re: FWREAD > How do I subscribe to FWREAD? > > Ronald Prowse >
Subject: Bits and Pieces From: thouart Date: 3/7/98 1:31 AM Dear Clifford, James Atherton devotes some pages to the Dodgson/Carroll/Liddell influence on FW in his work Books at the Wake. He alerts one fairly well on how to begin to see a series of threads that would be obscure to most of us otherwise, citings forinstance of the name of a stage actress who was associated with playing Alice. As Bill Buttler's citations of Mr Joyce indicate, even Joyce did not expect anyone to believe he hadn't read Alice's Adventures, and admits to some familiarity at any rate, and his intent to read. Atherton writes as well on other perceived influences on Joyce by Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll other than those from Wonderland, and takes the position that if Joyce was not a devotee when he began the Wake, his eventual first readings of the Adventures must have been as the embrace of a long lost brother. > I > cannot seem to find a reference to Carroll in Ellman's biography. Nor in > another smaller more recent biography can I find a reference. Did you > find this reference in the Selected Letters. On the other hand, I recall > reading a more thorough examination of this question, but alas I also > cannot recall where. Any takers? YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING -----Original Message----- From: Clifford Duffy ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, March 06, 1998 9:28 PM Subject: Re: Bits and Pieces
Subject: Bits and pieces/correction From: Riverend Sterling Date: 3/8/98 5:03 PM I made a very wrong statement from memory about James Atherton's read of Joyce's reaction to his supposedly belated reading of Charles Dodgson/ Lewis Carroll, and correcting it is germane to Clifford Duffy's inquiry as to the anxieties of Mr Joyce. Rather that the long lost brother embrace, apparently my subconcious wish for how Joyce should have reacted, Mr. Atherton believes that Joyce's feelings on encountering the earlier portmanteauist Dodgson's work was, in Atherton's poignant simile, that of Scott reaching the South Pole only to find Amundsen's flag already implanted there. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING
Subject: St. Bride's Finishing Establishment From: Riverend Sterling Date: 3/11/98 4:53 AM Mike Hood asked: "2. The rainbow girls (143.25) Glasheen says riddle number 9 is a picture of the rainbow girls. While this may be so, the riddle seems to me to be more important as a hint about the perspective of the reader as an earsighted fargazer. Again, I've seen the rainbow girls as several other places in FW. What is their significance?" RSt: Around the late 400's and early 500's the good St. Brigid, one of Ireland's three patrons, kept a nunnery of 19 members of which she, as abbess, was 20th. The number of her nuns always had to be 19. A line of abbesses of Cill Dara followed Bridgid and maintained the nunnery for many centuries. Brigid also kept an art school. Joyce has expanded the unusual numerology of St.Brigid's attendants to correspond to the number of days in the month of Joyce's birth -- February (the Abbess of Cill Dara, Brigid herself, becomes the special added day of the leap year). Joyce has furthermore combined the nunnery, now of 28 (with his patrona the 29th), and then gone on to blend the nunnery into the art school in the process of which somehow they are now Issy and the girls (and also the spectra of colours that the cloud girl Issy can produce at St. Bride's finishing school). ((( [220.3: THE FLORAS (Girl Scouts from St. Bride's Finishing Establish- ment, demand acidulateds), a month's bunch of pretty maidens] Above paste-in courtesy of the Williams Concordance [2] at: http://qinpalace.com/cgi-local/search.cgi ))) "Bride" is a common Irish nickname for Brigid. As a fancy but logical touch, while St. Brigid's nunnery expands to meet the calendric demands of being a month, which February alone meets with four even weeks (excepting when the abbess gets her day in the leap years), I infer that the weeks progress through the colours in a new science of religion and art displayed tastefully in the full view of coeducational audiences. And music and dance would be featured in such a course of refinement. The synesthesia of sight and sound has many singinging cites in FW, where every hue has a cry. The colour spectra which Mr Joyce is careful to establish as balanced, progressive, and suited for both patrons of art and friends to science (the very course you'd want for your own girl) enables colour and sound to be graphed together as harmonicaly related by colours' being much higher overtone octaves of musical tones. Depending on whether you are using additive or subtractive scales of colour tones (and bearing in mind that sound waves are transverse, and colour waves lateral) the sound frequencies called "C" are much lower octaves of red or its complement, green. For a full catalougue, of courses, contact the abbesses directly. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING
Subject: pftjschute From: Riverend Sterling Date: 3/12/98 12:35 AM Dear Bill, When I was a kid and used to ski, there was a nordic word "schuss," and it meant to put your skis together, point them straight down the slope, and oblivious to all else but speed, do what I think is best described now as we did then, "haul ass." It was basically the fastest way to ski, and perhaps too out of control to be called a technique. "Schuss" isn't exactly onomatopoeic(?), although it is somewhat, if the snow's powdery and not icy, but it gives a feeling of the fast "I don't brake for anything" sense of the wind shooting by. If there is some cognancy of "schuss" with a Germanic or Norse root common to chute/shoot, it reinforces the fall just taken by Herr Finnegan. You almost feel as in a free fall when you are schussing and it results in a lot of real falling. It was strictly verboten in many places and contexts, so there is even a little naughtiness implied. I can say "pft" pretty easily, "f" after all being an aspirated rather than plosive form of the "p" sound, with "t" then sort of recapping the aspiration. "J" is derived from the Latin "i," and as such retains a vowel function in north European languages, ja? So if one gives "pft" a chance, the sound strikes me as that of a cat "spitting," a short forceful warning sound. With no vowels, of course, there's not much volume. Then you throw in a "y" for the "j," since we're about to engage in a nordic sport, then you're out the chute ("shuss" is pronounced more or less like "chute" until the esses, which I recall as having the English "sh" sound). "Pft-y-shoot,": the great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice? YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING PS: I think "j" may be even more of a vowel in some eastern European languages. -----Original Message----- From: Bill Buttler (Ozemail) ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Wednesday, March 11, 1998 5:44 PM Subject: Re: pftjschute >> There were maybe six or seven "pftjschute"-related messages on FWAKE, from > 7 >> through 11 May 1997. I forwarded my copies of them to Bill Buttler. >> >> Greg Downing/NYU, at ... or ... >> > - and public thanks to Greg for forwarding them to me. I'm still interested > in anything else which can be added. > > Bill Buttler > Melbourne, Australia >
Subject: Finagles Waste; annotarie publique From: Riverend Sterling Date: 3/14/98 6:42 PM Dear Ross, PLEASUREBUBBLE HUBBYHOUSE with annotes: ninetofive -- Dolly Parton movie; Galatea pagan laing -- R. D. Laing, pop Scot psycho. dumpstincts -- The Waste King in essence He sews seemseeds -- cf. Hamlet, e.g., "seems mother, I know not seems (the Prince)," and "the very seems of his socks were down-jived (Ophelia)" stans -- see Watergate; Maurice . . . . geld me Hobson -- Hobson's Choice redrum -- cf. The Shining; Tom Thumb; Through The Looking Glass; " . . . most foul"; the Hen Otis lifteywater -- cf. Ascent of Man; Going My Way; Down Derry Down; Ladies Stockings and Foundation Garments Father, plash me -- Sylvia Plath blamed her father for her rejections by the New Yorker sainsburys -- another reference to Hamlet, the little prince whose father's ghost could not be laid (sans buried) Hom? -- cf. American prison slang for compatriot, as Holmes, or Homey condgeree -- The Conger's Eel by Liam O'Flaherty (see O'Flaherty for the Masses by Eric Maria Remarque) Yorke -- Dick; Play It Again, Samantha Innis? -- worst mispronunciation yet of Anaïs Nin YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING Flamenfans Wait!
Subject: An internet course on Ulysses? RE: RSterling From: Riverend Sterling Date: 3/28/98 8:47 PM Yes. YOURS IN HER GRACE'S WATCH, THE RAMBLING AND RIVEREND STERLING [>Interested in an internet course on Ulysses? > U.C.Berkeley's Extension program is considering offering a two-unit > fifteen-week course combining live meetings over the internet with emailed > assignments, but they'd like to know if there is enough interest > out there to sustain a class. If you are interested, and would > like more information, send a note to me at the address below.] -----Original Message----- From: michael Ditmore ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Tuesday, March 24, 1998 9:56 AM Subject: An internet course on Ulysses?
Subject: Genre From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/17/98 3:52 AM Dear Mike, one vote for poem; if read for meaning, FW goes too slowly for the reader to be a good novel; if read rapidly, it evolves into a mist of sounds and feelings and that is not exactly what novels usually emphasize . . . but I find much of it to seem invocatory, which is a very ancient form and in fact preliterate in origin and the vocative is mostly heard in Rap now Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling -----Original Message----- From: Mike Hood ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, April 17, 1998 12:26 AM Subject: Genre > Greetings All! > > I have what I hope isn't a silly question: Is Finnegans Wake a novel or > a poem, or does it defy traditional genre categories? What implications > does our answer to this question have for how we read the book? I've > noticed two trends in approach: Some readers approach it more like a > novel, tracing narrative through the book, while others approach it more > like a poem, weighing individual words more closely--often ignoring > grammar and narrative. Is there a middle ground? Are my observations > totally off? > > Mike >
Subject: Joyce Lists Distinctions (a crosspost) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/23/98 8:10 PM One thing I've been wondering is what has been going on with Bill Cadbury? In going back through FWAKE-L archives, he is the largest contributor, no? And his work is of a "heart-of-the-beast" nature, essential stuff for all other Joycean work to move forward I should think. When I joined FWAKE-L last Sept., Cadbury's posts were frequent, then for several months nothing, followed by a post in which he said he'd been having computer problems, then nothing again. This seems bad for the list if he's not returning to it. Does anyone know? = Also perhaps we who are on both Wake lists need to be more self-policing with ourselves and others. We must shift threads from FWREAD over to FWAKE-L whenever a new lister posts a general topic to FWREAD which is not specific to the week's page; or, when a thread begins logically from a proper week's page, but drifts into a wider scope more suited to FWAKE-L. Mega-motives like 1132 can blow-up this way easily as people cite other page occurences or wider thematic implications. (But FWREAD can handle some latitude of updates on previous pages, or occasional previewing of course.) = So to whom it may concern, and in hopes of quick constructive critiques: = THE THREE JOYCE LISTS AS I UNDERSTAND THEM: = 1. FWAKE-L is for the discussion of any topics about Finnegans Wake: To subscribe: send a message with the text "subscribe FWAKE-L [your name]" to <listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie>. = 2. FWREAD focuses on one sequential page of FW each week: To subscribe: send a message with the text "subscribe FWREAD [your name]" to <listproc@lists.colorado.edu>. (Currently on page 089). = 3. J-JOYCE is all things Joycean, with a reputation for things Ulyssean, but currently (1998 March-July) has a subgroup DUBS which is going through each story in Dubliners sequentially (currently on “Eveline”). To subscribe: send a message to <j-joyce-request@lists.utah.edu> with the word "SUBSCRIBE" in the body of the message. = For more information on these lists, visit the James Joyce Resource Center at: = http://english.ohio-state.edu/organizations/ijjf/jrc/caught.htm = Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling = (((Original Message-----From: Charles Cave > To: <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Thursday, April 23, 1998 3:43 PM Subject: What's happening to FWAKE????!!!! > It used to be junk mail... > > Now the FWAKE list wants to discuss Hip-Hop Music. > > What happened to all the good discussions on this list? > > It seems to me that the members of this list dont want to > discuss Finnegans Wake any more or don't want to contribute > to this list. The FWREAD list has a focus....namely, one > page a week, but this list (FWAKE) is able to discuss ANYTHING > about FW...yet the discussions are so quiet. > > How about each of us contribute some observation or topic > to the list for discussion? I don't think any of us can > MASTER Finnegans Wake, but rather, we each ENCOUNTER the > text and have a unique perspective. > > What aspect of FW do you enjoy the most?)))
Subject: Spiders on the run From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/23/98 11:23 PM Jonathan wrote: "In re the vexed question of hipness, surely we are the victims of some search engine? There were subject messages on the list in re the wake and music just before this rash of invitations to get down." RivS replies: Glad you brought this up. I had some susupicions this happened, but am not computer literate enough to be sure such occured. If so, I am probably the culprit. Right before our invitations to do the twostep, I ended a post on my perceptions that Mr Joyce wrote a lot of FW in the vocative voice, and that the vocative today is mostly heard in a certain popular music form in which a singsong rhythmic chantlike approach to lyric and melody is used to litanize the banality of urbanity while managing the most wonderful "rhymes utiles." Only I didn't give any of that description, just a simple word of three letters rhyming with map. So I think you are right, some big spider scuttling across deja news made a lock on that word and elicited the poignant and rather well-received query from the fan(s). Annoying, this debris from other ships in cyber-space. I apologize, although I probably just set off some similar alarm for twenty other groups with other buzzwords in my post. I like the song where they rhyme "acetimenophin(sp?)" with "David Letterman." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling -----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Warren Pickett ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE Date: Thursday, April 23, 1998 7:31 PM Subject: waxing global fecklessness
Subject: I had a dream...02 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/24/98 4:01 PM Will posted: " . . .(I couldn't help noticing last time I was in Dublin that the giant's testicals, putatively the Magazine, were appropriately wrapped up in barbed wire.) "But if that is the case . . ." Cf. p. 087: " . . . Ay! Exhibit his relics! Bu! Use the tongue [32] mor! Give lip less! But it oozed out in Deadman's Dark Scenery [33] Court through crossexanimation of the casehardened testis that [34] when and where that knife of knifes the treepartied ambush was [35]" & "magazine . . . 2. A warehouse or depot in which anything is stored . . . 4. A receptacle or part of a gun holding ammunition ready for chambering; also a case in which cartridges are carried. 5. A reservoir or supply chamber . . . " {Music to Joycean ears, eh?} [Funk & Wagnall's Standard Coll. Dict. '63,'68.] {RivS:} Magazine and case are somewhat synonimic, and as a steel chambering deck, a magazine can be casehardened. A testis is certainly a reservoir and supply chamber. Why, ma foi! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling -----Original Message----- From: ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Friday, April 24, 1998 2:16 AM Subject: I had a dream...
Subject: 037.36 "fain . . . wi'fennel" From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/24/98 4:41 PM Bill Cadbury posted: "37.36: I have wondered before, maybe asked before, why rats are supposed to like fennel." {RivS:} Fennel, dill, and anise are herb names which get somewhat interchanged, but all have a pungent licoriceness to their flavor in some degree or another. Seeds are a natural rodent food, and fennel is one of the herbs most likely to appear in seed form in a pantry. Fennel seeds are eaten to prevent indigestion, and if you ever seen what else rats eat . . . peacisely FW p. 037: “ . . . a supreme of excelling peas, [33] balled under minnshogue's milk into whitemalt winesour, a pro- [34] viant the littlebilker hoarsely relished, chaff it, in the snevel season, [35] being as fain o't as your rat wi'fennel; and on this celebrating [36]” Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling --Original message From: bill cadbury ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE Subject: a few things Date: Friday, April 24, 1998 9:57 AM
Subject: 314.07-10 plumb in center From: Riverend Sterling Date: 4/24/98 5:29 PM In response to the Mahan & Boyce & Campbell thread on Joyce's usage of his books' centers, I believe it is Art Neuendorffer who pointed earlier this year to the center of FW, p. 314, as having a thunder word: "Bump! [.07] Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrum- [.08] strumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup! [.09] -- Did do a dive, aped one." [.10] Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: HALP!!!!!!!!!!!! From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/6/98 7:13 PM . . . and that in the originally vowel-free spellings of Semitic alphabets, "1001" is "ALP + ALP," pronounced <'elef > and <'alef>, and respectively being the numbers "1000" and "one." "A" in Hebraic transliteration is not a vowel, but rather the glottal stop. "P," unless otherwise specified, is aspirated like the Greek "phi" or English "f." The reader guesses the vowels from context. By the way, does anyone know how Mr Joyce actually pronounced "ALP?" \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling / -----Original Message----- From: Jonna Kay Beck ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 3:50 PM Subject: Re: HELP!!!!!!!!!!!! > On Wed, 6 May 1998, alicorn wrote: > >> Ytirarevni wrote: >>> "Bababadalgaraghtakaminnaronn-konbrontonnerontuanskawntoo >>> -hoohoordenethurnuk!" >>> >>> what does this mean??????????????????? >>> >>> brian >> One of the hundred-letter words denoting a thunderclap. >> > Don't forget that the tenth thunderclap actually contains 101 letters, > making all ten claps eequal 1001 letters, thus referring to Sheherezade's > tales. >
Subject: Re: HALP!!!!!!!!!!!!(02) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/6/98 8:38 PM works for me \ -----Original Message----- From: Allen Mahan ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEA.IE> Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 5:09 PM Subject: Re: HALP!!!!!!!!!!!! > On Wed, 6 May 1998, Riverend Sterling wrote: > >> By the way, does anyone know how >> Mr Joyce actually pronounced "ALP?" > (Mahan) Nora? I'm guessing, here... > amm . . . >
Subject: 030.04 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/6/98 11:37 PM Greg Downing posted: \ I'm not sure what the exact deal is with "chalking halltraps," but the verbal formula used here is pretty familiar. You say "when [some ancient or biblical figure] was/did x" in order to express vividly and hyperbolically the idea of a very long time ago. / [RivS: WS seems to satirize the form by having Hamlet pretend to confuse it with current gossip -- ] \ (from Act II, Scene 2 [a room in the castle]) / HAMLET I will prophesy he comes to tell me of the players; mark it. You say right, sir: o' Monday morning; 'twas so indeed. \ LORD POLONIUS My lord, I have news to tell you. / HAMLET My lord, I have news to tell you. When Roscius was an actor in Rome,-- \ LORD POLONIUS The actors are come hither, my lord. / HAMLET Buz, buz! \ [Well, we have to allow Mr Joyce's competitors to occasionally share the spotlight!]. / Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 037.36 Fennella as she is From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/9/98 8:35 PM A secondary connotation of fennel, one most likely familiar to Mr Joyce: / "<The Fairy Goddesses, Aine and Fennel (or Finnen). --> 'There are two hills near Loch Gur upon whose summits sacrifices and sacred rites used to be celebrated according to living tradition. One, about three miles south-west of the lake, is called Knock Aine, Aine or Ane being the name of an ancient Irish goddess, derived from <an,> "bright." The other, the highest hill on the lake- shores, is called Knock Fennel or Hill of the Goddess Fennel, from <Finnen> or <Finnine> or <Fininne,> a form of <fin,> "white." The peasantry of the region call Aine one of the Good People; and they say that Fennel (apparently he sister goddess or a variant of herself) lived on the top of Knock Fennel' (termed Finnen in a State Paper dated 1200)." Count John de Salis, of Balliol College, cited in <The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries> by W. Y. Evans-Wentz ['11;'66;'94]. \ So our Good Fennel, among other worthy attributes, appears to be a sisterly manifestation of our Good Anna Livia. Fennel is also, it seems, cognate with our Mr Finnegan and, as a reification of "white," she even sneaks into the cloudlike drift of Issy, the raingirl. Now if we can only prove that Issy rats her hair . . . / Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Issy's Letter From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/10/98 3:22 AM Dear Laurel, / I am not good at spotting long sections of the Wake, so I'll take your word for it that there is a letter here by Issy. If so, then the ending seems easy enough, page 461.30-35. Line 461.33 shifts to the voice of Juan, someone referred to in line 31. The same line gives another name, Jaime. Juan and Jaime are the Spanish for the English names John and James. These names appear in various forms throughout the Wake (cf. lines one and two from page 216: "Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now!" Shem is a Hebrew form of James.) So to some extent the letter seems to be to both James Joyce and his father, John. The glass in hand fits the stereotype image of John Joyce. \ Page 461: Coach me how to [.30] tumble, Jaime, and listen, with supreme regards, Juan, in haste, [.31] warn me which to ah ah ah ah.... [.32] MEN! Juan responded fullchantedly to her sororal sono- [.33] rity, imitating himself capitally with his bubbleblown in his [.34] patapet and his chalished drink now well in hand. [.35] / Compare with page 457: Well, here's looking at ye! If I never leave you biddies till [.05] my stave is a bar I'd be tempted rigidly to become a passionate [.06] father. [.07] \ In the lines immediately above we may hear John Joyce talking before the letter begins. Again, the implication of a drink in hand by the toast "Here's looking at you." / Could we get away with starting the letter at line 25? There seems to be some narrative tag shortly after, but it reinforces the feeling of a letter: "she tactilifully grapbed her male corrispondee [line 28]." What we would seem to have then is a letter addressed to someone in the writer's presence. But such conundrums hold out little in the way of impedance to a Wakean. Good luck! I usually prefer to concentrate on one to six words at a time. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling / -----Original Message----- From: Laurel Sicks ... To: FWAKE-L@listserv.heanet.ie <FWAKE-L@listserv.heanet.ie> Date: Friday, May 08, 1998 8:35 AM Subject: Issy's Amourous Letter > I am tryin to translate this letter which is supposed to be from Issy. Whos > is it to? Is it to the writer, James Joyce. I thought there was a name in > the text which suggested Joyce. Am I away off mark as I think I must be? I > f anyone has the time, can you give me meanings for the words that are not a > lready given meaning? Also can you give me the exact beginning of the episo > de and the ending? That should keep you busy! The text may appear wierd as > I am using a Japanese System. Laurel Sicks > > Notes on Finnegans Wake > by the Wake Ass > CHAPTER 14 (Book III, chap. 2, pp, 457-61: > Issy replies in an amorous letter > (title after that used by Bernard Benstock in his > "A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake."
Subject: 123 FW & <U> Refs From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/16/98 12:17 AM -----Original Message----- From: Allen Mahan ... Date: Friday, May 15, 1998 3:54 PM \ > 123.05 -- "a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo > strokes tailed by a leaping lasso--" The number of pages in the 1st > edition of _U_. / RivS asks: \ Is then the tailing leaping lasso the terminal "S" of Ulysses (which then leaps in Viconian fashion to the verso across from the first page of text?) YES! (OK, MAYBE!). / Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 037.36 Fennella as she is(02) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/17/98 4:54 PM Dear listenfolk, \ This is a reposting from the recent dead zone in the first half of May. (Was all posting then undelivered?) It applies to the "rats are fain on fennel" thread introduced by Bill Cadbury, and expanded on by Ross Chambers, et al. There is perhaps, in addition to the obvious ties made below to Joycean themes around the names of "An" (Anna Livia) and "Finn" (Tim Finnegan), a more attenuated nuance: "fain" suggests "fay" by sound, although the words are not cognate. If Mr Joyce learned that Fennel was a sisterly remamafestation of the Irish goddess Ane from the book below cited, he would have known that "Faith" and "Fairy" are cognate with Old French words, "fae" and "fei" respectively. I am assuming "fay (fairy)" and "faith" both to derive from the the Latin "fata," the Fates who are aka The Weird Sisters, who perform so many marvelous cameos throughout <Dubliners>. / -----Original Message----- From: Riverend Sterling Date: Saturday, May 09, 1998 5:35 PM \ A secondary connotation of fennel, one most likely familiar to Mr Joyce: / "<The Fairy Goddesses, Aine and Fennel (or Finnen). --> 'There are two hills near Loch Gur upon whose summits sacrifices and sacred rites used to be celebrated according to living tradition. One, about three miles south-west of the lake, is called Knock Aine, Aine or Ane being the name of an ancient Irish goddess, derived from <an,> "bright." The other, the highest hill on the lake- shores, is called Knock Fennel or Hill of the Goddess Fennel, from <Finnen> or <Finnine> or <Fininne,> a form of <fin,> "white." The peasantry of the region call Aine one of the Good People; and they say that Fennel (apparently the sister goddess or a variant of herself) lived on the top of Knock Fennel' (termed Finnen in a State Paper dated 1200)." / The above notation is by: John de Salis, of Balliol College; cited in <The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries> by W. Y. Evans-Wentz ['11;'66;'94]. \ So our Good Fennel, among other worthy attributes, appears to be a sisterly manifestation of our Good Anna Livia. Fennel is also, it seems, cognate with our Mr Finnegan and, as a reification of "white," she even sneaks into the cloudlike drift of Issy, the raingirl. Now if we can only prove that Issy rats her hair . . . / Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ (PS . . . or are we to believe that the rats on Knock Fennel are fairies? That WOULD require faith!).
Subject: More musical references From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/27/98 5:34 AM Dear Bill Buttler, et al., / This letter you're quoting and the passage you've matched it with seem rather special and poetic. I wonder if one reason James Joyce named his son "Giorgio" (and am I correct in recalling that he was also called "George") was the association with St George's Channel, which Giorgio's parents crossed as the first step in their own flight (soon to lead to Giorgio's conception). Mrs. Nora Joyce's maiden name of "Barnacle" refers to an Irish seabird, a goose, and we know of Joyce's role in apotheosizing "quark," the English word for the cry of a seabird. (In more serendipitious musing, one of the major works of Mr Joyce's literary father, Ibsen, was [in English] "The Wild Duck," and the heroine of Ibsen's most important play is named "Nora (The Doll's House)." No wonder Mr Joyce got such a kick in their early days when Nora Barnacle showed him a press clipping about the playwright and asked, "Is this the Ibsen you know?" I've imagined he must have been tempted to say, "Yes, darlin', and knowing my great need for it, he seems to have created you to help me in the sad event of his passing." And Lord knows the good patient lady had a long go of it before himself let her hear the bells. But he did, and only from loving her more than strongly than he hated anything else. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling / -----Original Message----- From: Bill Buttler (Ozemail) ... Date: Tuesday, May 26, 1998 5:08 PM \ > FW 548.33: > > "I wound around my swanchen's neckplace a school of shells of > moyles marine to swing their saysangs in her silents" > > Letters III, 27 December 1934, to Giorgio Joyce: > > "*Silent, O Moyle*: Moyle is that part of the Irish Sea which is now called > St George's Channel. The three daughters of Lir (the Celtic Neptune and the > original of Shakespeare's King Lear) were changed into swans and must fly > over these leaden waters for centuries until the sound of the first > Christian bell in Ireland breaks the spell". > > regards, > > Bill Buttler > Melbourne, Australia
Subject: 127.01 [095] From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/31/98 3:02 AM RE/StanApple & alicorn [127.01] -- [095]: with his limelooking horse- [14] bags full of sesameseed, the Whiteside Kaffir, and his sayman's [15] effluvium and his scentpainted voice, puffing out his thundering [16] big brown cabbage! Pa! . . . [17] \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: concords. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/12/98 5:19 PM http://shaman.lycaeum.org/~martins/Finnegan/ \ http://howth.engl.uni-koeln.de/queryjoy.htm \ Above are alternative concordance searchers, for FW and U respectively, in lieu of the much missed John Williams sites. The FW site has one advantage in providing control over the size of included context, but one big flaw: the page numbers are incorrect, tending to fall behind on a rising curve of error. Good news? Line #'s are correct, so by the time you look ahead a few pages, you find your place in the text's real-world pagination. If you get twenty+ hits, of course, that can be labor intensive . . . but within the realm of the do-able. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Fw: Ulyssean abecedarics From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/13/98 3:26 AM BOOK: Part I. Chapter 5. Page 123. \ of all those fourlegged ems: [RivS—alphabetic character theme indicated by a reference to the printers’ spacer twice the width of an “en”] / and why spell dear god with a big [1] thick dhee [RivS—alphabetic theme linked to deity, and the Irish “D” words of divinity, as the ancient Anna called “Dana,” and the root for “oak” seen in “Druid” and the “dara” of “Kildare”; cf. Mikio/Ross on "dear knows"] \ (why, O why, O why?):[RivS—YOYOY, i.e., words which are hononymic to the names of alphabet characters, but have deep content and feeling] / the cut and dry aks [RivS--the rape of the oaks’ {“aks”=oaks+axe} groves ended druidism’s power centers] \ and wise [2] form of the semifinal [RivS—a direct reference to the character which begins and ends <Ulysses>, the “S,” which is shaped like the wise serpent, "semifinal" for the “S” is an ending but also a beginning as the serpent in its wisdom bites its tail to represent eternity] \ and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly . . . [RivS--the numbers of the Celtic Tree Alphabet and the Greek Alphabet furnish, respectively, the numbers of chapters in <Ulysses> and the <Odyssey>] / [3] . . . lastly when all is zed and done [RivS—zed is the final letter of the Standard Received English Alphabet] \ the pene- [4] lopean patience of its last paraphe [RivS--for anyone doubting the question, a direct reference to the fact that in <Ulysses,> Penelope is awarded the final say at last] / a colophon of no fewer than [5] seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso [6] [RivS—discussed in recent posts initiated by Mahan, RivS, Boyce, et al., & the focus being pagination association with <U> and the possibility of the leaping lasso being the initial and terminal “S” of <U>] \ who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the [7] vaulting feminine libido [RivS--the standard praise first given to <U> was for Mr Joyce’s potrayal of a feminine innerscape] / of those interbranching ogham [8] [RivS—refers to another old Celtic alphabet by a treetalk qualifier] \ uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male [10] [RivS--might refer to “S” by invoking the the god of winding streams, Meander, in regard of the streamlike letter; Ulysses is of course present as well, for he was the world’s most meandering of men]] / paddygoeasy partnership the ulykkhean [16] [RivS--<Ulysses> is well and briefly described in terms of its being a book combining Irish and Greek themata, a traditional Irish formula since the Middle Ages, hence “easygoing” and “paddy” {from Ireland’s initiator of the Medieval Period, St. Patrick, and his name’s devolution to a mild perjorative as Patty=Patty=Mick}] \ bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched [23] mariner [24] [RivS--the wretched mariner of course being Ulysses] / The original [31] document [32] . . . showed no signs of punctua- [33] tion of any sort [RivS—probably a portmanteau ref. to the unlikelihood of getting a period out of either Nora’s letters or Molly’s monologue] \ holding the verso against a lit rush this [34] new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent [35] query of our world's oldest light and its recto . . . [36] [RivS—Mr Joyce designed <U> to begin with an illuminated initial, the same one in fact, “S,” which begins a Bible in the Irish language. The author of Genesis, Moses, is thus referred to in a very Qabalistic manner which implies that Moses included codes in the Pentateuch, just as did Joyce in his own works]. / Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ PS I kept away from Mr McHugh('80,'91) until safely done. Now looking on his read, there is considerable confirmation, and also some very germane and observant allusions to the themes of Ulysses and abecedarianism which I missed, forinstance and most particulary the brilliant identification <McHugh's> notes on 123.30-33 regarding both Tiberian subscript in Hebrew and FW's everpresent Phoenician element. \ -----Original Message----- From: Riverend Sterling To: fwread <fwread@colorado.edu> Date: Monday, May 18, 1998 1:47 PM Subject: 123: Ulyssean abecedarics
Subject: Pp. 293; 314; 628 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/14/98 3:47 AM [Venal sin off the crosspost versus the more cardinal one of threading on a page not current to fwread list? Don't worry about not having the posts being corrected, you're that much better off]. \ To any poor soul who has plowed, or planning to plow, through my pi thread reprint from Allen [Mahan] . . . I've not reread them to see what else I got wrong, but there is one serious error woven through these hasty puddings which I later corrected offline, as the original posts were all offline: in my midnight whatever, I wrote "diameter" where I meant to write "radius." \ The "radian" is indeed named for the "radius." If the math-intolerant will remember the good old formulae for basic circle math, this is all we are talking about. Dividing any circle's circumference by its diameter yields the number called "pi," an irrational and non-algebraic number which is rounded off commonly to 3.14. \ The radius of a circle, that is, the distance from center to perimeter, is half the diameter (diameter being a line from perimeter to perimeter through the center). Therefore, the radius into the circumference of any circle is twice pi, and thus is 6.28. Stated directly, any circle's circumference is 6.28 times longer than its radius. If this ratio is "de-decimalized" to render a whole number, that is, if 6.28 is multiplied by 100, we reach the number 628, which is also the number of pages in Finnegans Wake. \ Since FW is the world's most circular of texts, it is compelling to explore what is at least a blatantly incredible coincidence for any signs of intentionality in regard of this significant pagination. In this light, it seems noteworthy that the page identical to the standard pi number (in pagination), page 314, has one of the ten thunderwords of the Wake. There are countless other intertwined math threads in the Wake, but the quasi related pp. 314 and 628 having a very "smoking gun" quality. If we had any idea what we were trying to prove, we might be even gladder of such evidence. \ Readers of course are referred as well to 293.12-14. Art Neuendorffer pointed me in these directions, and deserves only the credit. The mistakes are mine. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 029. 14 & 15: Eriugena From: thouart Date: 6/22/98 6:14 AM FW 029.14 & 15: "Creator he has created for his creatured ones a creation." \ The above sentence is a reference to a main tenet of the ninth century philosopher Johannes Scotus Eriugena (literally "John the Irishman from Ireland"). The giveaway is the four different forms of the root "create" flowing from one into the next. While not Viconian, because not dependent on time or mankind, a circularity is imparted. \ Eriugena's discussion of created and uncreated is a main subject of Book I of his Periphyseon. His term "nature" applies to all things, "those that are and those that are not." He divides nature into four categories: (i) that which creates and is not created; (ii) that which is created and also creates; (iii) that which is created but does not create; and (iv) that which neither creates nor is created. Eriugena explains that categories (i) and (iv) apply only to God. Only God is uncreated, and we may speak of Him as both creating and not creating. (There is not a division in God, but in our thought of God -- a very important distinction in terms of heresy). \ The way I present this to myself is not strictly what Eriugena probably intended, but it enables me to get an initial overview, albeit somewhat distorted. First comes (i) God, the uncreated being who creates (ii) me, who is a created being who also creates (iii) a chair, which is a created being which cannot create, but is part of (iv) creation, which is, in its totality, the passive side of God. Technical philosophers do not consider Eriugena "guilty" of either pantheism or polytheism, but as you can see, he was willing to push the envelope. Here,in Eriugena's words, is the four part thesis of how God emanates and returns through creating: \ THE DIVISION OF NATURE (PERIPHYSEON) (in Part) [John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), translated by I. P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by John O'Meara (Washington, DC, and Montreal: Dumbarton Oaks and Editions Bellarmin, 1987)] [CHAPTER 1] -- \ "ALUMNUS: Pray begin. \ "NUTRITOR: It is my opinion that the division of Nature by means of four differences results in four species, (being divided) first into that which creates and is not created, secondly into that which is created and also creates, thirdly into that which is created and does not create, while the fourth neither creates nor is created. Does such a division seem right to you or not?" \ Here is some biographical information: \ John Scotus Eriugena (or Erigena, c.810-c.877). "Scotus" at the time meant "Irish," not "Scottish." Eriugena means "born in Ireland," and he represents the intellectual activity that distinguished Ireland during the Dark Ages. (Having never been part of the Roman Empire, Ireland suffered no deterioration from the Empire's fragmentation . . . just Viking raids). Eriugena gained his fame after being called to the court of Charles (II) the Bald (who was King of France 843-877 and crowned Emperor by the Pope in 875). Eriugena also illustrates the danger of original thought . . . his works were condemned as heresy, centuries after their author's death. \ One of the best known stories about Eriugena is that when he was at the court of Charles the Bald, a jealous courtier asked him one night at dinner, "Tell me, learned one, just what is the difference between a drunkard and an Irishman (sottus/scotus)?" Eriugena looked across at the boorish courtier and replied, "I should say exactly the width of this table." \ Can we doubt Mr Joyce loved him? \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: noetic's rainbow From: thouart Date: 6/22/98 12:53 PM Dear Martin, \ In response to your marvelous assessment of the problematics of FW, surprisingly concise in terms of its coverage, and refreshing to see in a list of devotees, I must initially throw my hands in the air. You are posing a question which generates a million answers, none of which will be right or wrong. And that already gives one view into the glories and sorrows of trying to shake out a stable meaning from a “colliderscope.” \ As another recently-joined list-member put it so well, (I am paraphrasing from mememoremee): “What is your favorite edition to throw against the wall?” So in that aspect, it is an opportunity for those both blessed and cursed with an unusual combination of love of scholarly research, an ecumenical sense of humour, and something else that I forget at this moment, to embrace, regardless of one’s own racial story, the legendary spirit of Celtic contentiousness summed up by the aging Irish king who stood in the sea slashing at the tide with his sword. The gift Mr Joyce has provided for such poor overlit imbeciles as we is that the longer we stand waisthigh in this futile combat, the more we become impressed with the fact that he has been courteous enough to provide us with a real ocean, and not a sewage outlet. \ So I say to you, if you are what passes for wise in the catalog, “Run now, run back to the mainstream while yet you may!” If not . . . there is always plenty of room in the surf, we do stop for lunch, and we love company as long as you stand far enough apart that our swords do not clang too often against each other. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: getting it From: thouart Date: 6/22/98 1:20 PM Ruth Bauerle posted: \ "Read the Wake aloud. Always With an Irish accent." \ [RivS]: Which invaluable advice I iterate, adding that one may receive a good example of how by multiple listening to Mr Joyce's own recording of the ALP section (when will somebody please give it a digital remastering though!? all the scritchy- scratch can now be removed to give pristine sound . . . or has this indeed been done?) and add this: \ A devotee, whose name I unfortunately do not have to hand, wrote of his anxiety when his father, an American immigrant who, though originally from Dublin, was nevertheless what is commonly referred to as "a normal person," picked up a copy of the Wake from his son's coffee table. For several pages, the father's brow crinkled into deeper and deeper furrows, until suddenly they were smoothed away, and the father relaxed and said to his son, "Oh, I get it. It's like being in a busy Dublin pub where you are listening to twenty conversations at once." The son was both relieved and amazed. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ -----Original Message----- From: Ruth Bauerle ... Date: Monday, June 22, 1998 7:13 AM
Subject: 097.16 Father Allbrewham From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/24/98 5:42 PM On the call for alcohol at the Wake thread, this [097.16]: \ (may Allbrewham have his mead!) the creamclotted sherriness of \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: The earworker (& wee draps) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/25/98 7:24 AM Bill Buttler's latest post on the thread of how to best read the Wake, and particularly the now dominant subthread of reading it aloud (the main way of reading everything before our own century according to Eric McLuhan -- personally I read "aloud" within my mind, so my mind hears me reading, a distinctly different method than reading with only the eyes, but not externally audible -- I taught myself in school in order to be able to retain information for testing -- slower that reading for speed, it assures better understanding and seems to lock data into larger and more accessibles ranges of mental files and keywords for later accessing -- but anyhoo) -- \ I see Joyce's letter to Miss Weaver also has something for our lister(s) on the alcohol in the Wake thread: i.e., "half a glass of Irish whiskey" heard from reading "half a glance of Irish frisky" and I suppose one leads to the other. \ And gadzooks, there's even a drop of the crayture in Bill's goldmine of a signature from chapter five: " . . . the sack of auld hensyne," as not only is sack a wine, but the phrase sends the earworker quickly to "We'll drink a glass of kindness yet for the sake of . . . " \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ Bill had posted: \ "Apropos the question of reading FW aloud - I finally found the reference I was looking for. It is from Letters I, to HSW, 27 June 1924: " 'For instance, Shaun, after a long absurd and rather incestuous Lenten lecture to Izzy, his sister, takes leave of her 'with half a glance of irish frisky from under the shag of his parallel brows'. These are the words the reader will see but not those he will hear.' " \ -----Original Message----- From: Bill Buttler ... To: Fwread <fwread@lists.colorado.edu> Date: Thursday, June 25, 1998 3:34 AM Subject: Eureka!
Subject: Shak'n'Bacon From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/29/98 12:41 AM Dear Ross, thank you for this thread: \ " We are quite satisfied with labelling his creed [Bacon-Shakespeare rc] as a specimen; and placing it in a museum of intellectual curiousities, side by side with those of the Pyramid-religion people and the Anglo-Israelites, as interesting examples of the fantastic paradoxes which serve many as matters of faith and philosophy at the present day." [RivS -- I always love this sort of thing. The Pyramids certainly are of a religious nature, and there certainly are Anglo-Israelites by several valid definitions]. \ . . . [this] type tyrant will have to include lapsing London along with Indian America and Barbaric Australia [RivS -- say, I'm not sure we want to be lumped together with London!]. \ For it is the ambition of the half-evolved lower literary organism to be thought to live on higher life-stuff than its native bathibius . . . [RivS -- exactly why I study Mr Joyce]. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ Ross had posted: \ William Brockman posted information re William Thomson, proponent of the "Bacon wrote Shakespeare" school. This was in response to Edward Burns' query re Adaline Glasheen's note to Thornton Wilder which mentioned: " One Anti S book- 'A Minute Among the Amenities', lovely title" The FW link is 502.25-.26 "--The amenities, the amenities of the amenities with all their amenities." and I would very much appreciate any elucidation on the passage revealed by this new information. I have located a copy of this "book"--a 24pp pamphlet in fact--in the Mitchell Collection of the State Library of NSW. It is a refutation of various negative criticisms, particularly those published in Australian newspapers . . . \ -----Original Message----- From: Ross Chambers ... To: FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEANET.IE Date: Monday, June 22, 1998 10:31 AM Subject: 502.25 "amenities" 1 of 2
Subject: DUBS Graceshus! From: Riverend Sterling Date: 6/29/98 11:58 PM Using the 1969 Viking Critical edition, we see Mrs Kernan in "Grace" recalling on p. 170: "Edmund Dwyer Gray was speaking, blathering away . . ." The notes on p. 499 add: "170.17 'Edmund Dwyer Gray' -- son of Sir John Gray, he was noted for his indecisiveness." \ In the ALP passage of Finnegans Wake, the two washerwomen (again, the two sisters who herald death in Irish folklore) are indecisive about something misty spotted near the golden falls, and one says: \ "What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns." [FW 214.32 & 33] \ Perhaps the allusion here to Edmund Dwyer Gray includes then his own indecisiveness along with that of the washerwomen? No, probably not. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Fw: Raccontami di Anna Livia. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/10/98 4:05 AM Mr Joyce's supervised French translations, from my minute exposure to them, are very revealing. Cf. J. Joyce, Ph. Soupault, P.L. Léon, E. Jolas and A. Monnier: "Anna Livie Plurabelle" (1931) with the final English in the following examples -- \ [FW p. 215.16/17]: And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. \ Et chaque crochette ses sept couleurs. Et toutes les couleurs des cris différents. \ [In English, hue can be sound or color. In French, Joyce opted for the color side of the ambiguity, indicating his priority was synesthetic. Color is sound.] \ [FW p. 196.01-06]: O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. \ O, dis-moi tout d'Anna Livie! Je veux tout savoir d'Anna Livie! Eh bien! tu connais Anna Livie? Bien sûr tout le monde connaît Anna Livie. Dis-moi tout, dis-moi vite. C'est à en crever! \ [Vs. FW p. 215.03-05]: Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. \ Attends moun amour que la lune s'y mielle. Meurs petite soeir, petite soeir meurs. Dans tes yeux on voit le paradieu. \ In the "little eve" passage, die is die; in the "O tell me all" intro., the "die" is cast into an idiom accenting the casual slang of the washerwomen, "You'll blow your mind!" being not too far off . . . but not right on. "It is to burst from it" is certainly incorrect usage for any meaning in English, but connotes the theme of death in FW I;8. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Some one say Mackintosh? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/20/98 4:19 AM Several passages in Russell Kirk’s work on the Irish statesman, orator, and man of letters, Edmund Burke (1729-97), remind me of another Dublin-born wordsmith. First, on pp. 32-33 (of <Edmund Burke> 1967/1988), Kirk writes of Burke’s early work titled <The Sublime and Beautiful>: \ “In his emphasis on the terrible and obscure, Burke was breaking with eighteenth-century classicism . . . [according to Burke] one must observe phemomena and their influence upon mind and heart, rather than deduce neat conclusions from abstract propositions. The world, Burke saw, was still a place of wonder and obscurity, not a rational construction . . . Burke also penetrates, with considerable originality, into the emotional nature of words, defending their evocative quality, as against the rationalistic argument that words ought to be mere accurate symbols of objective things.” \ Later, on page 197, we learn that, in the last year of his life, Burke was visited at Christmas by his honorable opponent, James Mackintosh. “Mackintosh described, in glowing terms, the astonishing effusions of [Burke ’s] mind in conversation: perfectly free from all taint of affectation; he would enter, with cordial glee, into the sports of children, rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouring out, in his gambols, the sublimest images, mingled with the most wretched puns.” [Is this then an Irish habit?] \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Lambing Day From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/23/98 8:04 PM Dear Jerry, \ Yes, this would be most disturbing to receive the impression that St Brigid’ s day is not 1 Feb right after my posting which indicated that my entire reputation, and the wellspring of all of Mr Joyce’s works, and the heart of the auld sod itself – that all these revolve around that Good Lady and her day of recognition. I have forwarded two other people’s postings from the CELTIC-L list in support of my data, and am including in this post several website addresses in the same cause, as well as excerpts from them. The third site’s excerpt will shed some light on the situation, the problem being that Vatican II, in its vastly ineluctable wisdom, set in force the supposed decanonization of Brigid on the grounds that her origins were pagan myths. The frothy bubbles of these small sinking minds’ attempts to disguise themselves as theological judges have had scant success, but since most days are associated with more than one saint, a recently imprimatured calendar of saints might not mention St Brigid, hoping to obtain a “nihil obstat” or something. The Brigitte of 23 July is probably the Swedish saint of that name. I have seen close to a hundred listings assigning 1 Feb to the patrona bona dea of Ireland, St Brigid, the Mary of the Gael. But I have no desire to slight Sainte Ella, or her beautiful little yellow basket. Merely to have a shared feast day with St Brigid is a great honor, and the scurrying little beetles of the refrectory will surely dine on these saints’ crumbs, and grow sleepy, and dream of even greater feats of wisdom in the graceful sun of St Brigid’s sunny smile of amused forgiveness. Best wishes, \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ http://www.clannada.org/docs/brigid.htm \ St. Brigid is among the most popular of Irish saints, second only to St. Patrick. Known as "Mary of the Gaels," she has accrued many of the traditions which were earlier ascribed to Bride, Irish triune goddess of smithcraft and poetry, for whom she may have been named. Most notable among these is that St. Brigid's feast day is February 1st, the same day that the festival of Imbolg dedicated to the goddess Bride was celebrated. Numerous accounts of her life began to circulate after her death; the earliest of these is a fifth century account written in Irish, the Bethu Brigte. The seventh century Vita Brigante, which was written in Latin, is also frequently cited as a source on Brigid's life. \ http://www.st-brigid.org/brigid.htm \ Born in 451 or 452 of princely ancestors at Faughart, near Dundalk, County Louth; d. 1 February, 525, at Kildare. Refusing many good offers of marriage, she became a nun and received the veil from St. Macaille. With seven other virgins she settled for a time at the foot of Croghan Hill, but removed thence to Druin Criadh, in the plains of Magh Life, where under a large oak tree she erected her subsequently famous Convent of Cill-Dara, that is, "the church of the oak" (now Kildare), in the present county of that name. It is exceedingly difficult to reconcile the statements of St. Brigid's biographers, but the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Lives of the saint are at one in assigning her a slave mother in the court of her father Dubhthach, and Irish chieftain of Leinster. Probably the most ancient life of St. Brigid is that by St. Broccan Cloen, who is said to have died 17 September, 650. \ http://www.oakgrove.org/GreenPages/bos/2982.txt \ Brigit is clearly the best example of the survival of a Goddess into Christian times. She was cannonized by the Catholic church as St. Brigit and various origins are given to this saint . . . She became a nun and later an abbess who founded the Abbey at Kildare. The Christian Brigit was said to have had the power to appoint the bishops of her area, a strange role for an abbess, made stranger by her requirement that her bishops also be practicing goldsmiths. Actually, the Goddess Brigit had always kept a shrine at Kildare,Ireland, with a perpetual flame tended by nineteen virgin priestesses called Daughters of the Flame. \ When Catholicism took over in Ireland, the shrine became a convent and the priestesses became nuns but the same traditions were held and the eternal flame was kept burning. Their tradition was that each day a different priestess/nun was in charge of the sacred fire. \ In the 1960's, under Vatican II modernization, it was declared that there was insufficient proof of Brigit's sanctity or even of her historical existance, and so the Church's gradual pogrom against Brigit was successful at last and She was thus decanonized. It is very difficult to obtain images or even holy cards of St Brigit outside of Ireland anymore. \ Her festival is held on Febuary 1st or 2nd. It corresponds to the ancient Celtic fire festival of Imbolc or Oimelc which celebrated the birthing and freshening of sheep and goats (it really is a Feast of Milk). This festival was Christianized as Candlemas or Lady Day and Her Feast day, La Feill Bhride, was attended by tremendous local celebration and elaborate rituals. Her festival is also called Brigit. Brigit (the Goddess and the Festival) represents the stirring of life again after the dead months of the winter, and her special blessings are called forth at this time.
Subject: Brigittine bounty From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/24/98 2:51 AM Dear Jerry, et al., \ This is all I could find so far on St Brigit of Sweden, (other than a really bizarre site attacking "shoddy scholarship by neopagans" who are "trying to make people think St Brigit is Irish[!]" I'm telling everyone, there are TWO St Brigits, one IS Irish and the other, a much later one of the 14 century, is Swedish, and that is the she and the she of it, and I wish there were a hundred more): \ http://www.svkyrkan.se/svk/fra/history.htm \ Ces liens, cependant, ne garantissaient pas un soutien inconditionnel de l'Eglise à l'Etat, témoin le cas de Brigitte de Vadstena, Ste Brigitte (1303-1373). Elle était la fille d'un grand notable (lagman) de la province d'Upland, elle-même épouse d'un lagman et conseiller du royaume. Elle dénonça les abus de la papauté ainsi que les abus du pouvoir royal. Ste Brigitte fut canonisée en 1391. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 130.31&32 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/24/98 7:30 PM " . . . forth of his pierced part came the woman of his dreams . . . " \ coincidentia oppositorum, and all that -- (I am the eggman?) -- \ Shemolina Pilchard
Subject: 101.13&14; Part II From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/25/98 4:31 AM Finnegans Wake; page 101; lines 13 & 14: ". . . what price Peabody's money, or, to put it bluntly, whence is the herringtons' white cravat . . ." \ I have surfed around the big search engines, and cannot find any other prominent Peabody Harringtons other than John Peabody Harrington (1884-1961). Peabody was his mother's maiden name, and the combined appellative seems uncommon. I mention this because I have trouble believing that I just ran into the man whose work I studied for 12 years (JPH: 1976-1988) suddenly giving the old peek-a-boo from a work by the man I've studied the last 12 years (James Joyce:1986-1998) -- and you see the seamless segué. \ So I am most interested in, and encourage any able to suggest to me, alternate or serendiputious readings. On the other hand, I am faced with trying to understand the context and purpose and possiblility of J. P. Harrington's appearance in Finnegans Wake, hitherto unnoticed by myself and not referred to in any publications I have read. While I am in the forefront of neither Mr Joyce's nor Mr Harrington's scholars, I am perhaps near the forefront of scholars bizarre and socially ignored sufficiently to devote major attention to both men over an extended period of time, so I suppose I am pressed to bring the matter to the attention of those advanced in at least one field or the other -- particularly should this help demonstrate to me that I am out of my mind before further embarassment to all is done in my pursuit of this thread. \ There is no mention of JPH in the standard three vols. of Mr Joyce's published letters; I would certainly have noticed such reference in the standard works of biography and exegesis. But ditto goes for much of whom and what we see bobbing about in the Wake. JPH did not spell his patronymic as "herrington," but to demand standard spellings in the Wake is to invite madness. "Peabody" and "herrington" are not adjacent in the text, but again, the work in question is the fantastic colliderscape of a dreamer's earworks, and the words but a breath apart and linked by several rhetorical devises. 1) Both "Peabody" and "herrington" appear as quasi names ("Harring-" and "herring-" having quasi cognancy via the Old English "hæring" reinforcing this some, since it appears the words split the "æ" between themselves . . . diffusive drivel were we not speaking of our attempts to sift a mind of Mr Joyce's ilk); 2) the two quasi names are presented as equivalents via their status as mutual alternatives indicated by the conjunction "or"; 3) the usage of the interrogative adverbs "what" and "whence" enhance the sense that "Peabody" and "herrington" might form a type of dvandva (an equal but separate pairing forming an entity, as "secretary-general," or "Peabody Harrington" as a quasi Hispanic-style surname formed of family names from a child's mother and father both, as is the case with JPH). \ Of more interest I would think is the fuller context of the passage in review. The Peabodys are a prominent East Coast family of the United States. JPH's father was a Santa Barbara attorney (the city which served Reagan as "The Western White House"). JPH himself graduated from Stanford, where President and Mrs. Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, is currently in attendance. JPH rejected a Rhodes scholarship(!) to pursue his own lines of education and research. With no way for us to know for sure, we can at least say that the Wakean passage possible citing JPH has overtones which reflect JPH's rejected opportunities for a fast-track career of wealth, fame, and relative ease. \ By this hypothesis, "what price Peabody's money" is a rough equivalent to "what profit is there in gaining the world if one's soul be lost?" (A rather good question, I think . . . and not a rhetorical one necessarily -- and please note, it does not posit its terms by a mandatory mutual exclusivity). If we are, as is obvious, given the classical Hebraic construction of one answer (or concept) implied by the posing of two questions, then "whence the herrington's cravat" is meant to bring home more strongly the sense that one must follow one's own best judgement, even if it means missing those TV dinners by the pool, for the cravat has associations of privilege akin to spats (though in reality both appear in the garb of rich and poor). To put it simply, fancy clothes come with a price; for a scholar who is brilliant, egoistic, intuitive, and offbeat, it usually will mean making major early career choices between buttkissing and birdflipping (and sure the world needs frequent applications of both skills by judicious, gentle, and dignified appliers . . .) BUT -- \ I think we know the basic slope to the road chosen by James Joyce and John Peabody Harrington, that is, neither was likely to reach the lowlands afore ye. Each genius worked outside the Pale, an idiot savant feared and envied. Both linguists achieved enduring seminal works by a quietly fierce belief in the accuracy of their personal sirens. Neither was deluded. \ The following brief excerpts from letters between Ethnolinguistic giants Sapir and Kroeber discuss J. P. Harrington's assignment, soon revoked, to the orthography committe of the American Anthropological Association. Joyceans may note resonances with the sophmoric and aggravating brilliance of another wordman. \ "I should not be surprised...if you would have a great deal of trouble from Harrington. He is as keen and well informed on the subject as anyone in the country, but perhaps because he is a young man has shown a riotous inclination to indulge in the expressions of fine shades of sounds in the symbols used for them..." [Kroeber to Sapir, 1/6/13: SKC, letter 79, p.76] \ "I am somewhat afraid that Harrington is more interested in exhibiting his wide acquaintance with phonetic matters than in getting down to business." [Sapir to Kroeber, 4/28/13: SKC, letter 96,p.96] \ "I find Harrington very hard to fathom. His general attitude is extremely broad and reasonable, but he seems to completely contradict it at times by most surprising individual recommendations..." [Kroeber to Sapir, 5/8/13: SKC, letter 98, p.97] \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Correction (Harrington&Joyce) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/25/98 5:20 AM In paragraph #6 of the post 101.13 & 14 (on a possible reference in Finnegans Wake to John Peabody Harrington), <herrington's> is incorrect. \ <herringtons'> is correct, with the apostrophe indicating the possessive of a group, the Harrington family in my hypothesis; -- and <herringtons'> is Mr Joyce's spelling. Like J. P. Harrington, I would probably not have lasted long on an orthography committee. I apologize, but will strike again no doubt, -- best wishes, \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Harrington phonetics From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/25/98 5:22 PM -----Original Message----- From: Bill Buttler ... To: fwread <fwread@colorado.edu> Date: Saturday, July 25, 1998 3:49 AM Subject: RE: 101.13&14; Part II \ ". . . in view of JJ's comments to Mercanton re the rules of phonetics (discussed on this list earlier in the year). Are you able to give us a potted summary of Harrington's ideas?" \ [RivS]: I wish I could, but my studies of Harrington's work focused solely on his transcriptions of the testimonies of his informants on the native cultures of the southern California coast, so while I learned a great deal about the Chumash and some about the Gabrielino and such, I learned little of Harrington's methodology. Harrington published little during his lifetime, and that all in academic journals which go instantly out of print. I heard from a man who'd served one summer to Harrington as a field assistant while in college that Harrington told him, "If any anthropologists ever visit us, say nothing to them, not even your name." Harrington's goal was to record Indians in their own voices, by transcription and some use of wax cylinder recording. In this he was intensely successful, so that the many books published from his work after his death are indeed direct information as given by those elderly informants, and contain scant commentary by Harrington. So you learn little about phonetic models or stratigraphic analysis techniques, but you can build one hell of an ocean-going sewn-plank canoe if you've a mind for it, and study the notes with care. The only detailed study of Harrington made during his lifetime was done by a Chumash woman who wrote her 17 volumes of notes in Chumash. When she died, the language died with her. Her notes are, however, the best current hope for its resurrection. I see in Amazon that a book on Harrington's notes at the Smithsonian has been recently published. At $85, I shall have to wait. I am now too far removed from that field to request a review copy, and I suspect it would be largely in the form of a catalog. Any light it sheds on Harrington's inner workings would seem to be against his will, though I would be most interested myself in how he regarded these "fine shades of sound" which disturbed Alfred Kroeber -- not to mention how Mr Joyce came upon him! \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling \ Finnegans Wake; page 101; lines 13 & 14: ". . . what price Peabody's money, or, to put it bluntly, whence is the herringtons' white cravat . . ."
Subject: FW 100.31/32 & U 08.495 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 7/25/98 5:44 PM Sharon Hale posted: "Silvers from the sea are a type of salmon (Sam N.)? There are a lot of fishy things about HCE" \ [RivS]: " . . . pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt . . . " FW 100.31/32 \ But Sharon also pointed to another fishy character: "Riverend=Sea Sterling=a type of silver" \ [RivS]: And so we must flounder upstream to Ulysses 08.495: "Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well . . . " Curiouser and curiouser. \ Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: clueless in shemland 02 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/3/99 1:48 PM Karl posted today: Do you know the bit by Phillpe Solers which ends: "This is why it (FW) is a matter of the most forceful act ever accomplished against political paranoia and the overhanging weight of its deadening discourse, outside of all humor. Let me stress then that Finnegans Wake is the most formidably anti-fascist book produced between the wars." Right on. Joyce always emphasizes the awakened state. >From his adaptation of the epiphany to the desire to awake from history's nightmare to his final book's title, we always see Joyce's call to awake. The jarring and unnerving intellectual intrigue's running throughout FW word meanings do not mesh with or enhance the trancelike voice of the implied aural rhythms, so that the disharmony is increased by the chanting musicality of the Wake, as if the author had to shout his horrid doctoral level wordgames over a crowd of drunken celebrants and singing mourners. Everything in FW is thus the complete opposite and antidote to the smooth encouraging patterns of the cults with their mandatory special dialects of deception and disempowerment, their intense inspiring speeches, their homey gift for lowkey interpersonal banter, their instinct for balancing intimidation with narcosis. Joyce challenges us to fight with him across all time and space over every word he writes. There could not be a writer or book more incorrect to refer to as cultistic than James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Fw: Truth From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/5/99 4:52 PM -----Original Message----- From: Ross Chambers ... To: J JOYCE LIST MAIL <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> Date: Wednesday, May 05, 1999 9:50 AM Subject: Truth Greg D. posted: <<OED queen n., meaning 12. A male homosexual, esp. the effeminate partner . . . Cf. quean 3 . . . earliest citation yet found: 1924 Truth (Sydney) 27 Apr. >> Ross after snipping: "Truth was a newspaper . . . Cyril Pearl . . . followed the history of its founder, Ezra Norton, in . . . "The Wild Men of Sydney." The following is a snapshot of the newspaper in 1905. . . 'Hangmen I Have Met' or 'Abortionists of Old'; or an illustrated guide to the whores of Melbourne . . .: 'GOOD NIGHT DEARIE' Salutations of the Sexual Sinner Types of Trollops, Trulls and Town Walkers With Sketches of Well-known Street Strumpets' " "They don't make them like that any more! "Ross Chambers (who gained some of his sex education from Truth)." Note that the parenthetical comment is from Ross himself. From RivS: True, but as recently as 1967 the tradition was alive in southern Cali when Westways, the house organ of the Auto Club, published an illustrated (by a colorful two page hand drawn map) tour of all the best bawdy houses of the capital of Mexico. In this multi-page and lighthearted classic, the author, Robert Bryan, escorts his boss on uno viaje muy autentico, a drunken Irish American response to the late mid Sixties and generally gay fiesta permissible if stretching the envelope by virtue of that it was in another country. Hard to think of an editor at Westways magazine approving such a concept now, let alone participating onsite! But it happened, moving west. Is Joyce responsible? All too obviously. Robert Bryan followed in the tradition of Portrait of the Artist and the Circe chapter in Ulysses. It was literature now, Judge Woolsey said so in 1933, blah blah and suddenly you are being goosed by invisible strangers in a pitch black hallway which opens into a strobelit dance floor below hanging cages of dancing naked vampires of all the sexes Durrell lists on the wrappers of the quartet, I forget how many, and . . . never mind. The date 1924 for the bold pioneering usage of "queen" in print suggests the public scandals around those years carried in the Sydney press about the Theosophical author, radio star, and Bishop, Charles Webster Leadbeater, the discover and mentor of the philosopher and orator Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the longtime associate of Annie Besant, Besant herself the close cousin of Katharine Kitty O'Shea, the poor lady unfairly, inaccurately, and cruelly called the Great Whore of Ireland, a title the competition for which . . . never mind. Speaking of Parnell . . . speaking of Joyce . . . there seems a likely reference to the visits by Jiddu Krishnamurti in his younger days to Bishop C W Leadbeater's Sydney enclave in the Wake. Mr Joyce would hardly wish to miss bringing in hot gossip from Shem Hell. <<Our Chris-na-Murty! 'Tis well you'll be looked after from last to first as yon beam of light we follow receding on your photophoric pilgrimage to your antipodes in the past . . . .>> FW 472.15-18. For a more attenuated tie-in: <<Bisships, bevel to rock's rite! Sarver buoy, extinguish! Nuotabene . . . something to right hume about. They were erected . . . .>> FW 606.13-16. <<. . . of one sum in the same person? He comes out of the soil very well after all just where Old Toffler is to come shuffling alongsoons Panniquanne starts showing of her peequuliar talonts . . . .>> FW 606.28-30. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling <<. . . the whores winken him as they walk their side; on Christienmas at Advent Lodge, New Yealand, after a lenty illness the roeverand Mr Easterling of pentecostitis, no followers by bequest, fanfare all private; Gone Where Glory Waits . . . .>> FW 130.06-10. \\\///I
Subject: prankquean a mollycoddle? 021 & 269 FW; 12.505 (305:41-42) U From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/5/99 10:50 PM For loodheramauns and warthogs: there always someone to be ashamed of besides yourself. <<And, be dermot, who come to the keep of his inn only the niece-of-his-in-law, the prankquean. And the prankquean pulled a rosy>> FW 021-12-13. The genus of "sex scandals" runs along the specific of the rape of the Abbess of Kildare ordered by Dermot MacMurrough in 1132, and the usual vague intimations of homoeroticism seems to appear with what also seems the concomittant ambiquity. One interesting piece of data which the current debate on such things has brought to the foreplay, I mean foreskin, I mean foreground is that while apparently "queen" only recently came to be documented as a having a homoerotic meaning, "quean" goes back to Elizabethan times for "effeminate man" or "molly-coddle," a word used for Leopold Bloom in Cyclops (first line on p 306 in the 1961 edition of U). In the usual manner of inconclusive tantalizing, the paragraph uses the phrase "queer story" seven lines later. Chivalrous Terence had posted today: "With all the discussion on the FWake List about 1132 in FW I don't remember any discussion about Joyce's use of Sec. 11 subsec. 32, the anti-homosexual law Sec. 11 with Joyce's added subsec. 32, that brought poor Oscar down." The discussion which forms a paragraph running on pp 268-270 in FW seems to refer to Mr Wilde's difficulties. The paragraph is aptly labeled ". . . THE INFLUENCE OF COLLECTIVE TRADITION UPON THE INDIVIDUAL," the very crux of Wilde, who pitted the Classical traditions against the modern with himself as the arbitraguer and rugged individual. Marginalia whip along the teehee homoerotic theme with italicized references to "my can," "fight the fairies," "erse," and "if you'll suck." Foodnotes toss in "pink's cheek," "men's uration," and "nuts." <<It's a wild's kitten, my dear, who can tell a wilkling from a warthog>> we learn on FW 269.11-12. At line 18 of the same page we encounter the essential gay couple of the gods, glib Ganymede and zealous Zeus. At lines 21 and 22, we are informed that, no matter what we may believe and hold dear to the contrary, that << thou arr, I am a quean>> and must ask <<Is a game over?>> to which the answer is no, <<The game goes on>> and on and on like that damn pink bunny. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: prankquean a mollycoddle? 02 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/6/99 8:18 PM Along Karl's points, with which I heartily concur, there is this aspect to Joyce which I call the naughty schoolboy humor, or the teehee factor. Picasso said of himself that his genius was to be able to still paint as a child after he had entered adulthood, and do others seem to discern any that in Mr Joyce? The Wake especially lends itself to such because of its style and format, which allow for anything and tie it all together with a constant reploughing in the basic fields of linguistics. Thus I keep feeling that the author has whipped into a froth certain very silly conceptual sorts of wordplays. Mr Joyce, for an example, strikes the pose of a Molière nouveau rich buffoon and pretends that since he is a "man of letters" that that means he must devote convoluted diatribes of psuedo scholarship to eternal regurgitation of things about the alphabet, the most literal interpretation of literature meaning composed of letters (litterae; alphabetic characters). By the same token, Mr Joyce cannot mention grammatic roots without making a play upon "root" as "penis" anymore than he can write "tongue" for "language" without lifting the lace on the window of oral sex practices. I agree that is important to realize that this works both ways. Mr Joyce is interested in homoerotic nuances in word usage because he is interested in language as it really works, and because homosexuality is common but not to be spoken so that subtle imaginative half- disguises of agreed upon and spontaneous wordgames develop which are linguistically interesting. At the same time, there is a definite Beavis and Butthead side to Mr Joyce, a tittering child elbowing his mate in the next desk because Sister Concepta referred to St Peter's as the noblest of man's erections. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: antipodal bowdlers critiqued From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/7/99 5:22 AM In response to Ross's alert (and after studying the information on attempts in a similar vein in the USA thanks to an article by Donald Theall), I used the kind service of Senator Richard Alston to email him the following today: (to: http://www.richardalston.dcita.gov.au/contact.html ) "Dear Senator Richard Alston, and staff, "A friend in Sydney, someone I trust, has sent me the following note of concern: ". . . the Government has rapidly cobbled together a bill which would empower the Australian Broadcasting Authority to require ISPs to deny access to "offensive" sites." "As a member of a nation which came close to, but escaped, such a program of website content regulation, I feel compelled to advise strongly against it. The goals are well-intentioned, but censorship does not work, and in the process, seems almost always to turn into a nasty affair run by very limited and unpleasant sorts of people who are propelled by hidden agendas of their own. "Censorship creates robots discouraged from developing decent powers of discriminating and objective thought. Children who are raised to be strong-minded, balanced in opinion, and who are able to make judgements which are independent, informed, and fair -- these are society's treasure. Such children are usually some of the first victims of a censorship-prone society. "One concomittant of a free society is our right to be offended. It is a bittersweet right at times, but one to be cherished . . . unless you are ready to give up having a free society. "Thank you for your time, and best wishes to you." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: JJ's Utterings: (Novice from CANADA) From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/7/99 1:56 PM Dear Cait R Coogan, Good stuff -- thanky vous! My judgement: there is nothing lifted from the Wake in a manner which conflicts with the law or good taste. Small fragments are used for the overt purpose of citation, not theft, and no long passages from the Wake occur, just allusions in the classical tradition of educated poetry. If you are concerned not to offend the estate, I would address the title, not the content. Other books do have titles with Finnegans Wake within them, but "Images from FW" courts a misinterpretation. "Images Suggested by FW" is more accurate, but perhaps not poetic to your ear. Marshall McLuhan wrote and published a book called Surfing in the Wake. It shows what can be done to make the title refer to FW with FW type wordplay. I say "nihil obstat -- imprimatur! (there is no objection -- let it be printed." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: FW page 268/269 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/8/99 2:50 AM Dear Elaine and list, It's late and I am going to dodge out of looking up the passage again by not approaching things textually, but just to agree with your general point. Not only is this passage seemingly mingling both hetero and homo imagery, and each somewhat inconclusively, and each merged with nonsexual imagery, but I imagine that is true throughout the book, though someone I hope will disprove that, but all in all, we do seem to be in a dreamlike flow of layered images which hook into each other like water molecules sharing electrons so there is a huge sense of flow but it is impossible to disentangle specific particles -- thence the terms of the kaleidescope family in the Wake: colliderscape being one, there is at least one other. It is as though the dreamer is having sexual feelings during sleep which are looking for a place to land without much real effort or focus. Sounds good, I think I'll try it here pretty quick. Zzzzzzzzzzz . . . . At his mealy-mouthed best, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: A Sterling Hoax? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/8/99 3:03 AM Dear Bruce, Thank you for the clarification/correction. I meant to look the thing up on a book search but spaced it. A clerk mentioned the book to me as by M Mcluhan when I was trying to order Eric Mcluhan's book on the Role of Thunder in FW. Glad to have it cleared up. Best wishes, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: poets don't require money, infinite credit suffices-Baudelaire From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/8/99 4:09 AM Collected Books: The Guide to Values. By A Ahearn & P Ahearn. G. P. Putnam and Sons: NY, '91. "Finnegans Wake. London, 1939. Buckram. [1] One of 425 on large paper, signed. In slipcase, $4500. [2] London, 1939 , $1500. [3] New York, 1939, $500. [RivS]: Notice that the above are 1991 prices. The Ahearns have since published a NEWER edition of the Guide to Values. Internet book searches such as ABE or Bibliofind have made PRICE guides slightly less important, as you can usually find a range of actual for-sale-now prices, but the POINTS to look for remain invaluable. Here are the general points by which to identify a Faber and Faber (publisher of the London edition of FW) first edition: First Editions: Guide to Identification, 3rd edition. Zempel & Verkler. Peoria, Illinois: Spoon River Press, 1984, '95. IF (newer editions only) the foot of the title-page verso [opposite side of the leaf the title-page is printed on] has a number removal list, it must begin with "1." [In other words, many publishers have come to start an edition with a number string running from 1-10 at the page's bottom on the back of the title-page -- as each subsequent printing is run off, the printer will remove a number, working from one to ten. If it is a seventh printing, you will see "7 8 9 10" or sometimes "10 9 8 7." Look in a few books printed in the last twenty or so years, and you will find such a thing within looking too hard, most likely. This should not apply to most hardbound copies of the Wake, maybe none? The following will: The verso [back] of the title page should state "First Published in 19-- by Faber and Faber Ltd." BUT Faber and Faber does not usually mention whether a previous American first edition exists. [RivS: This can be a major factor in the game of collector's values, particularly if the author is an American. [RivS: It is not considered as improper if a bookdealer places a first edition out as such and does not mention that the edition does not "follow the flag," that is, is not the first edition from the author's homeland. Or that it is a first trade edition, and not an earlier run made for collectors, as in the case with the Wake, which had a limited run of signed large editions in a slipcase. Joyce didn't publish in Ireland, so England has for FW been granted the pole position pricing. Hence the three prices above, hence the immense value of the guides to the basic "points" that collectors and dealers look for in setting values. Is it a game? Bigtime, but at least there are rules and guides. And the occasional "yardsale" with the Poe holograph lining the parakeet cage for 50 cents. Still it's not time efficient, you have to be driven by the imps of hobbydom or major grants, etc. [I am trying to remember the preferred FW printing of serious scholarly readers. Is it the seventh which came out in 1958 (and all ones after)? Anyway, the first edition, at least in the States, came out with a little booklet laid inside with a long list of author's corrections. The second through the sixth(?) printings incorporate those corrections as a long list in the book's back pages, and thus constitute a second edition. In 1958, a third edition came out which incorporates the corrections into the main body of text, and that is preferred by READERS (not collectors) because few of us will stop at each sentence in the Wake and check a separate booklet or final signature for errata. No edition, so far as I know (not very) is considered authoritative, and people like Bill Cadbury (if there are any like him), or at least Bill, anyway, are still going over the drafts and notebooks and such sources comma by comma. At that level of examination, some of the printed "corrections" are not even internally coherent, let alone set in stone.] Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 013.17 They will be tuggling foriver. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/8/99 10:41 PM Dear Laurel, Your letter has caused me to feel very concerned about you. It is a frightening letter, filled with violent images, and I cannot tell if you are writing about yourself or another person . . . or both? At the same time in the midst of your hectic outpouring, you ask some very direct and important philosophical questions which affect the lives and souls of all of us, questions we should discuss when we are clear and calm, but don't. I admire your ability to keep your eyes on these higher issues when it is obvious you are in real pain and fear, not "merely" discomfort and anxiety. I feel feeble to address these questions, which I certainly cannot answer anyway, in view of the depth and seriousness of your tone. But such considerations rarely keep the Riverend quiet, though your post has come the closest to leaving me aghast and agape since I entered the land of Emailia. So I attempt to respond not because I am likely to contribute much, but because you are a sister on the path with us in this difficult time and I just want to give it a try. CAN A PERSON WHO SUFFERED ONE EXTREMELY SERIOUS PSYCHOTIC EPISODE WHICH INVOLVED MURDER, BE SAVED FROM SLIPPING AGAIN INTO A POTENTIAL 2ND EPISODE? Yes. Not only yes, but the horror of the first episode should be the inspiration to avoid the second outbreak. As tension builds, and the magnetism of destruction and senseless violence steals through the soul and body like a sleep with no solace, the urge to blow the lid off the jar for release becomes more and more seductive -- but the truth, and it is not a sad truth, is that releasing tension through senseless violence and destruction provides no more relief than when we pee on ourselves in bed. To overextend the metaphor, you, myself, anyone not catheterized, has got to awake, get out of bed, and go to the bathroom. In terms of reality, this may mean supervised medication for therapy, talking with the right people, frisbee in the park, or what I am currently using, which is Tai Chi. But it is usually a given that if your current situation is dragging you down, the antidote will be something new, a pattern breaker. It must be something, or several things, that raise the vibrations. My late aunt claimed that veritable armies of demons flee from a room as soon as a bowl of fresh fruit is put on display. Photographs of people one respects can be of great help. For me, these are good things, but only if I also spend several minutes every few hours making up childishly obscene lyrics about my neighbours, television personalities, and our American political leaders. When circumstances permit, I also make up dance steps while I sing the lyrics. It makes me feel I am back riding around with my high school friends, we always did that. We never heard of Davy Crockett, but sang often of Davy Crock-of-Shit, and so on. So I have DavEEEE etc and the beautiful slow flow of Tai Chi postures, and it gets me back to a peaceful mode. The fact that it would convince all the sort of people I can't please that I am completely bonkers reassures me that I remain on the right path, here at the white house, and in charge. Therefore I have no need for jerky acts of counterproductive psychodramatic violence, or what Lao Tze called the bumbling acts of an apprentice. Next. The slaying of an innocent animal in reaction to paranoia is a very bad thing which must never be repeated period. Again, the horror of the first episode must be viewed as the voice of your guardian angel giving you the holy keys to redemption. What is done is done. Free will exists only to the extent we can become properly seated in the present moment. To the extent we live in the past, we have no free will. The future, on the other hand, is so free we cannot touch it yet. But each second without exception that we experience the present we must dedicate to the salvation of all. Learn it again, start with yourself, let it grow slowly. I have on occasions turned to, and often received help from, really rather frightening people, because I know that in that present moment, they have the same freedom to be kind as anyone else, and perhaps more inspiration. As to the third question, can clarity be achieved and used as a means of self-control, if a person is going through replays of previous breakdowns while experiencing a severe hormonal imbalance? As you know, you have put your finger on the center of a great huge beast. We all are born into the bodies of jungle apes. Society immediately sets out to tame our spirit, in the process of which that spirit is often broken by other bumbling apprentices and then we turn upon ourselves. "I don't negotiate with terrorists" does not generally go well when the terrorist is your internal ape in a childhood rage at the betrayal of its instincts for a direct and physical way of life. We have to negotiate with our inner apes and demons, because they are in fact us. Everything in the world is unto itself the softest tenderest most vulnerable thing in existence. When the inner conflicts in the mental and emotional arenas play out as chemical imbalances in the bloodstream and endocrine system, the first stage of negotiation may be chemical correction through medication. In order for medication to feel right, and not like an invasion from alien shores, the resultant and initial relief must be used to incorporate other positive life changes, from my aunt's fruit bowl to a daily walk to solving the conundrum of who was the "WH" of Shakespeare's Sonnets to dancing the Davy Crock-of-Shit song -- my things, as you see, are not very people oriented, but that's me. I try to make up for that antisocial side of my ape with Red Cross work and telling cornball jokes to the cashiers at supermarkets. IS IT POSSIBLE TO EXERCISE FREE WILL & REFUSE TO ACT CRAZY THOTS OUT? Intentionality is very central. The mind is a conversation between a considerable number of voices to one listener. The listener has a voice as well, but it is a subtle voice because it begins in the womb without words. You have to peacefully but firmly begin to let the other voices know what you wish and expect, and when you want a little quiet. A voice in the head has no more power than your spirit gives it. The spirit is strong, it is a fire, it is wild, it does not desire to be understood or to understand, it is what it is, and that is why we called a proud and fiery horse spirited. The soul is different, it is always trying to understand and be understood. When the spirit and soul work in harmony to administer the heart, and the mind, and the body, the possiblility opens immediately for things to improve. Even in the worst of earthly hells, places designed to disempower whoever can be trapped in them, places like a concentration camp or military press conference, anyone working with soul and spirit is that far ahead of the game. As Dylan Thomas wrote, "I sang in my chains in the sea." It is not by our chains that we are judged, but by our songs. (Excluding, of course, I hope, the Davy Crock-of-Shit song.) "Above the stupid orgies' detritus and smoke in the holy hush of dawn the holy self revives," something like that. From Baudelaire. IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH WITH GOD'S HELP TO SAVE YOURSELF . . .? Sort of. You must join into the effort wholeheartedly yourself, because God needs our help and guidance and love just as we need God's. Think of the petty asininity and profound awfulness God gets exposed to every day. Look at the mistakes God makes century after century. We are all children, we are all in this together. Prayer is very helpful, don't get me wrong. But it's a two-way street. Our angels and demons come to us for guidance and strength, they can't fathom that we are just as wierd and mixed-up as they. What they can do for us in return is absolutely amazing at times, but you can't depend on it. Again, its all a conversation at Finnegans Wake. When falling asleep in a state of anxiety, one again should reassure the mind that things are on a positive road, because the mind is a terrible worry-wart. It is designed to solve problems, and will create them if it is too hyped-up. One technique I use is to recall very scary times in my past when I prayed to escape . . . in my case, I usually remember a flood I was trapped in for days in rugged inaccessible mountains in the winter, and how all I wanted day after night was simply a dry warm bed, and I say, damn if I didn't pull it off! I survived the flood, and am in the warm dry bed, and here I must not worry about some stupid city games based on inflated ideas of my starring role in the daily comico-pathetical tragedy. Dav-eeee, Davee, etc. Did Joyce roll around in the free will problem? I think so, and I think you have identified both of the great questions of 20th c philosophy: 1) Why do I feel this personalized inchoate sense of alienation beyond reason? and 2) What is the point of having limited free will, it's a contradiction in terms, but the undeniable reality of existence? These are not questions designed to have answers, they are the emotions of brains which are too big to be satisfied with a dog eat dog system of jungle jingoism. These foriver tuggles are peeling the eggshell, and herald the constant attempts toward the revival of the holy self. It is the marvelous nature of the soul to be reborn. It hurts like hell, it hurts real good, it is tingle on the sky scale. The absolutely worst possible reaction is destructive violence, like a struggling swimmer striking against a rescuer. Gently, gently, the universal mother is saying to us. You cannot storm the gates of heaven. You have to be tough to be alive, you have to be tough to be dead. One thing we know, we have a whole lot more time to get to be dead than to be alive, so we have to use these eyes to see all the beauty we can. One thing I think I've discerned from Joyce and my grandma, working on me as they do together, is without we the living, we the dead would have no eyes at all; and without we the dead, we the living would be without our souls. It seems like an imperfect system, but it may well be a work in progress. Whatever it may be, we are all in it together. Yes, all of us -- everyone. Keep the faith, Laurel. The world needs Joyceans! The world needs you, or it wouldn't have bothered with you to begin with. Nor a blade of grass, or a star. Is there a great cosmic plan then? I don't think so. Just something out there in here that loves creating things. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 375.08 & 17-18. From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/10/99 4:28 PM The issue initiated by Susan is a crucial one to our times, especially for anyone involved in crisis reponse on any level -- how to balance privacy issues with a free atmosphere of discussion. We are, after all, being labeled as The Information Age, and that cannot be all good. I, for one, am really tired of hearing politicians talk about "family values." My family is none of the government's business, but then again, I grew up in farm country, and my attitude is no longer realistic. Anyway. This is yet another deep subject we must thank Laurel for introducing, and there is no ideal solution. All in all, I am afraid we must get used to living in a constant ambience of crisis intervention as a modern way of life. If you don't reach out, they come for you. The whole planet seems to be bleeding and on fire, although the "deep down freshness inside of things" cited by Manley Hopkins is right there too, and the Holy Spirit yet hovers over all with spread wings. It's really a hell of a deal. And Mr Joyce, our topic around which we've come together? Himself appears to have been a fairly staid homebody at heart, a highly disciplined sort who never allowed his wild ape to interfere with his career goals (but I read a post last year to the effect that the Jolas's and Gorman, perhaps others, contriubuted actively to gild the "not a Bohemian or dancing drunkard" image of Mr Joyce. Anyhow, we know he was at best a calm eye in a storm. Not only was his daughter Lucia the sad victim of mental illness of a debilitating intensity, but so also was Joyce's poor daughter-in-law, Helen Fleischman Joyce. The sister which Joyce seemed closest with, Eileen Joyce Shaurek, suffered the suicide of her husband, Frantisek, and Mr Joyce helped Samuel Beckett recover from a serious stabbing inflicted by a disturbed man on the sidewalks of Paris. In the end, it was the most dominant and invasive explosion of mass mental disease in our century, the "Nazi priers" who seemed to have killed Mr Joyce by causing his intestines to writhe in nervous exhaustion due to the year he attempted to prevent his son, Giorgio, from falling into Nazi clutches -- having to escape to the sanctuary of Switzerland saved Giorgio, but cut the Joyce's off from their Lucia who had to remain institutionalized in France (and the capture of Paul Leon by the Nazis, a capture which partially derived from Leon's heroic and successful attempts to retrieve and see to the safekeeping of Joycean documents left in Paris, eventually resulted in Leon's death under Nazi detainment -- Joyce died fighting his personal war against mass insanity. And like Paul Leon, Mr Joyce won his goal of preserving what he loved, but died on the field in so doing). En otras palabras, we are with you in Tokyo, Laurel. Ask not for whom the bell tolls indeed. Much of history really is a nightmare seen through a glass darkly. Is there hope? We'll just have to wake and see. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 146.20: married to reading From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/13/99 4:53 PM My mail is working at last. Cait's story of two men by the hospital window is quite a beautiful one. You may have heard a story that in both heaven and hell people are seated at a grand feast table, but with collars around their necks too wide for them to reach around, and so cannot feed themselves. In Hell, the people scream, complain, and curse everything for ever. In Heaven, the people simply resort to feeding one another. Before I learned to read, I used to "read" to other children by opening a book, and then making up stories which I claimed I was reading from the book. That is how bleezing impossible it is to shut me up! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 556.19 child of tree From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/13/99 8:17 PM Dear Mr Spicer, et al., <Coded languages, funny tales, the neccesity of human interaction concerning the work and perhaps most importantly the transcendental quality of the words.> A marvelous description of Finnegans Wake! Your reference to the fact that it takes a (global) village working together to read the book correctly I found very thought provoking. There is reference to Scheherazade, the woman who spins the 1001 tales of the Arabian Nights, in FW, and the number 1001 is one of several numbers which Mr Joyce constantly weaves throughout the work. 051.04-05: <scherzarade of one's thousand one nightiness>. In Hebrew transliterated into Anglo-Roman script, the words for "thousand" and for "one" are both written as "ALP," the initials of wakean heroine Anna Livia Plurabelle. In speaking Hebrew, the two meanings for ALP are distinguished by two different pronunciations. ALP+ALP thus = 1001 ('elef + 'alef). Near the quasi end of FW, there is wordplay upon the Arabic (South Semitic) pronunciation of ALP, which is "alif," pornounced as "all leaf." At 619.16 is this paragraph: <Alma Luvia, Pollabella.> Several lines below we find "Only a leaf, just a leaf . . ." (619.22) which gives us the number 1001 by this route: ". . . a leaf . . . a leaf . . ." pronounced "alif alif" which again in Semitic languages is spelled ALP ALP which means, among other things, 1001. This sheds a little light on the leafy imagery associated with "Alp, mother of Shem," (page 420), which grows thickly toward the book's final leaves. Semitic languages, like Greek, use the same words for numbers and letters, so ALP is not only "one" but the first letter of the alphabet, so "Alp, mother of Shem" also means "Alif, mother of the Semitic alphabet," and in the Qabala, ALP is indeed one of three alphabetic characters referred to as "mother." ALP is considered as having given birth to the other two letters accorded the honor of being referred to as mothers in the alphabet. Those other two letters are Shin and Maym which in Hebrew spell "Shem." And on we go and on we go. Arabian stories have cameo appearances in other Joycean works. One of the stories in Dubliners, Araby, is about a boy's harsh awakening to reality from the land of fairy tale romance. Sinbad the Sailor, as an Arabian counterpart of Ulysses, gets sent up in the novel of that name as Darkinbad the Brightdayler, etc. Perhaps most significantly, or maybe with no significance at all (the usual Wakean problem), the first thunderword (page 003) begins with the name of a most prominent character in the Arabian Nights, (Ali) Baba, and the number of letters in all ten thunderwords combined is 1001. Best wishes, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: virus alert 1999 May 14 fwake-l From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 6:27 AM This is a virus alert. The alert involves a virus in a listmember's computer. It is not in my computer, which never became and has never been infected. I don't know how serious a virus it is. I detected and deleted the virus on 14 May, and ran a deep scan using definitions from 10 May (it was caught with definitions from around 25 April) and all my computer files are uninfected. The virus was in an attachment mailed to me by Cait Coogan which was to open in Word. Poor Cait had mentioned in a post about having mail problems, but I don't know if there is a relation to the virus. Until Cait can delete the virus or mail from another and virus-free computer, do not open any attachments from Cait Coogan or any from the address <crcoog [at] pop.intergate.bc.ca>. Everyone seems agreed that viruses cannot infect regular email, but can infect attachments which arrive by email. Therefore there should be no worry about opening and reading any basic posts from Cait, just immediately delete any attachments or at least scan them in a 'Net updated virus detection/deletion application. It is given out that some/many viruses do not really do much, while of course many are damaging, so Cait can have the virus and not know it. If you have opened attachments recently, you might want to do a virus scan with your appropriate software. I detected the virus when I saved the attachment to a floppy disk. At no time did I open the file. I deleted the file from my mail account and from the diskette. According to my log, the file had been infected with the <097M.Tristate.C virus>. Does anyone know anything about it? Sorry to be an alarmist. Never a dull moment. Best wishes to all, and sorry to be the one to break the news to you Cait, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the gnarlybird From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 7:55 PM Several questions involving the Joycean oeuvre reincarnating in the genres of mystery appeared in the 1998 "No Cheating Before Go" quizes on the jjoyce list (U Utah). Will try to forward some of the relevant posts, so delete the forwards toot suite if you are not into this thread. Fwake-l listers should consider subscribing to jjoyce (and to fwread) so that proper threads go to proper lists -- so, THE THREE JOYCE LISTS AS I UNDERSTAND THEM: 1. FWAKE-L is for the discussion of any topics about Finnegans Wake: To subscribe: send a message with the text "subscribe FWAKE-L [your name]" to <listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie>. 2. FWREAD focuses on one sequential page of FW each week: To subscribe: send a message with the text "subscribe FWREAD [your name]" to <listproc@lists.colorado.edu>. (Currently on page 139). 3. J-JOYCE is all things Joycean, with a reputation for things Ulyssean, but anything to do with Mr Joyce and his oeuvre is fair game. This is perhaps the most professionally-oriented, and at times contentious, of the three lists. To subscribe: send a message to <j-joyce-request@lists.utah.edu> with the word "SUBSCRIBE" in the body of the message. For more information on these lists, visit the James Joyce Resource Center at: http://english.ohio-state.edu/organizations/ijjf/jrc/caught.htm Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Fw: Joyce mysteries From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 7:57 PM -----Original Message----- From: Brandon Kershner ... To: j-joyce@lists.utah.edu <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> Date: Friday, February 20, 1998 8:48 PM Subject: Joyce mysteries Amanda Cross, author of The James Joyce Murder, is a pseudonym for the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun, who contributed a dubious Afterword to a book called Women in Joyce, edited by Elaine Unkeless and Suzette Henke. The Death of a Joyce Scholar, the book Greg referred to, is by Bartholomew Gill, and has a substantial Beckettian element as well. I believe Gill was American-born but educated at UCD. Brandon Kershner
Subject: Fw: NO CHEATING BEFORE "GO!" From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 8:00 PM -----Original Message----- From: Gregory {Greg} Downing ... To: j-joyce@lists.utah.edu <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> Date: Friday, February 20, 1998 7:27 PM Subject: Re: NO CHEATING BEFORE "GO!" The James Joyce Murder, 1967. There are fifteen chapters, not in the same order as the Dubliners stories. Thus, 1. is The Boarding House, 6. is The Dead, 11. is The Sisters, 15. is A Painful Case. There is also a one-page prologue and a half-page epilogue. Greg Downing/NYU, at ... or ...
Subject: Fw: NO CHEATING BEFORE From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 8:15 PM > HINT: the mystery novel Finnegan's Week is linked > by title to the Wake, and not by plot. The author is Joseph Wambaugh, 1993. Finbar Finnegan is a San Diego police detective. The story involves the toxic waste disposal industry in Tijuana. It's OK to not read it and say we did. Thanks for your response Karen. RSt. > (RSt: The Death of a Joyce Scholar has the conceit that a > Dublin police detective must acquire a basic knowledge of > Ulysses quickly in order to "crack" a murder during a > Joycean convention held in Dublin on Bloomsday). -----Original Message----- From: Riverend Sterling To: Karen Eblen ... Date: Saturday, February 21, 1998 2:13 PM Subject: NO CHEATING BEFORE "GO!"
Subject: Fw: no cheating 02 update 02 From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/14/99 8:25 PM > c. In a very famous movie a very famous song is sung in a cafe under > emotional and dangerous circumstances. Name the song, and cite where and > when Joyce had already sang it under similar circumstances. Kelly Anspaugh answered: In "Casablanca," the "Marseillaise," sung in response to a gang of Nazis singing. Joyce in Paris cafe prior to German occupation? <<RSt: You know the scene, Rick's Café Americain . . . Major Strasser is a special guest at the café that night. Dooley Wilson is taking five for old times sake while the major's table takes over the piano. The countersinging of the French anthem is lead of course by Victor Laszlo. And in 1939, several years before the movie, we read in R. E. Ellmann, '59/'82/'83 (pp. 727 & 8): "During these shattering days, when La Baule was filling up, as during the first World War, with refugees, Joyce renewed his friendship with Dr. Daniel O'Brien, who was stopping there for a time too. O'Brien, having been trained in psychiatry, gave Joyce what help he could with Lucia, but mostly he companioned him in his misery. One night they went together to a large restaurant with dancing at La Baule. It was close to where the French and British soldiers were encamped, and two or three hundred of them having crowded into the place, they began to sing the 'Marseillaise.' Joyce joined in the singing, and gradually his voice caught the soldiers' attention. They turned and stared at him, and then a group hoisted him onto a table so he might sing it all over again. As O'Brien recalled later, 'You never saw such an exhibition of one man dominating and thrilling a whole audience. He stood there and sang the "Marseillaise" and they sang it again afterwards with him and if a whole German regiment had attacked at that moment, they would never have got through. That was the feeling. Oh, Joyce and his voice dominated them all!'">> g. Post-graduate work: in what Raymond Chandler novel is Joyce mentioned, and how? [RivS to fwake-l listers on 1999 May 14: jjoycers were never able to answer this one, and it is open to this day. If you want to one-up them, go ahead. What's stopping you? Losing your touch, or maybe you're just plain yellow? Go ahead -- reach for your mouse. Well, do you feel lucky?] -----Original Message----- From: Riverend Sterling To: jjoyce <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> Date: Saturday, March 14, 1998 4:01 AM Subject: no cheating 02 update 02
Subject: FW for Dummies/Idiots Guide to FW & Ulysses From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/17/99 7:31 PM Last night on "60 Minutes" actor Sean Connery seemed to identify Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as the most valuable keys to his becoming a successful actor, and as well to elevate the two books to be highpoints of literate culture. When asked by the interviewer how Connery had been able to evolve from part-time model and hod-carrier to being one of history's most successful actors, Connery explained that after receiving his first role, in the chorus of South Pacific (a Brit production), he asked a friend how to improve himself in preparation for becoming a viable professional actor, and was told to learn to speak more properly, and to expand his horizon through reading. Over the next year, Connery said, he read ". . . all of Shaw . . . and those two Buttes, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake." The actor went on to state that what he learned in going to the dictionary was itself a magnificent doorway to knowledge, and he next revealed himself to the interviewer as a true and typical member of the Joycean community by stating that the parts he did not understand did not discourage him when he read Mr Joyce's work. We have been there, and happily remain there! Were I interested in publishing a popular guide to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, something which could have the freedom and humour not appropriate to the academic presses without being hostile in the slightest to accuracy, now is definitely the time. I would strongly suggest sending out feelers to Mr Connery very quickly for the solicitation of a preface by this wonderful Celtic star of the silver screen. What could possibly please more our Mr Joyce, the founder of Dublin's first cinema theatre? Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: FW for Dummies/Idiots Guide to FW From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/17/99 7:38 PM Dear Tim, You posted, 'I've got the original underground comic version of "Prisoner of Hell Planet".' Is this the work which has a line to the effect that "every second that time passes, my teeth get worse?" I frequently cite this long lost comic to people after listening to their litany of complaints and ingenuous amazement of our times being so out of joint, saying "Welcome to the Hell Planet." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Connery's Carricagurra Canteen From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/18/99 5:54 PM Sean Connery's name was introduced by myself as a possibly good choice for someone to preface a popular and accessible approach to the Wake for the general reading public. Mr Connery was not chosen because he is a political leader, but because he is popular and very-well-known by most people on earth, but has a true interest and respect for Mr Joyce's works. To require someone who fits this bill to also provide us with other leadership qualities may be asking too much. The function of a lens is to allow light to go from point A to point B, in Mr Connery's case, from a vast public mythos in which James Bond is a ruling deity to a tiny but entrenched mythos in which wordgames about a woman named for a Celtic river goddess whose initials spell the name of the original alphabetic character in the northwestern proto-Sinaitic alphabet are discussed with passionate scholasticism -- to ask Mr Connery to also empty and clean out the garbage pail of history's nightmare for us as long as he is in the vicinity is to push in an infinity of criteria from a third wing of the party which will then open the door for the fourth through millionth other good causes crying at the door -- and not one of us will then be found fit to do one damn thing, because we all are sinners, everyone of us. Were Mr Connery to abuse his so far fictive preface of a popular Wakean guide to promote a personal agenda of offensive political beliefs, that would be another matter, but should Mr Connery actually deign to lend his name and thoughts to such a project, he should be initially offered a fresh palimpsest in our minds that he may do his best to give a decent account of himself. Redemption is always a breath away, or least the freedom to move in that direction is ever-present. Is Mr Connery "anti-feminist" by the way or is he in disagreement with some militant planks of the feminist agenda? To denigrate a person for having strong views about politics is unpleasant. To disagree with prevalent opinions lumped together as "feminism" is a perfectly legitimate right of any citizen of a free country, and not the same as attacking the totality of specific individuals. The line to me is drawn between MY discomfort with another person's way and beliefs versus actively working to make life uncomfortable for a person who disagrees with me. It is a line people of passion cross at times, but the distinction should never be lost or thought to be minor. None of this means that Mr Connery's alleged anti-feminist views should not have been brought forward. Again, the goal is to be awake when decisions are being contemplated. Does it preclude his thoughts being received with an open mind. No, and nobody has said so, so what in the hell am I writing this for -- well, it's in the air everywhere, but most people are hesitant to discuss the thing, so I did. That has always been a big problem in my life, the major effort to insert the loafer into the oral cavity. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: nothing you can do that can't be done From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/18/99 7:02 PM Allah is great because Allah is merciful. Mary's power is not from the moon, but over the moon. Her power is derived from the goodwill of each heart which gives way to its kindest impulses. If the night were a slate, then the moon would be chalk. Each dawn the spirit associated with Maryam of Nazareth erases the sky and one more freshness is given in hopes we may yet awake from the nightmare of history. There is nothing easier to find on earth than powerful logical reasons to justify any form and direction for hatreds. To continue to adopt the absurd stance of goodwill toward all when you live on the Hell Planet is called the contradiction of harmony, and it leads toward the mastery of the individual over fate which is at the heart of both existentialism and liberation theology. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 051.04-05: scherzarade of one's thousand one nightiness From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/19/99 6:52 PM On the 13th instant, Mr Spicer opened a thread on the influence of Arabic and Persian themata in the Wake, with a particular interest in Sufism, and a more peripheral enquiry re/ 1001 Nights. The latest issue (a double issue) of James Joyce Quarterly, "ReOrienting Joyce" (guest editing by Kershner & Shloss), features a number of articles focused on the East in Mr Joyce's work, and primarily the Near East. The cover has an especially attractive display of Kufic Arabic calligraphy from the 12th c (1132! 1132!) in the service of the Koran's sixth Sura. Articles from the this issue (35;2-3 Winter/Spring '98) which bring up, along with other things, 1001 Nights include: "All in a Night's Entertainment: The Codology of Haroun al Raschid, the Thousand and One Nights, Bloomusalem/Baghdad, the Uncreated Conscience of the Irish Race, and Joycean Self-Reflexivity" by Zack Bowen and, " 'In the Name of Annah': Islam and Salam in Joyce's Finnegans Wake by Aida Yared. Articles which comment on 1001 Nights with neither that work nor Finnegans Wake as the primary subject material include ones by R. Brandon Kershner (on Ulysses & Orient), Heyward Ehrlich (on Araby), Carol Loeb Shloss (on the harem), and Abdellah Bouazza (on Ulysses & Tigris). I will not attempt any redactive abstraction to summarize the content or theses of the above articles, since they of a type to be read in entirety. One can certainly say in regard to the articles as a body that Mr Spicer appears to have been on to something. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: nothing you can say that can't be sung From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/19/99 7:00 PM Dear Elaine, my pleasure, and much grace to you -- Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Idiots' Guide to The Idiot? From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/20/99 8:52 PM Best approach, and most collectible version in wraps, of Crime and Punishment has got to be the Classics Illustrated. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: now I've said my abc's From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/21/99 1:39 AM > It was the Jews who invented alphabetical writing, Shlain > assures us (here flying in the face of scholarship). Current and conventional wisdom seems to indicate that the alphabet, defined as the system of a small batch of phonograms named for its first two characters, 'alef and beth, has origins in the north-western area of Semitic nations extant in the fourth millenium back from ourselves. Who specifically devised the alphabet, and it shows signs of concious design more than a blind evolution although it draws from various pre-existant writing systems for some of its symbols, the origins and originator are a deep mystery. The first alphabetic inscriptions are graven in Sinaitic mines and on cups and sword-hilts found in the hills above the Jordan's west banks. This would seem to indicate a movement toward literacy by soldiers, slaves, prisoners, and bandits, or at least by their associates. The alphabet seems to have been a rebellious reaction to the elitist guilds of the highly trained scribes who used very complex and difficult systems of writing which were unavailable to the rest of society. There was good reason for the originator(s) of the alphabet to remain anonymous. Thus we simply do not know who created the alphabet, and the Sinaitic mines and hill country west of the Jordan and east of the sea were areas you were likely to run into all the worst sorts from the Levantine, Pontian, Two Rivers, and Mediterranean communities. The mines were likely to be Egyptian owned and managed, but the mine workers were of all nationalities, including Semites and Hittites, the former group including proto-Jews along with Canaanites and Moabites and others, while the Hittitic people in the Levant were Indo-Europeans who wrote with a Semitic script! It was exactly this mishmash of all of our greatgrandparents which both demanded a simplified universal writing system, and which made it possible by a universal selection of speakers onsite. So to say that the alphabet is the invention of anyone or any society is inaccurate. The closest truth to claiming, for better or worse, that the alphabet is the invention of the Jews is that the Jews are a Semitic people, and that the alphabet first appeared in the north-western territory of the Semites as they existed around 3500 years ago. That alphabet was soon adopted and spread by Semitic peoples, but it is not the Jews who are identified with the diaspora of the proto-Sinatic alphabet, but that is rather credited to the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. If one is tempted to say, well that's the same as the Jews, then one should reread some of the more unpleasant parts of the Bible. Although the Jews are said to have coexisted in a more friendly and civilized manner with the Canaanites than the Hebrew Canon lets on, it is obvious that the Jews do not aspire to be known as Canaanites any more than the Semitic peoples called Arabs can be accurately referred to as "well, the same as the Jews"; or Celts called, "well, the same as the Anglo-Saxons." The ultimate truth is that almost every "truth" about races is at least half fantastic distortion at best, and we all have a commoner mother whether we want to run right out and embrace all our long lost siblings or not. On one level or the other, all rivers run past Eve and Adam's. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: a wake and its dreamer From: Riverend Sterling Date: 5/21/99 5:57 PM Terence's recent and fascinating post on the role of schizophrenia in Mr Joyce's life, both personal (family) and public (art) asked the question as to, since the interfaces and lap- overs between avant-garde art and mental disorder seem patent, what if any are the subjective biochemical differences between the states of mind that we find to be neatly summed in the little Wildesque dichotomy Jung coined about Mr Joyce and Lucia Joyce. (And on which Dr Jung might better have said nothing, since he had reviewed Miss Joyce's case clinically, and she should have had some right to privacy granted as a result). So speaking more generally, I believe one major biochemical difference can be seen. When we dream, the body's ability to act out the dream by physical movements is usually severely and blessedly curtailed through the disconnection of the motor impulses from the dreamer's mind. I may dream I am running, but very seldom will that be obvious to an observer of my sleeping body. Occasionally people will jerk about a bit, and in unusual cases, people will sleepwalk, but these are various levels of dysfunctionalism which may indeed indicate significant mental disturbance lurking in the wings. What occurs in the wholesome sleep is a chemical dislocation which removes any orders a mind delivers to the physical nervous system by a short-circuiting of the synaptical chain. Incoming sensory data is not part of this chain, and hearing remains keen enough to influence dream content, since we cannot "shut" our ears as we do with our eyes. Several exotic mental states lie between sleep and awakeness. One is hallucinatory, in which dream- like fragments invade reality as black clouds of night-time sparkling with stars might cross a sunny blue sky. The problem is that the perceiver is awake, and therefore has motor control to react to something which in effect is not there. If the perceiver is cool, other forces of conciousness will over-ride the desire to react physically to the hallucination in inappropriate or even dangerous ways. If not . . . no need to tell you more -- the world today is redolent with people over- reacting to things which do not exist anyway. In a fourth state, "lucid dreaming," the perceiver also experiences the free association of vivid storylike imagery proper to dreaming, but either by accident or will, the perceiver becomes or remains somewhat awake, and concious that a dream is occuring. The dream is thus experienced both objectively and subjectively at the same time. This is not the same as the common activities of the imagination, and lucid dreaming has the distinction of being more movie-like as time unfolds, and the perceiver is apt to go in and out of remembering that a dream is taking place. Lucid dreaming may be further divided along the lines of whether the lucid dreamer has simultaneous motor control. It gets complex, these are not rigidly defined states, almost by definition of what a dream is, and I suspect these states are better understood by earlier systems of metaphysical technology than by by modern mainstream psychology, which is prevented from grabbing the bull's horns by insisiting on the "scientific" approach. Since we speak of subtleties of interplay between subjective and objective states in one timeframe of experience, anyone who starts from the premise of "objective good/subjective bad" as the criteria for data collection, is doomed to at least partial failure. But it will of necessity provide the focus for the science of the future. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: the joker laughs From: the recent past Date: 1/15/00 3:27 AM Dear Eric, Maybe the fact that we are racking our brains trying to read a book which, at a glance, almost anyone will inform us has surely the most awfully written text in publishing history (yes, Finnigan's Wake), should tell us something! Best wishes, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: this, that, and, oh bother, what, yes, the other thing From: the recent past Date: 1/15/00 5:24 AM RE/the opinion that the 2nd, ie verse, section of Pale Fire is intended to be poor writing: "Shade's poem seems to be a fairly straightforward bit of personal reminiscence, as unmarked by worldly concerns as it is by any hint of literary talent." the above opinion by MM Keep and McLaughlin From: http://web.uvic.ca/~ckeep/hfl0244.html Their article begins: "Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, Pale Fire, is widely considered a forerunner of postmodernism and a prime example of the literature of exhaustion." Which comfortable road of cyclic reappearance brings us to Kiran's comment on Beowulf -- I didn't find it quite as awful as most do, although it smelled slightly of fish oil. Since it is valued most especially as an example of early Old English literature, I think it helps to secure a facing text in both Modern and Old English, and try to learn the basics of OE pronunciation, and read some of Beowulf aloud in OE. Furthermore, there is a fringe benefit. Just as reading Chaucer makes Shakespeare easy, so does reading Beowulf (in OE) make reading Chaucer easy. To make reading Beowulf easy, you can prep yourself with a) explanations of proposed hierarchical flowcharts by the American Red Cross; b) speeches by political leaders which begin "let me make one thing perfectly clear"; c) hiway information signs in Flagstaff, Arizona (try to pick a night when it is snowing). As to Tristram Shandy, my only advice is to make sure you are getting an edition which retains the original page of wallpaper, or whatever it is. It is a most easygoing page, and it is meant to be there by the author, I would think. Can anyone recall the 18th c eccentric English author who published a book with no punctuation, and then published a second volume with ONLY the punctuation? I think this all has pretty clearly to do with Finnegans Wake, the Mendippean thing (see Eric McLuhan's book on Wakean thunder), etc. Now to strap up my hobbyhorse, and AWAAAYYYY . . . . Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling an
Subject: AD 1132 Jan 31 old year's eve, freebutter year of Notre Dame, the year of buy in disgrace 02 From: the recent past Date: 1/15/00 6:04 AM Here is my latest revised form of the Brigidine hypothesis as first posted to this list about two and a half years ago. I have much more data collected, but not yet incorporated into this article. It is all corroborative. Especially essential, and quite difficult initially for a y2k mindset, is the need to grasp Medieval time, and then to further grasp Mr Joyce's adaptation of it for his own artistic usage. Central to this, and something I am gathering more and more sources which are reinforcing, is that time has become less fluid in our time. It has to be understood, as it was by Mr Joyce, that St Brighid's Day began in observance traditionally on the evening of January 31, and extendend, depending on where one was within the British Isles, to the evening of February 02. This 48 hour "day" thus extends from the "last of the first" theme in Finnegans Wake (last day of first month, Jan 31) to encompass Mr Joyce's birthday, and favoured publication day, Feb 02. In hardcore lunar time cultures, the event's timing would most likely have been even more flexible, as it was set from glen to glen, so to speak, and various communities had the option to time it with particular lunar phases, the new or full moon to be specific, something which would change from year to year. This remains the situation with Easter in our own day, which in Catholic liturgical time, must follow the first full moon of spring (as defined by the vernal equinox). I send this in every year or so, this time by the suggestion of Florentius, for which much grace. You will be grateful I have not yet incorporated any more text, I am sure. 1132 AD & SAINT Brighid Notes on Some Implications in Chapters II;4 and III;1 of FINNEGANS WAKE by the Riverend Clarence Sterling c. 2000 “St Bridget’s Crosses . . . must be made on St Bridget’s Eve, after sunset on the last day of January. St Bridget’s Day marks the commencement of the pastoral year.” Pennick, N. The Celtic Cross (1997). “Wee, cumfused the Gripes limply, shall not even be the last of the first, wee hope, when oust are visitated by the Veiled Horror.” Finnegans Wake. 156.31-33. >From James Joyce, the genius who placed the portmanteau word among the stars, comes (inevitably) the portmanteau number (saints preserve us). So while reaching into the 1132 satchel, I want to emphasize that what I shall pull out will in no way contradict the other outstanding interpretations extant. My lemma should rather reinforce others, and gild our appreciation of James Joyce's awesome skill at making numbers and ideas mesh and reverberate. There is however a "smoking gun" significance for 1132. This stumbling student of Mr Joyce’s required some time to discover it. Clues, however, confirm my radix for 1132 in Finnegans Wake once dug ( -- at least it’s within the Heisenberg parameter stating that an area of uncertainty can never be reduced to zero). What we know quickly from the text is worth reviewing at this point. Most germane is that Mr Joyce wants us to realize that 1132 is a date, a year. Surveying what might be called the 1132 section of FW (pp. 387-420), we note references to: 1) < the year of the flood 1132 > (387.23); 2) < the freebutter year of Notre Dame 1132 > (388.20); 3) < around about the year of buy in disgrace 1132 > (391.02); 4) < old year's eve 1132 > (397.30); and in the final page featuring 1132 (as a numeral anyway), we have what seems the dénouement -- not only a year, but a specific day in history, 5) < 31 Jan. 1132 A.D. > (420.20). The other 1132 entries in this section of FW largely involve playing upon the numeral as part of a street address, by which we are instructed perhaps that not only is a specific time in mind, but a specific place as well. Let us then take time and space to be the vertical and horizontal planes of a Cartesian grid. Each intersection of time and space will mark some particular event. But what? Again, it's worth iterating that hints abound, but their value is mostly post facto. These clues are esoteric and encrypted to the extent that we are as in a dark room and unlit signs pointing to the light switch are of little use. But even after the light becomes present, to be intelligible the signs must be in a language we know. This means escaping from the wind of my extended metaphor to a much more pleasant focus of discussion, and that is the patron saint and guardian spirit of Ireland, St Brighid, so respected as to be called The Mary of the Gael. One should like to spend a great long time on the subject of St Brighid, but she still would not be done justice by such meager skills as I muster, and I suspect she will pardon me for appearing crass in bringing to the table only a handful of knowledge chosen because it applies to our search: a) yes, Ireland is blessed to have three patron saints in all, including (with Brighid), Pátric (Patrick) and Colum Cille (Columba); b) yes, some scholars within and without the pale of the Church are disturbed by the fact that Brighid reappears in various guises in various times and seems part historic, part mythic -- part Christian, part pagan – part here, part there, and so on -- but that is no problem for Joyceans and other such simple-hearted souls of the laity; c) one of her dualities is that she is herself; -- but also an incarnate representative of Mary; d) as a saint, Brighid is the protectress of dairymaids; as a Celtic "supernatural lady," her attributive associates are the cow and lamb; e) as a saint, her feast-day is February 01; as a Celtic "supernatural lady," she is associated with February 02, lambing day (one of the four primary Gaelic holy days, Imbolc, meaning "bag of cream” or “butter-womb") -- and due to the standard lunar calendrics of Celtic Ireland, which began a “day” at the sunset of its preceding eve, St Brighid’ s Day has some right to being seen as beginning on St Brighid’s Eve (the sunset of January the 31st), and extending from there to encompass both the 1st and 2nd of February, so that various celebrations in Brighid’s honor will occur over a period of 48 hours plus the tilly if we include in our survey Eire, Scotland, and the Hebrides; f) as a saint, she founded the Cella Roblorum, or Church of the Oak (Cill-daur > Kill-dara > Kildare), which I think (therefore I am probably wrong) is not too far from the Liffey headwaters; as an ancient Celtic goddess and representative of the Bona Dea, Brighid has never left us and is capable of appearing anywhere anytime in any guise; g) as the first abbess of Kildare, she was followed by an unbroken line of abbesses who commanded great respect from the people and were responsible through Brighid’s order for maintaining by precise ritualistic means a continuous fire ignited by St Brighid before her death in ca. 522. The abbesses were assisted in this by a self-replenishing school, comprised at all times of exactly 19 nuns. In 1132, a truly horrid and disgusting event occurred which one does not care to have to relate, but it must be confronted, and that is the rape of the Abbess of Kildare by a soldier -- allegedly ordered by Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster for the purpose of destroying the sanctity of that abbess, and thus rendering her unfit for her office. This is said to have been done so that MacMurrough might enhance his power by imposing in her place a kinswoman of his own. The travesty was amplified by depredations on the monastery of Kildare. The rape of the Abbess of Kildare is an especially disturbing instance of that aspect of Irish politics (perhaps endemic to most politics) which Joyce naturally despised – the ugly face of internal betrayals evoked by the image of an old sow eating her children. (It has a savage resonance with the issue which awoke in childhood Joyce’s passionate disdain for the banality of evil, and that was the verbal rape of Katharine O'Shea by the clergy through which the political power of Charles Stewart Parnell was broken). Meant as an opening move in MacMurrough’s checkered rise to power, the rape of the Abbess of Kildare threw open the gate on a hellish path which led to the Norman occupation of Ireland. St Brighid’s house had been purposefully shattered because it bred harmony. We still try fitting together the broken shards. James Joyce was intensely proud of being born on February 02, lambing day, that is on Imbolc, which by the old reckoning shares the claim for being St Brighid's Day along with February 01. Joyce considered St Brighid to be his muse and liked to have his works first issued on February 02 to honor her. She is invoked in all post-Chamber Music work. As St. Bride, Brighid continues to maintain her abbey in FW, where it is become a Finishing Establishment for the “THE FLORAS” . . . < a month’s bunch of pretty maidens > (220.03-04). She is Maria in Clay, the moocow in Portrait, the old milk woman in Ulysses, the maid in Exiles (don't miss the milk truck), perhaps the broken branch in Tilly (one means allowed to stoke the sacred fire at Kildare was to wave air over it with a branch), plus a thousand references to milk and bovine things in the Joycean oeuvre. Brighid was born herself by manifesting from a bucket of milk being carried out the door by her mother, a milkmaid. And the Irish Catholic Church, before it came under the foot or aegis, as you will, of the Roman Catholic Church, baptized in milk rather than water. Within our fleeting 20th century, Irish farmers have been seen crossing yet the flanks of their cows by means of milk-dipped fingers. For those still with me, we return to the clues of our quest: 1) < the year of the flood 1132 > (387.23); In the passage from p 387 through p 420, a character is imparted in steps to the number 1132, whose essential characterization is that it is a year, and 387.23 sets the motif. The reader learns furthermore that 1132 was the year of the flood. In one gloss, < the year of the flood > has the ring of a provincialism, a way of telling time that is too local for modern senses. On a grander note, < the year of the flood > calls the Diluvian chapters of Genesis to mind (cf U 084:06 Random ’61). The two inferences enhance one another’s conjuring of a Way-Back Machine landing and opening its door to us – but there is no direct sighting of Brighid’s hem as it slips into the astral. Not until we skip down a line to 387.25 and read < Her Grace the bishop Senior >. This is a nearly bald allusion to St Brighid, as it has often been alleged that she achieved the unique position of being ordained a female Bishop. Her Catholic apologists have noted that the absurd thought of a woman with a bishopric precludes its possibility, and have explained that St Brighid was merely accorded the equivalency in power and respect. Water. Color. I offer those two entities as forming a soft dichotomy for dividing up the motives and conceits of the Wake. When matched with the moieties space-of-being versus time-for-grace (the polarity fueling the mock-comico-serious dissension of Wyndam Lewis and James Joyce respectively), then time must obviously be assigned to the camp of Water, as the function of time is the tide, and the river its simile. P 387 provides an imagery of time and the tide through the citation of historic and legendary disasters at sea, the voyage of Noe (the Irish for Noah), the shipwreck of Henry I’s son in 1120, the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, and the execution of that good submariner, Sir Roger Casement -- all aqueous events which followed variotous improprieties. The linkage of the flood with the year of . . .1132 is to establish that 1132 is not only a time, but a bad time that recapitulates and anticipates crises from other ages, in the allegorical sense that Brighid reincarnated Eve and Mary. All in all, good times rarely signal the shift of Viconian gears, and bookwise we are but a dozen pages from the end of the second part (Part Three begins at p 401), and not many more pages again, we hear the 10th and final clap of thunderous repercussion at 414.19-20. Meanwhile the bride-ship of Yseult sinks slowly in the west, as the heroic voices of the evangelists prepare to yield the floor to Shaun, the Hardware Saint and proper people’s voice. This at least is what I have read, for in truth, on my own I rarely can follow a thread of meaning through more than five consecutive words of Finnegans Wake, let alone be carried along by the narrative flow. And you see how I try. 2) < round about the freebutter year Notre Dame 1132 > (388.19-20); By freebutter, we are implied St Brighid's dairymaid attributes, and reminded of her primary passage and annual re-origins from the butter-bag (or womb) each Imbolc, but more directly, Mr Joyce’s agglutinate, freebutter, acknowledges folkloric testimony to the effect that no one ever went without butter in Kildare when St Brighid was there. She had magic, whoops, blesséd cows, and the good lady indeed gave away a great deal of free butter to her parishioners; Notre Dame (Our Lady) points to her as The Mary of the Gael; < 1132 Brian or Bride street > (388.26-27) cites St Brighid’s common nickname of Bride (sometimes modified to Bridey or Biddy), in conjunction possibly with Brighid’s son, Brian, upon whose death Brighid invented keening, and thus to some extent the wake itself (and perhaps as well a Brigantine writer is cited, Brian O'Naillgusa -- and inevitably the Brian of all Brians, Brian Boru, the high king slain at the Battle of Clontarf in the early 11th century); < at or in or about the late No. 1132 or No. 1169 > (389.13); the Norman-Anglo Conquest of Ireland began in 1169, when a mercenary invasion force sailing from Norman-occupied Wales captured Wexford and Waterford. A year later the Normans took Dublin, and over the next century, 75% of Ireland would fall, including virtually all of the vital coastal areas along the eastern banks. Dermot MacMurrough’s wily reign of deceit, beginning in 1132, paved the way for the Norman occupation. Church politics in these affairs is glossed by plays on Kill (church, cf Kill-dara) in lines 389.06-07, eg Killeachother; -- and an allusion to Mary via Fatima (389.15), her Portuguese apparition; -- and to Mary’s son, Jesus, as Fitzmary (389.13), meaning “the son of Mary.” “ . . . the matther of Erryn . . . was to rule . . . the grandest gynecollege” (389.06-09]). Mr Joyce reminds us: the mother of Ireland (first Brighid, and then later her vicars, the succession of abbesses at Kildare) for centuries ruled a famed, powerful, and beloved clerical assembly whose heart was a corps of 19 nuns and the abbess herself (gyne is Greek for “woman”; collega is Latin for “colleague”; a “college” is a body of clergy living together – it is hard to imagine that there is no intended reference therein to Brighid, and to Kildare and the noble nuns); 3) < year of buy in disgrace 1132 or 1169 or 1768 > (391.02); -- and the treachery of greed echoes for six centuries leading to the Irish “agrarian outrages” in the latter half of the 18th century. Buy sounds agrarian Anglo-Irish for “boy.” Don't miss the appearance of the villainous MacMurrough on the facing page as Mahmullagh (390.09), followed soon by the poignant: < The good go and the wicked is left over. As evil flows > (390.29-30), and what could be MacMurrough’s brusque and desperate orders to the soldier-rapist: < Woman. Squash. Part. > (390.32-33); 4) < old year's eve 1132, M.M.L.J. old style > (397.30); -- the clarification that we are to view the date (when we come to it fully) by the old style, the Celtic moon-based calendar, that is, hidden within what at first glance one assumes to be a reference to the Old Style, or Julian, calendar-system which preceded our modern Gregorian system of calendrics. The old style older than the solar Julian or Gregorian, the lunar, begins each day of record at sunset (old year's eve), blurring our modern distinction between "days" [cf “Christmas Eve” on December 24]; -- now, with the light on, we come to the dénouement: 5) < 31 Jan. 1132 AD > (420.20) is henceforward seen blurrily but with some confidence as a finger pointing to the awful rape of the Abbess of Kildare, recorded as occurring in that year (1132) to a woman charged with perpetuating the spirit and ritual and facility and order of the saint whose day is February 01, an extension of the eve of January 31 by the old style). < Once Bank of Ireland's > . . . <Now Bunk of England's> (420.32-&-34). The cynical violation of a holy maid in a soldier’s bed made the shores (banks) of Ireland into England’s bunk for 750 years. < Milchbroke. Wrongly spilled > (420.33). You may cry over the spilling of sacred milk. Although the Riverend is on record as requesting no followers, I sincerely thank you for attending his discourse, and apologize for its length. Meanwhile, the top of the morning to you, a phrase, by the way, which refers to the cream which rises to the top of a dairy bucket just as did once the infant St Brighid. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling 1998SEP22 POB 1584 Ojai, CA 93024-1584 Adapted and developed from my e-mail to the Joycean newsgroups, first to < fwake-l@listserv.hea.ir> in Sept 97; later to <fwread@ lists.colorado.edu> and to <jjoyce@listserv.utah.edu> in July 98. SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: The Annals of Loch Cé: A Chronicle of Irish Affairs, 1014-1590. ed. W. M. Hennessy, 2 vols. (London, 1871; reflex. facs., Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1939). 1132. Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. Harper & Row: San Francisco, 1989. pp. 107 & 112-113. Curtayne, Alice. Saint Brigid of Ireland. Dublin: Brown and Nolan, 1931. SEE ALSO: Dolley, Michael. Anglo-Norman Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1972. p. 30. Gwynn, Aubrey. The Twelfth Century Reform. Dublin: Gill, 1968. p. 54. " " with R. N. Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses. London: Longman, 1970. p. 320. Pennick, Nigel. The Celtic Cross. London: Blandford, 1997. pp. 92-93. This is the location of the citation which prefaces this essay. It corroborates the identity in folkloric Ireland of the 31st of January with Saint Brighid, and that it was as a New Year’s Eve in the religious lives of the people. As the “last of the first,” that is, as the last day of the first month, the 31st of January is the date of the letter described in FW 111.05-24 [“of the last of the first to Dear”]. The letter is ascribed to a hen given a popular form of the name of Brighid, that is, Biddy the Hen. ROSS CHAMBERS ... HELPED GREATLY IN LOCATING THE ABOVE RESOURCES. FOR WHAT IS SEEMINGLY THE EARLIEST APPEARANCE BY SAINT BRIGHID IN THE SCHEMATA FOR FINNEGANS WAKE, SEE PAGE 51-LINE 12b, OF THE BUFFALO NOTEBOOKS OF JAMES JOYCE: VI.B.10 [1922-1923]. FOR AN EARLY “1132 AD . . .” IN THE SCHEMATA, SEE THE LIST ON PAGES 129-130 OF T. CONNOLLY’S EDITION OF SCRIBBLEDEHOBBLE (pp. 746-7 of the original) [acc. to Bill Buttler < ... >]. The best book on St Brighid in our century is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Not many pages seem to go by without a reference perceived by the dedicated Brigidine reader. Another must is to read the description of Brighid's Book by Gerald of Wales as recorded in his 12th c Irish travelogues. I think that Mr Joyce must have patterned his concept of Wakean structure from Gerald's account of this mysterious Brigidine work. Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare in the eighth century, expounded the metrical life of St. Brighid, and versified it in good Latin. This is what is known as the "Second Life", and is an excellent example of Irish scholarship in the mid-eighth century. Most of the lore of St Brighid must be followed as a thread wound in and out of works in which she makes all too brief appearances, and the tales are legion once a personal collectanea is assembled. Be prepared to recognize her various faces. She is both a pre-Christian and post-Vatican II pagan supernatural lady and, from the time of her thriving around 500 AD, until 1967, a mainstream saint of the Church. She spells her names more ways than the author of Finnegans Wake even could have devised! Hardest at first to associate with “Saint Brighid” is the Welsh version of “San Ffraid.” (Cf FW 172.21 where Mr Joyce’s Wakean namesake, Shem, is referred to as <fraid born>, indicating that Shem’s birthday may be the same as his creator’s). I am including some Brigidine weblinks, and they in turn have weblinks that have weblinks, and they had weblinks before them: 1) < www.chalicecenter.com/imbolc.htm >, 2) < www.cin.org/saints/bridget.html >, 3) < www.clannada.org/docs/brigid.htm >, 4) < www.imbas.org/brighid.htm >, 5) < www.jough.com/joyce/essay/riverend1.htm >, 6) < www.knight.org/advent/cathen/02784b.htm >, 7) < www.nesta.org.uk/fwake/fwake.html >, 8) < www.ncf.carleton.ca/~dc920/saintale.html >, 9) < www.oz.net/~dmagnat/wendybrig.html >, 10) < www.technovate.org/whiteoak/imbolc.html >, & 11) < www.toad.net/~sticker/thesaint.html >. "What sort of reverence is shown to the saints when we place their pictures on the floor and then walk on them? Often someone spits in an angel's mouth." -- BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX: APOLOGY \\\*///
Subject: half a hlaf better? From: the recent past Date: 1/16/00 1:00 AM Jack Kolb responded: "Old English is another language, much closer to Dutch than to English. (I'd courteously disagree with my friend Riverend; I don't think it's much of an introduction to Chaucer. Chaucer's middle English is more or less comprehensible to a modern reader, with notes and a facing text. Old English is not.)" Rivs: I have to agree when put to the fire. Thus my emphasis on trying to learn at least the most basic rudiments of OE, even just the pronunciation, as being superior to reading a flat prose attempt at translation -- but Jack is right. Middle English is more accurately the early stages of Modern English, and Chaucer is user-friendly Middle English to boot. OE is Frisian Lite, or some crazy southern Norse. It is not only another language, but an inflection rich classical language, with a nasty series of permutations in words from case to case, and such. Better for such as I to settle for pondering Runic headstone inscriptions, there is a pretty limited text that can be carved on rock for a grave. But again, struggling for a few months with a bilingual text of Beowulf will help with the Runic inscriptions. And also <Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk> 013.33-34. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: swirling fluid graphics From: the recent past Date: 1/16/00 1:45 AM >From Kiran: "What is the literature of exhaustion?<seriously> . . ." RivS -- < http://web.uvic.ca/~ckeep/hfl0258.html > says that, "In 1967, John Barth published a controversial essay in The Atlantic which amounts to a manifesto of postmodernism. The essay was called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and in it Barth proposed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been "used up . . . ." RivS -- Apparently the literature of exhaustion concerns itself with way to keep alive old gasping forms by reviving them with new techniques, licenses, media. Borges is supposed to be a hero to the camp. Hypertext is mentioned as a medium which may be able to defibrillate the flat-line of the mainstream. This site: http://anthro.spc.uchicago.edu/~dphoberm/Narrative_conventions.html on narrative conventions has a little about the literature of exhaustion, and links through "lexias" to a site about hypertext versus narrative conventions, and states that, "Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, are all examples of works which utilized numerous narrative and /or typographical conventions in order to represent the complexity of experience in non-linear fashion." Then, in another part of the forest, Kiran: ". . . which page are you talking about?" RivS -- Traditional copies of Tristram Shandy have a marbled page somewhere in the midst of the text, a page with no words but these swirling fluid graphics such as you see as fancy endpapers in old editions. I have forgotten how the page is featured in the narrative context, but there it is. And then it starts getting deleted from newer, less expensive editions -- I don't know the full story. Kiran cites Rivs: "To make reading Beowulf easy, you can prep yourself with a) explanations of proposed hierarchical flowcharts by the American Red Cross . . . ." Kiran asks, "What???? Please Explain, as we say around here." RivS -- I wouldn't try making sense out of something that doesn't. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: <Like four wise elephants> Finnegans Wake 513.35 From: the recent past Date: 1/17/00 5:19 AM Here, I've tried to paste up my previous post to include the name of the book being cited, not just its page numbers. A little reminiscent of the San Francisco DJ (name anybody?) who use to read baseball scores without the teams' name, and temperatures thoughout the nation without mention of which cities. I am especially trying to get it right because I have thought for some time that it seemed an interesting allusion, no less for the waking dilemma of whether it be Joyce's or the reader's device. It requires careful reading, not always the wrong approach to any author (sorry, major syn tax owed on that line). The musicality of Joyce is at play, at any rate. Why else the juxtaposition twice of lubber- and elephant-? The similar association of paper/page and "four in type/quobus quartet . . . four wise . . .?" Why else is indeed the question. There may be no why else, the jingling itself is pleasant, and suggestive of the eternal return in its sense of leitmotif. Four/paper and quartet/page are key notes defining a cluster of melodic phrases which can be identified with each other in spite of changes in key, rhythm, even modality and meter, because a page in the sense of a leaf of paper has four axial points, and four edges. A page of paper is wide and white. What a page of paper has to do with elephants and lubbers, or what elephants and lubbers have to do with each other, I do not know, but the evanescent Hemingway allusion may help. The cumulative stops of page 124 in Finnegans Wake are in a context of much wordplay involving printics, particularly punctuation and pages (verso & recto), and in a localized context of violent language describing invasive penetration: <it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument.> FW 124.01-03 In the terse taut dialogue by Papa Hemingway he named "Hills Like White Elephants," a man and a woman, both unnamed, are at a railside cantina somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid. They are going to obtain an abortion for the woman. They do not talk about it much, or anything else, but the pain and hopelessness is electric, and the ultimate phatic nothingness of English robo-talk is given its definitive place in literature at the story's anti-climactic closing: "I feel fine," from the lady off to have her unborn baby killed. Is this behind FW's <A take back to the virgin page>, for in an awful sense, an abortion is that, an attempt to revirginize a pregnant body, and "a fresh page" is synonymous with a new start, especially a wide white page. The unnamed lady in Hemingway's piece is perhaps attempting a bit of fresh start by opening the story's conversation with an imaginative pleasantry, that the hills past the trees and river are like white elephants. It doesn't work. The conversation turns openly bitter in its numb way within several exchanges in the repartee. Even though the conversation is on paper, the reader feels the wounds. <These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively> FW 124.03-05 In "Hills Like White Elephants," shortly before the ending (which can be said, I suppose, of any place in that brief text), the lady asks: <"Would you do something for me now?" "I'd do anything for you." "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"> [From the closing of "Hills Like White Elephants" E Hemingway (1927)] Far from page 124 of the Wake is this: <A take back to the virgin page . . . The quobus quartet were there too . . . flopsome and jerksome, lubber and deliric . . . Like four wise elephants> FW 513.27-35 [<wise> cf Ger "weiss" = Eng "white"] While only the content and rhythm of FW 124.03-05 seem, by mimesis, to remind one of "Hills Like White Elephants," the cited passage of FW 513.27-35 contains the above elements from both: the white virginity of a blank page, the four-wise motif, and et voila, some white elephants ("white" being in German -- but most elephants in Finnegans Wake are white, except for the pink one). Just to tweak my woofer, and lure me further into the quicksand of your iffy assessments on my credibility, Mr Joyce tosses in the weird: <What a lubberly whide elephant for the men-in-the-straits!> 300 n 4 which says nothing of hills, paper, pages, or fourness, but has the intriguing "lubber," quasi a name of one of the quartet of white elephants on p 513, now in adverbial form near your neighborhood. I don't imagine any one cares about any of this, I apologize for rambling on. But it is what I do, and I try to stay on the road (that road which all men scorn). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Sherwood spotted in another part of Forest From: the recent past Date: 1/17/00 7:09 PM A hip member has informed me offlist that the wonderful San Francisco DJ (in the early 1960's, anyway) I was trying to name is Don Sherwood. (I don't know what Don Sherwood is doing at this time, myself not being as hip as I once was wont). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: man delights not me: no, nor woman neither From: the recent past Date: 1/17/00 8:41 PM Lucia wisely reminded us: ' "I know," interrupted the Sphinx crossly. "But you didn't say Woman." ' "But when you say Man, you mean Man AND Woman - heavens above, everyone knows that." ' "That's what you think," said the Sphinx - and she disappeared into the night.' RivS calls upon ShSp to add (not noting the flock of angels rushing in the opposite direction): (in another part of the castle) Hamlet The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing-- Guildenstern A thing, my lord! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling pee ess, hey, how come women get their own word, but men have to share theirs! do we need to have men, women, and unwomen -- It may be, very likely . . . though by your smiling you seem to say . . . what . . . what?
Subject: <heruponhim in shining aminglement> p 092 & environs From: the recent past Date: 1/18/00 9:30 PM Four themes (among infinite themes) form an immediate and relevant context for paragraph 092.06-32 in its setting -- Theme I = At the Drunken Bar: <the gentlemen in Jury's> 091.19-20 [ref to a Hotel Bar then in Dublin, now in Zurich as James Joyce Pub: < http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3662/joyce.htm >] <the inexousthausthible wassail-horn tot of iskybaush> 091.27-28 [a cornucopia of holiday whiskey] <the firewaterloover returted with such a vinesmelling> 093.07-08 [along with more whiskey {firewater} and wine, is a Qabalistic reference to a line of the Sefer Yetzirah 1:12 {Gra version}: "Fire from Water," ascribed to Isaiah 64:01-02, a vision of ages changing in cataclysm, "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil . . . ." In his gloss of SY 1:12, Aryeh Kaplan states that "fire from water" is the lightning generated by a rainstorm; we know it's Old Bushmills; and then there is nuclear fusion. In Biblical terms, a fire-water lover is one who desires a current age to be destroyed that a new and better one might replace it, the mindset of many alcoholics and temperance workers] Theme II = At the Pagan Epiphanies Festival: <light of this world> 091.25 [the pre-X'tian lunisolar god(s) adapted into X'tian mythos] <ab-god of the fire> 091.28-29 [same-o; ab, the fire father, reappears in Judaism as the god in the burning bush; in Ireland, the fire goddess, Brighid the Bright, turns into a X'tian abbess whose nuns maintain a sacred fire within a brush hedge] <thereinunder proudly showing off the blink patch to his britgits> 093.04-05 [a pagan epiphany -- the priest exposes his tenders to the vestals, the devotees of Brighid --] <even of a tumass equinous> 093.09 [the equinoctial ceremonies, anticipated in Ireland by Imbolg, the opening of spring dedicated to Brighid, begin at evening -- also, a ref to celtic horse goddesses, and Aquinas -- again, the mass as pagan in origin] <twofromthirty advocatesses> 093.12 [St Brighid's 19 fire-maintaining nuns are become in the Wake the 28 Floras, a month's bunch of pretty maids, from St Bride's Finishing School -- this allows Mr Joyce to play upon the flux of February, the month sacred to Brighid, and to himself {b'day}, by having Issy become a silly surrogate of Brighid as the 29th leap day -- the "two-from-thirty = 28 days of Feb" device will reoccur soon] <the chassetitties belles> 093.19 [the naughty schoolboy side of Mr Joyce can't help from reminding us that celibate nuns and temple prostitutes are one at the Wake -- honky-tonk angels] Theme III = In Eire, With a Lovely Tear in Our Eye: <Tyre-nan-Og> 091.25-26 [the Irish posthumous fairyland you tell peasant children about when the stewards of the landlords have locked them from the upper decks of a sinking cruise liner in order to save all lifeboats for the nobility, lending "upper crust" a new patina of callousness] <from Fillthepot Curran his scotchlove machreether> 093.32-33 [shades of theme i -- drunkenness merges mistily with fine sentiment, filling the pot {one meaning leads to the second, after a brimming overflowing flagon is quaffed, it's off to the back for a bit of chamber-pot tinkling}, bringing about a whiskey- fied love for . . . for another drop of the creature, and I really mean that from my heart, babe {"mo" = "my"; "croidhe" (cree) = heart (PW Joyce date, courtesy of Ross Chambers)}, and to thicken the slurry, Philpot Curran is one of the army of those credited with a version of "Mother Machree!"] <Samyouwill Leaver or Damyouwell Lover> 093.34 [Samuel Lover is the leading candidate for the penman of the best know "Mother Machree," and a superb Irish storyteller to boot, and famous for telling his true love that she was welcome to live forever in his heart rent free] Theme IV = Shameless In a Shameful War: <Warhorror> 091.30 [speaks all to well for itself] <upon the halfkneed castleknocker's attempting kithoguishly to lilt his holymess the paws and make the sign of the Roman God-> 091.36 [soon after the Macbeths kill their royal guest, Duncan, an act which starts a very nasty war, the bloodstained thane hears a knocking at his castle's south entry, an insistent knocking which becomes the signal of Macbeth's desire to undo what is done. Already, and from now on, Macbeth is unable to bless himself. Quickly the distraught regicide becomes himself undone. "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!" {Macbeth II.2 another part of the castle}] <the testifighter> 092.04 [cf <violer d'amores . . . to wielderfight his penisolate war> 003.04-06 the association of rapist and warrior arises here and there in the Wake, the penis and testicles' perversion as weapons, the desire to humiliate one's enemy by abusing them sexually, so that they lose their dignity and become mere things-but as Macbeth finds, the unbridled warrior risks becoming isolated himself] Paragraph in question 092.06-32: <the maidies of the bar, (a pairless trentene, a lunarised score)> 092.12-13 [the temptresses, a la Sirens, goddesses on a strand, or the evening shift at the pub -- thirty-one {in French} minus a pair is twenty-nine, the number of the 28 Floras plus Issy, and thus as well the leap-year with its 29-day February -- the fact that Issy and the Floras are wakean stand-ins for Brighid (and later her succeeding line of abbesses) and her 19 nuns is acknowledged by juxtaposing "thirty-one minus a pair" with "a lunarised score" -- the meaning here is that the 29 Floras with Issy are the wakean equivalent of the 20 {score} nuns with abbess of Brigidine tradition, with the numeric difference between a coven/abbey/school of 20 and 29 resulting from Mr Joyce's artistic priorities involving "lunarising" the Brigidine 20 by expanding their number to reflect the days of a month (moon-th, the days of one lunar cycle of phases), so that the Floras be a month's bunch of pretty maidens] <the swiney prize> 092.15 [First Witch: Where hast thou been, sister? Second Witch: Killing swine. {Macbeth I.3 on the heath near Forres} On page 90 is the fourth thunderword. It is precipitated by a final reference to trees and the countryside. Eric McLuhan calls the fourth thunderword "The Fall of the Garden Itself." A Pastoral Age of childlike innocence has ended, and the urban age of holy whores is upon us. The word "pearced" also appears shortly before the age-change chimes. I have glossed elsewhere on the hypothesis that among other things, we are invited to think upon the obsession of St Augustine on an incident in his own childhood. The then-unsaintly curmudgeon was out with some other local hellraiser boys, when they decided to vandalize a neighbour's pear tree, ripping down the forbidden fruit to throw at a herd of pigs. This senseless act of trespassing, theft, and hostility to animals later became representative to St Augustine of his personal fall from grace. At any rate, after the 100-letter clapper strikes on page 90, a bunch of pigs starts running amuck through the following pages. It this is a valid wakean thesis, then "swiney" in part is tied to the previous "pairless." And the bubble-babes from the heath remind us of the ultimate prize for swine.] <Oirisher Rose> 092.18 [The teary-eyed Irish songfest theme -- "My Wild Irish Rose," by one Chauncey Olcutt, whose "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" is right up there, and entitles Chauncey to be another claimant for "Mother Machree"] <mechree me postheen flowns courier> 092.20-21 ["my heart and my pocheen(sp?) {homemade Irish bootleg vodka} runneth over" -- <flowns> = flowings; <courier> = one that runs -- in short, more Irish booze-fueled sentiment] <to belive them of all his untiring young dames> 092.21-22 [more singalong with the bar sirens, the misty-eyed maidens of the Rhinegold, with their endearing charms becoming younger as the evening ages] <treats in their times> 092.22 [Did Chamberlain invent "Peace in Our Times?" I suspect it was thematic to the post-Great War mindset] <Ymen> . . . <Lunar Sisters' Celibacy Club> 092.22-25 ["One cried 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other . . . But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'? I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' stuck in my throat." Macbeth II.2 More on the dynamic tension between the barmaids in the sentimental songs version, the virginal vestals of the holy fires, and the temple whores who are fair game for the bold marauders -- Hymen as Issy as the Inviolate Abbess of Kildare who must be violated in amour to penis-isolate her from respect of the people of Leinster, and so break the power long held by the Brigidine Abbey of Irish vestal virgins, the lunar sisters' celibacy club] <a lovelooking leapgirl, all all alonely> 092.25 [again, Issy as the 29th day of February] <heruponhim in shining aminglement> 092.28 [cf <himundher manifestation> 092.09-10) one of those so-beautiful phrases that bob by in the muddy filthdump of Anna Liffey's wake -- the true desire buried far beneath the bleary boozery toughtalk and shallow songs of the gentlemen of Jury's -- for the sacred embrace that sets the dark aglow] <sheeshea melted most musically mid the dark deepdeep of his shayshaun> 092.31-32 [the holiness of the sacred embrace is even accorded to that poor woman maligned so shamelessly by the Irish as The Great Whore, Katherine O'Shea, who became Mrs Parnell.] So what? As the towns replace the forests and the heaths, the vacant-eyed men gather in loose clusters within the night, and pay wan-cheeked women for what had flowed free rurally, that is, for companionship over the bowl, and for an embrace in the moonlight. As they drink, their hearts begin to rewarm, and they try to forget what a daily fistfight their lives in the city are, that to make ends meet they have had to kill what they loved and desanctify the ancient pagans' celebrating of the sky, and fell the trees which once they adored. They sing beautiful songs filled with sentimental values of a lost way of living -- its symbols are a wild rose, a fairyfilled land of eternal youth, an aging parent -- all the things which we cannot hold, which melt away from our hands the harder we grasp. In the morning, the war will continue its weary marches up and down the foulsmelling streets. In the meantime, let us remember that night among the corn-brakes with Annie, boys -- a full-moon nymphomaniac, and a truly lovely mother she was. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: floodgates are open From: the recent past Date: 1/19/00 4:25 AM < the year of the flood 1132 > (387.23) In this regard, Florentius posted: "To me, "the year of the flood 1132" means the 1132nd year <after> the flood . . . ." and in a subsequent post, added: "Well (St. Brigit's). The first entry in the Annals of the 4 masters: " 'The Age of the World, to this Year of the Deluge, 2242' . . . ." Florentius also makes the interesting observation that A.D. can be read as Ante Deluge (which reminds us in turn of the infamous "Apres moi, le deluge" of one of the Louis the Lasts). Andrew Blom has written some good material on 1132 as the year of the flood, and it is worth looking through list archives in hopes Blom posted it to fwake-l. Whatever you find by him will be worthwhile anyway. As a seemingly common phrase in Ulyssean Dublin, "year of the flood" rolls through the mind of the artist formerly know as Leopold Bloom in Lotus Eaters, U 05.465 (084.06). The context is Bloom's attempt to recall the address of Hamilton Long's, state apothecaries (drugs being tied to the theme of poppy ingestion). His conceit is that chemists rarely relocate, because their <beaconjars too heavy to stir>. Ergo, Hamilton Long's must still be where they used to be. Further acknowledgement of the hoary stability of said establishment, muses Bloom, is his mental notation that it was <founded in the year of the flood>. In the Ulyssean usage, then, <year of the flood> is not a precise or specific time, but a folkloric "long time ago." The Great Flood of Noachian times is involved, but dimly. In that sense, 1132 is just a distant year in the remote past. But the deluge recorded in Genesis should not be dismissed from the allusional set of 1132 as a year. The Biblical Flood is the world's best known Viconian myth, and figures heavily in FW, see my site: < http://www.joycean.com/essay/riverend1.shtml > and have we got a car for you! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: elementary, my dear penguin From: the recent past Date: 1/27/00 3:59 AM Jack Stone posted that: ". . . Grafton rather fumbles his one reference to Joyce, remarking that 'the _New Science_ even inspired James Joyce to devise the complex structure of _Ulysses_' (xiii)--which is sort of true, I guess . . . ." RivS explains: The thing is, although the cyclic nature of history in various systems of philosophic chronology posit the periodic replication of broad patterns from the past, the variations and anomalies and outright deviations from the patterns are what make the times alive, and not flat dead mirrors. Mr Joyce is very good about showing how flotsam of one age reappears in grossly different rearrangement in another, how the vestal fires of an island goddess return years later as something you burned on the stove making breakfast for your wife, etc. Thus we note that in another of the Viconian mill wheel's revolutions, during its experience of the always difficult and decadent democratic age, it IS Ulysses, and NOT Finnegans Wake, which is identified with Vico's New Science. It needs to be noted as well, however, that in that separate and not quite equal regurgitation of our current era, that our favourite author's last name is "Jois" (same pronunciation); that James Jois is of mixed Kinsusha and Mayan ancestry; and that the writes in profound detail of a single day in his native city, Belize, several decades before its escape from the yoke of colonial administration by the British. Molly, of course, is still Molly -- but in an eerie twist of fate, or the lack thereof, the controversial final work by James Jois is titled Finnigan's(sic)[sic] Wake, and is easily understood by schoolchildren (though few others), in spite of its text being nearly identical -- biggest single deviation is that the sentence split from page 628 to page 003 is left to the individual reader's discretion, so each copy has to be custom ordered from the printer after weeks of consultation and argument (done, of course, in public on email listgroups). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: you should have seen them kicking edgar allen poe From: the recent past Date: 1/27/00 3:09 PM -----Original Message----- From: David E. Mark ... To: <FWAKE-L@LISTSERV.HEANET.IE> Date: Thursday, January 27, 2000 11:38 AM Subject: Re: elementary, my dear penguin I've never tried penguin, but if you say it is delicious I will. RivS: Don't poke too much fun at the gracious compliment Harold paid me . . . I have just been eating major crow on two other lists! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 099.01 <golddawn glory > From: the recent past Date: 1/28/00 3:14 AM Thank you, Chris Tus Rex, for your forwarding and editing of Golden Dawnery From: http://www.hermeticgoldendawn.org/tarot.htm containing data from "Soror I. D. D." A few annotations: "Sepher Yetzirah 1:1" This brief compact text, dating back to around the second century, outlines a mystical theory of the relationship of the Hebrew alphabet to the creation of the universe. Sepher Yetzirah is, in my opinion, a key Wakean source. (<longsephyring sighs sought heartseast for their orience> 418.29) Mr Joyce would have had particularly easy access to the English translation of Sepher Yetzirah published in 1887 in London by William Wynn Westcott, one of the founding members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats was another prominent member, and George Russell, the first publisher of Mr Joyce's fiction, was also associated with the Golden Dawn, although he appears to have had a much more peripheral connection than did Yeats. "Zero relates to Unmanifest Deity . . . ." writes Soror I.D.D. Compare that with: <Ainsoph, this upright one, with that noughty besighed him zeroine.> 261.23-24 ("Ain soph" is Qabalistic Hebrew for "endless limitlessness," a reference to deity beyond all conceptualization). "The letter Aleph, is given to the 11th Path and . . . means "Ox" or "Bull," but more specifically it symbolizes creative power . . . Aleph has a numerical value of one . . . ." [RivS]: The eleventh path is the central path in the diagram of the 32 paths, the middle of the three horizontal paths. All letters of the alphabet issue from this path, because ALP (the standard transliterative spelling of "Aleph" from the Hebrew spelling) is their mother. By extension, ALP is the source from which flows all literature (works made with letters). In one pronunciation, ALP is a single bovine creature, and the number one in Hebrew; in a slightly varied pronunciation, ALP is a herd and thus is Hebrew for "thousand." Because ALP in Hebrew means both "one" and "one thousand," 1001 (the total number of letters in the ten thunder words of the Wake) is, in Hebrew, "ALP and ALP." ALP as "cattle; herd" also conjures a vision of St Brighid, one of Ireland's three patron saints, who was once a dairymaid, and who is traditionally associated with cows, milk, and butter (and one of whose feast days is also the birthday of James Joyce). ALP (Aleph, the first Hebrew letter) is of course the initials for Anna Livia Plurabelle, and so contains a deep richness of Wakean imagery. "Its first two letters spell out the word AL or "God . . ." Note also that "al" is Southern Semitic (Arabic) for "the," the word which "ends" the Wake. Note as well that just as "al" is a root word both for "god" ("Allah") and "the" in Southern Semitic, that "the" itself is a root for "god" (eg, "the-ology"). This holds for the Northern Semitic (Phoenician and Hebrew) root for "god," which is "el," which appears as "the" in Spanish. As is explained by Soror I.D.D., the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Tau, properly translated as TV, also yields considerable symbolic profundity in Qabalism, and is not considered as simply the final letter of a linear alphabet, the way we think of "zee." Qabalists think of the alphabet as circular, the same as Mr Joyce considered the text of the Wake. "V," as indicated, is the conjunction "and" in Hebrew, so the spelling of the "final" letter, TV, is "Tau And," given in Qabalism as "End and . . . ," implying that endings are not the end. Note that Jesus of Nazareth did not really say "I am the Alpha and the Omega." He rather said something closer to, "I am the ALP and the TV ( the Aleph and the Tau)," a phrase rich in interpretations (including "I am you"). <And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated!> 249.17-18. ("There it is: Old Semitic -- as simple as ABC"). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 107.34 <it's as semper as oxhousehumper!> From: the recent past Date: 1/31/00 1:28 AM <it's as semper as oxhousehumper!> 107.34 To continue on this shiny thread, as McHugh annotates, 107.34 "translates," as it were, to "simple as ABC," since "humper" in this context is the third letter of the Northern Semitic alphabet (eg Hebrew), which is camel. Ox=Alef;house=beth;camel=ghimel. Also of interest is to note that this is echoed in the later passage recently cited: <pat as ah be seated!> 249.17-18, right down to the exclamation point! It is helpful to add the Greek correspondences, more familiar to some readers: A=alpha=alef (aleph)=ox B=beta=bet (beth)=house C/G=gamma=ghimel=camel The "C/G" configuration is to indicate that in the original alphabets, the third letter was a hard gee in pronunciation. The Anglo-Roman "C" is a modern sort of hitherandthithering character, being sometimes the equivalent of ess, other times like kay, or in compound characters as "ch," or "cz." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Do you tell me that now? I do . . . . From: the recent past Date: 1/31/00 2:55 AM Eric asked if Chris Tus REX or I had any thoughts re/ <Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light!> 214.30-31 If this means in regard to the Golden Dawn, there is an attenuated at best possibility. After the initial heydays of that order, Golden Dawn continued to operate for several decades in Paris under the directorship of the intense and gifted artist/mystic Moina Mathers, whose maiden name was Mina Bergson. I have read that she and her brother, the philosopher Henri Bergson, were of Irish-Jewish descent, which I would think should have intrigued Mr Joyce. Mina Bergson seems to give a cameo appearance early into the Wake: "Make strake for minnas . . . of the shortlegged bergins" 012.25-26. Anyway, as with all the Golden Dawn, Mina had profound interest in Egyptology, and their is a striking picture of her ca 1900 as "a priestess of Isis" at: http://www.cafes.net/ditch/GDgallery.htm But back to page 214, and the Golden Falls. The main interest to me at that juncture of the Wake is that the author has taken a severe and horrid personal disability, his iritis and its incipient blindness, and woven that experience into a beautiful tapestry of poetic imagery wherein it is metaphoric with several other strands, the onsets of night and death, and two Liffeying washer ladies gossiping and sparring with each other as they do what modern children call "morphing" (from "Power Rangers") or "evolving" (from Pokemon) -- ie, changing from one being into another. One of the washer ladies keeps seeing an unidentified something, a light through the mist, which was how everything was appearing if at all through the author's glaucoma. The various guesses made as to what is being seen are both comic and pathetically poignant: 1. <the great Finnleader himself>; 2. <a blackburry growth>; 3. <the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns>; 4. <the Poolbeg flasher>; 5. <a fireboat coasting>; 6. <a glow I behold within a hedge>; 7. <my Garry come back from the Indes>. None of it can quite come into focus, for <My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows>, and the long 73-line paragraph ends with a simple reference to the author's earliest childhood memories: <rathmine>, Wakean for the Dublin suburb whose images by now were probably clearer in the writer's mind than were the furniture and people and walls of the room in which he sat. <Throw the cobwebs from your eyes> the passage shouts, and therein lies, I believe, the essential philosophy of Mr James Joyce. What he could not command his body to perform, he showed for the rest of us in his art -- the epiphany of the mind, the heartfelt embrace of life as she is sung, the spreading of your washing proper before the night. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 32nd day of year From: the recent past Date: 2/1/00 3:59 PM Culling through Eric's rich field of Brigidine calendrics, this: "I just read that after the 19 vestal virgins took their turns tending the fire, Brigit herself watched it the 20th day. This is echoed, isn't it, by Issy being the 29th (leap-year) student at St. Brigit's academy. Issy, as the young ALP, is Brigit-in-training?" Rivs: It seems undeniable that calendrics was an obsession of Mr Joyce's which finds its apotheosis in the mythamatics of St Brighid. Not only has Mr Joyce adapted the "19 + a Tilly = 20" fire maintenance roster which the Abbey of Kildare kept in rotation for many centuries, changing it in FW to fit the month of his birth as "28 + a Tilly (the epact, or intercalary day of the Julian leap year, or in 2000, the rare Gregorian leap year) = 29" but in those instance where the Floras shift to being a week rather that a month, in order to reflect the rainbow's ROY G BIV configuration, Mr Joyce is paying homage apparently to those accounts of the Brigidine fire- keepers which list their number as seven (plus the Abbess). It is also noteworthy in a more indirect context that those supreme calendricists, the Maya, used a vigesimal system of counting, and thence a 20 day month. The 20th day, as in the Brigidine system, was an obvious Tilly (epact), because the Maya broke their numerical system at that point, going into a place-holding system, so that "19" would be in one place, represented by "zero," and "20" in another, just as we do with our decimal system, where "10" equals "one" plus "nine." In other words, the Maya had pictorial glyphs for numbers up to 19, at which point the system switched. "28x13=364. (According to Robert Graves, the Druid tree-alphabet calendar comprised 13 months of 28 days each.) Could the 365th day (the 29th day added to the last month) have been February 1st (the next day marking the start of Spring, and therefore a new year)? This would make it correspond better with the festival year." RivS: Note that in the Graves system, the month in which James Joyce was born is "Ash," ie, "Rowan." The ashplant is a major motif in Ulysses, and the figure representing Mr Joyce in Exiles is Richard Rowan (note as well the maid, Brigid, and the milk truck). As to New Years, it is well recognized that Brighid's Day (the eve of Jan 31-the eve of Feb 02) marks the Irish New Year and the beginning of the liturgical calendar of the Irish Church. A few other appropriate comments: Mr Joyce expressed a desire to die on his birthday, like Shakespeare (although conventional wisdom places Shakespeare's alleged birthday as really a baptismal day). Although Mr Joyce did not "succeed," he did die on the Gregorian day of the Julian New Year, 13 January, and the rape of the Abbess of Kildare is recorded as being on New Year's day (but not centennial to Mr Joyce's death, due to a six day epact caused by the Julian Calendar's imprecision as regards the precession of the equinoxes). (Langston Hughes did get the job done, being born on Feb 02 of 1902, and leaving us on Feb 02 of 1967. Molly Bloom's place of origin, Gibraltar, seems to have tipped its hat to the Joycean mythos by having a freak snowfall on 1954 Feb 02.) "Imbolg," the Gaelic for the holiday corresponding to St Brighid's day, is of uncertain meaning. "Im" seems to be cream in Ireland and "butter" in Scotland. "Bolg" has associations with "bag" and "belly," so both the womb, the milk sack, and the fourth stomach of a ruminant are candidates for "Imbolg." Mr Joyce couldn't decide?: <bag belly> 054.22 The Wakean stand-in, the low sham Shem, was born on St Brighid's day just like his creator: <the fraid born fraud> 172.21 In Wales, Brighid's name is spelled "Fraid" and "Ffraid," similar to the Irish form of Brighid as "Bride," with the shift of plosives. <Fireless> 172.25, quasi a reference to the post-Brigidine era of Ireland, and in this instance also quasi a signature to a letter or telegram, seems appropriate, as the shamed post-Brigidine era is where we would expect to locate Shem. Top of the morning to all, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: vico versus the blue pencil From: the recent past Date: 2/3/00 4:05 PM <In his "Translator's Preface," David Marsh states that Vico's "larger view of history and society demands our attention, and I have striven to make his work readable for the modern reader" (xxxv). He writes, "On occasion I have corrected minor lapses and supplied phrases required by the context, taking care that these surface adjustments in no way distort the substance of Vico's argument" (xxxiv). Grafton, in his intro., comments on Vico's "pullulating erudition" and "strange language . . ."> [the above from: Jack Stone ... date: tuesday, february 01, 2000 5:28 am Subject: re: penguin edition of vico's new science...usefully readable?] [RivS: sorry, I originally sent my response to the wrong list -- what follows is basically the same as what you may have read.] There it is, the apple in the garden almost all editors will eat. Several personal experiences (which do not have anything to do with the larger body of corrections editors will make which are justified) of the editors' gnawing awful need to remove the finest examples of a writer's zeugma, by which I intend a writer's purposeful and skilled and informed usage of awkward construction for artistic and philosophic reasons versus the editors' crusade to make all writing conform to a sterile puerile template more suitable to a teacher correcting homework: 1. A family member and myself conspired on an article about our sighting of Halley's Comet which was published in a small literary journal. The article began "We were not interested in seeing the comet until we learned nobody else could. Because of our crass attitude toward American culture, we disdain anything popular." The editor simply could not abide the word "crass," and seemed to take real personal pride in deleting it, and seemed to expect us to be grateful. "Crass" just did not fit. Yet that was the Uncle Charles principle at work. We did not like things that "fit," and we said so in a way that did not "fit." We also poked fun at ourselves, and thus deflated somewhat the silly pompousness of our stance. No use. Although our piece became the "cover story," we lost our "crass" in the process. "Crass" in our opinion, and we did write the damn thing, was the single most important word in the entire article, and the only one that the editor would not allow. Amazing. 2. After passionate argument, another editor of a small literary journal (nothing I write "fits" in anything else) did reallow the word "dingdang" in a sonnet. Again, in her opinion it did not "fit" with the seriousness of the poem. I am very proud of the fact that, in a world of four-letter curses that are working their way into Disney movies, I was censored for saying the "dingdang" word! 3. At my aunt's deathbed request, I wrote her obituary and service eulogy, which were later (also based on her wishes) spliced into a biographical introduction to a small book of fiction which was already set to be published at the time of her death. This time the word of contention was in the phrase, "My aunt was that rarest of refreshment, a refined Bohemian." I faxed the draft to my aunt's home, and a woman who was "arranging things" sent back her "corrected" version, in which "refreshment" was now pluralized to "refreshments." I faxed back a return to the original. No good. A person who typed the "final" version took it upon herself to replace "refreshments." I phoned and requested a rereturn to the singular, got an agreement, and faxed up my suggested "final" version. The next day, her eulogy was read by a very intelligent man, a professional drama critic of good standing, indeed a lovely person, but he just could not resist: the recorded version of the service, mailed to me as a video-tape . . . that's right, "refreshments" was back! I will spare the whole song and dance with the publishers of my aunt's book, but you guessed it anyway. In the published version they again insisted on pluralizing my word, "refreshment." Now I will grant that "My aunt was that rarest of refreshment . . ." does not "fit" modern mainstream ears. It is hardly, however, "incorrect." It is rather a bit 19th century, perhaps actually quite 18th century . . . OK, it shouts of the Augustan Age, and I had a hard time not capitalizing it to Refreshment. It indicates after all a genus of various species, it says that my aunt was the rarest of many forms of things which are themselves not as common as we might like -- things which replenish our spirit, and give us the strength to go on as a result of the comfort which their pleasurable nature imparts. There is also again a bit of the free indirect style, since my aunt was somewhat Victorian, which is pretty much a precondition to being somewhat Bohemian. There is one thing which my aunt was not. She was not a soft drink. To say that she was the rarest of "refreshments" implies, however, that my aunt was a soft drink and one not well marketed. That is where we hear "refreshments," in the context of beverages mostly, or more generically, assortments of snacks and dishes and drinks served casually and generally cold (a classic example, by the way, of the zeugmatic construction). My aunt was never served casually and cold, or if so, did not speak of it. But without any real thought involved, this is what people meant by "it doesn't fit." My usage of "refreshment" in the singular conflicted with a more common usage in thousands of dingdang crass commercials, and although "refreshments" made no sense in the context of my aunt's eulogy, it was inserted ad nauseum by fiat. What did Proust write, someone will know, quoting another writer, Sainte-Beuve -- it is not the well-trimmed hedge which defines a writer's art, but that one branch which has produced flowers beyond all reason until it thrusts itself out from the trimmers' plane like a madman? I think that is very appropriate for editors to keep in mind as a balance only, mind you -- the trimmers' art is a noble one. The trimmer must frequently, however, step back to critique his work against that of nature to ensure that he or she is working in harmony with the greater picture. Chagall would hold his hand next to a painting, and if there was a clash, the painting was not done. I used to do a great deal of pruning, and I loved it, because you worked hand in hand with plants and not people (nothing personal). I learned how to bring light into the heart of a tree, and to make a bush look as though it were praying. But most importantly, I learned to work with and emphasize each plant's deviations from the templates of some abstract and idealized "perfection." If a plant is not hurting another plant, then it "fits." Otherwise, if one simply continues to remove every branch which does not conform to what the book of standards allows, one winds up with a parking lot and must try to call it a botanical paradise. It doesn't work. And Joyce it surely ain't -- no, nor the work of the Holy Saint Brighid, who taught the mighty how to remove their hats in the hovels of the agrarian poor. And in what society do the people who grow our food ever "fit?" Only those primal enough to admit of Refreshment. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling -----original message to: <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> date: wednesday, february 02, 2000 12:41 AM
Subject: and may we have some From: the recent past Date: 2/3/00 8:19 PM Just for the fun of it (I wonder why I never get invited to parties), I ran searches through the four primary works of Mr Joyce in terms of refreshment vs refreshments. These things are not infallible, of course, but here are my results. There are eight instances of "refreshment" in D, P, U, and FW combined. This includes instances starting with a capital "R" or having an "s" at the end. The word "refreshment" occurs seven times in the singular, and only once in the plural. The single occurrence of "refreshments" is attributable to the mental shenanigans and hi-jinx of Miss Gerty MacDowell, and not necessarily the opinion of proper English by the author (assuming Mr Joyce had such opinion -- and not to mention that Gerty is herself citing one Reggie Wylie, an impetuous fellow of dubious character). The instance of "Refreshment" is found on a sign above the window of the "poor-looking shop" in the area of Rutland Square where Lenehan eats in "Two Gallants." It is used adjacent to and preceding "Bar." In "The Dead," the word occurs four times, including two hyphenations with "room" in the comings and goings of the four young men at the party. There is one "refreshment" apiece in Portrait and the Wake. In most cases, it seems that probably Mr Joyce considered "refreshment" as quasi plural, in the sense of a subdividable category: <he might offer him some refreshment> [P 5.3150] could, to current ears anyway, be just as well "he might offer him some refreshments." They are not quite saying identical things, but when can one say safely "he might offer him a refreshment"? So . . . if I write, "My aunt was that rarest of refreshment," I am saying that within that entire class of various acts causing refreshment, my aunt was refreshing but uncommon. If instead I am forced to have it that my aunt was the rarest of "refreshments," then my aunt risks becoming a genus of refreshing things within a larger family of refreshing things -- or worse, some specific soft drink, eg ginger beer <menu at the Rutland Square Refreshment Bar <all things which restore one's strength. Of course, when absolute beatified clarity is desired, we must turn to the Wake -- <Shall we follow each others a steplonger, drowner of daggers, whiles our liege, tilyet a stranger in the frontyard of his happi- ness, is taking, (heal helper! one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!) his refreshment?> FW 191.05-08 -- to which I say an enheartened Yes! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling pee ess, you might say "why couldn't you just take the simple and conventional route, and allow your phrase to be changed to "my aunt was that rarest of refreshments" which sounds better and makes perfect sense to anyone who hears it -- and I can only reply that that is exactly what I did, and am in fact beginning to prefer it. And yet, damn it all . . . .
Subject: There it is: Old Semitic, as simple as ABC! From: the recent past Date: 2/9/00 8:25 PM To the neat posts about the names of the Northwest Semitic letters from Katonah, Arye Kendi, and the LegendaryChrisTusRex, a few additions and nuances: [given in order of ordination, transliteration, pronunciation, meaning as noun, meaning as number] [continental vowels] 1. ALP -- alef and elef -- ox, cattle -- 1 and 1000 2. BYTh -- beth -- tent (bayith), house, temple, interior -- 2 and 2000 3. GML or GYML -- (hard) gimel -- camel (gamal) -- 3, 3000 4. DLTh -- daleth -- door -- 4 5. HA -- heh -- airhole -- 5 6. VV -- (soft) vav (almost "wow") -- nail, hook -- 6 7. ZYN -- zayin -- weapon -- 7 8. ChYTh -- (scot/german guttural "ch") cheth -- fence -- 8 9. TYTh -- (hard, emphatic) teyth -- coiling, twisting -- 9 10. YVD -- yod -- hand (yad) -- 10 11. KP -- kaf -- hollow hand, palm -- 20 (500 as terminal) 12. LMD -- lamed -- oxgoad -- 30 13. MYM -- meym -- water -- 40 (600 as terminal) 14. NVN -- (long vowel) nun -- fish -- 50 (700 as terminal) 15. SMCh -- samech -- support -- 60 16. 'AYN -- (semitic guttural) ayin -- eye -- 70 17. PA, PY -- pey -- mouth -- 80 (800 as terminall) 18. tSDY -- tsadiy -- fishing-hook -- 90 (900 as terminal) 19. QYP -- koph -- back of the head -- 100 20. RYSh -- reysh -- head -- 200 21. ShYN, Shyn -- siyn, shiyn -- tooth -- 300 22. TV -- tav (tau) -- sign, mark, cross -- 400 These are from Langenscheidt's (Feyerabend), which uses Sephardic pronunciations. As one goes into Qabalistic overtones, certainly a Joycean consideration, many more traditional and implied nuances come into play. Comparing the lists of the various posts today will begin to demonstrate that expansion. The works of Paul Foster Case are very helpful, as is of course a book of basic Hebrew grammar. The seminal work on the mystical significance of the original Semitic alphabet is the Sefer Yetzirah, a work difficult to date for various reasons. The second century is given a lot of consideration as a place to hang a date of origin in secular terms. Mystical tradition places Sefer Yetzirah much earlier, and the first citations appear around 600-700 with the earliest extant text being from around 900-1000, I think (therefore I am probably wrong -- please corroborate on your own time, or discorroborate me as the case may be). Many references to Hebrew letters appear in Ulysses, and, more especially, in Finnegans Wake. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Phoenician Park From: the recent past Date: 2/10/00 6:20 PM Much grace to Arye and Eric for keeping alive the thread on Semitic letters in Mr Joyce's work, a very essential area of study with much excavating yet to tell its talings. One overt and established site in the Wake is page 249.06-18: <In the house of breathings lies that word, all fairness.> Almost all phonetic utterance is of course organized obstructions of breathings. For a good tour of the house of breathings: http://www.unil.ch/ling/phonetique/api-eng.html#intro Notice how <all fairness> can also be spelled as "ALPh airness," a phrase which cites the first letter of the Northwestern Semitic alphabet (the origin of all alphabets which technically qualify to be named such) <'alef>, and then names the engine of human speech, <airness>. <The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone.> True. The walls of the house of breathings, to the extent we accept that to be the oral cavity, are ruby-red flesh; the gates are the teeth of bone. <all the house is filled with the breathings of her fairness . . . and the fairness of promise with consonantia and avowals> Self-explanatory -- consonants and vowels. <A window, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sign, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay. And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated!> <Heh, Cheth, Vav, Yod(Kaf), 'Ayin, Tav, Resh and keep your eye for the future on her Peh aspirated-Peh unaspirated-Peh final. There it is: Old Semitic, as clear as ABC!> Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: if I prove you are right, do I win the debate? From: the recent past Date: 2/11/00 6:03 PM RivS submitted: <A window, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sign, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay. And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated!> 249.16-18 <Heh, Cheth, Vav, Yod(Kaf), 'Ayin, Tav, Resh and keep your eye for the future on her Peh aspirated-Peh unaspirated-Peh final. There it is: Old Semitic, as clear as ABC!> ----------End of Original Message---------- Arye corrected: Actually: He/Chet , Lamed (prong), Yod, Ayin, Tav, Resh, Pe Fritz Senn discovered that it combines into Heliotrop. ------------End of Arye's Message---------------- RivS responds: I am grateful for Arye's response, as it opens up the avenue for a longer look at this marvelous page, so deep in its enfoldment. McHugh also gives the correspondences listed above by Fritz and Arye. With affirmation by a trio bearing such credentials and respect to the table, only a complete fool would question their (and very probably Mr Joyce's) association of letter names. So here goes: The insight by Fritz that "heliotrop" can be extracted from <A window, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sign, a head> is a brilliant find, and once someone as perceptive as he has found it, it also seems very logical. Corroborration would seem found on page 533 where <heliotrope ayelips> appears on line 02, followed at line 08 by the recently cited <Lambeyth and Dolekey>, identified as "lamed" and "beyth" and "daleth" references, three letter names (the first two by sight, the third by association, "daleth" meaning door, and <Dolekey> suggesting "doorkey" -- & eye lips = ayin pey) <Heliotropolis> at 594.08 is followed by <Rubbinsen> at 594.11, and that reminds us of <rubinen> at 249.07, the page which we are analyzing. <In the heliotropical noughttime> at 349.06 also has "alefbeth" connotation wakewise. At the Qabalistic passage on page 261, we read <Ainsoph, this upright one, with that noughty besighed him zeroine>. Then there is the wonderful phone number near the start of Proteus, chapter 03 of Ulysses: <Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.> "Ain soph" is "endless limitlessness," the mystical origin and context of the 32 paths in the Sefer Yetzirah which emanate in sequence the 10 digits of the Sefiroth, and the 22 letters of the alphabet. The Ulyssean reference joins the letter alef/alpha with zero/nought and with one: the zero being assigned to the alef by the Golden Dawn, and one being assigned to alef/alpha in Hebrew and Greek numerics. Several other instances of heliotropical words are found in the Wake, so we know it was an important word to the author. The above instances show that among other usages, heliotropical words in the Wake have sympathetic resonances with Hebrew letters, and their mystic study, the Qabala. How can one possibly question that "heliotrop" is spelled out cryptically on page 249? Their are several levels involved with what is "correct." 1) what did the author intend?; 2) what is correct Hebrew? IF Mr Joyce's Hebrew is as sloppy in the Wake as it is in Ulysses, then we may essentially throw out question two. First, we should at least see what we are throwing out due to the baby factor. Here is the heliotropic conceit: window = heh = H [no contest] hedge = cheth = E [contested -- hedge is well recognized as synonymous with fence and cheth, but the E association is not orthodox; there is a system for associating vowels with Hebrew letters, which are designed to represent consonants, but cheth is not such a letter -- the consonant associated with E is "heh"] prong = ? = ? [here is the contention -- we need an L for heliotrop - yes, a prong could be a prod, giving us lamed = L; prong could also be a fastener, yielding vav = V/W; and cases can even be made for prong = samech = tent peg; or prong = fang = shin!] hand (pointing/touching) = yod = Y [and by vowel assignment I; OR: hand (open/taking) = kaf = K] eye = ayin = Semitic guttural sound [and by vowel assignment O] sign = tav = T head = resh = R [yes, BUT, resh is also often specified as the FRONT of the head, the face, in contrast to qof, Q, the BACK of the head -- in other words we have the option of: head = qof = Q] other augur = repeat the O/ayin/eye, since "augur" is an eye which sees into the future [OK . . . very like, could be] [mouthmouthmouth] = paypaypay = PPP [the letter pey has three forms, aspirated/non-aspirated/terminal, ie, "f," "p," and ending a word, as in heliotrop -- in classical Hebrew, an aspirated pey is not supposed to begin a word, incidentally, for those of you who have wondered why there are no Freds in the Hebrew Canon] So we actually spell HELIOTROPPP, by noticeable twisting and a little tormenting of Hebrew transliteration. There is no point in objecting to the failure to match "heliotrope." Mr Joyce makes his own spelling rules in English, he will certainly do so in Anglo-hebraic transliteration. Heliotrope as a color is important to the Wake, because as a variable color in the red-purple spectrum, it is that color which gave the Phoenicians there name, or the other way around, pick your take, and Phoenicians are central to the Wake due to their role as alphabet "inventors" (along with their inland cousins, the Canaanites) and a quasi cognancy with Phoenix, the bird of resurrection which suggests "Wake" (party for dead, awakening) and hence the Leinster Edenville, Phoenix Park, derived from a mispronunciation of the same Irish word seen in Finn (white/fionn)! So what could possibly justify Mr Joyce's having intended "vav" for "prong," and thus lose his HELIOTROPP? Probably none, and basically I have to yield to the clearer perception of Mssr McHugh, Senn, and Kendi. BUT in the process of losing vav, we lose the name of G-D so holy it is not to be pronounced, only spelled: yod-heh-vav-heh [in this case, heh becomes the other augur, the clear window by which the future might be seen] as an element within the passage on page 249. So there. Since obviously I have proven beyond little doubt that Roland, Fritz, and Arye are far more likely to be correct than I by their reading of "prong = prod = L" than my "prong = tine/tooth/nail = vav," I feel we can all safely agree that I have won the debate. Assuming there was one. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: Phoenician Park From: the recent past Date: 2/11/00 6:33 PM Eric confided: <I was remembering last night that it was the Greeks that reassigned some of the Phoenician characters to vowel sounds > RivS: A book which I don't have to hand, published within the last several decades, goes into immense detail about the precise, if vague (I am an oxymoron at heart), time, place, and purpose of the original Greek vocalized alphabet. The author's contention is that the Greek alphabet was specifically invented to record the works of Homer. If so, we have another instance of Mr Joyce's perceptive intuition, since he followed his book on a partly Homeric theme (Ulysses) with a book obsessed with (among other things) the alphabet (FW). Here, I picked the book up on a 'net search: <Powell, Barry B. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1991. xxv, 280 p. (incl. maps and a profusion of text figs.). The author concludes that the development of alphabetic Greek writing was brought about for the specific purpose of recording the works of Homer in material form. He further suggests that this important invention was the work of a single individual and even identifies the inventor as possibly someone from Euboea (the predominant island to the east of the Greek mainland).> RivS: I did not find the author's hypothesis compelling, and I am not sure Powell himself did. One has to satisfy a publisher's hype addiction. What you do get is a good look at abecedarian protohistorics, and some most excellent cataloguing of early Greek obscene graffiti! Too bad Cambridge didn't want to sell on the mass market. The title "Who Did What To Whom on Aegean Beaches" also might have been used, or worse. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: commodus From: the recent past Date: 2/18/00 2:35 PM Dear Eric, A great connection: <From _Architecture Mysticism and Myth_ by William Lethaby (London, 1892, reprinted 1974 by Architectural Press and 1975 by George Braziller). "In the reign of Commodus, Q. Julius Miletus built a labyrinth as an institution for the amusement of the people. (C. O. Mueller) "The _choros_, or dancing-place, built by Daedalus for Ariadne--as it existed in story, of course, not in stone--was probably such a labyrinth.> I don't recall seeing a ref to the labyrinth of Commodus before in Joycean recircles . . . excellent. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Fw: poppie's prefalling From: the recent past Date: 2/22/00 7:57 PM -----Original Message----- From: the recent past To: jjoyce <j-joyce@lists.utah.edu> Date: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 4:55 PM Subject: poppie's prefalling Much grace to Noel Purdon and to Charles Cave for making accessible to us the web version of "James Joyce's Sister," which I find to be one of the most moving and incredible pieces of Joycean biographic material I've yet to read. It ranks with the several accounts of Joyces pere and fils playing that last seaside piano duet. Here's the site again: http://www.wordarchive.com/archive.php3?id=Purdo942832005 I did find it necessary to copy the article, and reformat it in a word processor. The site, on my monitor at least, had established a tedious horizontal scrollbar. References to the Joyce sister called "Poppie" by her brother, James, do seem to appear in Finnegans Wake. The flower association is played on, of course: <that will bring the poppy blush of shame> FW 445.15-16 being seemingly a reference to the nature of Poppie which led her to exile herself in a convent, and supposedly never read her brother's works. The flower tie also may give the good sister an appearance among the seven Floras: "Gillia . . . Poppea, Arancita, Clara, Marinuzza, Indra and Iodina" FW 572.35-36;573.01 A more specific and developed reference to Poppie (Margaret Alice Joyce, later Sister Gertrude of the Convent of Mercy) is noteworthy in that it combines allusion to daughter and father in the portmanteau "Poppypap," one of the many instances of the author's fascination with juggling feminine and masculine identities; and for alluding ("passport") to how Margaret Alice Joyce came to flee the decaying realm of her father's fireside for the sanctuary and vocation of a holy order in a foreign land: <Poppypap's a passport out. And honey is the holiest thing ever was> FW 025.05-06 One passage in Mr Purdon's interview stood out in my mind beyond all others, a description by Poppie of a vivid incident experienced by her and James on a walk: <Another time I remember was when we were coming back from one of our long walks, we were walking through a cemetery. And there was this white thing flapping in the moonlight. I don’t know whether it comes out in his writing, but Jim was a terrible one for phobias. He was also completely terrified of thunderstorms. Once he hid in the pantry shaking. It was doubtful whether or not he’d finish his examinations. But father was the fearless one. There was this white form flapping away. And it was he went to investigate. And do you know what it was? It was an old goat eating the ivy off the tombstones.’ >* This is really stunning. We all have been wondering aloud for decades about the role of HCE as a goat in Finnegans Wake. The above passage seems to be the seminal key, combining an intense preternatural vision of two children with the Joycean sine qua non, the thunderstorm, and an old goat, and a tombstone. We already know the goat to be a major icon in the Wake. The tombstone is equally significant, because the Wake, as indicated by the very word, is about death and resurrection, a wake being 1) a party for a dead person, and 2) an awakening. For some time I have attempted, to waves of thundering silence, to engage the attention of Joyceans to the fact that HCE is an abbreviation used on the ancient Roman equivalent of tombstones. HCE is the older equivalent of RIP. It stands for Hic Conditur Est, meaning Here (the) Author Is. Thus all the HCE's in the wake point both to the eternal interment and the eternally resurrecting rebirth, but as well to Mr Joyce, the book's author (author in the older sense, including maker, founder, constructor, initiator). All this has been dug and redug. What Sister Gertrude has brought to the table, thanks to Mr Purdon, are the roots in a moment of the reality of two children, an intersection of time and space on Vico Road, which literally lit up a mythscape. At last we have, for one thing, the ivy. Ivy winds itself throughout the trellis of Finnegans Wake, where it is often in a pagan/christian pairing with holly. Joyce seems to associate the ivy with darkness, hoods, cloisters, death, and holly with brightness, gaiety, and life: <Hollymerry, ivysad> FW 588.17 We read, soon followed by an allusion to the author's perhaps single most indelible image for most, <truce of snow, moonmounded snow?> (FW 588.19), the general snowfall ending "The Dead." Here are more, but not all, Wakean clusters of death and ivy: <circling the square, for the deathfête of Saint Ignaceous Poisonivy> FW 186.12-13 <shows his death its grave mistake; brought us giant ivy> FW 134.20-22 <how it is triste to death, all his dark ivytod! Where cold in dearth.> FW 571.14-15 Yes, you say, there is the ivy in the graveyard, but where is the GOAT when the ivy is present? One Wakean phrase especially addresses that: <Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise> FW 030.14-15 in which we see a goat-root (Sp. chiv-), the ivy (ch-ivy-as), HCE (by his initials), and a reference to the prefall paradise of childhood. The all-mother in her triple role as crone (hag) and temptress (Eve) and milky nurturer (goat) tie it all together, and we end up again with the male-female duality of HCE, this time with the female in particular emphasis (as distilled in the plays in the Wake on "pap," a word meaning father, tit, and treacle -- yet another trinity). The Spanish word "chivas" may even be a particular invocation of the Joyce children's scary moonlit storm, because "chivas" (chiv[ych]as) specifically means two little goat children, or as we say in English, two kids. "esquire earwugs . . . with his I've Ivy under his tangue" 485.21-22 is another example in the Wake of ivy and HCE (earwugs=earwicks=Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker= earworker, the blind author, here he is=Hic Conditur Est= tombstone, and I could go on, which if nothing else, you believe). In the extension of the Wakean passage cited above as seeming in particular to point to that sister described as Mr Joyce's favorite, there is even the beatific doe herself, again in an ambience, an ivylike clustering of imagery, which suggests that idyllic light in which we often see moments in our childhood, that land which, even at its most frightening (or especially), we see so clearly now to have been a land of milk and honey: <Poppypap's a passport out. And honey is the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb and earwax, the food for glory, (mind you keep the pot or your nectar cup may yield too light !) and some goat's milk, sir> FW 025.05-08 *The passage in which Sister Gertrude describes the epiphany of the goat in the graveyard is from "James Joyce's Sister," <wordarchive.com> by Noel Purdon (c) [1987?]. *[Note the stream of conciousness wherein the father, the son, and the thunder appear in other times and contexts midstream to the primary tale in the telling]. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: correction: Hic Conditor Est From: the recent past Date: 2/22/00 11:36 PM Those plowers of my post on Poppies prefalling should note and excuse the following: HCE on ancient Roman equivalents of tombstones stands for: Hic Conditor Est (NOT Conditur). Sorry, & thanks. Hic Conditor Est still means "Here (the) Author Is," using "author" as "founder, maker." Daedalus is also present, as "conditor" also means "contriver" in the positive sense of "builder, composer, artificer." Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: Joyce & popular culture From: the recent past Date: 2/26/00 2:49 AM Jack Stone is right, the Winslow Boy is a movie likely to appeal to Joyceans. The work of the lead actress (Rebecca Pidgeon?) is especially keen, that nice passionate understating that Americans have often mistaken in the English for sang froid -- a good drama of manners from the culture who sells books with statements such as 'quite readable' -- and what mainstream American media can't understand is that the book is exactly that, and that is all it need be for its consumers, not the American 'an epic saga of secret forbidden lusts spanning generations,' which may in fact be quite UNreadable. If the question on the table then is movies which reflect Joyce's influence or interests or game pieces, I would like to recommend Cool Hand Luke, with Paul Newman. The story is very Wakean for a mainstream movie, with no attempt to be so in a literary manner. As in the Wake, Biblical elements surface here and there with no attempt to actually retell the Gospel of Luke in modern form -- but rather a very Joycean usage of New Testament this and that picked almost randomly from a compost litter by a chicken -- which of course works much better. As in the Wake, the people are sleazy bottom feeders, and the Newman character, a prisoner somewhere in Texas, is a rounder, not an allegorical Jesus or Luke (and as in the Wake and Ulysses, his character is subject to flashes of more than one classic role model, that is, Luke and Jesus are invoked to a certain degree in one character, who in fact is neither). The best hope for salvation Luke now offers are lies about how happy he will be when he escapes to go gambling and whoring in the big city, and the crucifixion is become an eating contest wager with Newman in the attitude of Jesus on the Cross spread on his back on a mess table with gambling prisoners stuffing hardboiled eggs down his throat. But there is a visitation from Mother Mary, and an existential argument with The Old Man in a deserted church. Somebody tried, and maybe even succeeded. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: gospel according to cool hand luke From: the recent past Date: 2/26/00 3:11 AM PS and I forgot the movie's most famous line -- what better statement to issue forth from a modern Pontius Pilate, now the warden of a rural southern chain gang, than "What we got here is a failure to communicate." And can't you recast it in your mind with say any one of about 95% of the other literary image makers of this recently past century standing before the crowd, with the bleeding Joyce wearing the stephanos (wreath-crown) of thorns, and suddenly the procurator of the 7 figure advance exposes on high the black first American edition of Finnegans Wake to the jeers of an angry mob, and he shouts with the cords of his perspiring neck taut in the unforgiving sunlight -- "What we got here is a failure to communicate!" Where is Miss Weaver then! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Finding of a Formula: Fibyouare wins -- Year! Year! From: the recent past Date: 2/28/00 9:31 PM <a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark> FW 473.08-09 Fans of Joyce, and of Issy, the lovely cloudy leapgirl of his invention by which he embodied into the 29th of February all the gauzy flighty shining precipitant and obnoxious glory of youth, may be interested to know that 2000 February 29 is an unusual leap day in the modern (ie, Gregorian) calendar. The Julian calendar, instituted during the administration of Julius Caesar, terminated the lunisolar calendar, with its intercalary epacts needed to allow the coincidence of lunar months with solar years, (<And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light> FW 226.26-27) in favor of the simply solar calendar now in worldwide use (although the lunar calendar also remains in play, as in Semitic nations). The Julian calendar used three years of 365 days and an intercalary year of 366 days to form a four year period which allowed for the actual solar years of roughly 365.25 days. As we know, the extra day in fourth years has been made February 29, and placed in years divisible by four. The solar year, however, is not quite that long. As centuries rolled by, this imprecision made the Julian calendar fall behind real time. By the 1500's, the easily recognized reversal of the sun's apparent movement in relation to the horizon (the traditional holiday of winter solstice) was ten days off. Under the aegis of a Pope Gregory, the calendar was defaulted deleting ten days from October in 1582, and a new epact was ordered: leap days would no longer occur in years ending with two zeroes unless the first two digits formed a number also divisible by four evenly. In application, it works so that, three times in sequence, years ending in two zeroes will not be leap years, although all such years are of course divisible by four, and would have been Julian leap years. In Gregorian terms, only each fourth turn of the century will be allowed a leap day. 1600 got a leap day, because 16 can be divided by four evenly. 1700 got no leap day, nor did 1800, nor did 1900. 17 is not divisible by four, nor are 18 and 19. 20 is divisible by four, so the year 2000 does get a leap day in February. There is more to it. Not only is 2000 the first Gregorian turn of the century leap year in 400 years, but it is the first universal one. 1600 had the anomalous leap day in Catholic countries only, since other countries did not wish to be seen taking advice from the Pope. (<And this, pardonsky! is the way Romeopullupalleaps> 303.01-02) Since then, they have come around slowly but surely. The Prots have been becoming Gregorian now for 200+ years, and those countries traditionally Orthodox came around during the 20th century. So -- 2000 February 29 is the first global Gregorian turn-of-the-century leap day in history! Everyone lift an appropriate glass an say "Aminglement!" And to all of you I wish <leap smiles on the twelvemonthsminding?> FW 280.08 Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: flooding fields and the equinarx From: the recent past Date: 2/29/00 10:47 PM Eric posted (along with many other good calendrics): <the equinox was occurring on 21 March, and was fixed there> and this opens the door to remind us of the nice serendipity that James Joyce was born during the traditional Celtic holiday heralding the entrance of spring (Brighid's "Day": the eve of Jan 31 through the eve of Feb 02), and Nora Joyce was born on the day now most associated with the first day of spring, March 21 (also, according to John Gordon, the day of Finnegans Wake). Shem's birthday is also Brighid's "Day": <the fraid born fraud> [172.21], "Fraid" being the Welsh, or Cymric, form of Brighid (often spelled "Ffraid"). The Joyces, incidentally, are purported to be Welsh-Norman Irish, rather than Anglo-Norman. In lines 03-04 of page 035, a quite calendric page throughout, HCE's birthday is given as the Ides of April: <one happygogusty Ides-of-April morning (the anniversary, as it fell out, of his first assumption of his mirthday suit>, specifically April 13, but more generally the period back from April 13 to April 06. Ides are a fitting mirthday for HCE, as founding father of what seems the only family in the Wake, as the Ides are dedicated to Jupiter, the Roman father god (Ya pater=Iupiter). [Eric:] <the Spring equinox (originally at 6 calends March?> [RivS:] The placement of the vernal equinox into the Roman calendar is indeed confusing, and is still a Vatican II bugaboo, causing the quasi pagan shuffling of Easter each year to align it with lunisolar calendrics. This seems to be in play in the context of Eric's citation from 085.27 <the calends of Mars>: <on the calends of Mars, under an incompatibly framed indictment of both the counts (from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow's fetch being the other follow's person)> 085.27-29 Perhaps this difficulty is also reflected during the burst of calendrics from Butt beginning at 346.31: <roughnow along about the first equinarx in the cholonder> 347.02-03 What Butt divulges about this first equinox in the calendar is of interest for its display of Mr Joyce's incroyable ability to shred real-world data and remix it into Wakean word salad. <Hittit was of another time> 346.35-347.01 points to the time of the Hittittes, Indo-Europeans who appear early in the 2nd millennium BC. Some case can be made for this falling into a time in which the equinoctial observations, most especially the spring ones, were rising in status. The earlier holidays formed around solstices and heliarcal risings, because those can be recognized by direct sighting if one knows what to look for. Equinoxes raise the ante for priest-astronomers who set public festivals because equinoxes have to be calculated, not seen. You have to count the days between solstices and divide by two. You have to keep track of each day inbetween. In short, you have to keep accurate records in order to know when the equinoxes occur. Stick notching doesn't really cut it. The equinoxes are holidays for cultures who can write. You can try, of course, once you do learn to calculate the spring equinox a few times, simply to memorize or draw what the sky looks like at that time in terms of stars which are rising or setting or culminating at early or last darkness of the proper night. But if you try that, something even more fascinating starts to show up. The equinoctial sky picture is not static! It changes each year. What is more, if you keep good records for a number of generations, you can gather enough data to make calculations which will reveal that the equinoctial sky picture not only changes, but changes by an orderly progression of sequential increments. Now you can predict what the stars of the equinoctial sky will be for any future or past year, that is, which stars will be rising or setting or culminating at first or last dark for the equinoctial night (the night halfway between the solstices). At that point you literally go full circle, and realize through your calculations that the progressive changing of the equinoctial skies is cyclical. The pattern will repeat itself every 26,000 years or so. (Conventional wisdom credits Hipparchus with discovering precession much later in Hellenic times. Mr Joyce, however, was not always wedded to conventional wisdom, nor need we be. Hipparchus probably discovered precession in roughly the same way that Europeans discovered the Grand Canyon -- by following the trails). <a white horsday where the midril met the bulg> 347.01 The equinoxes occur when the sun passes by the intersection of the ecliptic (sun's pathway) and the celestial equator (plane extended into the sky from the earth's equator). This is the coincidental point of two arcs, which is in the subsequent wordplay of equinox/equinarx. And then of course, Joyce cannot resist wordplay upon horse=equus and equinox (equal nights [to days]). He also sneaks in the eternal plug for Brighid's day, the Irish alternate to the equinox, in <bulg>, noted by McHugh as the Irish "belly." This word appears in the Irish name for Brighid's day: Im-bolg, or "cream-belly." Bolg is also bag, and cream-bag is a better translation of Imbolg, since creambag conjures the breast, the thee universal icon of motherhood. This is also in play in <equinarx>, which combines the mounts upon which stood Roman temples of Juno, who personified the motherly life-giving principle: the temple of Juno Lucina, the childbearer, on the Equiline Hill; and the temple of Juno Moneta, the warning teacher, on the Arx summit of the Capitoline Hill. <moist moonful date> 347.07 One reason desert cultures in particular watch for the equinox is that it heralds the snowmelt in distant mountains, which bring the yearly flooding along the river banks. The inundation not only irrigates, but amends the soil with mud high in nutrients. <date> is thus not only calendric in this phrase, but includes resonances with palm dates, and perhaps inun-dates. "Hegheg . . . wraimy wetter . . . samewhere in Ayerland." [McHugh: heghegh=flood in eastern Armenian; ayer=water in Malay]. <old stile and new style and heave a lep onwards> 347.13-14. Old Style and New Style are other designations for Julian and Gregorian in calendrics. In Joycean calendrics, they may also indicate the lunar and solar approaches to calendrics, lunar being the old style. Half a leap refers certainly to the leap year, along of course with the Light Brigade. The phrase also can be read: Julian and Gregorian calendars both have a leapday. This is more than CNN knows. Today they ran a "Factoid" informing us that the leap year was started by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, a piece of gross misinformation. What Pope Gregory XIII did in 1582 was actually to drop three leap years from each subsequent four-century period. Our leap year was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC on the advice of the Alexandrian astronomer, Sosigenes. After some false starts while everyone took turns failing to understand how it worked, the basic leap year system was in place by the second decade of the common era, during the reign of Augustus. The usage of other forms of leap days and years had been common for several thousand years at least prior to the current Julian-Gregorian form. <the great day and the druidful day come San Patrisky and the grand day, the excellent fine splendorous long agreeable toastworthy cylindrical day, go Sixt of the Ninth, the heptahundread annam dammias that Hajizfijjiz ells me is and will and was be till the timelag is in it that's told in the Bok of Alam to columnkill all the prefacies of Erin gone brugk> 347.16-21 Well. The great day can be various things. The precession of the equinoxes came to be called the Great Year, since as with the solar year, it was a regular period of time which was cyclical and repetitive. For a long time, ancient societies considered the year as having 360 days, with various fine tuning thrown in all over the place to account for the epact five more days plus change. Forinstance: "During the reign of Romulus ...they only kept to the one rule that the whole course of the year contained three hundred and sixty days." Plutarch. (A.D. 75) Lives, The Life of Numa. Translated by John Dryden. When the Great Year of approximately 26,000 solar years is divided by the 360 days of the ancient year, it becomes analogous to the division of any circle into degrees. Thus one degree of the precessional circle which the earth's poles describe requires 72 years. One great day of the Great Year is 72 years long. 72 or so years has long been the average life span (don't believe cooked statistics compiled to justify the industrial revolution . . . yes, people in huge cities live longer if their garbage and feces are hauled away regularly, and colonized people die young after their cultures are eradicated . . . but the human life span of 70-80 years was documented in the Bible thousands of years ago). Thus, each average life is one degree of a grand celestial circling of the ecliptic by first days of spring. This means each average human life will last the duration of the progress of precession through a given day of the year. About thirty of these Great Days will then define a Great Month, by which time the first day of spring will have advanced so far through the ecliptic that it is in an entirely new one of the ecliptic's twelve sectors, or "houses." These are named as the signs of the Zodiac, and this is what is meant by the Aquarian Age hoopla. At root, it is mathematical. Whether we will enter an age of better understanding as a result is a different matter. We are absolutely entering the Aquarian Age, it just means that the first day of spring will occur when the first second of Right Ascension is within that area of the sky map. Astronomy simply says "We are now traveling through Flagstaff." Astrology claims that as a result, we will have a guaranteed good time, an <excellent fine splendorous long agreeable toastworthy cylindrical day.> All we really can know, of course, is that with luck, we will have a day. Flagstaff, to me personally, is not necessarily a good sign, but I am blowing in the wind of my metaphor. <go Sixt of the Ninth> In the lunar Roman calendar, the Older Style, so to speak, this could be the day after the first sighting of the new lunar crescent (assuming <Sixt of the Ninth> is Wakean for the sixth day before Nones, itself the ninth day before the full moon): "Nones (Latin nonus or ninth) was originally the day when the moon reached its first quarter phase. When the pontifex initially saw the lunar crescent he noted its width and, using empirical knowledge, calculated the number of days that were expected to elapse between then and the first quarter moon. He then specified that number after he announced the new crescent. If he called out the number six, the day following Calends would be referred to as the sixth day before Nones." http://www.greenheart.com/billh/calends.html "The day of Calends itself began a new month. It was dedicated to Juno." Ibid A great holiday was dedicated to Juno on March 01, the Matronalia. This, in early Rome, was the first day of the year, and occurred at the moon's first increscence, the first sighting of the skinny silver sickle, which fell before the last full moon to precede the spring equinox. You see why Romans separated their months from the lunar cycle in the fifth century B.C. "the druidful day come San Patrisky and . . . the heptahundread annam . . . that . . . will . . . be . . . the timelag . . . to . . . Erin gone brugk" This sifting highlights the mystical mythomatics alluded to in McHugh. What is given to our consideration is a Viconian-like era of divinity in Irish History, the fairly precise era in which the island's political jurisdiction coincided with a distinct ecclesiastical bailiwick we can identify as the Irish Catholic Church, and not the Roman which followed or the Druidic which preceded. The wakean time zone of <heptahundread annam> is a seven hundred year period from the second coming of Patrick in 432 to the politically- motivated rape of the Abbess of Kildare, the earthly vicar of St Brighid, in 1132. The date of record for that rape is New Year's Day. For <the prefacies of Erin gone brugk> I would read the era which follows the destruction of the Irish Church, and its replacement by a tense marriage of Roman and English interests. Facies are symbols of heavy-handedness of Roman rule, and also the fascistic manner by the English Church's members increasingly approached Irish affairs as centuries rolled. The allusion to Erin go brath is a reminder that all this was brought on by recurrent instances Irish duplicity embodied by Dermot MacMurrough, believed to have ordered the rape of the Abbess of Kildare as an opening move in his long career whose foliation was the handing over of Leinster to the Normans some decades later. <annam dammias> may recall the pro-Greek Egyptian king, the Saite, Amasis (or Ahmose II; ruled 570-526 BC), associated with a talismanic garment wonderously woven from the numeric days of the year: "The breastplate was of linen and with many figures woven into it, and decorated with gold and cotton embroidery. The greatest wonder of it is that each single fine thread of the fabric has in itself three hundred and sixty strands, and they all can be seen to be there. One exactly like it was dedicated by Amasis, in Lindus, to Athena." Herodotus. The History. [Trans by David Grene, 1987 (3.47)]. On the other hand, Butt could be full of shit. It happens. St Kevin also is in on whatever it is on page 347. In the following: <eastward genuflecting, in entire ubidience at sextnoon collected gregorian water sevenfold> 605.29-30 there is reference to the varying calendrics of Easter again, separating the western and eastern moities of Christianity, and the Sixth of Nones (the beginning of a the moon's first quarter), and the Gregorian calendar, and the seven-day week. Also we see the theme of water, prevalent in Wakean calendrics, and Wakean everything else, in an especially personal context for the February-born author -- as an Aquarius, Mr Joyce was a Waterbearer, and thus <collected gregorian water>, that is , fell by birthdate into the part of the calendar personified by Aquarius, the Waterbearer (cf 035.28 <waterbury, ours by communionism>). Somehow Joyce links not only Brighid but Patrick to the Aquarian month: <4.32 M.P., old time, to be precise, according to all three doctors waterburies> 290.05-06 but Mr Joyce is undoubtedly referring to himself as <Waterman the Brayned> 104.13 There. So much for February 29 . . . at least until the Sixth of the Ninth, that is, the sixth day of September, when we will discuss the defeat of James the IV in 1513 at Flodden Fields. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: my nose you say is rather big -- kindly I provide the birds a perch From: the recent past Date: 3/1/00 2:37 PM In response to my post on <equinarx>, and calendrics at play in Finnegans Wake, Michael Mastrogiacomo was able to contribute this, and nothing else: <if you look deep enough into a river your sure to come up with mud on the tip of your nose> The implication seems to be that I have tried too hard to plumb the springs and depths of the Wake, and have soiled myself? If anything in my post were designed to hurt someone, I might understand, but my post was written in a spirit of generosity and good will. To paraphrase Carlyle, can't we learn to disagree in our opinions only? If Mr Mastrogiacomo could critique my post's actual content, I probably would learn something. His intent seems more to hit and run. I will attempt nevertheless to address the content of his post, such as it is. 1) What is said of a river is not true. Lakes accumulate deposits of mud on their bottoms. River currents tend to carry away such silt as a suspended load until they can deposit it somewhere that is cool -- still and static. 2) What one actually learns from peering deeply into a river is that rivers contain many levels of beauty and instruction. 3) All in all, one tends to have a cleaner face after looking into the depths of a river. Moving water is cleansing. 4) If indeed I have sullied my nose, it was in the quest of novelties, antiquities, and lost treasures which I thought to share with my friends of a like interest. The proper response is to hand me a tissue, and say, "Look what I also found along the shore, my friend." Ubiquitous blustering blathering thoughtlessness, the whine of diesel engines, doors slamming, gears shifting, children screaming like little fascists, the two-dimensional phatic announcements of our commercial administrators on the flickering set . . . should not the works of Mr Joyce provide some island of refuge from this? Are not his beyond all other works designed to promote profoundly passionate discourse? If not, then my only choice is to pretend I am not saddened, and to respond with a similar unkind one-liner. You can all easily imagine some, but let's not and say we did. No, let's not even do that. Let us rather join hands and invite Mr Mastrogiacomo to lead us into shallower waters. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 391.01-02 1169-1768 From: the recent past Date: 3/2/00 4:57 AM <in or aring or around about the year of buy in disgrace 1132 or 1169 or 1768> 391.01-02 For a year or two, I have been hoping to find linkage between the above years. 1132 and 1169 are easy. 1132 is the beginning of Dermot MacMurrough's nauseous career, highlighted at the start by his ordering of the rape of the Abbess of Kildare. 1169 is the culminating inflorescence of MacMurrough's self-aggrandizing wickedness, his awarding to Robert Fitzstephen of the city of Wexford. Both were acts of betrayal to Ireland by an Irishman, so I have especially looked to see that theme apparent with clarity in some 1768 event, but it took over a year to find it in this simple, but superbly adequate, little sentence: "From 1768 onwards Catholics offered prayers in their churches for the British king," [Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry. A History of Ireland. 1993/98. Chapter 08, The Protestant Ascendancy, p 183]. This would seem to be another thunderclap signaling the changing of ages. The period from 1132 through 1169 saw the ending of the rule of the Irish Church instituted in 432, a period of some 700 years. Mr Joyce seems to use 1768 in similar fashion to mark the ending of the Roman Church's key position in the politics of the Irish. The 1798 Rebellion would be, after all, Protestant led with Catholic supporters on either side, it's most severe setback perhaps being the resolution by the Catholic clergy and students of Maynooth to support the British against the Irish rebels. As the entrance into the arena by MacMurrough in 1132 set events in motion for the Norman Invasion of 1169-71, so did the adoption of Catholic prayer in Irish churches for the Protestant king of England pave the way for the Catholic clerical betrayal of the 1798 Rebellion. The fear by the church of democracy led them to buy into the Anglican establishment which had attempted for years to eradicate them. Buy in disgrace. At least, that is one way to look at it, certainly an oversimplified one, but 1169 to 1768 makes a neat 600 year age for the Viconian in the crowd. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: row and ruction From: the recent past Date: 3/2/00 3:43 PM Following up on Eric's wakish song, re/Finnigan's Wake itself -- audio sample of the song: http://www.seacoastmusic.com/Celtic/TownPants/liverdance.htm version of the words: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aq938/tfw.htm >From Liverdance by Town Pants, who mention Joyce in their notes.
Subject: 550.08-552.30 From: the recent past Date: 3/8/00 3:18 AM In sifting the sizeable pearlagraph within which falls the phrases of inquiry from Florentius Campuquiensis, I noticed several interesting themes and allusions. 1. Lots of stones are in the passage. Benstock (1965) names pp 546-554 as "H.C.E. recounts the conquest of A.L.P.," which strikes me as double entendre -- on the one hand, Anna is being mounted by Humphrey; on the other, Anna is a mountain being ascended. Is this why we come upon all the rocks? a. 550.31 <Pieter Stuyvesant> ("Pieter" fr Lt Petra=rock) b. 551.30 <was I not rosetted> Rosetta Stone c. 551.30 <on two stellas> fr Lt stela>Grk stele: a usu. carved or inscribed stone slab or pillar used for commemorative purposes d. 551.31 <rockcut readers> e. 552.05 <stonefest> f. 552.05 <freely masoned> masons=stoneworkers g. 552.12 <Stoney> h. 552.30 <altarstane> stane is Scot for stone All these seem to tie in with even more numerous references to architecture and other masonic building materials. Just as stones are the bricks from which the Alps are built? 2. Their are also passages of music, and musical references appear in the paragraph. a. 552.02 <vampared> Tampa Red was a prominent blues artist who began recording in 1928. Born Hudson Whittaker, he did vocals and slide guitar. Tampa Red formed a partnership with pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey in 1928. That same year the two musicians recorded "It's Tight Like That," for the Paramount label. The record sold thousands of copies. Don't make the mistake of thinking that authentic blues music by black musicians was in obscurity until discovered by white students in 1964. Bigband blues with female vocalists were on the groundfloor of the recording industry. Black singer Mamie Smith was the first vocalist to record a blues song. Her version of composer Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues," recorded on August 10, 1920, was a gigantic hit, sold some seventy-five thousand copies in the first month of its release, and more than one million in the first year. Bessie Smith's blues helped establish the Capitol label in its infancy. D.H. Lawrence showed the same petty jealousy he displayed by denigrating Joyce when D.H. threw one of his wife's Bessie Smith records against a wall because she listened to it so often. If a European was going to have heard of Tampa Red in the late 1920's or early 1930's, the Joyces were in the proper city: Paris. b. 552.18 <organisation> organ c. 551.27 <open noise> organs sound by opening stops d. 551.32 <sevendialled changing charties> the seven tones of the diatonic scale e. 551.33 <to pass through twelve Threadneedles> the twelve tones of the chromatic scale f. 552.09 <horns, hush!> g. 552.25 <the oragel> fr orgel, German for organ h. 552.26 <tellforth's glory> an allusion (see McHugh) to Telford and Telford, maker's of St Patrick's organ i. 552.28 <zackbutts> sackbut: medieval and Renaiss. trombone j. 552.28 <ollguns> organs, all of the above leading, I believe, to: k. 552.30 <all have mossyhonours!> a patent, and apparently until now, overlooked commendation for the radical young French organ composer, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), glorified here by Mr Joyce in a hail of hails which we assume HCE means as well to apply toward his own organ by which he rose upon the Alp. An interesting question arises, and for once, it is a question which can be answered definitively -- what is needed is to compare the version of our paragraph under consideration with the earlier publication (1930 & 1931) by Mr Joyce, Haveth Childers Everywhere, a booklet previewing pp 532-554. The watershed is this: if the Joyce's were listening to Tampa Red and Olivier Messiaen during the 1930's, they were hip; if they were aware of these musicians within the 1928-1930 period, they were more than hip, the Joyces would have been cutting edge avant-garde. Can anyone here access and report as to whether Haveth Childers Everywhere has the <vampared> and/or <all have mossyhonours> allusion(s)? Both artists, Tampa Red and Messiaen, made their first break-outs in 1928, so it is quite possible they will appear in Joyce's 1930 booklet. Messiaen was certainly a Wakean at heart, preparing for his long career as a composer by studying with equal fervour plain chant, hindu rhythms, birdsong, Greek music, holy scripture, and surrealistic poetry. His public premier was an organ piece he named The Celestial Banquet (1928), and it brought him much attention, as did the mysteries of his improvisations at the Church of the Trinity, where he was organist. Messiaen was quickly believed to be evolving a new and personal language of musical meditation, and he became in turn the primary influence on Pierre Boulez. Joyce seems to prepare an anticipation for the climax of our paragraph by plays on the "olive" in "Olivier." a. 550.18 <Uliv's oils> b. 552.11-12 <Shepperd> whose first name was Oliver There are of course other themes is the paragraph, and an intriguing one is the appearance of many references to the occult, the supernatural, things that go bump in the night, the New Testament, and to food. Is this the Celestial Banquet of Olivier Messiaen from 1928? But enough for now. I have not explained much in the koanic presentation sent in by Florentius, but we do see within the calendrics of <sevendialled changing charties> and <pass through twelve Threadneedles>, that is weeks and months, also reference to the standard scales, the diatonic(s) and the chromatic, and in either one, the process of modulation (changing and passing through) by which Western music evolved first the seven major/minor keys, and then later, the twelve well-tempered keys of Bach. One more presence in the area highlighted by Florentius is the apparent awareness by Mr Joyce that the saying cited by Jesus about a camel passing through the eye of a needle is believed to be an allusion to The Eye of the Needle, a nickname for one of the twelve gates into Jerusalem, a particularly narrow gate. So that gives the rich man a somewhat better shot on heaven, but far from a shoo-in. (". . . to pass through twelve Threadneedles and Newgade and Vicus Veneris to cooinsight?: my camels' walk, kolossa kolossa! no porte sublimer benared my ghates: Oi polled ye many but my fews were chousen . . .") Pardon my closing on a delicate note, but the Vicus Veneris shading to the difficulty of threading one's colossal camel through the sublime port of the nude gate forces me to guess that HCE is both bragging about his organ's pipesize, and perhaps admitting he encountered a bit of difficulty at first entering the rocky road to the mount of Alp. [551.33-36]. [Also cf "It's Tight Like That" by Tampa Red, 1928]. No doubt the amazing efficiencies of handewers and groinscrubbers were enough to teaze out her comely tussy, and douist her more moister wards . . . but really, I feel at the risk of indelicacy in private country matters. [550.19-22]. Pelves ad hombres sumus? Dream on, Mr Earwicker. I mean, really! That's terribly crude. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: 550.08-552.30 From: the recent past Date: 3/9/00 3:43 AM Dear Will, Thanks for the insight about the London streetnames. They were not at all obvious to me. Newgate rings a bell now that you mention it, but Threadneedle is news to me. I have noticed a financial institution motif in the Wake (along with about everything else, of course). "Bank of Ireland" is cited in my Brighid essay. I just read yesterday that the Bank of Ireland bought the old Irish Parliment Bldg back in the 1830's or something, and that there are still murals there from the Irish House of Lords. Best wishes, Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: FW 183.16 "vestas which had served" From: the recent past Date: 3/12/00 5:06 PM Liesbeth wondered: "Vestas are Vestal virgins, and virgins that have served are not virgins anymore?" [RivS]: Hard to say exactly what Joyce had in mind, but in Rome the Vestals retired after 30 years, at which time they were around 37 or 38 years old, and they were then given, for the first time, the right to marry. Some did, but apparently most chose to remain virgins. What I don't know is whether they would have still been subject to penalization if discovered during retirement to be having an unmarital fleshly encounter of the horizontal kind with someone. Does anyone know any 2000+ years gossip? Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: on umbrella street From: the recent past Date: 3/12/00 11:51 PM As Annalisa and others are documenting so well, the word "umbrella" was a favorite of Mr Joyce's. It appears in easily recognizable forms over 50 times in his four primary works, including instances in his first story of Dubliners, "The Sisters": <It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children's bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now, for the shutters were up.> Dubliners also supplies one of Mr Joyce's very best umbrella-isms, a fine example of his early classical period, when he still desired to prove he could write straight normal, but very fine, English: <His magniloquent western name was the moral umbrella upon which he balanced the fine problem of his finances.> [Description of Mr O'Madden Burke from Dubliners -- "A Mother."] In Ulysses, "umbrella" is already subjected to Wakean distortion, where a delightful play is made upon umbrella and its (fairly new at the time of Dubliners) lighthearted popular neologism, "bumbershoot": <Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels> U 9.280 (Gabler p 157) which follows fast upon the unforgettable: <A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.> U 9.975 (p 173) an enigmatic aphorism -- an umbrella is not easily forgotten when it is needed, only before and after. Perhaps the all time Joycean crescendo for the lofty umbrella-isms occurs late in the Wake at 513.01-02: <-- Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.> The presence of the Latin root for "umbrella," meaning shade or shadow, given here in its dative inflection <umbris> (from the nominative "umbra") is enough to tip off a Wakean that Mr Joyce has opened his bumbershoot in the house again -- for initial confirmation, he has added most of the rest of the word "umbrella" in the word <tellurem> (accusative from "tellus," meaning "earth"), that is, the "ella" diminutive which forms "umber-ella," meaning "little shadow." You already may have noticed a secondary and rather fascinating affirmation for reading "umbrella" into <umbris tellurem> -- its preceding sentence ends with a word found in the phrase from Dubliners by which umbrellas took their first bow: <Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now, for the shutters were up.> ["The Sisters"]. This is a good example of just how nearly infinite the warp and woof of the Joycean oeuvre be. There's more of course. We start by asking, "What is the literal meaning and figurative intent of <Securius indicat umbris tellurem>?" It is straight Latin with no distortion of any kind, yet it manages to distort another Latin sentence from Augustine, "Securus iudicat orbis terrarum," given rather freely as "The verdict of the world is secure." The Joycean version can be translated in a number of ways which are of interest, yet literal. By analyzing the context, one can narrow down the field of justifiable ways, and still remain with several variations which may indicate that Mr Joyce began with a English sentence which is as sibilant as the one which precedes, <-- Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter.> That translation basically is: "She serenely shows the shade a soil." As I said, that is an absolutely straight read from the Latin. "She," it is true, can be "he," as in McHugh, or even "it," since the nominative pronoun is only implied in the Latin. Conventional wisdom deems the pages in which the sentence occurs to be an interrogation of Yawn. Shortly before p 513, we read a statement in question form, the latest of many: <The park is gracer than the hole, says she, but shekleton's my fortune?> 512.28-29 Much goes there. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, who has several cameos in the Wake, was an Antarctic explorer. Like Joyce, he was a Leinster Irishman (from County Kildare) and February-born (the 15th). Shackelton died several weeks prior to the publication of Ulysses. He was on expedition. The most famous ordeal of Shackleton was surviving, with most his men, the loss of an expedition ship, which involved ten months of drifting in the ship before it was crushed in an ice pack, then five more months of drifting on ice floes, and a climactic, harrowing 1300 km voyage in a long boat! The book South, published in 1919, tells the story in Shackleton's own words. So if Shackleton's fortune is also to be that of the "she" who says, then we imagine "her" at sea, surviving much duress.( A reference to Shackleton's support boat, the Aurora, may be in the preceding question, at 512.27: <Primus auriforasti me>). Various other references to being at sea under distress are nearby. Christopher Columbus appears on both sides: <Crestofer Carambas!> 512.07 <Crashedafar Corumbas!> 513.16 as well as Vasco da Gama, Sebastian Cabot, the Ancient Mariner, and Noah. Sailors in general are referenced (in Latin): <Nautaey, nautaey, we're nowhere without ye!> 512.21 and all the exclamation points add to the sense of maritime urgence seen in: <Wilt thou the lee?> 512.12, and: <but the main the mightier the stricker the strait> 512.14-15. Anyhoo, "she" is possibly to be struggling at sea like Shackleton. Next are veiled references to Dublin in terms of the Liffey, and evasive responses. The final paragraph on p 512 begins with the long hyphen Joyce uses to indicate dialougue in play. The three line paragraph speaks of bridges and things Egyptian, and seems to ask: 1) are you as perfectly sure as is the solar calendar -- and beyond the <shatter> (shadow [of doubt] = increment of discrepancy [epact]) that falls between the solar calendar and the canicular one (an Egyptian calendar based on Sirius, and thus 12 minutes shorter than the solar one); and, 2) <Nascitur ordo seculi numfit.> [512.36]. "Is it possible that the succession of a generation shall be?" We turn the page, and find the two sentence paragraph originally in question: <Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.> Apparently this is Yawn's response for the previous two questions, are you precise by the solar calendar, and will the ages roll? Yawn's answer is again evasive and saucy: he says he is as sure as can be, by the shades of Sirius and the moon ("selene" is Greek for "moon, moonlight"). Yawn has the nerve to name his source as the calendar which predates the solar one. It is as though he were swearing by the devil to be good! Then not to be outdone by the scholasticism of his interrogator(s), Yawn gives his own Latin -- only instead of saying that "the orbit of the earth (orbis terrarum) judges free from care (the literal translation of Augustine)," Yawn says literally "[He/she/it] serenely shows [to] [a/the] shade [a/the] soil/earth/land/area/goddess [who is the earth]." I choose "she" because "she" continues the sibilancy (in English), and "she" continues the presence of the mysterious "she" of the previous page, the one possibly in Shackleton's boat, and "she" reflects the presence as well of the feminine goddess named Tellus, a seminal pagan meaning for the word we translate "earth," a sense of feminine deity mamafesting as our planetary home which the Church has spent much time and energy trying to expunge. Mr Joyce of course does not yield the point, and even identifies Tellus with Anna Livia herself, as in: <Do tell us all about. As we want to hear allabout. So tellus tellas allabouter> [101.01-02] which soon resurfaces in: <O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.> 196.01-05 [<Tell> being the actual name of the Terra Mater, without the nominative inflection of "-us"]. This also guides me into adapting "soil" to "shore" in the sense of "Land ho!" It is reasonable to translate tellus/tellurem to "shore" if it is "land" seen from sea, as seen by a Shackelton, or a Columbus, Gama, Cabot, or Noah. It enhances the sense of "land" as a protective feminine spirit, a shelter (which is a sense of "shutter" Joyce uses elsewhere in the Wake, in referring to the shutters on the windows of Noah's Ark). <Indicat> as "show" is patent. <Shade> for "umbris" is also a direct translation, and clarifies the meaning more than "shadow," because a shade in classical usage can be a someone, a ghost. Since "shadow" has been established on the previous page as meaning "epact," i.e., the 12 minute discrepancy between the solar year and the Egyptian lunar calendar based on the heliacal rising of the dog-star, Sirius, we have the sense of Yawn speaking directly to the epact which disturbs his interrogator(s) so much, and saying, "Look, there is the land, the shore of shelter, the harbour of the intercalation." Remember, the Easter epact defined the Eastern and Western schism of Christianity, and also the schism of the Irish and Roman Catholic churches prior to the Synod of Whitby. These things may appear as nothing to we moderns, but they are serious and real and we can navigate the Wake by their lights. "Serenely" is a straight read for "securius." So -- for <Securius indicat umbris tellurem>, I read with fair confidence: "She serenely shows the shade a shore," meaning "Mother Earth calmly shows the ghost-like epact (a darkness between the Roman solar calendar and the Egyptian lunar-sidereal calendar) where it may find the shelter of its harbour by an intercalation." The entire paragraph beginning page 513 answers a previous two-layered inquiry: "Can you use the superior solar calendar, rather than the shady lunar one, and tell if a shift in the times will happen?" with what can be paraphrased as, "Sure, with all the confidence that stands behind the authority of the lunar-sidereal calendar!" The implied "umbrella" (remember the umbrella) is an affirmation that the sleepy Yawn is not all that impressed by the sun. An umbrella protects one from the sun, and enables one to walk around in his own little patch of lunar shade. All the better to yawn. The next two paragraphs are in harmony [513.03-06]: < -- Date as? Your time of immersion? We are still in drought of. . . ? < -- Amnis Dominae, Marcus of Corrig. A laughin hunter and Purty Sue.> <Amnis Dominae> is "Flood [of Our] Lady" -- (Domina in the Church is always Mary). "Mar-" is "sea." "Corrig" suggests "corruighim," Irish for "stir, shake." Read: "At what time where you in need of finding the shore? There is a dry-spell currently . . ." [Yawn answers]: "In the Flood of Our Lady, when the sea shook -- 1132." There are, of course and always, other readings -- but, " -- Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. She serenely shows the shade a shore." Works for me. That should be good enough for Mr Joyce. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: re/cigars From: the recent past Date: 3/13/00 2:42 PM Michael Begnal reminded us: "In regard to Joycean umbrellas --it rains a lot in Ireland, and sometimes an umbrella is just a cigar. Just as, sometimes, a vesta is simply a wooden match." Yes, I think we are all aware of this. That is the basic outlook one needs for sanity, however, and it is good to be reminded. Nevertheless, we are reading Finnegans Wake as an ongoing group, and it is important that each listmember feel free to make openly speculative suggestions, and not feel that they will be hit back with vacuous generalities (unless they are as witty as Michael's). Are we saying that the moral umbrella upon which O'Madden Burke rests is NOT his name, as Mr Joyce states, but an actual bumbershoot? Are we to believe that when we read that a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella that we are to understand that brother's are frequently left upside in the entrance hallway? Of course not. Clearly those be a metaphor and a simile, and to think otherwise would be deranged. Yet those are cited from Dubliners and Ulysses, books using language which, compared to the Wake, is relatively straightforward. To say that sometimes a vesta is just a match, when reading the Wake where it is well known and stated clearly by the author that most words will function within a matrix of many overlapping grids and levels, is to be rather metaphoric and far-fetched yourself. Actually, the match was named Vesta to evoke the very thought of the Vestal Virgins who kept the sacred Roman temple fire lit. So you are not stating an accurate metaphor to say a Vesta is only a match. That was not the intent of the match company, and Mr Joyce knew that, and was in appreciation, and simply moved the ball a little farther down the field. Tim Conley requested listmembers to consider making suggestions as to the possible inferences of Mr Joyce within "umbrella," and I found the information from Annalisa quite germane and interesting. If Mr Joyce in fact could be called in the astral and queried for a verification, and should say, "Well no, that is not what I had in mind," it would not surprise me if he added, "That's good, though . . . thank you, I like it." In other words, once he grew out of his earlier phase of sophomoric sophistries, Mr Joyce was a polite person. Before he grew into that maturity, unfortunately, he did on occasion treat his brother rather like a condom. But we can rest assured that not he, no, nor any on this list, ever mistakenly unrolled a prophylactic device onto a cigar. If we did, there is probably little accomplished in advising us not to do so. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: shem was a low worm and he went tra-la-la From: the recent past Date: 3/13/00 6:09 PM Maybe it is a good time to drop back ten yards and kick. There are occasionally some very spirited and productive conversations on jjoyce about the difference between symbols and associations. The choice of words is perhaps in part arbitrary. The point is that there are two radically differing ways to abstract another meaning from the obvious, be it word or action. The dichotomy kinda reached at jjoyce is kinda this: To attach a symbolic meaning to a word is to contract the word's potentiality -- to limit its meaning to less than the obvious. There is then the fear than literary usage of words by as careful an artificer as Mr Joyce will be viewed the way elements of dreams are in chapter seven of Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams. In Dr Freud's model, one which undeniably is valid at least sometimes, an area of the mind which does not use words has to contact the verbal mind through an intermediate mental staging area, "the preconscious." Frequently when constructing dreams or conversation, the preconsciousness decides that the verbal mind will not accept an image from the older mind of the womb, so a substitution is made which attempts to convey the meaning in encoded form. In a dream I was shown the living skeletons of my ancestors in my grandmother's basement. In order to persuade me to walk down the dark staircase, I was told in my dream simply that we were going to see Effie Skelton, an elderly lady I knew of Irish/Cherokee descent. I was not told that I would visit ghost-like skeletons, yet was being subtly prepared for it. Effie Skelton was never seen in the basement once I made the descent. A very elderly woman whose last name was Skelton was used as a symbol for anatomical skeletons. That is what defines a symbol -- the thing perceived is not its own meaning. Effie was not Effie; instead, Effie symbolized the living spirit of dead ancestors I had never known. When I told this dream to my sister, she reminded me that my grandmother's basement (the house had been torn down 25 years before the dream) was accessed by a locked door at the top of its stairway, and that the door was opened by what we called a skeleton key. There was never any reference in my dream to the skeleton key, and the door was already open. There was, nevertheless, an association present, running underneath the application as it were, and enriching the whole texture of the dream by making its colours more subtle, its shadows more palpable. So, too wit: A symbol replaces the obvious, and tends to be exclusive. It looks like a cigar, but it really functions cognitively as a penis. Forget the cigar. It never really was an cigar. It also is not a banana, not a missile, not anything but a penis. An association expands the groundfloor meaning without replacing it. It looks like a cigar because it is a cigar, but through association it can evoke secondary thoughts of bananas, penises, missiles, cigarettes, smoking chimneys, smokey the bear, and white owls, and dragons, and the smell of the mens' room at a bus station, and the single red eye of paranoia glowing in the night, and sigalerts, and people named Sigmund. By reinforcing this a little here, a little there, a writer can make a cigar more of a cigar to the receptive reader. It is still a cigar. Effie Skelton, by way of example, used to enjoy telling me about dreams she had which she felt to be prophetic or revelatory. She felt this was a gift she had inherited from Irish and Indian ancestory. This added special associations in my dream, which itself focused on my own ancestors who had died before I was born. The reference to Effie in my dream also reminded me by feeling, not by word, that I was about to have a special dream of particular significance, not merely a reaction to a draft from an open window (although that would help create the feeling of my grandmother's basement). So these associations made Effie more Effie, and not less -- in contradistinction to Effie's role as a symbol for boney skeletons. So to add to the general marvelosity of the thing, Effie was able to function, by the coincidance of opposites, as both a self-negating symbol for something else AND a self-expanding bundle of cognitive associations, and all in the same dream by someone else! But then, Effie was like that. When Effie was six years old, growing up in the sticks in Oklahoma, she told her mother that she had met a singing worm in their yard. My that child can imagine things, her mother told everyone. Sometimes a singing worm can be a rattlesnake. That's what Effie told me. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 005.26 <dreamydeary> From: the recent past Date: 3/13/00 7:52 PM Now that I have prodded someone as perceptive as Florentius to see the footprints of Brighid in the Wake, I must needs of course turn my coat and say that I see Cropherb the Crunchbraken on page 005 as primarily a goat, the same <hegoak, poursuivant, horrid, horned> chap of line 07, instead of Brighid the friendly cow(maid). However, it is not stretching it too far to state that Brighid is the patrona of the barnyard in general, and is shown as frequently with a lamb as with a cow. And there are Brigidine references on page 005, including calendrics such as Florentius cites. <a'buckets> 005.03 another Brigidine emblem -- she was born in a bucket of milk from whence she appeared as her ma, a milkmaid, carried it over a threshold <Of the first was he to bare> 005.05 St Brighid's day is February the first in most areas <helio, of the second> 005.08 Brighid's day is February the second in many other areas <She has a gift of seek on site and she allcasually ansars helpers, the dreamydeary.> 005.24-26 That is obviously not a reference to a he-goat. McHugh has spotted a camel (dromedary) which I think is good, the whole paragraph is replete with Middle Eastern, Levantine, and Egyptian allusions. The actual description, however, is of a Bona Dea and a dairy queen, and that is Brighid. If we read <dreamydeary> as "creamy dairy," then we have to think cow/Brighid, because goat's milk does not yield a cream, the smaller globules of fat being already integrated into the whole milk as though it had been homogenized. At least where I hale, goat farm's are most always called goat farms, and not dairys. "Dairy" just sounds too content and cooperative for goats. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 005.23-.24 Cropherb (02) From: the recent past Date: 3/18/00 5:43 PM Florentius shared and queried: <There was a town in Vermont (USA) some years ago that used sheep to keep the grass in the graveyard trimmed. (In the news for the dispute over their droppings.) And I recently read of a similar use of sheep (for herb cropping, not necessarily for fertilizing) in another town. Is this--was this--at all common?> RivS: I've used tethered goats and horses for weed abatement, and it works really well. I was living in a remote mountain area, and the Forest Service gave me one week to meet a 100-foot- radius-of-mineral-soil requirement -- basically an eviction notice, since that meant 31,400 square feet of thick brush and grasses reduced to zero by one human. I put a dozen goats and three horses onto the grasses, and I began pruning the scruboaks and chaparral brush into pleasantly sculpted and well-spaced shapes free of deadwood, since you could not be required to remove legitimate and well-maintained ornamental landscaping. The fire prevention officer came back to cite me into oblivion, and amazedly applauded the progress. He gave me an extension, and in several more weeks, the goats, horses, and human had advanced the thing enough to where the ranger overlooked what we hadn't finished, and wrote us a nice clear bill of health. As to "common," I can't say, because where we were, there were not enough of anyone to create that genre. Breathing wasn't common. But I have talked with other people who use Cropherbs and Crunchbrakens to meet fire prevention rules. While several years of living with goats did not, on the whole, endear me to the species, I must say I owe the mischievous maniacs much in this regard: <weedy broeks and the tits of buddy> [199.07-08], that is, turning weed brakes into nice friendly milk -- certainly makes up for some of their dyspeptic personality problems. And so I <drank milksoep from a spoen, weedhearted boy>, happy to taste the rich, healthful and even heatheful conversion of my formerly messy, tick-infested, and overgrown yard (now especially good with chocolate powder). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: OP = Order of Preachers From: the recent past Date: 3/18/00 8:07 PM Charles Cave queried: <What does O.P. stand for?> The Order of Preachers, that is, the Dominicans, a mendicant order founded in the early thirteenth century in the wave of interest in the monastic reformations instituted by Saint Francis. THE BOOK OF CONSTITUTIONS AND ORDINATIONS OF THE ORDER OF PREACHERS. 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTION I. The purpose of the Order was expressed by Pope Honorius III writing to St. Dominic and his brothers in these words: ". . . to propagate the Catholic faith . . . having embraced poverty and . . . given yourselves to . . . preaching . . . throughout the world." II. For the Order of Friars . . . The Dominicans (Order of Preachers) were founded in 1215, in Toulouse, France, by Saint Dominic to preach the truth of the Gospel. Saints Francis and Dominic were contemporaries and friends. Today, there are over 50,000 Dominican friars, sisters, and lay people active in many countries throughout the world. Historically, Dominicans have also been involved in promoting human rights. In the 16th century, friar Francisco de Vitoria and the Salamanca School established the theoretical foundations of the modern problematic of human rights. In the same century, Fray Bartolome de las Casas and Fray Montesinos championed the rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America. from Ambrose Coleman OP: Three years after the Dominican friars had made their way into England, sent there by St Dominic, they were brought over to Ireland by a certain Maurice Fitzgerald, who is also credited with introducing a little later on the first members of the Franciscan and Trinitarian orders. All the old annalists agree in fixing the advent of the Dominicans to Ireland in 1224. The land they acquired for the purpose of erecting their convent is now one of the most central positions in Dublin, the Four Courts; but in the 13th century the city proper did not extend to the northern side of the river Liffey. That portion was merely a suburb outside the City walls, and the only notable buildings it contained were those forming the Church and monastery of the Cistercians, commonly known as St Mary's Abbey, from which Abbey Street at present takes its name. Outside the enclosure wall of the monastery grounds, a few miserable bye-ways and lanes went by the name of a Oxmantown, or Eastman's town, owing, perhaps, to the fact that the inhabitants of that locality were the remnants of those Danish families who before had been the proud possessors of the whole city. -- The above stolen, I mean down-loaded, by Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: on umbrella street From: the recent past Date: 3/18/00 8:44 PM Dear Elaine, As always, you are most welcome. Thanks for your recent kind support. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 185.24 don't good offices have restrooms? From: the recent past Date: 3/22/00 5:36 AM <cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto> 185.24 -- "mixed by the good offices of the divine Orion" is the intent of this phrase; in a fuller context, it may be intended to leave the reader with freedom to distort that to an entendre of "mixed with urine" or "mixed by urination," but it is absolutely straight Latin, and it's literal meaning is as above. There is some mild discrepancy in the ways this phrase gets translated, and a disagreement as to what is actually meant may be at the root. McHugh: <with the "sweetness of Orion"> Sister Grace: <with the pleasantness of the divine Orion> O Hehir: <mixed with the good offices of divine Orion> Of the above three versions, it seems to me that O Hehir comes closest to the mark. McHugh for some reason omits an English equivalent for "divi," meaning "divine" [from "divus," the "divi" form being inflected to agree with the genitive form "Orionis"]. Sister Grace has "divine" in place, and uses the more standard "pleasantness" instead of "sweetness" for "iucunditas." "Iucunditas" [or "jucunditas" -- same thing] is, however, in an inflection which is absent from the Romance languages, and thus prey to "soft" translating, and that is the ablative form: "iucunditate." "From," in the sense of "separation or source" is the primary level of implication by the ablative. But just as "from" can also indicate agency and cause in English, so it can in Latin. ("He died from being poisoned" is a causative usage of "from.") It is tricky, because the "from" need not actually appear in Latin, nor any preposition at all, in cases of cause with the ablative. It appears magically when English arises. That O Hehir has decided to read agency and cause into "iucunditate" is shown by his choice of a secondary translation, "[with the] good offices." The sense still is not clear in his English, however, and perhaps O Hehir felt some hesitation which I think he did not need, and left a certain intentional vagueness. Neither the preposition or definite article is in the Latin text, and must be inserted by inferrence of a perceived inplication by Mr Joyce. Once one accepts that "good offices" is correct for "iucunditate," as it must be, then a clearer preposition would be "by," so that the reader is less likely to miss that it is Orion, or his good offices, doing the mixing. This is not actually in opposition to any of the above renderings, but they do not make it clear. Thus: <cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto> 185.24 -- "mixed by the good offices of the divine Orion." Some say Orion was produced thus: Hyrieus, the king of Hyria in Boeotia, sacrificed a bull when he received Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon. Hyrieus was childless and asked the gods for children. Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon, resourceful and fun-loving deities that they are, urinated on the hide of the sacrificed bull, and buried it in the earth. >From it, Orion was born nine months later, his Terra Mater apparently having a human period of gestation. There is possibly some trace of this legend residual in: <Rurie, Thoath and Cleaver, those three stout sweynhearts, Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden> 254.02-04 If <Rurie, Thoath and Cleaver> are resonant with the three <Ipse dadden> ["self" daddies, fathers without mothers] of Orion, there would be an added echo in that Thoth is the Egyptian name for the Greek Hermes, one of the male trio who spontaneously generated Orion. Orion seems to appear under distorted spelling here and there is the Wake as a remnant of the ricorso period where we all go back to being hairy bestial sorts. He was a giant given to the chase of pretty much whatever moved for whatever he felt like doing to it, various forms of penetration, and in one of various versions of his death, he was terminated after he rashly claimed he was going to prove what he considered prowess by wiping every animal off the face of the earth. So we have an early cautionary tale by some proto-environmentalists which we can place with Hesiod's early, basic, and right-on: "Never urinate in the mouths of rivers which flow to the sea, nor yet in springs; but be careful to avoid this. And do not defecate in them: it is not well to do this." Hesiod's Work & Days 755-760 Shem may have other ideas. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: carlyle recarled regurgitatus From: the recent past Date: 3/29/00 5:55 PM [The following is just the wakean part excerpted from a post to a weblist. If you read "carlyle recarled" there (and much grace for it), then you are dismissed (or may stay to work on other projects)]. A thread of Joyce's view of Carlyle appears to be woven through FW Book III;3 [chptr 15], during the section of this so-called Interrogation of Yawn which Benstock calls "Regarding the Wake." The gist seems to be that Joyce identifies Carlyle with Cromwell, and the violent suppression of the Irish by bigots in general. Cromwell, who was a savage monster to Irish Catholics, was celebrated as an ideal hero by Carlyle, who also despised Catholicism. <We are still in drought of. . . ?> 513.03-04 Here the questioner asks, Are we not still at Drogheda?, invoking the massacre by Cromwell's forces of a town to the north of Dublin, an outrage both retaliatory and cautionary. The retaliation, alas, was for alleged Catholic outrages reported to Cromwell, but since then recognized as wildly exaggerated at best. Drogheda served as a bloodthirsty and inhumane notice to the Irish that Cromwell's version of Christianity was not that of Jesus. The holy war of "to hell or Connacht" began. <A laughin hunter and Purty Sue> 513.05-06 Quickly on the heels of the reference to Drogheda, a reference to the event Joyce uses so often as the beginning of the loss of Ireland to the British Normans is cited, the rape of the Abbess of Kildare by which Ireland's grand betrayer, Dermot MacMurrough began his career in 1132. Joyce is making his standard Viconian association of an event in 1132 producing a resonant replication in 1649. <Schottenly there was a hellfire club> 514.09 <Schottenly> = "by a scot" in Wakean anglo-german. Carlyle was a Scot who believed ardently that Europe should be ruled by Germany. <Carlisle, guardian of the birdsmaids and deputiliser for groom. Pontifical mess. Or (soddenly) Schott, furtivfired by the riots> 514.26-28 Joyce despised that oxymoronic plague, the "holy war." In the passage above, Carlyle is satired as a self-appointed messiah, a deputy of Jesus (the groom) who will guard the bridesmaids (the flock). Carlyle's anti-papism is cited, and reference is made to how the Scot's hellfire rhetoric was refortified in his 70th year when he took it upon himself to defend the actions of E. J. Eyre, who had been removed from his station as Governor of Jamaica due to the brutality he used in suppressing an uprising by black rebels. Carlyle commended Eyre for "saving the West Indies." <The eirest race, the ourest nation, the airest placethat erestationed. He was culping for penance while you were ringing his belle> 514.36; 515.01-02 Here Joyce seems to be using the person of Eyre to draw an analogy between the ancient and ongoing suppression of the Irish by the British, and the more recent British suppression of blacks. A direct blow at Carlyle follows: "While Eyre was paying the price of his sins, you were praising him." <massacreedoed as the holiname rally round took place> 515.25 >From Carlyle's ringing of the bloodstained Eyre's belle, Eyre a saviour by Carlyle's lights, Joyce begins working back to Cromwell and others who use creeds and holy names to rally their troops to commit massacres. <Ah, go on now, Masta Bones, a gig for a gag> 515.32 This and several other references to "minstrel shows" on these several pages keep in mind the self-serving mental shenanigans of white bigots, who loved and replicated black music, but did so in a demeaning way. <angelic warfare> 516.35 Again, the oxymoronic killing for Jesus. <Miles, and so on and so fort, and to take the coocoomb to his grizzlies and who done that foxy freak on his bear's hairs like fire bursting out of the Ump pyre and, half hang me, sirr> 516.12-15 Now the Viconian wheel rolls to 1798. Myles Byrne, a member of the United Irishmen, was one of the leaders (and chroniclers) of the rebel forces during the Wexford Rebellion of 1798 (cf "Battles Recalled" in the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses). Reference is made to two forms of torture used around that time by British officers against perceived Irish rebels: pitchcapping, by which a man's scalp was set on fire; and half-hanging, by which a man was garroted by a hemp-rope until nearly dead, and then (possibly) resuscitated (sometimes to be half-hanged again). <That forte carlysle> 517.22 We are reminded of Thomas Carlyle's "hemp hemp hurray" approach to social ills. <near the Ruins, Drogheda Street, and kicking up the devil's own dust> 518.05-06 About where Irish-British relations remain to this day. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: felix culpa medley (by adam leftus and the painapples) From: the recent past Date: 3/29/00 9:52 PM Here follow some permutations in FW of the phrase "O felix culpa," followed by associated textual flotsam. <O'Phelim's Cutprice> 072.04 <Ophelia's Culpreints> 105.18 <O'Faynix Coalprince> 139.35 <O happy fault!> 202.34 <O felicitous culpability> 263.29 <felixed is who culpas does> 246.31 <phaymix cupplerts?> 331.02-03 <O foolish cuppled!> 433.30 <-- Oh Finlay's coldpalled!> -- Ahday's begatem!> 506.09-10 (cf Easter Eve liturgy below) <Poor Felix Culapert!> 536.08-09 <O ferax cupla!> 606.23 <O, felicious coolpose!> 618.01 Those were obvious, but what about: <the fairest sin>? 011.26 If this be a "felix culpa," it should precede, at least in pagination (perhaps not in circular viconian road time), the <O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum> of page 023. We would like to take the highroad, and skip speculating on the grounds that there are far to many verifiable hits in the Wake, and it is silly to make attenuated guesses -- but that involves ignoring the quasi affirmation on page 011, where: <nickelly nacks and foder allmicheal> 011.23 (three lines ahead of "the fairest sin") are obviously anticipating "nicky" and "mickel" (who appear on page 023 adjacent to "foenix culprit"). So let's get out of here while we can! Below are some extra-joycean references. ------------------------------------------------------------ "O felix culpa! O necessarium peccutum Ade!": "O happy guilt, O necessary sin of adam!" (From the Easter Eve liturgy [cf "peccutum Ade!" with "Ahday's begatem!" 506.10>]) ) ------------------------------------------------------------ --Medieval Hymn: Ne hadde the appil take ben, The appil taken ben, Ne hadde never our lady A bene hevene quene. Blessed be the time That appil take was Therefore we moun singen Deo gracias. (Nicolson 318) ------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur O. Lovejoy presents the problem succinctly: Adam's eating of the forbidden fruit, many theologians had observed, contained in itself all other sins; as the violation by a rational creature of a command imposed by infinite wisdom, and as the frustration of the divine purpose in the creation of the earth, its sinfulness was infinite; and by it the entire race became corrupted and estranged from God. Yet if it had never occurred, the Incarnation and Redemption could never have occurred. (162) He concludes: These considerations, taken together, tended to suggest two larger, and awkward, questions. Was it true in general that the existence of moral evils is, from another and more comprehensive point of view, a good? And if, from such a point of view, the Fall was preponderatingly a good, was it not necessary to assume that its occurrence must after all have been in accordance with God's will? These question, implicit in the notion of the felix culpa, were fairly explicitly raised and considered by Augustine; and his answers to both were, at least sometimes, in the affirmative . . . . (173) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Lovejoy, Arthur O. "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall." ELH4 (Sept. 1937): 161-79. Rpt. In Arthur O. Lovejoy. Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1948. 277-95. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His Poetry. New York: Farrar, 1963. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- There are primitive and classical mysteries whose traces are hidden in the "thanks, snake -- nice felix culpa" train of thought. Was the snake the messiah? Was the snake Jesus? Be careful whom you ask, some fundamentalist types are not ready for this type of speculative qabalist dialectic. The snake was identified by our early ancestors as possessing the powers of rebirth and resurrection, due in part to the gift snakes have for shedding old skin. "You do not have to die," the snake tells Eve (if it was a snake -- it's not that clear). In one theory, the Christian resurrection mythos was influenced by the Orphic mysteries, which had also influenced the Pythagorean school of thought. Orphics were, as are Christians, concerned with sin, guilt, and afterlife, and believed that individuals consisted of a soul which was fallen from grace. The soul was not identical with the body, but left a dead body for heaven or hell. Orphism differed from Christian doctrine in a belief more akin to Buddhism that birth, death, and judgement occurred in cycles for a soul until that soul was purged fully from its sins, and restored to its pristine before-the-fall state. The primal roots of the Orphic legend were derived from the serpentine cultus of Zagreus, the son of a snake-god. Zagreus was killed and reborn in the evolved Greek version of the myth, and became Dionysus, the god of cyclic vegetative regrowth, which also incorporated the cultus of Orpheus, who, like Jesus, was said to have gone to hell and returned. If you do get into trouble discussing this with your local "I love God so much that I have assumed his powers" type, You may happily blame: Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: tripping the light fantastic with a peculiar sort of a gal From: the recent past Date: 3/31/00 3:48 PM Tim Szeliga queried: 'Where does "She's the Daughter of Rosie O'Grady, a regular old-fashioned gal" fit in to this schema? 'Bugs Bunny sings this while skipping past the brownstones of New York . . . .' RivS: Somewhere between Frivolous Sal and sweet Mamie O'Rourke? Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling (cf "From the sallies to . . . Mamie, My Mo Mum!" 491.23-29?)
Subject: 549.08 <trembling sod> From: the recent past Date: 4/2/00 6:36 PM <what was trembling sod quaked no more> 549.08 cf. <Fearfully true is the Four Masters’ word that MacMurrough’s treacherous act "made of Ireland a trembling sod". http://www.ireland.org/irl_hist/hist19.htm A History of the Irish Race Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 11.29 thru 12.25; 316.16 thru 318.18; 372.19 thru 373.11 From: the recent past Date: 4/5/00 6:08 PM 11.29 thru 12.25; 316.16 thru 318.18; 372.19 thru 373.11 Here lies an interesting thread, mayhap? <How bootifull and how truetowife of her> 011.29 [Refers to Mina Loy, who continued for half a century to mourn the enigmatic loss at sea of her husband, Fabian Avenarius Lloyd]. <she'll loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat> 012.09-10 [The second couplet of a quatrain -- Lloyd sailed out of sight from Mina in Mexico in 1918 -- He was taking a small barque he had rebuilt on its maiden test run, and apparently it sank and took Lloyd to the bottom -- Mina, who had remained ashore, literally and littorally searched the shore for days.] <even if Humpty shell fall> 012.12 [The theme of Lloyd's loss is linked to the Wakean megatheme of the fall, and its oval emblem.] <there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim> 012.14-15 [Breakers = waves hitting the shore; while in Mexico, the near-destitute couple lived largely on eggs, especially Mina]. <when you think you ketch sight> 012.16 [ketch = small sail boat]. <Make strake for minnas!> 012.25 [Two Minas are heralded in this paragraph: Mina Loy and Mina Bergson (Moina Mathers)]. <he had gone dump in the doomering this tide where the peixies would pickle him down to the button of his seat> 316.16-18 ["Lloyd had gone down in the tide to the bottom of the sea" -- combined with Wagneria and Joyceanish]. <with the help of Divy and Jorum's locquor> 316.19 [Davy Jone's locker -- deep freezer for the big chill]. <for the Big Water. He made the sign of the hammer> 316.25-26 [Lloyd was an advocate of the politics of Trotsky]. <you can sink me> 317.03 [Continues the theme of loss at sea]. <Ekspedient, sayd he, sonnur mine, Shackleton> 317.15 [Cf the story of Ernest Shakleton, the polar navigator and explorer, who lost his ship in the Antarctic, and was at sea for many weeks with his men is a long boat]. <Humpsea dumpsea> 317.24 [Combines the fall of the nursery rhyme henfruit, the ovarian cycle, the theme of loss at sea, and the breaking of the amniotic sac, etc, a la wake]. <do you kend yon peak with its coast so green?> 317.35-36 [An allusion through a distorted quotation to the ballad of "The Demon Lover" -- a young wife is seduced to sea by a devil disguised as a lover from her girlhood -- once at sea, they spy a beautiful island which the demon says they never shall reach, for it is heaven, and they are bound for hell -- at the end of the song, they are spun about and drug to the bottom of the sea]. <Take thee live will save thee wive?> 318.03-04 [Lloyd was testing his boat with the intent of then sailing from Mexico to Chile -- It was a plan of desperation to escape being drafted as the US entered The Great War -- Mina Loy, just recently become Mina Lloyd, and now carrying their child, was to travel on a much safer liner to Chile, where they would reunite]. <till deltas twoport> 318.13 [The fatal attempt to remeet after traveling separately between two ports, one in Mexico and one in Chile, is artistically and poignantly blended by Mr Joyce with the marriage vow, "till death do us part"]. <Listeneath to me, veils of Mina!> 318.17-18 [An affirmative reference to the widowhood of Mina Loy Lloyd]. <(chalkem up, hemptyempty!) till they caught the wind abroad (alley loafers passinggeering!)> 372.19-20 [The eggman reintroduces the ill winds of the Mexican Pacific Coast for the star-crossed couple -- the name of the port from which Lloyd sailed to his oblivion is named Bahia Ventosa, meaning "Windy Bay" -- the colony of foreign draft evaders were called "slackers" by the locals, who associated their stance with malingering rather that political resistance]. <all the boots in the stretes> 372.21 ["boats in the straights" suggests boats in troubled waters, and also recalls by resonance the <Make strake for minnas!> on page twelve]. <Ah hoy!> 372.22 [The classic English seacall means "Oh, today" in Spanish]. <Last ye, lundsmin, hasty> 372.23 [Lloyd's boat renovation was done in haste -- he was not strictly a landsman, but his professional sea experience was not as a sailor, strictly speaking, but as a stoker]. <And roll in clover on his clay By wather parted from the say> 372.26-27 [The second couplet of a quatrain, recalls the quatrain of page 12 -- Lloyd's clay, that is, his grave, is parted from the sea by the water, as were the graves of Pharaoh's army]. <Are now met by Brownaboy> 372.29 [Mina and Fabian had fled to Mexico on the advice of their friend, Bob Brown -- it was Brown and his wife, Rose, who escorted them from Mexico City to Veracruz and thence to Salina Cruz on the Pacific, all in the attempt to escape military induction -- Brown devised the plan for all of them to proceed to Chile (and from there to Argentina, by separate means to avoid attention -- it was the Browns who convinced Mina of the need to continue her voyage south in spite of her husband's disappearance and apparent loss at sea, something never fully accepted by Mina -- the Browns went to Chile from Mexico by train, an epic accomplishment, and met Mina in Valparaiso -- See Bob Brown. You Gotta Live. London: 1932]. <at their wetsend in the mailing waters, trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek!> 372.34-35 [The configuration of <trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek!> appears four times in the passage under consideration, enhancing the singsong affect -- the game of Hide and Seek aptly describes the southern journey into the night of Lloyd, for not only was he attempting to hide from conscription, but he also stated that he was going to reveal a new side to himself in his poetry -- Lloyd was already an established poet of the Dada movement under the name Arthur Cravan]. <And the last with the sailalloyd donggie> 373.04 [Mina preferred the usage of her husband's real name, Lloyd -- his last boat was somewhat bigger than a dinghy, but little good it did]. <baffling with the walters of, hoompsydoompsy walters of. High! Sink! High! Sink! Highohigh! Sinkasink! Waves.> 373.06-08 [A well-evoked and poetic approach to a doomed sailor's final moments, and the dull scene of emptiness which follows the final gulp -- "What did the deep sea say? . . . It rolled on its weary way." -- as presaged at 372.34-35, the final passage of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section is evoked, with its misty images of death, water, metamorphosis, and the endless eve: <the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!> (216.04-05)]. <To speed the bogre's barque away O'er wather parted from the say.> 373.10-11 [Fabian Lloyd was not only a poet, nightclub entertainer, and seaman, but he was as well a professional boxer of some accomplishment, so <bogre's barque> may have the intent of "boxer's boat" -- "say" is the Irish pronunciation of "sea," as "wather" is for "water" -- Lloyd had an Irish connection, to sweeten the strong draw of this romantic and truly tragic story for Joyce (drawn from the life of his friend and fellow Parisian expatriate writer, Mina Loy), for Fabian Lloyd, aka Arthur Cravan, was the nephew of Oscar Wild]. For more on this terrible and magnificent story, I highly recommend "Becoming Modern: the Life of Mina Loy," by Carolyn Burke, 1996. Burke ends her biography with several great quotes from Mina Loy, including: "Being alive is a queer coincidence," which of course will remind Wakeans of the centrality to life of the coincidence of contrarieties which Joyce derived from the "coincidentia oppositorum" of Nicholas of Cusa ("as Micholas de Cusack calls them . . . the coincidance of their contraries" 049.34-36"); and Mina's almost too perfectly summed statement on the nature of intellectual understanding as "an eternal stairway on which each step as you ascend from it ceases to be" which has to remind us of "she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one . . . She climbed over the bannistars" (159.07-08). Mina lived into her eighties, and on several occasions I accompanied my parents when they visited her at her upper storey dwelling in the Colorado Rockies. Her front door was accessed by a steep wooden stairway hung on the outside of an old Victorian-style Silver Rush building, and if you were lucky, and waited below as a restless growing boy might, you could see Mina "looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. How she was brightened . . ." (157.09-10). My mother listened last night on the telephone as I told her the story of Fabian Lloyd's death form "Becoming Modern." She replied, "So that is how he died . . . she never would say, but she loved to talk about the way they spent their last days peeling oranges for each other in Mexico." Mina Loy's final step evaporated from our view on September the 25th of 1966. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: 11.29 thru 12.25; 316.16 thru 318.18; 372.19 thru 373.11 From: the recent past Date: 4/7/00 6:21 PM Thanks, Florentius, for the Fabian Lloyd hyperlink, and the right-on extensions of Lloyd's persona into the Wake at large, a la Kenner etc. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: still harping on my dada? From: the recent past Date: 4/8/00 5:16 PM <you're too dada for me to dance> 265.17 Tim Szeliga mentioned: ". . . never knew that Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roche' were the trio immortalized in the film Jules and Jim." [RivS]: I am not sure if this has become a given, or not -- for awhile it was unresolved when feet were put to the fire. One day when I had some business to do with Miss Wood, I phrased the question to her somewhat more delicately than "feet to fire," and she answered in kind, plus . . . . something to the effect that it seemed unlikely and rather inconsequential, but she phrased it better . . . she definitely left it open, but with a slight and quasi twist toward the denial side of the equation -- the precisely vaguely proper response from an artistic lady who had the relaxed aura of "she don't look back," but in reality had spent the morning hammering away on another volume of her memoirs. It seems to be in the process of becoming more and more accepted as the standard mythopoetic reality, at any rate, that Beatrice Wood was Melina's role's model for the story told in that film ('Jules et Jim'). A cataloguing of Marcel Duchamp's bedmates was recorded by Mina Loy for the wee hours of the night of 1917 May 25/26. This menage a beaucoup transpired at the master iconoclast's New York apartment, following a night of madcap hijinx at the Blindman's Ball (the Walpurgisnacht of New York Dadaism). Simultaneously sleeping (we assume and hope) in one pull-out bed were: 1) Marcel Duchamp; 2) Mina Loy; 3) Beatrice Wood; 4) Aileen Dresser (actress); and, 5) Charles Demuth (artist). <Up, girls, and at him!> 561.33 A tempting thread suggestive of this morning melding occurs late in the Wake: <Promiscuous Omebound> 560.01 [We do not know if any indoor body surfing actually took place at Duchamp's after the Blindman's Ball, but that is hardly the point.] <What scenic artist! It is ideal residence for realtar> 561.13 [Marcel Duchamp was indeed at that moment in an absurd role as the High Priest of Anarchistic Art. On the next page is seemingly a fairly overt reference to Dada]. <She is dadad's lottiest daughterpearl and brooder's cissiest auntybride.> 561.15-16 ["She is Dada's loftiest pearl-daughter, and a brother's sisterest anti-bride" does not seem too questionable of a subtext. If there is a specific who (or two) in the author's mind, is there a clue? A line several back gives reason at least to place Beatrice Wood on the table for discussion]. <Whom in the wood are they for?> 561.02-03 [To this we may add that during her 105 years on earth, Beatrice Wood never married, and was to some extent then an "anti-bride." The intent here, however, may be primarily another of the countless Wakean invocations of Bride, the ancient Irish goddess who became St Brighid in Patrician times, and in Wakean time, Biddy the Hen. On the next page is a usage of Brighid, her art school, and her abbey's fire attendant nun's in the Wakean mode of those colorful calendar girls, The Floras]. <She will blow ever so much more promisefuller, blee me, than all the other common marygales that romp round brigidschool> 562.11-13 [This seems to include an extension of a shallow riffle of lesbian wordplay flowing here and there on p 561, in its own turn merged with freespirited feminists as tomboys, whatever their sexual preferences might be]: <The coeds, boytom thwackers and timbuy teaser.> 561.04 [with little needed to push that parochial school humor in Catholic populations -- nuns and schoolgirls are both subject both to the tasteless jokes and the thing itself (cf Edna O'brien's memoirs of growing up in a Catholic girls' school). If there are references to Beatrice Wood and the giant bed and guest-towel opportunities of New York Dada in 1917], <They are numerable. Guest them. Major bed> 561.07 then the author has mixed it into a broader stream of promiscrewity in which Lesbianism is an element among others, including autoeroticism: <does she do fleurty winkies with herself> 561.34-35 but several specific literary lesbians are alluded to: <Silvoo plush> 561.30 [the lady who always said "yes" to Joyce's "please," Sylvia Beach]; <Pussy is never alone > [561.35] & <Has your pussy a pessname?> [561.10] [seeming to cite the drooly-wooly gossipy account by Hemingway of his allegedly catching Toklas and Stein in flagrante vocali; and], <O Charis! O Charissima!> 561.22 [is similar to a specific one of the fragments of Sappho's poetry which are found preserved in other contexts by other antique authors as samples of a meter, etc]. This riffling has carried us somewhat past the issue of whether p 561's <Whom in the wood> could be meant as an evocation of Beatrice Wood. Several lines away at 561.12 is an encouraging word, however: <Her bare name will tellt it, a monitress.> Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 561.12 fragment of sappho? From: the recent past Date: 4/9/00 1:45 AM The fragment ascribed to Sappho which I had in mind is [see Harvard 1982, ed D A Campbell #108]: <O Kale! O Chariessa!> cf: <O Charis! O Charissima!> 561.12 The meaning of the fragment is something to the effect "Oh beauty! Oh grace!" I think maybe it is in the vocative? Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: 561.02-03 <Whom in the wood are they for?> From: the recent past Date: 4/9/00 5:43 PM <Whom in the wood are they for?> 561.02-03 On the table yesterday was whether the answer could be Beatrice Wood, the Dada Mama, with the drift seeming to be "possibly." After continued webfooting, I have come to think that Thelma Wood is more likely to be a primary resonance (which thanks to Wakean, does not necessarily rule out Beatrice's presence). Elements under consideration included a variety of references clustered on or near p 561 which seemed to evoke dada, eroticism, and lesbian literati. Thelma Wood was an important figure among the so-called lost generation, see Paris, see 1920's, and specifically among its prominent and influential group of lesbians. At this point, it is handy to drop back ten yards and kick. Here are two online lists -- the first is a list of Dadaists; next, the lost generation. It is worth noting that Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan are almost the only figures to cross over from the Dada list into the lost generators: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/dadaists.html http://www.onecity.com/paris/intro.htm Having established Thelma as in with the out-crowd, we next need to link her name, as it inextricably became, with that of Djuna Barnes. Here be an image, a photograph of Thelma Wood, the source for the central character in Djuna Barne's _Nightwood_, taken in Paris in the 1920's: http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/barnes/introbytslft.html Djuna Barnes was the one American woman writer whom Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and other male Modernists on the Left Bank held in high literary regard. Her scandalous Ladies Almanac, published privately in Paris in 1928, was a clever satire of Natalie Barney's literary salon, in which virtually all of the women of the left bank community appear in coded form. Legendary for her beauty and caustic wit, Barnes was in some ways a victim of the artistic and sexual freedom supposedly offered by Paris in this era. She retreated into drugs, alcoholism, and a tortured ten-year romance with sculptor Thelma Wood. "I was never a lesbian--I only loved Thelma Wood." Djuna Barnes. OK. Paris. Literature. Erotic scandal. Djuna interviewed Joyce for Vanity Fair in January 1922. We have some rights of expectation in regard to these left-bank ladies appearing somewhere through the mist in the Wake. <never lay bare your breast secret (dickette's place!) to joy a Jonas in the Dolphin's Barncar> 434.26-27 This is one possibility, attenuated yes, but the Wake's allusions throughout grade from overt to fairy dustian. Dolphin's Barncar does not sound as Djuna Barnes, but it yields a little more resonance that merely the sharing of initials. <joy a Jonas> actually is closer to replicating the "Dj" sound in "Djuna." As for <never lay bare your breast secret (dickette's place!)> . . . well, hmnnn . . there is a case, drunken yes, that there are rather tasteless allusions to lesbianism, a "breast secret" and "dickette" evoking the cliched prejudice, more prevalent perhaps then than now, that lesbians attempt to reject their womanhood and try to ape men. The thought that Joyce would call a clitoris a "dickette" is, however, absurd -- shame on you! <I simply never talk about athel darling; she's but nice for enticing my friends and she loves your style considering she breaksin me shoes for me when I've arch trouble and she would kiss my white arms for me so gratefully but apart from that she's terribly nice really, my sister> 459.13-18 Is "athel" intending "a Thelma?" Iffy, but the passage is definitely about erotic sisterly love. Circus. Corridor. Shifting scene. 560.03-04 The good old <commodius vicus of recirculation> strikes once more, and we are back at the page-cluster where we started our quest among the Woods. Notable this time, with Thelma in the forefront rather than Beatrice, is that a circus provides the dark and shifting scenic imagery for Djuna Barnes's novel about Thelma Wood, the eponymous _Nightwood_. <knightlamp with her, billy's largelimbs prodgering after to queen's lead> 559.36-560.01 <His move.> 560.02 <Room to sink: stairs to sink behind room. Two pieces. Haying after queue. Replay.> 560.05-06 <The castle arkwright put in a chequered staircase certainly. It has only one square step, to be steady, yet notwith stumbling are they stalemating> 560.09-11 Harping on my Dada again, perhaps we should note that Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting (1923), and devoted himself largely to the game of chess. His most famous work, of course, is Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2. <Shop! Please shop! Shop ado please! O ado please shop!> 560.16-17 The above is in my opinion part of a reappearing Wakean motif which derives from the closing dialogue of "Hills Like White Elephants" by lost gen megastar Hemingway. <her dearest friendeen> 561.17 The German-Jewish photographer Gisele Freund? A student activist in Nazi Germany, she escaped Frankfurt just before the police came to arrest her. In Paris, she resumed her Ph.D. studies at the Sorbonne and, browsing in La Maison des Amis des Livre, met Adrienne Monnier who was to become her mentor and life-long friend. For a photo by Freund of Mr Joyce at home, booming some crashing chords on the Joyce's home piano: http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/joyce/JJ_piano.html <Allaliefest, she who pities very pebbles> 562.07 In 1930, [Djuna Barnes] interviewed Alla Nazimova, the great Russian stage actress most famous for her performances of Ibsen's A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler. Later, she became a film actress in such popular films as Camille and Salomé and performed as a conventional stage vampire. [Thank Alla-Leafiest! We certainly would not wish to have the name of Ibsen mixed with performances of UNconventional vampires]. <as two maggots> 562.21 The name of the quintessential lost generation cafe. The French, actually, is "Les Deux Magots" -- this is the site where Joyce was interviewed by Djuna Barnes (with Mina Loy drawing his portrait at the same time) in anticipation of the publication of Ulysses in 1922 -- "Les Deux Magots" is a Hemingway shrine as well -- photo: http://www.paris.org/Cafes/magots.html <he will find it yet. What Gipsy Devereux vowed> 563.20 "The Gypsy" was the bar where Joyce, Budgen, and McAlmon went to get tanked with Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy after Ulysses came out (Feb/Mar '22). <Any pretty dears are to be caught inside but it is a bad pities of the plain.> 564.27-28 The Cities of the Plain were destroyed in the Old Testament because they featured too many bars which welcomed people with alternate life styles. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: query: 18's From: the recent past Date: 4/11/00 3:35 PM <May the 18 be perhaps the number of letters in the Irish alphabet? Bob> Bob has hit the nail on its shiny head, IMHO. The Odyssey and the Iliad were each divided into 24 chapters by post-Homeric scribes, a tribute perhaps to their newly developed 24-character alphabet. One scholar has it that, in fact, the Greek alphabet was designed, probably by a Euboeian scholar, specifically for the purpose of recording Homer's epic in written form. Joyce, in following an ancient Irish tradition of adapting Homeric themes to an Irish setting and mythos, reduced the 24 Homeric chapter divisions to fit the 18 letter Irish alphabet. He used, as far as can be told, the version of the Irish alphabet given by Father Patrick Dineen, who also gets a cameo appearance offstage in Ulysses (Scylla and Charybdis). Every so often I send a list the alphabet entry from the version of Dineen's dictionary which Joyce was known to own. This is useful, because many Irish alphabets are given with only seventeen letters, but the Dineen version has eighteen since it features the "rough breathing" as a full-fledged character. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: Re: query: 18's From: the recent past Date: 4/11/00 4:59 PM Tim -- nice work! Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: eighteen year olds rule! From: the recent past Date: 4/11/00 5:11 PM Eric, In terms of Issy, eighteen may intend lunar connotations. Issy, as the 29th Flora at St Bride's Finishing Establishment, is already identified with cycles of the moon. The Floras, in fact, are called "a month's bunch of pretty maidens" in reference to the lunar months. The Floras also frequently appear in a group of seven, representing the Roy G Biv spectrum of colors, but also the seven day subdivision of the 28 day lunar month into quarters of one week each. There are three major lunar cycles of roughly eighteen years. As they roll by, they increase in the precision of their replication. In other words, thirty-six years brings certain alignments back even better, and seventy-two years is mo' bettah yet. Seventy-two, being four times eighteen, was especially valued by the ancients. The three lunar cycles of approximately eighteen years are: 1) the rotation of the lunar nodes marking moments of orbit where the moon, sun, and earth may be on the same plane during oppositions, and thus create lunar and/or solar eclipses; 2) the cycle by which the solstices find the moon and/or sun at their farthest possible points north in terms of local horizons; 3) the other one -- I can't focus my brain on it right now (sometimes I can, honest) -- maybe it is the cycles of apses by which the moon makes its closest and furthest approaches to the earth; but that is pretty esoteric in terms of naked-eye astronomy -- maybe it is the approach to a lunisolar cyclical alignment, eg, the same lunar phase will seem to manifest at the same time of the solar year (if it was full moon at winter solstice 1999, it will be full moon at the winter solstice in 2017 -- but it is more apparent than precise, no real lunisolar cycle of realignment has ever been found). Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: lunar cycles From: the recent past Date: 4/12/00 3:33 AM Everyone will be greatly relieved to know that Eric and I were both correct (ie, I was partly wrong) -- the Saros lunar cycle is roughly 18 years; the Metonic is roughly 19 years. Here is some webfooting: SAROS Cycle Eclipse Cycle 18 Year + 10.32 or 11.32 days. SAROS Cycle of Eclipses is perhaps the most familiar periodic cycle in astronomy. Simply stated, the SAROS Cycle is the result of a nearly perfect common integral number of synodic, nodical and anomalistic months. Eclipses (either Lunar or Solar) occur when the line of nodes points towards Earth. This periodicity is called the Saros cycle. This cycle was almost certainly known to the ancient Babylonians and was possibly used by Thales around 585 BC. Eclipses of the Sun and Moon can only occur at New or Full Moon respectively and these have to occur close to the nodes of the Moon's orbit. The nodes are the places in the orbit where the plane of the Moon's orbit and the ecliptic cross. The time between successive passages by the Moon through one of its nodes is called the Draconic month and equals 27.212220 days. The time between successive New or Full Moons is called the Synodic month and equals 29.530589 days. If we take 223 synodic months (6,585.321 days) and compare them with 242 draconic months (6,585.357 days) we can see that they are almost the same. This period is the Saros and it amounts to 18 years, 10 and a third days. This means that eclipses can be expected in families whose members are separated by the length of the Saros. Thus knowing the date of one eclipse allows the prediction of others. It also happens that the Saros is also nearly equal to 239 anomalistic months (the time between successive closest approaches of the Moon to the Earth) and so the length of the eclipses in each cycle will be approximately the same. Moon's Nutation Cycle 18.61 Years Time it takes the moon's nodes to complete one revolution (retrograde) along the ecliptic plane (opposite to the movement of the perigee). Moon's Metonic Cycle 19 Years + 0 to 2 days The Metonic Cycle is a period of about 6939.6 days, the approximate length of both 235 lunations and 19 solar years. Moon phases repeat on about the same ordinal day of each 19-year period. The Greek astronomer Meton, in the fifth century BC, discovered that the dates of the phases of the Moon repeated exactly after a period of 19 years. Mathematically, it uses the fact that 19 tropical years contain 6,939.60 days while 235 synodic months contain 6,939.69 days. Synodic month: The interval between two successive New Moons. Draconic month: The interval between two successive passages of the Moon through the same node of its orbit. Anomalistic month: The time between successive perigee passages of the Moon. Eclipse year: The period between two successive passages of the Sun through the same node of the Moon's orbit: 346.620 days. There are very close to 19 eclipse years in one Saros. Stolen, er, down-loaded from the 'Net by Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: correction re: still harping on my dada? From: the recent past Date: 4/14/00 8:20 PM correction re: <still harping on my dada?>, a post of this April 08 -- In discussing Beatrice Wood as part of the Mina Loy thread, I wrote: < Melina's role's model for the story told in that film ('Jules et Jim')> intending Melina Mercouri. I noted in the video store last night what most of you already know: The female lead in Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" is really Jeanne Moreau. Melina could have handled it, but Jeanne Moreau is of course tres bonnie and accurate. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling
Subject: dada mamas From: the recent past Date: 4/17/00 9:51 PM Steve Diedrich posted: Riverend, your ability to connect Wood as Kathe (or Catherine) in the movie Jules and Jim to FW is ingenious, but . . . Nothing that I have seen connects Jules and Jim with either Wood or Duchamp . . . . [RivS]: For some reason which I do not know, this legend, for such I suppose it to be, has taken root, and appears here and there as breathless fact. It rarely seems to appear as possible conjecture, when it does arise, but I was trying to indicate that it probably is folkloric, but has a certain interesting life of its own anyway. Looking at my post carefully with that in mind, it said (in excerpts): <I am not sure if this has become a given, or not --> (ie, it definitely has not become a given that Beatrice Wood inspired the female lead in Jules et Jim] . . . <One day when I had some business to do with Miss Wood, I phrased the question to her somewhat more delicately than "feet to fire," and she answered in kind, plus . . . . something to the effect that it seemed unlikely and rather inconsequential> [and, charming as her approach was, I would be inclined to take it at face value] . . . <It seems to be in the process of becoming more and more accepted as the standard mythopoetic reality> . . . . [ie, "mythopoetic" = having to do with creation of a myth] But, as with Beatrice herself, I suppose I like to leave it a bit open so as to be among the mythopoeic myself. Added to the confusion is that the Beatrice Wood thread became entwined with the Thelma Wood thread, both of which were subthreads of a Mina Loy thread; and the whole thing was carried on two different lists, with neither list having all the posts -- and some posts were done offlist! If anyone asks, I can forward all my Mina Loy posts (but I am not always here, so be patient). Anyhoo, thanks for the more complete cinema dada data, Steve, it helps fill out what has been a rewarding sideline to things Joycean re/the twenties expatriate crowd in Paris. Yours, in her grace's watch, the Riverend Sterling