Retracing Recent Ramifications of Thought, Part 1 (VALIS, Duality and Finnegans Wake)

"Each of us has within us a secretly potent pantheon. The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, deluding images up into the mind–whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unexpected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life–that is the lure, the promise and the terror, of these disturbing night visitations from the mythological realm that we carry within.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

On Completing Finnegans Wake

"Booms of bombs and heavy rethudders"

- Finnegans Wake, p. 510

Welp, I've finished my first full reading of Finnegans Wake.

Took almost exactly six months, reading each chapter in a non-chronological order (detailed here) along with a few guides and some other relevant books. The experience was a rewarding and enlightening one, certainly. I had an awe and strong curiosity for the book before actually reading it and now those feelings have only deepened.

It's going to take a while for me to assimilate all of my observations and notes into a full piece about the experience and I will in fact be starting up a separate blog to be entirely devoted to Finnegans Wake stuff. But for now I'd just like to share a few reflections.

On the Recurrence of 423 and 432

Today is April 23rd and I've had many 4/23 thoughts rolling through my head all day so I'd like to unravel them here for all to see.

I awoke this morning around 4 AM in Daytona Beach, Florida. Had to catch an early flight to come back home to Austin after spending a weekend visiting with my family, especially my newborn niece and 2-year-old nephew.

My girlfriend (whose birthday is June 23rd) picked me up at the airport but her phone had fallen and broke yesterday so that added some complications to things. Later in the afternoon she acquired a new phone and called me at exactly 4:23 PM.

Today is Shakespeare's birthday, he was born on April 23, 1564. He died on April 23, 1616.

In his book Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson examines a vast net of seemingly never-ending synchronicities in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, including those having to do with the number 23. Shakespeare is involved in it all and he gets tied in with legendary Irish king Brian Boru who died at the Battle of Clontarf which took place on April 23, 1014.

In the Wake, there are 5 main characters: 2 females (mother and daughter) and 3 males (father and twin sons). One of the main recurring themes of the book is a foggily remembered incident that occurred in Phoenix Park involving 2 girls and 3 soldiers, resembling Dublin's Coat of Arms which features 2 girls and 3 castles. Wilson notes that Ireland "is a living synchronicity, having 4 provinces divided into 32 counties and also having been converted to Christianity by St. Patrick in 432 A.D." (We'll talk more about that other funny number, 432, in a minute...)

The Easter Rising, an organized Irish uprising against the ruling British, was originally scheduled for Easter Sunday April 23, 1916 but because ammunition arrived late it began on Monday April 24th. The principle culprit behind the Easter Rising, namely Padraic Pearse, is frequently mentioned throughout the Wake and Joyce even knew Pearse personally because he took a Gaelic class from him once.

On my two flights and all throughout this past weekend I've been reading both Finnegans Wake and Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger Volume II.  Volume I of Cosmic Trigger (arguably RAW's best book and one which I hope to write a review for soon) prominently features the number 23 and the synchronicities that accompany it.

Wilson explains that he first heard of the 23 enigma from William S. Burroughs who told him a story about a boat captain named Captain Clark who ran a ferry between Tangiers and Spain. Clark told Burroughs one day that he'd been running the ferry for 23 years without any accidents. Wilson solemnly notes, "That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard."

That evening Burroughs put on the radio and the first thing he heard was a news report about a plane crash that occurred on its way to Miami from New York, the pilot was also Captain Clark and the flight was number 23.

This led Wilson to start keeping track of coincidences involving 23 that he encountered and he realized that (among other things) Euclid's Geometry opens with 23 axioms, 23 in telegrapher's code means "bust" or "break the line" while the 23rd hexagram of the I Ching is "Breaking Apart," and he continues:

I was even thrilled by noting that in conception Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fertilized egg, while within the DNA coil of genetic metaprogramming instructions there are unexplained bonding irregularities every 23rd angstrom ... 23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal.

The most important part of the book's story occurs on July 23, 1973 when Wilson thought he had begun to receive contact from the Sirius star system. The "Dog Days of summer" are associated with the star Sirius (known as the Dog Star because it's the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major) and begin on July 23rd each year. (Scanning the Dog Days page on Wikipedia I came across a quote from John Webster's play that was first performed in the year 1623.)

It's worth noting that I completed Cosmic Trigger Volume I back on January 23rd of this year.

*   *   *

"Where the lisieuse are we and what's the first sing to be sung?"
- Finnegans Wake, p. 432

Now, some tidbits on the number 432.

As already mentioned, I'm in the middle of reading Robert Anton Wilson's very engaging autobiographical book, Cosmic Trigger Volume II. I've just finished the chapter entitled "The Square Root of Minus One & Other Mysteries" in which the author briefly delves into the basics of mathematics and Einstein's relativity to highlight the awe-inspiring inexplicable fact that mathematics (a human invention) is always absolute and verifiable in the world we live in. It almost seems to be of divine origin.

With that in mind, we now take a look at Joseph Campbell's mathematical mind games as presented in two of his books, Occidental Mythology and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space.

Campbell notes that a Chaldean priest in Babylon named Berossos wrote an account of the history of Babylonia in which 432,000 years elapsed before the coming of the mythological flood came and wiped everything out, beginning a new cycle. Strangely enough, this resembles the cosmic cycles in the Icelandic Edda where, on the Doomsday of the Gods, Odin's heavenly warrior hall Valhalla will see 800 fighters entering through each of the hall's 540 doors to wage war at the end of a cosmic cycle.

540 x 800 = 432,000.

In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years they calculate our current cosmic cycle to last (until it concludes and then another begins) is exactly 432,000 years. The astonished Campbell concludes:

So that we have found this number, now, in Europe, c. 1100 A.D., in India, c. 400 A.D., and in Mesopotamia, c. 300 B.C., with reference to the measure of a cosmic eon.

It gets even more interesting as Campbell explains how the Babylonians managed to calculate (to a precision that was just slightly off) the precession of the equinoxes, that is, the very slight wobble of the Earth on its axis that causes the stars to be in a slightly different position in the zodiac each year. The precessional lag is extremely small, just 1 degree every 72 years. Thus it takes 25,920 years for the zodiac to go the full 360 degrees of a circle.

25,920 divided by 60 (the basic unit of time measurement still to this day) = 432

It is as though the ancient observers of the stars all independently managed to calculate the rate at which the universe inhales and exhales.

Campbell quotes "a popular book on physical education" which states that a person of good conditioning who exercises regularly will have a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute.

60 beats per minute equals 3,600 beats per hour

3,600 x 24 = 86,400

86,400 divided by 2 = 43,200

There's more:

A computer program has found that the optimal number of dimples on a golf ball is 432.

The diameter of the Sun is about 864,000 miles (divided by 2 that's 432,000). The diameter of the Moon is 2,160 miles (that equals half of 4,320).

Pretty startling, huh?

Read plenty more about it here and here and here.

Thirst for Knowledge Thursdays: That Face is Your Face

You will notice that I've added a little Amazon widget to the sidebar on the right. I've been wanting to do that for a while but never actually explored it until the other day. It's actually very easy to do. And instead of making it a collection of my favorite books, I've got it displaying the books I'm currently reading. As for my favorites, we'll continue to take a look at some of those each Thursday.

When I first mentioned the idea of a weekly post sharing some good books, I mentioned that I'll be picking books off my "Jacob's Ladder" bookshelf and, indeed, I do have it set up like a ladder. The easier or more earthly books (sports, mainly) are on the bottom and things get heavier as we move upwards (from basic religion/science/history up to deeper physics/spiritual/philosophy stuff) culminating in the top shelf which houses a whole collection of Joseph Campbell books as well as some of Carl Jung's best stuff, Nietzsche, and Goethe. Today we're up at the top shelf. And the book I've chosen is probably the only book by Campbell that I've read more than twice. It's his first book (well, the first book he wrote on his own) and it remains his most famous work: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. While it is basically an introduction to the material that he would expand on all throughout his career, it is one of his most accessible books and thus, perhaps, the most rewarding. It continues to be a major influence on people, especially artists and, most famously, it was the major inspiration for George Lucas' Star Wars films.

The book is a deeply enlightening analysis of the archetypal stages of the mythological hero journey which, as Campbell shows, is essentially the story of the basic stages of human growth and individuation in society. Weaving in ancient myths and tales from nearly every corner of the globe, Campbell takes us through each stage of the hero's journey and shows us how the story is the same all throughout the world, though always with a different local inflection. The story is essentially this: growing up in a society of inherited ideals, an individual feels compelled to jump out into the world of adventure, of unfamiliar territory; this individual crosses the community's threshold and then goes through numerous trials, often life-threatening, before receiving help from supernatural or serendipitously appearing aids who help the individual continue along toward a goal; he encounters the mother goddess who helps him on his way to acquiring the ultimate boon of wisdom; the hero returns to the society bearing the bright gifts of knowledge and wisdom to uplift others from their sorrows. Discussing this theme as it appears in the Bhagavad Gita, Campbell explains:

What, now, is the result of the miraculous passage and return?
The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.

After explaining each stage for us, using elements from a ridiculous amount of different myths along the way (Buddha, Jesus, Eskimo stories, Native American myths, African tribal rituals, Greek myths, everything), Campbell then explores the source of it all, the unconscious mind from which these rich stories spring forth, and what it all means psychologically and cosmically. He discusses the "universal doctrine" found in the cosmologies of every culture throughout human history that "teaches that all the visible structures of the world---all things and beings---are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as shakti, and the Christians as the power of God...And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure and flux of the universe itself."

But to apprehend the very source of this energy, one must transcend the human organs of apprehension because the forms and categories of our rational minds are, themselves, manifestations of this power and thus preventing one from being able "not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful, fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle." And so the function of myth is to help the mind achieve that "jump" beyond the phenomenal. As Campbell says, "Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness...into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved." The elements of myth are meant to attract the mind towards what is beyond these elements, the infinite eternal void out of which our categories of opposites and duality spring. "Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means---themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves."

This was the first book by Campbell that I ever read and, though I think there are others that are actually better, it is the book I come back to the most. Especially in times like right now where I'm traveling rather aimlessly on an unfamiliar road that I hope leads to a creative future. This book was my bible when I initially left the nest at age 22 and traveled across the US to San Diego with no practical plans. Three years later, I'm still on the journey and maybe only slightly less confused. This is still one of the first books I turn to for answers.

Music of the Spheres

Astrological Projection by Salvador Dali

"Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche." - Carl Jung

"Study constellations, they personify the Sun!" - Kevlaar 7

I don't really pay much attention to my horoscope at all unless I come across it randomly. Then I'll check it out just for the heck of it and usually put very little stock into what it says. I never really knew or cared much about astrology or the Zodiac signs actually until a couple years ago when two different books on the subject randomly confronted me and hit like lightning bolts.

The first was a book by Richard Tarnas, an eminent scholar who had previously written a book on the history of Western thought called The Passion of the Western Mind which received high praise from some of my favorite peeps like Joseph Campbell. That text has always been the book used in colleges around the country to teach Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times. This new book of his is actually a sequel though it deals entirely with what's called archetypal astrology; basically, the view that each planet (plus the Sun and Moon) embodies certain principles or archetypes and there are discernible patterns and cycles throughout history corresponding to the position of the planets relative to the earth. Really, really paradigm-shifting stuff and this was coming from one of the most respected minds in the academic community which, of course, led to lots of harrumphs from the conservative geezers.

Still, though, the basic world view put forth by Tarnas (microcosm = macrocosm) is one that most of the advanced and integrated modern minds have been revolving around for a while now. Really, it's a modern revival of an ancient world view, "That which is above is the same as that which is below" as Hermes Trismegistus puts it.

When I first came across this book I was in a bookstore after visiting my dying grandmother in the hospital back in June of 2008. I quickly flipped to the index to see which names were referenced and written about. Sure enough, all of my favorites were there: Campbell, Carl Jung, Nietzsche, Fritjof Capra, Goethe, and even Stanislav Grof. One of the main blocks Tarnas builds on is synchronicity. The book certainly seemed worth checking out but it would have to wait because I was on a Nietzsche binge at that moment in time. I eventually bought it a few months later when I found myself at the California Institute of Integral Studies where Tarnas teaches in San Francisco. I got into a great conversation with the bookstore clerk there and he convinced me to pick it up.

It's a very good book, absolutely filled with world history presented in a clear, engaging manner though admittedly it is pretty long (around 500 pages) and he presents his case so thoroughly that it kind of drags on at times towards the end. But, as the magnum opus of a renowned world historian, it's certainly a worthwhile book and I can guarantee it will, at the very least, shake the frame through which you view your earthly existence and possibly make you rearrange your perspective a bit.

*   *   *

"As long as you still experience the stars as something 'above you,' you lack the eye of knowledge." - Friedrich Nietzsche

*   *   *

It was in December of 2008, right around Christmas, when I was first confronted with the possibility that astrology not only contained valid truths but shockingly precise assertions. On this night, I was with a group of friends in a small city east of San Diego called El Cajon, situated seemingly in the middle of nowhere amidst valleys and canyons. We had driven out there to see a movie which one of us heard was excellent and it was only playing in a theater out there in the boonies. The movie was Slumdog Millionaire.

The entire evening seemed to be imbued with a sense of mystery and the unknown. I had only been living in San Diego for about six months at that point and was with a group of four friends, all Mexican and talking to each other in Spanish (which I don’t speak), out in the middle of nowhere in Southern California on a starry December night. After arriving an hour or so early for the movie, we decided to kill time by loitering in a Best Buy across the parking lot.

As I roamed the aisles of the crowded store (it was Christmas time, mind you) it hit me that I was in a totally different world than I’d been used to in New York. I was in a huge, extremely packed store and yet there seemed to be absolutely zero chance that anybody would recognize me all the way out in the middle of this dark desert in California. Whereas, in the Staten Island Best Buy that I’d been used to, I would run into someone from my past just about every single time I was in the store.

Now I was a stranger. In a strange land. And it felt cool.

I stood playing Madden football on a huge TV set for a little while until I was hit with an urgent need to use the bathroom for number-2 purposes. My stomach was under attack. I rushed through clusters of people and aisles of electronics until I found the store’s bathroom. Each stall in the men’s room was absolutely, horrifically mutilated. Stacks of urine-drenched toilet paper covered the seats, unflushed excrement piled up in the bowl. I became enraged at humanity and burst out the bathroom door headed outside and next-door to Barnes and Noble.

The atmosphere of B&N hummed the essence of a sanctuary compared to the pounding bright images of Best Buy. It was crowded but calm. Classical music played and turned my frantic jogging into a fast-paced stroll. I asked for directions to the bathroom then maneuvered a maze of shelves until I approached a wide path that led to the bathroom. Just before I entered the bathroom, a book facing me from a shelf on the right caught my eye. Its big beautiful yellow cover boasted: The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need. Though time was of the essence, I had just about reached my destination so I quickly stepped off the path and peeked at this book. It was big, well-organized, and had an air of authority. It also didn’t seem gimmicky and even if it did, this was something I knew nothing about. Since it was already an adventurous night, I figured I might as well pull a George Costanza and bring it into the bathroom with me. When else would I be able to do such a thing? If a store clerk confronted me I’d just ignore them and go ahead with fulfilling my urgent need to use the bathroom.

I’ll spare you any more lavatorial details. I flipped open the book and the first page I saw was from a chapter entitled “Astrology and Health” and I happened to open it on the page for my sign, Cancer. “They have delicate stomachs and digestive problems,” it stated. At that very moment I was experiencing stomach problems and I’ve had them throughout my entire life. It mentioned the Cancer’s inability to tolerate alcohol, which aggravates their sensitive stomachs, another problem I’ve dealt with. I became more interested. When the book pointed out a Cancerian susceptibility to varicose veins, an ailment which I’d experienced and had surgically corrected one year prior, I was sold. This shit is serious, I thought.

No need to flag this book because I was convinced that I needed to buy it. It has unremittingly enriched and shocked me and anyone else I’ve shown it to for two years now.

*   *   *

"Attributes shared by Krishna, Attis, and Mithra
Dionysus, exploiting astrological sequence,
the birth and the death of god's son"
-Kevlaar 7

In December, when there was an eclipse on the night of the Winter Solstice, I started preparing to write a post about the solar and lunar symbols underlying Homer's Odyssey using Joseph Campbell's thorough breakdown of this in his Occidental Mythology. That idea faded away until it came back and smacked me in the face recently.

In doing some research for this post I came across some information that rocked my world. I probably should've known it already by now but somehow I never came across it (though, admittedly, I did come close to reaching this conclusion in my post about the Tunc page). The story of Jesus is the story of the Sun. Since, as I'm now realizing, pretty much all ancient hero or god stories perfectly correspond with the path of the Sun, I guess it shouldn't be that much of a shock. But, reading the parallels thoroughly explained, I found it explosively enlightening.

I think it is very simplistic and materialistic of folks to wave their hands and dismiss the importance of such information. For, what could be more simple and primitive than worshiping the sun? I think it goes way deeper than that. It has to do with an identification with the Sun, the solar symbol of infinity and timelessness. An identification with what the Sun represents is also an identification with a star or, really, all the stars in the universe since our sun is just one of many trillion.

It is this path that leads to an identification with the universe, thus shattering the ego and the subject-object dualism.

Put your thinking cap on.

Schopenhauer on The Illusion of Separation

(I would like to present this book excerpt because it's something I often find myself bringing up in conversation but don't always explain so clearly. This is from Joseph Campbell's superb book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and it is a quotation from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.)

[Schopenhauer asks] in his celebrated essay On the Foundation of Morality, "How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?...This is something really mysterious, something for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of this kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life..."

(My favorite recent example of this was the Subway Superman Wesley Autrey risking his life to save someone who had a seizure and fell onto the subway tracks.)

Schopenhauer's answer to this question is that this immediate reaction and response represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization---namely (as he states the idea in Sanskrit), "tat tvam asi, thou art that."

"This presupposes," he declares, "that I have to some extent identified myself with the other and therewith removed for the moment the barrier between the 'I' and the 'Not-I'. Only then can the other's situation, his want, his need, become mine. I then no longer see him in the way of an empirical perception, as one strange to me, indifferent to me, completely other than myself; but in him I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves."

"Individuation is but an appearance in a field of space and time, these being the conditioning forms through which my cognitive faculties apprehend their objects. Hence the multiplicity and differences that distinguish individuals are likewise but appearances. They exist, that is to say, only in my mental representation. My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature as truly and immediately as known to my consciousness only in myself. This realization, for which the standard formula is in Sanskrit is tat tvam asi, is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed."

Examining James Joyce/Stephen Dedalus' Esthetic Philosophy (part 1)

James Joyce cannot be described as simply a ‘novelist.’ He was a poet before he had even attempted to write prose. In fact, he composed a poem at the age of 9 that was so incredible his father mailed it to the Vatican. Calling him a ‘writer’ simply doesn’t do the trick either, it’s best to describe him as an ‘artist’ and Joyce himself made the distinction clear in the title of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which details Joyce’s own life from childhood through young adulthood in a prose style that grows more complex and intelligent as the character does. 

He is also a philosopher, at times outlining his own philosophies and theories through his characters (mainly, his alter ego Stephen Dedalus) and this is especially so in Portrait. In the final chapter of the book, Stephen is a student in the first years of college and he’s already gained a reputation for being an aspiring poet.  We’ve heard him describe his goal to escape the nets of nationality, language, and religion which are flung at souls to hold them back from flight. And, in a conversation with the school’s dean, we learn that Stephen has been working on an esthetic theory using ideas from Aristotle and Aquinas. A few pages later, in conversation with his friend Lynch who jokingly acts disinterested, Stephen outlines in detail his esthetic philosophy.

Proper vs Improper Art
Joyce first distinguishes between proper and improper art.

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Proper art = static
Improper art = kinetic

Proper art is art in the service of what is properly the function of art and that function is to elicit a state of esthetic arrest. Arrest = static (from the Greek statikos, “causing to stand”). You apprehend a proper piece of art and you can only stand there in sensational (esthetic) contemplation and enjoyment. You’re in awe, raised above desire and loathing. Whereas a picture of a pretty girl or even of a plate of delicious food draws you physically to desire it. Joyce calls this pornographic art and, in this sense, all advertising art is improper art. Derogatory satire, art with social criticism that causes you to loathe or dislike something: that’s improper art---it’s didactic, instructing you what to do.

The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system.

What is art?
We then get into what exactly art is and there is a quote which I think perfectly describes James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus (or, perhaps, any artist) at this point in his life:

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand---that is art.

Once art and its proper function (esthetic arrest) are understood, the artist crafts an image of beauty using things like sound, shape, and color which open the gates of the soul.

Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Beauty
In response to his friend’s question “What is beauty?” Stephen (Joyce) gets even deeper. Thomas Aquinas’ simple definition (“that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases”) does not suffice because, using woman as example, he notes how the many different cultures around the world “admire a different type of female beauty.” The popular hypothesis explaining the phenomenon is that the physical qualities admired by men are “in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.” Stephen dislikes that dreary hypothesis (“It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic”) and describes his own:

This hypothesis is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty.

And a few pages later he continues:

The most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty…[Now quoting Aquinas again] Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony and radiance.”

Looking at each one now:
1. Wholeness: [He points to a basket someone is carrying on their head] “In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.”

2. Harmony: “Then you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.”

3. Radiance: “When you have apprehended that object as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

Joyce alludes to this kind of esthetic apprehension in Ulysses: “Any object intensely regarded may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” And Joseph Campbell elaborates the experience for us in his book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words:

This is a breakthrough. You have gone through the object and felt the transcendence that manifests through it, the transcendence of which you are yourself a manifestation. Pure object turns you into pure subject. You are simply the eye, the world eye, regarding beyond desire and loathing…

Forms of Art
Having explained what (proper) art is and how we apprehend beauty, Stephen now goes on to describe what he sees as the three forms of art, in all of which “the image must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others.” The three forms, each “progressing from one to the next,” are:

1. the Lyrical form: “the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself”
2. the Epical form: “the artist presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others”
3. the Dramatic Form: “the artist presents his image in immediate relation to others”

He elaborates each one:

The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narrative itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The lyrical form seems quite easy to understand from his explanation, it’s as simple as a poem written by someone in love. The poet is presenting his image (the poem) in “immediate relation to himself” while everybody else reads the poet’s feelings expressed in lyrics. In the epic, the artist presents his work in mediate relation to others, I find Ulysses to be a perfect example as Joyce (through Stephen) is directly involved in the action but the story is presented with a full, detailed backdrop of the city, its inhabitants and especially the other main characters. One could perhaps make an argument that, in his three books, Joyce displayed the progress from one form to the other: the self-centered autobiographical Portrait (lyrical) leading into Ulysses (epical) and then the intricately crafted dream world of Finnegans Wake (dramatic). But, more likely, both Portrait and Ulysses should be considered epics and Finnegans Wake the absolute epitome and farthest extreme of the dramatic form.


Read Part 2 HERE

(Note: This whole discussion owes a great deal to Joseph Campbell's book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce.)

The Solstice in Circe (Ulysses)

Today is the Summer solstice, the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. The Sun is at its highest point and from now until December it descends lower and lower on the horizon. As I'm now starting my 2nd reading of the longest day in literature, Ulysses, the solstice has me pondering a scene from the Circe episode, the wild, weird, witches' brew of the book.

It's June 16th, days away from the Summer solstice and, as I've discussed here before, young Stephen has gone about as far as his egotistical, self-centered, cynical attitude (keep in mind he's 22 years old) can take him. Ran away from home to go live in Paris, lived like a bohemian there for a little while and now he's back in Dublin after his mother, whose deathbed he refused to kneel down and pray at, has recently died. He's drunk and fooling around in a brothel in the heart of Dublin's red light district. Unbeknownst to him, a rather concerned Leopold Bloom has been following him to make sure he stays out of serious trouble and I draw attention here to a line from the scene in the brothel when Bloom first walks into the room where Stephen, his friend Lynch, and three prostitutes are hanging out (pg 502-503 in my 1961 Random House edition).

  (...Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths...) 

For this scene, I prefer Joseph Campbell's decyphering of Joyce's symbols from his book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words (pg 148):

The fifth is the furthest one can get from the tonic without being on the way back: Do re me fa sol la ti do, then do begins to close again. At this point in Ulysses, Stephen knows that he is at the extreme of his departure from the base, of his separation from the father. The tonic is the father or the ground or the base or the drone, and he has separated himself as far as he can. The sun will cross the Tropic of Cancer on the June 22 summer solstice, and will then start on its journey south, to set. Stephen realizes that this episode is the end of his old life, the moment of crucifixion, the moment when the sun reaches the apogee of its climb in the heavens and begins its descent: "I have gone as far as I can in this egoistic single way of mine, and I am about to embark on my way home."

Stephen, the heavily intoxicated young poet and scholar, tries to put this feeling into words but his friend's cap (yes: his cap, the chapter is filled with weird hallucinations) argues with him.

Stephen: ...The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which...

The Cap: Which? Finish. You can't.

Stephen: (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which...

Before he can finish, a gramophone outside suddenly begins blaring the song "Jerusalem, The Holy City," a perfect Joycean synchronicity as this is the meeting of the two characters whom the whole book is about (also an interesting coincidence because the song begins with that same Do re mi fa, etc). Stephen, trying to finish his explanation, is annoyed, "Damn that fellow's noise in the street" (bringing to mind his earlier refutation to his lecturing boss that God is simply "a noise in the street"). His friend Lynch makes fun of him ("What a learned speech, eh?") but one of the prostitutes pretends to know what the hell he's talking about:

(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)

Florry: They say the last day is coming this summer.

This thought conjures up a variety of ridiculous hallucinatory phenomena in Stephen's drunken brain and onto the scene enters a characterization of The End of the World, dancing and talking with a Scotch accent. Elijah also enters, speaking with an American accent and going on a perfect Billy Sunday-like preaching tirade. This character produces one of my favorite quotes in the book for, as Campbell explains, "very frequently, Joyce brings out key thoughts in a totally contrary kind of language and situation" and emphasizes this as one of Joyce's essential messages. Here's the hallucination of Elijah (looking and sounding like Billy Sunday) preaching to Stephen, Lynch, Bloom and three prostitutes:

Elijah: ...Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are... 

The James Joyce Quarterly and the Tunc page

In my study of Joyce, I constantly come across interesting articles through Google from the James Joyce Quarterly but I can never read the articles because, aside from one page previews, they're hidden behind the walls of archives like JSTOR.com which require that you have a subscription. To have a subscription, one must be a scholar, student, or researcher. When I try to register for the site, I'm immediately shunned away with the message: "Unfortunately, we do not recognize you as belonging to an institution or organization that has access to JSTOR." The often extremely insightful  essays written by all kinds of Joycean scholars from the 30-plus years the Quarterly has been published aren't available anywhere else on the web so I recently decided to go ahead and subscribe to it for a year and my first issue arrived the other day.

It's a beautiful looking softcover book that's about the size of a literary journal. It's labeled as Volume 46, No. 1 Fall 2008 which seemed weird at first but I discovered that it was written over the period of Fall 2008 to Summer 2009 (and then published at the beginning of 2010? I have no idea). There are at least two articles in it that talk about events from 2009 (one that details a Joyce Conference held in Rome in 2009, the other about Bloomsday '09 at the University of Tulsa where the Quarterly is published), then a few different Joyce essays exploring perspectives on Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake (more on that later), followed by book reviews for a shockingly huge number of brand new Joyce books that appeared during 2009 (about twelve).

But, the reason I'm posting about the Quarterly is to discuss its cover image which is the elaborately colored thing shown above. The image is of a children's coloring-book replica (colored in beautifully) of the so-called "Tunc page" from the Irish Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is a magnificently illustrated book of New Testament passages that was transcribed by Celtic monks some time in the 9th century. The actual page looks like this:

 

What makes The Book of Kells so cool is that it was created during a period in Irish history when Christianity was still in its early stages and thus was interpreted and assimilated into older pagan mythology and its symbolic forms. And so the pages and the passages they feature are absolutely loaded with deep meaning in an early form of Christianity that was not yet in accord with the orthodox interpretations and boring, historically rigid version of things which eventually developed from the Byzantine Church councils right around the same period of history (700-800 AD). These councils determined that a culture's pre-Christian symbols, images, and other icons must be destroyed and banned.

So, let's take a quick look at the Tunc page and what's going on there. I've posted a large picture of it above so hopefully that will suffice to help you see what it is I'm referencing. I'm deriving the interpretation of it from pgs 467-469 of Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology. The page bears the sentence from the Matthew Gospel: "Then there were crucified with him two thieves" in Latin as "Tunc cru cifixerant XPI cum eo du os la trones" and it is that first elaborate "Tunc" that the page is named after. The entire page is encircled by the very old familiar mythological symbol of the self-consuming, self-renewing serpent, a popular Oriental symbol which is symbolic of the self-consuming and self-renewing powers of life. The serpent has a lion head and the "T" in the word "Tunc" (that cool J-looking thing that jumps out of the page) is also a lion with serpent attributes that is "either swallowing or emitting (or both) a tangled pair-of-opposites." As Campbell explains, the serpent is representative of "the lunar mystery of time," life waxing and waning, rising up and then dying, within the sphere of time while the lion is "the solar power, the sun door to eternity." The serpent then is the "demiurgic, world-creating and -maintaining principle, or...the God of the Old Testament" according to Campbell while the lion is the New Testament view, the eternal door, the "way and the light," the Redeemer (the New Testament is considered to have redeemed the Old Testament where Adam and Eve's fall from grace locked man of heaven).

The Greek letters XPI inserted in the text after "crucifixerant" are the Greek letters of abbreviation for Christ and, if you turn the page clockwise to lie on its right side, you see that XPI is spelled in big letters on the page. The huge curled "T" becomes the circle in the Greek "P", the middle letter "symbolizing the Savior between the two thieves" but here is where it all comes together: the whole thing is uniting these lunar and solar symbols beautifully. It is on the fifteenth day of each lunar month that the full moon appears directly across from the sun which shines on it and now observe, along the border of the page in the curving serpent's body, there are three groups of five men, fifteen. Easter (the most important day in Christianity, celebrating Christ's resurrection after being crucified) is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon on or following the Spring equinox and, as described in the Synoptic Gospels, the crucifixion took place on the fifteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan which is around March-April. It all seems to be "a lunar theme of death and resurrection."

But it gets better: the letter T is one of the symbols of the cross (+) and the cross is a traditional mythological sign of the earth (think of the north, south, east, west axis) and now picture the earth between the sun and full moon... It is at the time of the Spring equinox when the earth is in perfect alignment, standing upright on its axis instead of titled as it faces the sun---seeing the earth as Christ crucified between two thieves (the sun and moon) deepens our view here. Also consider that the T, the cross, as a symbol for the earth is also the symbol for the principle of space while the word Tunc, which means "then," is a word of time. It is in the field of space-time, phenomenality, that the mystery of Christ's Incarnation and Crucifixion took place, the eternal solar aspect coming forth into lunar time. 

The monks (the "filid", as they're called) who created this mind-blowing manuscript were trained under a highly organized system in which "they learned not only the entire native mythological literature by heart but also the laws according to which mythological analogies were to be recognized and symbolic forms interpreted" and they applied this training to read the symbols of the Christian faith and to recognize the parallels between it and their native pagan myths and legends.

What does this have to do with James Joyce? I'm glad you asked. Again, here's my mentor Joseph Campbell from his awesome book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:

The reader of Finnegans Wake will not fail to recognize in this page something like a mute indication that here is the key to the entire puzzle: and he will be the more concerned to search its meaning when he reads Joyce's boast on page 298: "I've read your tunc's dismissage."

The cover of the Skeleton Key book bears a huge letter T from a page in The Book of Kells, highlighting the ancient manuscript's importance for an understanding of Joyce's maze-masterpiece.



There is a great article in the Quarterly called "Finnegans Wake for Dummies" by Sebastian Knowles of Ohio State University (see my discussion of that article here) in which he conceives of an easier way to approach the text, starting from the middle of the book and working your way out going from the easier chapters to the increasingly difficult ones. Telling the story of a semester spent teaching the book in a new seminar for grad students, he describes how he came across the Tunc page in a coloring book on the floor of his five-year-old's room and brought it in for his students to color in, one of which is on the cover of the Quarterly.

Knowles' reading plan begins with Chapter 5 in Book 1, pgs 104-125. These are the pages devoted to the "Mamafesta," the Manifesto of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the flowing female presence that opens the book and runs throughout it as a river. Indeed, it could be said that the entire book is devoted to this female-archetype with the initials ALP. The "Mamafesta" is a letter written by ALP memorializing her deceased husband and, as can be seen from even a brief glance at any part of the chapter, it is also Finnegans Wake itself (pg 107: "The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture."). But this exhumed manuscript that was dug out of a local rubbish heap by a neighbor's hen is also the Book of Kells which was once buried to protect it from the Danes invading Ireland in 853 AD. For four pages (119-123) in this Mamafesta chapter, Joyce parodies the language of Sir Edward Sullivan's description and analysis of The Book of Kells and thoroughly describes the Tunc page but he is also describing his own crazy book with its multitude of meaning, unnecessary elaborate flamboyancy, weird funky sigla, and "the sudden sputtered petulance of some capItallIsed mIddle; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons" (FW 120).

Further Notes:

-The Book of Kells is now in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. A facsimile of the volume was produced in 1990, this handbound leather edition comes in a hand-crafted presentation box accompanied by a volume of scholarly commentary. There have been 1,480 copies of this facsimile produced worldwide and one could pick up a copy for the meager price of... $20,000.

-In his Book of Kells study, Bernard Meehan notes that the lion (which appears twice on the Tunc page) is also a "potent symbol of Christ's resurrection. According to the natural history contained in the fifth-century Greek text Physiologus...lion cubs were born dead, but on the third day were revived by their father's breathing on their faces or roaring. This was a striking metaphor for the revival of Christ three days after his death." The lion was also associated in the Old Testament with the royal house of Judah, from which Christ was thought to be descended.

-Ulysses contains a reference to the Book of Kells in the crazy, hallucinatory "Circe" chapter. The polymorphous beastly creature named Virag that pops in and out saying crazy stuff to Bloom exclaims at one point: "Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet." The first part is Yiddish for "Cursed Gentiles!" and he is alluding to Christ. "Pig God!" is a common curseword in Italian ("Porco Dio!") similar to "goddammit." And the two left feet thing refers to a page from the Book of Kells of "The Virgin and the Child" in which the child has two left feet while the Virgin has two right feet as you can see here (click on the pic and zoom in):

World's Most Beautiful Bookstore

El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Came across this via Roger Ebert's Twitter page.

Just returned from a lovely dinner with my girlfriend followed by a trip to a favorite local used book store of ours. They had a weird old paperback copy of Ulysses, apparently very rare it was priced at $150 and kept in a glass case with some other rare birds. I ended up purchasing a paperback copy of Joseph Campbell's India Journals entitled Baksheesh and Brahman (I have the Japanese Journals and wasn't that into it but this one is supposed to be a little better to read) for pretty cheap as well as a cool little paperback that contains Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait, and Chamber Music.

Books I'm Reading

I'm still new at this, this manner of displaying one's thoughts and contents out for the world to see, but I've often seen people on the web make note of the books they're reading and so I'd like to briefly discuss my own readings here. I've maintained a bi-annual book-reading count in a notebook journal for the last few years but, with a blog, why not put it out there for the online universe... I hope it's not as boring to people as listening to someone discuss their fantasy baseball team or the contents of their stamp collection.

Reading Right Now
Baseball Prospectus 2010 - I'm going to have a post this week all about this wonderful annual introduction to the upcoming baseball season. I received it last week and am slowly reading and leafing through it each day, savoring it while the baseball season's prelude, Spring Training, rises stretching from its hibernation in the bed of winter.

ReJoyce by Anthony Burgess - in the midst of a second reading as I prepare to re-approach the perigee of the celestial body that is Ulysses


Reading Next
Well...my plan is to begin reading Ulysses again (perhaps with a second reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first) and, as any good reading of this encyclopedic novel entails, I will be accompanying this second reading of it with a few of what the honorable Judge John M. Woolsey called its "satellites". Mainly these:

James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert - I acquired this book when I was already past the most ridiculous chapter of Ulysses, "Circe," and so I didn't get full of use of it yet. The format is a chapter-by-chapter walkthrough but it's not as good as some of the more recent ones in that respect. The lengthy introduction to the book and its themes, though, is perhaps my favorite piece of Joyce-commentary (out of everything I've read so far). The composition of this book was overseen by Joyce himself and, supposedly, Joyce spoke through Gilbert at times to give the reader some clues to his puzzle book so this, the first attempt by a writer to make sense of Ulysses, is an enlightening and essential sidekick.

Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List by Weldon Thornton - this is one my new toys. It's an enormous (506 pgs) and overwhelmingly thorough listing of the insane amount of references and allusions from Ulysses. What kind of allusion, you ask? One of the most daunting aspects of Ulysses is the fact that it contains so many references to things like: Shakespeare, Irish history, Thomas Aquinas, Catholicism, a ridiculous amount of old songs and plays or operas, Dante, The Bible, and about a million other people, places, and things. The book explains as many references as it can and does so in a chronological order, organized by chapter. This is most essential for the parts of the book where Stephen is talking or thinking because he is a walking Wikipedia and spins out that globular ball of yarn in his brain through poetic but opaque short sentences---like aphorisms or Tweets. An example from the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode:

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

from Thornton...Dana, who is called Mother of the Irish Gods, was the greatest of the Danaan deities. She is mentioned in A.E.'s play Dierdre, which was alluded to earlier in this episode. J. Prescott points out an allusion here to Walter Pater's The Renaissance: "It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off--that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves"

Further down the Reading List
Finnegans Wake - I've already read A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Campbell/Robinson but I'm eager to begin a study of the book itself along with...

Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop - I've only read the introduction and first chapter but this appears to be the coolest Joyce book ever made. It's huge, not just lengthy but wide and has pictures and diagrams and all sorts of cool stuff. I look forward to reading this more than anything else.


Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - I picked both of these up recently and am eager to get into them after I read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther last year and loved it. (Also, the name Wolfgang is awesome.)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche - I read a few of Nietzsche's books a year or so ago and absolutely freakin' loved them. I took a break from the poet-philosopher to get more into the poet-novelist (Joyce) and hope to get into the former's most famous book this year. (I've actually got two editions of this, one a paperback Penguin classic, the other a huge hardcover with a cool cartoon of Nietzsche on the front and large font inside.) A couple other Nietzsche titles sit on the bench of my bookshelf waiting for their name to be called.

Besides those, there's a random smattering of books including some more Joyce ones, a couple Alan Watts titles, and a re-reading of Volume 4 of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God series. And, since I started this post with a baseball book, I might as well end it with one:

Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker - I've been enjoying his blog for about three years now and this Spring, finally, he will be releasing a book. His reminiscences of growing up in a strange household are channeled through old 1970s baseball cards into sentimental, poetic, hilarious, and existential essays. One of my favorite baseball writers of the last few years.