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.

Christmas thoughts

Typing this on my new iPad while in bed right now. Technology is amazing. Accelerating at an absurdly rapid pace. Watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight and have remained in a bit of a reflective haze afterwards, seeing my life (past, present, future but especially the present) with a bird's-eye view. This led to a realization that Christmas is (for me at least) a marker of time, the conclusion of a chapter and the opening of a new one, more so even than New Year's.

The celebrated birth of baby Jesus in a manger, which by our calendar would have occurred at the exact instant that the year 1 BC turned into Year Zero AD, seems largely forgotten as the mythological meaning behind this yearly winter ritual of ours. The origin of December 25th as the celebration date, adapted by the early Christians so as to draw in followers of the (at that time) popular Mithraic cult, is also completely buried underneath the sands of time. One can make a convincing argument that Christmas is becoming nothing but an extremely powerful and pervasive marketing tool.

Around the age of 18 or 19, I went through a period where I totally rejected Christmas and everything it stood for, told my family not to get anything for me, that there was no reason to go out and have to buy me gifts and that I wouldn't be doing so for them. This lasted a couple years. All the glittery, childish memories of my Christmas past had been stepped on by cold reality, rationale, and reason. I started thinking and talking about how absurd it was that Christmas is always shoved in everybody's faces even though there are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and many more religious groups that don't celebrate the holiday.

It was only very recently, last year in fact, that my perspective on the Christmas season and celebration completely changed. For Christmas in 2008 my parents flew me back home to New York and I enjoyed the opportunity to see and catch up with everyone in my family, but it didn't renew my so-called Christmas spirit at all, really. It just brought back memories. But last year, spending the whole season out here in San Diego and getting a full glimpse of this city's manner of embracing the holidays, plus enjoying my first ever Christmas away from home here with my girlfriend (who made every effort to assure I had a nice Christmas), I came to a new realization.

There is an undeniable beauty to the atmosphere of the Christmas season. Everything seems imbued with a sense of the magical and timeless and this is a good thing, something that has been disappearing in our modern industrial society but which was an integral part of our history. As I said above, the holiday season and Christmas have also transcended the church celebration of Christ's mythological birthday. It's as though the story of Santa Claus with his elves and reindeer in the North Pole has become its own Christmas myth, one that you need not be Christian to celebrate. Yes, of course it's totally fake, but we're talking about the realm of myth here. When considered, I think it's a beautiful thing that the season emphasizes giving and being thoughtful about others, trying to surprise those you love and make them happy. It's especially refreshing that we use this Santa Claus myth to encourage children to "be good for goodness sake" with the promise of reward for it.

The commercialization and overzealous promotion of Christmas is discomforting if not painfully annoying but if you can somehow manage to strip all of that away and see the holiday for what it really is, a season of selflessness, you'll realize there is something very special to this holiday and much potential in it. The glittery timeless realm created by the season lingers for a couple of weeks and when it's over, there's a sense of waking up, of rebirth, closing one chapter and starting a new one. The days will now start getting longer and we all have new tools (gifts) to help us get by with. You can bet this technological wizard wand, the iPad, will be immensely helpful as I continue on my own personal journey.

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):