Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century.”
“The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological.”
“What I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking.”
” ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries.”
“Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this.”
“It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get.”
“Anna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically.”
“People say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience.”
“The character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you are supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.”
“What all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language.”
“We are living in a terminal civilization. I don’t want to say dying, because civilizations aren’t animals. But we are living in an age of great self-summation. … Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway.”
“The purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future.”
“Somehow, complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/014118311Xhttp://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1577314050
The Oracle Gatherings … June 2009 … The Fountain
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And we’re going to delve into the world of
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literature for a bit today. But first, I’d like to thank a few people who are helping me to bring
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these podcasts to you today. And they are Paul M., Dominic C., Matthew W., Charles H., and Mark A.
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So thank you all very much.
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I appreciate your donations more than you can imagine.
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And I also want to thank my Facebook and Twitter friends
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who are helping to spread the word about the salon.
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And in particular, I want to thank Brent H.,
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who left a comment the other day saying that
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as soon as he could save a little money,
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he was going to make a donation
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so he could hear his first name and initial mentioned in a podcast.
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Well, Brent H., now you don’t have to worry about it for a while,
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so save your money and enjoy the show.
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Just having you and all of the other unnamed slauners come back each week is more than enough for me.
00:01:20 ►
You know, I’ve been hesitant to bring this up,
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but over on one of the forums at thegrowreport.com, the topic of podcast donations has come up, and I feel like I should add my two cents to the discussion.
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For the first six months or so that I did these podcasts, I didn’t have a donation button on our website because, well, there were so few downloads that it wasn’t an issue.
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Thank you. We’re all paid up for about six months ahead. So you can relax now. This is definitely not a call for more donations.
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It’s just the opposite.
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What I’m trying to get at here is that I’m not doing these podcasts to earn a living.
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But some of the new programs coming online have taken the opposite approach
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and are beginning to sound like permanent PBS pledge drives.
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And that’s what some of the buzz has been about over on the forums.
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You know, for a while, I thought that my wife and I were the only ones who had stopped listening
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to what otherwise were interesting podcasts because they were filled with what sounded
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to us like desperate pleas for help.
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And it’s just a major turnoff for me to constantly be made to feel like
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I should be sending money to them every week. And so I figured that if the main reason they
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were doing these podcasts was to make a living, then they weren’t in the original spirit of this
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medium, at least as I saw it. You know, I’m from the old internet crowd who believes that
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information should be free. But apparently some people have
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gotten the idea that you can get rich doing this, and I guess that may be partly a fault of mine,
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I guess, because I’ve mentioned before that podcasts from the salon have been downloaded to
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well over a hundred thousand different IP addresses now, and you’ve got to believe me,
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that doesn’t translate into a comfortable living.
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Over the course of a year, I’ve seen that the average donation to the salon is around $11,
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which works out to about $4.50 an hour for the time I put in, which means that flipping burgers
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in a fast food joint is more financially rewarding. And 100% of the money that comes in here goes to cover actual expenses associated with getting these programs out to you.
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So I’m obviously not doing it for the money.
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Now, getting back to the discussion on the forums, the general sense I’ve picked up from reading the postings is that I’m not the only one who doesn’t enjoy being berated week after week because there weren’t enough donations.
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I enjoy being berated week after week because there weren’t enough donations.
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Now this week, we received donations from Paul M., Dominic C., Matthew W., Charles H., and Mark A.
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And I really appreciate the support, because without it, I’d be dipping into my savings every once in a while.
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And even by saying this, I realize that I’m more or less doing the same thing, you know, asking for donations, but in a softer way.
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At first, I didn’t even thank our donors in the podcast, but I sent them an email to thank them instead.
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And finally, I realized that it would probably be better to thank you in the next podcast.
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I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this, but it’s been on my mind for a long while,
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and I thought that in the event you are thinking about starting your own podcast, you might want to keep some of what I just said in mind. Of course,
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I’ve now kind of boxed myself into a corner because a few weeks from now I’m going to release
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my new book, and that will be for sale. So the cynics among us can rightfully say that what I’ve
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been doing for the past four years is building an
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audience to which I hope to sell my new book. And although that wasn’t my original intent,
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that’s how it seems to have worked out. But no matter how my book is received, I fully plan to
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be here with you in the salon each week, and you’re never going to have to pay to hear any
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of these podcasts. Well, I’m sorry to take so much of your time on this, but I think it’s best to
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have these things out in the open. Oh, and I guess I should mention that for the foreseeable future,
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I’m only releasing my novel as an audiobook that I’ll be reading myself, and it won’t be very
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expensive. Now, let’s get on with today’s program, which is a lecture Terrence McKenna gave about James Joyce’s monumental novel, Finnegan’s Wake.
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And if you’re wondering why I decided to play a talk about literature in the salon,
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well, the reason is that I simply wanted to hear it one more time myself.
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As you know, this talk has been widely circulated on the net and is even available on YouTube in about a dozen or so segments,
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but I find it hard to sit at my computer and watch a lecture on the screen for that long.
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However, I do want to thank the YouTube poster whose handle is TheBoyDanny for putting it online,
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and you might want to at least take a little look at it to get the feel of the room in which this lecture was given.
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This entire talk now runs over two hours,
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and so I’m only going to play half of it today,
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and the rest of it I’ll play as soon as I can.
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But now, without any further ado,
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here is the Bard McKenna,
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surfing James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
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Finnegan’s Wake is the last and most ambitious and most puzzling work of the British writer James Joyce, who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses.
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And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature, then Finnegan’s wake is the partial differential equation. Most of us
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break down at algebra. Few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential equation.
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In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the 20th century,
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and Joyce intended it that way.
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Joseph Campbell called it a staggering allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind.
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Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion of the human mind.
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So the main thing about it is that it is linguistically dense.
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It is dense on every level.
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It has over 63,000 individual words in it.
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That’s more words than most fictional manuscripts have words, period.
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It has over 5,000 characters in it. Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce
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thought of it as his day book. It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner, this is Ulysses,
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an ordinary Dubliner through the vicissitudes of his day,
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his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast,
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his chance meeting with his wife’s lover, so forth and so on.
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and so on, fairly straightforward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life.
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Finnegan’s Wake was designed to be the night book to that day book. So it was conceived of as a dream. And one of the questions
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that undergraduates are asked to shed ink over is whose dream is it? And what is this book about?
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I mean, when you first pick it up, it’s absolutely daunting. There doesn’t
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seem to be a way into it. It seems to be barely in English, and the notion, you
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know, that one could, by spending time with this, tease out characters, plot,
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literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing, seems fairly unlikely.
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Actually, it’s one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it.
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The first 25 pages are incredibly dense,
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and most people are eliminated somewhere in those first 25 pages,
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and so never really…
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It’s a language, and you have to gain a facility with it,
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and you have to cheat, that’s the other thing.
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And there’s lots of help cheating
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because it has spawned a great exegetical literature.
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All kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists
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of Finnegans Wake or a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in
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Finnegans Wake or so forth and so on. Hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp lit have been ground out over the decades.
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The reason I’m interested in it, I suppose I should fess up,
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is because it’s two things, clearly.
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Finnegan’s Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic slash eschatological.
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And what I mean by those phrases is, first of all, what I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view.
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There is no character per se.
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You never know who is speaking
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you have to read into each speech
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to discover, you know, is this King Mark
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and Olivia Pluribel, Humphrey Chimptonier
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Wicker, Shem, the Penman, Sean
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who is it?
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and identities are not fixed
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those of you who have followed my rap over the years I’m always
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raving about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries well Finnegan’s Wake is as if you had taken the
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entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries. So Queen Mob becomes Mae West.
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You know, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend,
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Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging.
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Time is not linear.
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You will find yourself at a recent political rally,
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then return to the court of this or that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh.
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It’s like a trip
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and the great technique
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I was thinking about this
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as I was thinking about this lecture
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the great technique of the 20th century
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is collage or pastiche
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it was originally developed
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by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919
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right now it’s having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling
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in pop music. And Joyce was the supreme sampler. I mean, he draws his material from technical
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catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations.
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Everything is grist for this enormous distillery.
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And yet, you know, what comes out of this, once you learn the codes and once you learn to play the game, is a
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Joyce-ian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize. I mean the main,
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what Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people and an awareness of the dilemma of
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You know being a Jew in Irish Ireland being a devotee of scholasticism in the 20th century
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of
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dislocation and disorientation of being the cuckolded husband, of being the failed divinity student.
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All of these characters and themes are familiar.
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It’s quite an amazing accomplishment.
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There’s nothing else like it in literature.
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It had very little anticipation.
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The only real anticipator of Joyce in English
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I think is Thomas Nash
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who most people have never
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heard of, Thomas Nash was a
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contemporary of Shakespeare
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and wrote of
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famous, I don’t know what that means
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in such a context, but a novel
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called
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the
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it was called The Wayfaring Traveler.
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Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language,
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this attitude that it’s better to put it in than take it out.
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And that’s certainly what you get with Joyce.
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I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms,
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brand names, pop references, localisms.
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The way to conceive of Finnegan’s Wake, really,
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is like a mitten, a garbage dump.
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And there is, in fact, a garbage dump in the wake
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that figures very prominently.
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And what you as the reader have to do
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is go in there with nut pick and toothbrush
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and essentially remove one level after another level
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after another level and sink down and down.
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And the theme is always the same you know the delivery of
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the word the misinterpretation of the word and the redemption of the word at every level in all times
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and places the reason i now go on some distance toward explaining why i think of it as psychedelic. The reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic
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is because he really…
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You know, it’s hard to tell.
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We don’t have James Joyce around to ask
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how much of this material he took seriously
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and how much of it was grist for his literary mill.
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But he was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic.
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The entire book is based on La Ciencia Nuova of Gian Battista Vico, who was a, I don’t know what you would call him, a Renaissance sociologist, basically, and systems theorist and Joyce once in a famous interview said that if the whole universe
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were to be destroyed and only Finnegan’s Wake
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survived that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be
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reconstructed out of this. Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea
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that somehow a book is the primary reality. You know, the idea in Hasidism in some schools is
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that all of the future is already contained in the Torah.
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And then when you ask them, well, if it’s contained there, then isn’t it predestined?
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And the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled,
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and only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letter
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this is joyce thinking for sure and it’s it’s very close to a central theme in joyce and a central
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theme in the western religious tradition which is the coming into being the manifestation of the word, the declension of the word into matter.
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And in a sense, what Joyce was trying to do was, he was in that great tradition of literary
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alchemy, whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius Kircher, Paracelsus.
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These are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy,
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when the birth of modern science could already, the rosy glow could already be seen,
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glow could already be seen the alchemists turned toward literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century joyce is essentially in that tradition i mean this is an effort to condense
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the entire of experience all all as jones as joy says in the wake all space-time in a nutshell
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is what we’re searching for here
00:19:31 ►
a kind of philosopher’s stone
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of literary associations
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from which the entire universe
00:19:39 ►
can be made to blossom forth
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and the way it’s done
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is through pun and tricks of language
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and double and triple and quadruple entendre.
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No word is opaque.
00:19:59 ►
Every word is transparent.
00:20:02 ►
And you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations.
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And as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection, you eventually get the feeling, which is the unique feeling that the wake gives you,
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which is it’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get,
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because you are simultaneously many points of view,
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simultaneously many dramatis loci, many places in the plot,
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and the whole thing is riddled with resonance. dramatis loci, many places in the plot.
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And the whole thing is riddled with resonance.
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You know, a man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a task,
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and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology.
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So really, one thing about Finnegan’s Wake, it’s like a dipstick for your own intelligence.
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What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.
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And if you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with, or if you have armed yourself with such simple things as a Fodor’s Guide to Ireland,
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or a good map of Ireland, or a good work of Irish mythology,
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then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you.
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And it’s so rich that it’s easy to make original discoveries it’s easy to see and
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understand things which probably have not been seen or understood since james joyce put it there
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because he he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence maybe i didn’t make clear enough why that, to my mind, is an eschatological phenomenon, this production of the Philosopher’s Stone.
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It’s because it’s about the union of spirit and matter.
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That’s what the Philosopher’s Stone is about.
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And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union of spirit and matter as
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well and the the um the christian scenario of uh redemption at the end of profane history
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is another uh scenario of transubstantian union union of spirit and matter. This seems to be in fact the overarching
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theme of Finnegan’s Wake and of the 20th century. In terms of the temporal context for this book,
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it was finished in 1939, a few months before 1939, and Joyce died early in 1939
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in a sense he died in one of the most science fiction moments
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of the 20th century
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because the Third Reich was going strong
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it had not yet been pegged down a notch
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schemes of eugenics and thousand-year racially purified super-civilizations.
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All of that crazy early 40s stuff was happening.
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And the book is surprisingly modern.
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Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear appear all of these things appear
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he mean presciently he was some kind of a prophet and also he understood the
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20th century sufficiently that the part he hadn’t yet lived through was as
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transparent to him at the part as the part that he had, he could see what was coming.
00:24:09 ►
Well, that’s by way of my introduction.
00:24:12 ►
I want to read you what some other people have said about this, because I don’t think I can say enough on my own.
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This is the indispensable book, if you’re serious about this,
00:24:24 ►
A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake.
00:24:27 ►
And it takes the view that we don’t know what this thing is,
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so we have to go through it literally line by line.
00:24:36 ►
And he tells you the story, the entire story,
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in the one-page version, in the ten-page version,
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and in the two-hundred-page version. And even in the two-hundred-page version, in the ten-page version, and in the 200-page version. And even in
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the 200-page version, there are sections where Campbell simply reports, the next
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five pages are extremely obscure. Mark it. But this is just a short section, and one
00:25:03 ►
of the things about working with the wake is you become,
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at first, this language, which is so impenetrable and bizarre, it ends up infecting you,
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and you become unable to write or talk any other way.
00:25:18 ►
So I’ll read you some of Campbell’s introduction, and I think you will see it’s like the wake itself,
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except in baby steps.
00:25:32 ►
Introduction to a strange subject.
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Running riddle and fluid answer,
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Finnegan’s Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind.
00:25:43 ►
It is a strange book, a compound of fable,
00:25:47 ►
symphony, and nightmare, a monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of
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sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the
00:26:00 ►
necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases
00:26:07 ►
of individual and racial development into a circular design of which every part is beginning,
00:26:13 ►
middle, and end. In a gigantic wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons and are replaced by other images, vague but half-consciously
00:26:27 ►
familiar. On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy
00:26:35 ►
the same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously.
00:26:46 ►
Tristram and Wellington,
00:26:49 ►
Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single precept.
00:26:52 ►
Multiple meanings are present in every line.
00:26:55 ►
Interlocking allusions to key words and phrases
00:26:58 ►
are woven like fugal themes
00:27:00 ►
into the pattern of the work.
00:27:03 ►
Finnegan’s Wake is a prodigious,
00:27:07 ►
multifaceted monolith,
00:27:14 ►
not only the Kashimar of a Dublin citizen, but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained evolving humanity. The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan’s Wake give the book a forbidding
00:27:20 ►
aspect of impenetrability. It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle,
00:27:26 ►
trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities
00:27:30 ►
of form and language.
00:27:32 ►
Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
00:27:36 ►
It tasks the imagination,
00:27:38 ►
exacts discipline and tenacity
00:27:40 ►
from those who would march with it.
00:27:42 ►
Yet some of the difficulties disappear
00:27:44 ►
as soon as the well-disposed reader
00:27:47 ►
picks up a few compass clues
00:27:49 ►
and gets his bearings.
00:27:51 ►
Then the enormous map of Finnegan’s Wake
00:27:54 ►
begins slowly to unfold.
00:27:57 ►
Characters and motifs emerge,
00:27:59 ►
themes become recognizable,
00:28:01 ►
and Joyce’s vocabulary falls more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.
00:28:07 ►
Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting,
00:28:13 ►
or in fifty, I might add.
00:28:16 ►
Nevertheless, the ultimate state of the intelligent reader
00:28:20 ►
is certainly not bewilderment.
00:28:22 ►
Rather, it is an admiration for the unifying insight,
00:28:26 ►
economy of means,
00:28:27 ►
and more than Rabelaisian humor
00:28:29 ►
which have miraculously quickened
00:28:31 ►
the stupendous mass of material.
00:28:33 ►
One acknowledges at last
00:28:35 ►
that James Joyce’s overwhelming
00:28:37 ►
micro-macrocosm
00:28:39 ►
could not have been fired to life
00:28:41 ►
in any sorcerer furnace
00:28:43 ►
less black, less heavy, less murky than this his incredible
00:28:48 ►
book he had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis and
00:28:56 ►
mutation of language in order to deliver his message but the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all
00:29:08 ►
every book has to be about something I mean so what is this book about well as
00:29:18 ►
far as anybody can tell it appears to be about someone named, well, they have hundreds of names, actually,
00:29:30 ►
but for economy’s sake, someone named Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker, or abbreviated HCE.
00:29:50 ►
And Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chapalazod, which is a suburb or a district of London.
00:29:58 ►
And he has, as it says, an idle wifey who is Anna Olivia Pluribel.
00:30:09 ►
And now these two people, this barkeep and his wife and their two children, Jerry and Kevin, or Shem and Sean,
00:30:17 ►
and then they also have hundreds of names because they occur on hundreds and hundreds of levels. Every brother’s struggle in history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin.
00:30:24 ►
is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin.
00:30:30 ►
They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one.
00:30:35 ►
And they dichotomize certain parts of the process. So here is, in one paragraph,
00:30:39 ►
this is the Cliff Notes version of what Finnegan’s Wake is all about.
00:30:43 ►
If you commit this to memory,
00:30:45 ►
you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party.
00:30:54 ►
As the tale unfolds,
00:30:56 ►
we discover that Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin,
00:31:01 ►
a stuttering tavern keeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck.
00:31:06 ►
He emerges
00:31:08 ►
as a well-defined
00:31:10 ►
and sympathetic character,
00:31:12 ►
the sorely harrowed victim
00:31:14 ►
of a relentless fate,
00:31:16 ►
which is stronger than, yet identical
00:31:18 ►
with, himself.
00:31:20 ►
Joyce refers to him under various
00:31:22 ►
names, such as Here Comes
00:31:24 ►
Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere,
00:31:28 ►
indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor.
00:31:32 ►
The hero has wandered vastly, leaving families, that is, deposits of civilization,
00:31:39 ►
at every pause along the way from Troy and Asia Minor, he is frequently called the Turk,
00:31:46 ►
up through the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen,
00:31:50 ►
and overseas to the green isles of Britain and the Eyre.
00:31:54 ►
His chief Germanic manifestations are Vodun and Thor,
00:31:58 ►
his chief Celtic, Mananan Maclare.
00:32:02 ►
Again, he is St. Patrick carrying the new faith
00:32:05 ►
again Strongbow leading the
00:32:07 ►
Anglo-Norman conquest
00:32:09 ►
again Cromwell conquering
00:32:12 ►
with a bloody hand
00:32:13 ►
most specifically he is our
00:32:15 ►
Anglican tavern keeper
00:32:17 ►
HCE in the Dublin suburb
00:32:20 ►
Chapellezade
00:32:21 ►
so like Ulysses
00:32:23 ►
the ground zero here is the utterly mundane uh you know middle class
00:32:30 ►
tormented irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th century but there’s an effort to
00:32:38 ►
never lose the cosmic perspective never lose the sense that we are, you know, not individuals lost in time,
00:32:50 ►
but the front ends of gene streams that reach back to Africa, that we somehow have all these
00:32:58 ►
ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming within it.’s a it’s a very it’s a glorious psychedelic
00:33:07 ►
heartful irish view of what it is to be
00:33:12 ►
embedded in the mystery of existence well okay enough arm waving now let’s cut the cake here
00:33:21 ►
well okay enough arm waving now let’s cut the cake here
00:33:24 ►
river run
00:33:27 ►
past eve and adams
00:33:28 ►
from swerve of shore
00:33:30 ►
to bend of bay
00:33:31 ►
brings us by a commodious
00:33:33 ►
vicus of recirculation
00:33:35 ►
back to halif castle
00:33:37 ►
and environs
00:33:39 ►
sir tristram the alorda
00:33:41 ►
or the short sea
00:33:43 ►
had passing core re-arrived from North Amorica
00:33:47 ►
on this side, the scraggy isthmus of Europe minor,
00:33:51 ►
to welter fight his peninsulate war,
00:33:54 ►
nor had top sawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee
00:33:58 ►
exaggerated themselves to Lawrence County Gorgios
00:34:02 ►
while they went Dublin their mumber all the time,
00:34:06 ►
nor a voice from a fire bellowed Misha, Misha, to tart Toph, tart Patrick.
00:34:14 ►
Not yet, though Venice soon after had a kid’s gag but ended a bland old Isaac.
00:34:20 ►
Not yet, though all’s fair in Vanessi, were Sophie Sester’s Roth with two-in-one Nathan Joe
00:34:28 ►
Rotapec of Paws Malt had gem or shen brewed by arclight
00:34:35 ►
and Rory End to the Regenbow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface
00:34:41 ►
The Fall on the aqua face. The fall.
00:35:05 ►
Of a once wall-straight old par is retailed early in bed and later on life
00:35:08 ►
do it down through all Christian
00:35:10 ►
minstrelsy the great fall of off wall
00:35:14 ►
entailed at such short notice the fit
00:35:17 ►
shoot of Finnegan earth’s solid man that
00:35:22 ►
the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly
00:35:24 ►
sends an unquiring one well to the west
00:35:28 ►
in quest of his Humpty Tumtoes and their upturned pike toe and place is at the knockout in the park
00:35:35 ►
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlin’s first love Livy. So, now, granted that the first pages are dense,
00:35:49 ►
and it isn’t all this dense,
00:35:51 ►
because even though the concept of fractals lay years in the future,
00:35:57 ►
the effort here is to tell the whole damn thing in the first word,
00:36:02 ►
to tell it again in the next two words to tell it again in the next three
00:36:08 ►
words and so on so here in these first roughly three paragraphs a huge amount of information
00:36:16 ►
is being passed along first of all we’re given a location if we’re smart enough to know it
00:36:26 ►
River Run
00:36:28 ►
past Even Adams
00:36:29 ►
from Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay
00:36:32 ►
brings us by a commodious
00:36:34 ►
vicus of recirculation
00:36:37 ►
back to Howarth Castle
00:36:39 ►
and Environs
00:36:40 ►
well now
00:36:42 ►
if you know the geography
00:36:44 ►
of Dublin you know that’s where you are.
00:36:48 ►
And notice Howarth Castle and Environs is H-C-E.
00:36:55 ►
These initials recur thousands of times in this book,
00:37:01 ►
always bringing you back to remind you that this has something to do with
00:37:06 ►
humphrey or wicker what this first sentence says is river run and it’s the river liffey
00:37:12 ►
which we will meet in a thousand reincarnations because anna livia pluribel is the personification
00:37:19 ►
of the goddess river the river runs past even adams and there is a church there on the shore named adam
00:37:28 ►
and eve in dublin from swerve of shore to bend of bay and then this strange phrase brings us
00:37:34 ►
by a commodious vicus of recirculation this announces the great architectonic plan of the wake,
00:37:49 ►
that it is in fact going to be based on the sociological ruminations of Guillaume-Baptiste Vico’s La Sciencia Nuova,
00:37:54 ►
the Vico’s mode of recirculation,
00:37:57 ►
because, as I’m sure you all know,
00:38:00 ►
Vico’s theory of the fall and redemption of mankind was that there
00:38:05 ►
were four ages
00:38:07 ►
I can’t remember, gold, silver, iron
00:38:10 ►
and clay, I think
00:38:11 ►
and so this
00:38:13 ►
idea of the recirculation
00:38:16 ►
of the connectedness
00:38:18 ►
of the cyclicity
00:38:19 ►
of the, as he says, the same
00:38:22 ►
again, again and again
00:38:24 ►
sin again, sin, the same again, again and again. Sin again, sin again, the same again.
00:38:29 ►
And this is one of his great, great themes, is the recurso.
00:38:34 ►
Everything comes again, nothing is unannounced.
00:38:38 ►
Love affair, every dynastic intrigue, every minor political disgrace,
00:38:44 ►
and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently
00:38:48 ►
in this book, because as the carrier of Adam’s sin, the great dilemma for Humphrey Earwicker
00:38:57 ►
is that he is running for a minor political post, alderman, but apparently one night, rather juiced, he relieved
00:39:11 ►
himself, well, there are many versions and you hear them all and they are all given in
00:39:17 ►
dreams and in mock trials and in accusatory fantasy he either innocently took a leak in the park or he fondled himself in some
00:39:30 ►
way in the presence of maggie and her sister in such a way that his reputation is now at great
00:39:38 ►
risk and it all depends on the testimony of a cad, a soldier, or perhaps three soldiers.
00:39:47 ►
It’s never clear. It’s constantly shifting.
00:39:49 ►
And this question of, you know, what happened when Maggie seen all with her sister in shawl at the magazine wall haunts the book because on it turns the question of whether hce is a
00:40:07 ►
stalwart pillar of the community or in fact a backsliding masturbator and a monster and so
00:40:15 ►
forth and so on as one always is if one is trapped in a james joyce novel James Joyce novel then this puzzling list
00:40:26 ►
in the second paragraph
00:40:27 ►
is simply a list of things
00:40:29 ►
which haven’t happened yet
00:40:31 ►
Sir Tristram
00:40:33 ►
lover of music via Lord O’Moore’s
00:40:36 ►
for o’er the short sea
00:40:37 ►
had passing core not yet
00:40:40 ►
re-arrived from
00:40:41 ►
North Amorica
00:40:43 ►
from the coast of Brittany
00:40:44 ►
on this side
00:40:46 ►
the scraggy isthmus of Europe
00:40:48 ►
minor to welterweight
00:40:50 ►
his peninsulate war
00:40:52 ►
now this word
00:40:54 ►
peninsulate is typical
00:40:56 ►
Joyce punning
00:40:58 ►
peninsulate
00:41:00 ►
war obviously is being
00:41:02 ►
launched from Brittany
00:41:03 ►
peninsulate war because Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover.
00:41:10 ►
And so his war is penicillate.
00:41:15 ►
Okay, so that’s the first thing that has not yet happened, it’s telling you.
00:41:19 ►
Sir Tristram has not yet come to Ireland, to put it simply.
00:41:22 ►
Tristram has not yet come to Ireland to put it simply
00:41:23 ►
nor has Top Sawyer’s
00:41:28 ►
rocks by the stream Oconee
00:41:30 ►
exaggerated themselves to Lawrence County Gorgios
00:41:34 ►
while they went doubling their mumber
00:41:37 ►
all the time
00:41:38 ►
now this is further obscurity
00:41:42 ►
there is a
00:41:44 ►
stream in Georgia,
00:41:49 ►
and Top Sawyer is a reference to Tom Sawyer,
00:41:53 ►
because Tom Sawyer was Huck Finn’s friend,
00:41:57 ►
and Huck Finn is Finn in America.
00:42:01 ►
There is a huge amount of Mark Twain that has been poured into these books because of the
00:42:06 ►
Huckleberry Finn connection Finn in the new world and Top Sawyer’s Rocks is a reference possibly to
00:42:17 ►
testicles and so forth and so on every single word I mean you can just take a word and go into this and until you exhaust yourself
00:42:26 ►
and then the next thing that has not yet happened nor a voice from a fire bellowed
00:42:33 ►
to tartoff the art petric tartoff is celtic for thou art baptized so St. Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland
00:42:46 ►
not yet
00:42:48 ►
though then a soon after
00:42:50 ►
and the then a soon is a pun on venison
00:42:54 ►
and very soon
00:42:55 ►
had a kid scab butt ended a bland old Isaac
00:42:58 ►
it’s a reference to the Isaac Esau tale
00:43:01 ►
in the Bible
00:43:03 ►
it’s also a reference to Isaac Butts,
00:43:06 ►
who was a figure in the politics of the Irish Rebellion.
00:43:15 ►
Not yet, those all-spares in Vanessi,
00:43:19 ►
where Sothecester’s rocked with two a Nathan Joe.
00:43:23 ►
That’s, at this point, a very obscure reference,
00:43:26 ►
but there is a great incest and sister theme in Finnegan’s Wake.
00:43:33 ►
And the twin, the mistresses of Jonathan Swift
00:43:39 ►
become carriers of a huge amount of energy in here,
00:43:44 ►
as do the mistresses of Thomas Stern,
00:43:47 ►
because it’s better to be swift than stern,
00:43:53 ►
or something like that.
00:43:57 ►
And then the last of these things which hadn’t happened yet,
00:44:01 ►
Ratapek of Paul’s malt had gem or shem brewed by arclight, and Rory into the
00:44:07 ►
Regenbro was to be seen ringsome on the aqua face. That seems pretty obscure to me. According to
00:44:14 ►
Joseph Campbell, it’s simply a reference to the presence of God moving over the waters in the first lines of Genesis.
00:44:27 ►
Ringsome on the aquaface. Then this phrase, the fall, and the multisyllabic word,
00:44:34 ►
babalabara gebrur, but that word,
00:44:37 ►
these are the Viconian thunders.
00:44:41 ►
And they announce the beginning of each Viconian age.
00:44:46 ►
And when the thunder speaks, you know then that you’re into a transition.
00:44:54 ►
Then it actually launches in, in the last paragraph, into a fairly straightforward evocation of at least the mythological Finnegan. As you all probably know, there is an Irish
00:45:09 ►
drinking ballad of great antiquity called The Ballad of Tim Finnegan, or The Ballad of Finnegan’s
00:45:15 ►
Wake. And it tells the story of Tim Finnegan, who was a hod carrier, a bricklayer’s assistant.
00:45:45 ►
who was a hod carrier, a bricklayer’s assistant, and he was given to hitting the poteen rather fashion, and at the height of the wake,
00:45:49 ►
they became so carried away and intoxicated that they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head,
00:45:53 ►
and he revived and joined the dance.
00:46:00 ►
Tim Finnegan lived in Walken Street,
00:46:04 ►
a gentle Irishman, mighty art, paid a beautiful brogue, so rich and sweet, to rise in the world he carried a hat.
00:46:09 ►
You see, he’d a sort of a tippling way, with a look for the liquor poor Tim was born, a helpful man with his work each day, to drop with a crater every morn.
00:46:17 ►
I called the dam out and see a man there who held the floor, you trotter, shake. Wasn’t it the truth I told you, lots of fun that Finnegan swang?
00:46:22 ►
Trotter shake, wasn’t it the truth I told you lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake
00:46:24 ►
One morning Tim got rather full
00:46:26 ►
His head felt heavy which made him shake
00:46:28 ►
Fell from a ladder and he broke his skull
00:46:29 ►
And they carried him home as corpse to wake
00:46:31 ►
Rolled him up in an icing sheet
00:46:33 ►
And laid him out upon the bed
00:46:35 ►
A gallon of whiskey at his feet
00:46:37 ►
And a bottle of pork were at his head
00:46:38 ►
For the man who danced the apartment
00:46:40 ►
With the lawyer, Trotter shake, wasn’t it the truth
00:46:43 ►
I told you lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake.
00:46:46 ►
His friends assembled at the wake
00:46:48 ►
and Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch.
00:46:50 ►
First you brought in tea and cake,
00:46:51 ►
then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
00:46:53 ►
And the O’Brien began to cry,
00:46:55 ►
said, it’s a nice clean corpse that you will see.
00:46:57 ►
Tim O’Brien, why did you die?
00:46:59 ►
I hear a howl, your gob said, Paddy McGee.
00:47:00 ►
I called it an out and stay apart there
00:47:02 ►
while the boyer trotters shake.
00:47:04 ►
Wasn’t it the truth I told you? Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake. Then Maggie O’Connor took up the job It’s the end of the world. was all the rage in a row and eruption soon began. Whack for the Dano, dance to your partner, well to blow your totter’s shape.
00:47:26 ►
Wasn’t it the truth I told you,
00:47:28 ►
lots of fun that fit against wife.
00:47:29 ►
Then Mickey Maloney raised his head
00:47:31 ►
when a nug of whiskey flew at him.
00:47:33 ►
It missed and fallen on the bed,
00:47:35 ►
the liquor scattered over tip.
00:47:37 ►
Tim revived, see how he rises,
00:47:39 ►
Timothy rising from the bed, said,
00:47:41 ►
well you’re a whiskey around like blazes,
00:47:42 ►
Tannerman Dale, do you think I’m dead?
00:47:44 ►
Whack for the Dano, dance to your partner, well to blow your totter’s shape. from the bed said well you’re a whiskey your own leg blazes tanaman deal do you think i’m dead this is the resurrection i mean tim finnegan is very clearly for joyce a christ figure and here
00:47:59 ►
is then the first evocation of Tim Finnegan the fall
00:48:05 ►
then the Viconian thunder
00:48:07 ►
of a once wall straight old par
00:48:10 ►
which is just an old person
00:48:12 ►
is retailed early in bed
00:48:14 ►
and later on life
00:48:16 ►
down through all Christian minstrelsy
00:48:18 ►
the great fall of the off wall
00:48:20 ►
entailed at such short notice
00:48:23 ►
the shoot of Finnegan.
00:48:26 ►
Now this word, P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E,
00:48:31 ►
fitchute, is Norwegian, I’m informed,
00:48:36 ►
and it refers to the act of falling
00:48:43 ►
and the act of falling from a hill.
00:48:47 ►
Finnegan.
00:48:48 ►
Earth’s solid man
00:48:49 ►
that the humpty hill head of himself
00:48:52 ►
promptly sends an unquiring one well
00:48:55 ►
to the west
00:48:55 ►
in quest of his tumpty tumtoes
00:48:58 ►
and their upturned pike point and place
00:49:01 ►
is at the knockout in the park
00:49:02 ►
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the
00:49:06 ►
green since devlin’s first love livy this is fairly transparent if you’re irish or a citizen
00:49:13 ►
of dublin because what it’s talking about is dublin is imagined to be situated basically in the belly of an enormous giant person who is uh finnigan finnigan
00:49:31 ►
lies like a giant reclining figure along the liffey there husband and wife river and mountain
00:49:41 ►
and and this is actually then the focus has changed and now we’re
00:49:46 ►
talking about the geography he was a solid man earth’s solid man but then
00:49:55 ►
somehow he turned into something where the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly
00:50:01 ►
sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his
00:50:05 ►
tumpty tum toes and if you have a map of Dublin laid out you can actually see
00:50:11 ►
this enormous man in the landscape and there are many enormous men and women in
00:50:19 ►
the landscape of this planet and Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them some of you may know
00:50:27 ►
Istaxivatl the magical mountain in Mexico Istaxivatl means the sleeping woman in Toltec
00:50:35 ►
and many mountains are imagined to be sleeping people so here he introduces this theme and this is one paragraph
00:50:48 ►
this is the the invocation of Finnegan as hod carrier big mr. Finnegan of the
00:50:59 ►
stuttering hand freeman’s mower lived in the broadest way imaginable in his rush lit too far
00:51:07 ►
back for messages before Joshua and judges had given us numbers or Helviticus commuted
00:51:15 ►
ditteronomy. One yeasty day he sternly strokes his teat in a toe for to wash the future of his fates. But ere he swiftly took it out again,
00:51:26 ►
by the might of Moses, the very water was evaporated, and all the gunases had met their
00:51:33 ►
exodus. So that ought to show you what a pension-junchy choppy was. And during mighty odd years,
00:51:40 ►
this man of hard cement and edifices, H-C-E, hard cement and edifices hce hod cement and edifices in toppers
00:51:47 ►
thorp piled bildung supra bildung pon the banks of the livers by the so-and-so
00:51:54 ►
he iade idil fife ani og’d the little creetir with her har in huns took up
00:52:02 ►
your part in her off while fabulous mirror ahead
00:52:07 ►
with goodly trowel and grasp and ivor old overalls
00:52:11 ►
which he had particularly fancied
00:52:14 ►
like harum childeric egerberth
00:52:17 ►
he would calculate by multiplicables
00:52:21 ►
the altitude and multitude
00:52:24 ►
until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor where twint
00:52:29 ►
was born his round head stable of other days to rise in undress masonry upstanded joy granite
00:52:40 ►
a walworth of a skier scrape of most eiffel howeth and towerly
00:52:47 ►
originating from next to nothing
00:52:50 ►
and salascating the hymnals and all
00:52:53 ►
higher architect tip of flopical
00:52:56 ►
with a burning bush a bob off its bubble top
00:53:00 ►
and with Lorenzo Tuller’s clittering up
00:53:03 ►
and Thomas Abackett’s cluttering down.
00:53:07 ►
Now, what this paragraph says is he was a great builder.
00:53:13 ►
And I think if you think back through your impression of hearing it read, you knew that. These words that are associated, words like a wall worth of a skyscraper of most eiffel howeth and towerly.
00:53:33 ►
These are skyscraper words.
00:53:35 ►
Woolworth, skyscraper, and towerly, howeth, so forth and so on.
00:53:41 ►
And he can do this.
00:53:43 ►
He can build up a past pastiche of surfaces of impressions
00:53:49 ►
now you might say why is there no economy well there is no economy because economy is an aesthetic for shoemakers, not for artists.
00:54:09 ►
And, you know, economy is the curse of the Bauhaus babblers from hell,
00:54:12 ►
which Joyce was very concerned to refute all of that.
00:54:17 ►
If you have to place this in a context,
00:54:20 ►
it’s in the context of the most hallucinatory of the Baroque you know
00:54:27 ►
this is our come bold o land this is a work that would have been welcome at the
00:54:33 ►
Rudolphine court in Prague it’s a work of magical complexity and and in folded and enfolded self-reference.
00:54:47 ►
Now we’ve just been through these first four paragraphs.
00:54:52 ►
Now I’ll read you what Joseph Campbell has to say on it.
00:54:56 ►
By no means all of what he has to say on it.
00:55:01 ►
The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time
00:55:05 ►
between a cycle just passed
00:55:07 ►
and one about to begin
00:55:08 ►
they are in effect an overture
00:55:10 ►
resonant with all the themes
00:55:12 ►
of Finnegan’s Wake
00:55:13 ►
the dominant motif is the polylingual
00:55:16 ►
thunderclap of paragraph three
00:55:18 ►
baba baba daru your woman
00:55:20 ►
that one
00:55:20 ►
which the voice of God makes audible
00:55:24 ►
through the noise of Finnegan’s fall
00:55:26 ►
narrative movement begins
00:55:28 ►
with the life, fall and wake
00:55:30 ►
of Hod Carrier Finnegan
00:55:31 ►
pages 4 to 7
00:55:34 ►
the wake scene fades into
00:55:36 ►
the landscape of Dublin
00:55:37 ►
and environs
00:55:39 ►
we’ve just heard how he fell from the ladder
00:55:42 ►
now we move
00:55:44 ►
into a description of the wake,
00:55:48 ►
and there’s a certain voice that appears at certain times.
00:55:54 ►
It’s where there are a lot of words ending in A-T-I-O-N,
00:56:00 ►
continuation of the celebration until the examination of the extermination
00:56:05 ►
okay these are the twelve judges
00:56:08 ►
each character when they appear has a certain tempo to their character
00:56:14 ►
so when that tempo enters the text
00:56:18 ►
you know the character is present even though there may be no trace
00:56:23 ►
for example Anna Olivia Pluribel’s tempo is the tempo of the hen.
00:56:29 ►
Here a little, there a little, go a little, see a little, do a little.
00:56:32 ►
The hen is scratching.
00:56:33 ►
This is this nervous, bird-like, that’s Annalivia’s signature.
00:56:38 ►
Here’s just one paragraph from the wake scene,
00:56:41 ►
which builds and has quite a minor amount of humor associated with it
00:56:47 ►
she’s i should say
00:56:52 ►
of a trying thursday morning sobs they sided at philun’s chrysomorous wake all the hulavans of the nation prostrated in their consternation and their duodismally ploflusive plethora of ululation and cinnamon too and they all going in with the shout most
00:57:25 ►
show reality agog and mawgog and the round of them agrog to the continuation
00:57:32 ►
of that celebration until hand and hungans extermination some in kink and
00:57:38 ►
chorus more can can keenan belling him up and filling him down. He’s stiff, but he’s steady, is Priam Olam.
00:57:48 ►
Twas he was a decent gay labourin’ youth.
00:57:52 ►
Sharpen his pillow-scone, top up his beer.
00:57:55 ►
Ere where in this whorl will you hear such a din again?
00:57:59 ►
With their deep-brow fundigs and the dusty fidelios,
00:58:04 ►
they laid him brawn-drawn a langlast bed,
00:58:08 ►
with a buckle-lips of fisky for his feet
00:58:11 ►
and a barrel-load of gunas or his head,
00:58:14 ►
to the total of the fluid hang the twaddle of the fuddle-dough.
00:58:19 ►
Well, it’s a drunken Irish way, that seems clear,
00:58:24 ►
but there are a lot of things going on.
00:58:27 ►
Where in this world will you hear such a din again?
00:58:31 ►
And he’s stiff but he’s steady is Priam Olam.
00:58:36 ►
All this Dionysian and sexual imagery is fully explicit.
00:58:47 ►
In some ways, more realized as a character,
00:58:51 ►
or more lovable, if that’s the word,
00:58:54 ►
is Anna-Livia Pluribel.
00:58:56 ►
I mean, Anna-Livia Pluribel is Molly Bloom on acid, basically.
00:59:01 ►
I mean, Molly Bloom, we don’t lose her outlines we understand molly and because molly
00:59:10 ►
doesn’t offer us that much of her own mind she stands for the eternal feminine but only in the
00:59:18 ►
final soliloquy in ulysses do we really contact her and olivia it’s her book it may in fact be her dream
00:59:27 ►
and the whole thing is permeated
00:59:29 ►
with her tensions and her cares
00:59:32 ►
as it says
00:59:33 ►
grandpapas is fallen down
00:59:35 ►
meaning the great father god is at wake
00:59:39 ►
grandpapas is fallen down
00:59:41 ►
but grinny spreads the board
00:59:44 ►
meaning an Olivia is always there she’s always
00:59:49 ►
there and in in the wake really you could almost say that molly bloom’s soliloquy has been expanded
00:59:57 ►
to 300 400 pages and the whole thing is a meditation on the river the river is the feminine and the first
01:00:08 ►
image in the book and the last image are the image of the river the river dissolves everything
01:00:15 ►
and carries it out to sea let me read this description of anna olivia pluribel and then
01:00:21 ►
we’ll go back to the synopsis how How beautiful and how true to wife of her,
01:00:27 ►
when strangly forbidden,
01:00:30 ►
to steal our historic presence from the past post-propophoticals,
01:00:36 ►
so as to will make us all lordiers and lady-maidesses
01:00:40 ►
of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.
01:00:43 ►
She is living in our midst of debt
01:00:46 ►
and laughing through all plores for us.
01:00:50 ►
Her birth is uncontrollable,
01:00:52 ►
with a napper on for her mask
01:00:54 ►
and her sabos kicking arias.
01:00:57 ►
So ser, so solly.
01:00:59 ►
If you ask me and I sack you,
01:01:01 ►
how, how, Greeks may rise
01:01:04 ►
and Troisers fall.
01:01:06 ►
She is mercenary.
01:01:08 ►
Through the length of the land lies under liquidation,
01:01:12 ►
flute, and there’s nor a harbow nor an eye-brush
01:01:16 ►
on this glabrous place of Hershruft.
01:01:20 ►
What are, Walter, she’ll loan a vesta
01:01:22 ►
and hire some peat and sarge the shores her cockles to heat,
01:01:27 ►
and shall do all a tarf woman can to puff the business on, puff, to puff the blaziness on, puff, puff,
01:01:36 ►
and even if Humphrey shall fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beard’s bus bussulum of all our grand remonstrances
01:01:47 ►
There’ll be eggs for the breakers come to mourn him sunny side up with care
01:01:54 ►
So true it is that there’s where’s a turnover the Tay is wet too
01:02:00 ►
And when you think you catch sight of a hind make sure you’re cocked by a hen
01:02:06 ►
well Nora felt that Jimmy would have been much better as a singer she so
01:02:13 ►
stated that she had great hopes for his voice and she was a very practical woman
01:02:20 ►
Nora Barnacle there wasn’t a literary bone in her body I think I think that’s what Joyce
01:02:26 ►
loved about her was that she was the real thing and all these women Molly and Olivia
01:02:35 ►
they all are are Nora Joyce for sure he died shortly after it was published although it had been known in manuscript for over
01:02:48 ►
10 years to the literati of his circle um it was called work in progress and um people didn’t even
01:02:58 ►
know if he was serious or not uh and it was very hard to find a publisher. It was a typographical nightmare. Joyce was going
01:03:08 ►
blind. And so, you know, trying to keep track of the spelling. And there’s hardly a standard
01:03:15 ►
spelling in there. There’s hardly a word that is not somehow fiddled with and changed around.
01:03:24 ►
somehow fiddled with and changed around.
01:03:29 ►
If you pay attention to what you’re calling life as it is,
01:03:33 ►
you will discover that it’s not a simple thing at all,
01:03:36 ►
that it’s like this.
01:03:38 ►
I mean, I used to say,
01:03:40 ►
when you’re vacuuming your apartment,
01:03:44 ►
Rome falls nine times an hour,
01:03:49 ►
and your job is to notice and you always do notice but you never tell yourself that you’re noticing so it in the course of a day you know I I live
01:03:58 ►
and you live to some degree, the entirety of global civilization.
01:04:06 ►
I mean, Rome falls, algebra is discovered,
01:04:11 ►
the Turks are beating at the gates of Vienna,
01:04:14 ►
and it isn’t even 11 a.m. yet, you know.
01:04:17 ►
So there is this sense of the co-presence of history.
01:04:24 ►
We are imprisoned inside the linear assumption
01:04:27 ►
that I’m a person in a place, in a time,
01:04:31 ►
I’m alive, most people aren’t.
01:04:34 ►
But in fact, when you deconstruct all that,
01:04:37 ►
that’s just, that is fiction.
01:04:40 ►
And the truth is more this onrushing magma of literary association.
01:04:50 ►
And you know in Ulysses you get an enormous amount of half-baked science.
01:04:55 ►
Leopold Bloom is always looking at things and explaining to himself how they work
01:05:01 ►
using very crack-potted notions of hydraulics and electricity
01:05:06 ►
and this sort of thing I think you know people say the psychedelic experience is
01:05:14 ►
hard to remember dreams are hard to remember but harder to remember than
01:05:19 ►
either of those is simply ordinary experience you know you lie in the bath and you close
01:05:27 ►
your eyes for 30 seconds and empires fall dynastic families unfold themselves
01:05:34 ►
power changes hands princes are beheaded a pope disgrace so for that was for you
01:05:41 ►
and and then somebody drops something and you wake up and
01:05:48 ►
15 seconds have passed that’s the reality of life but we suppress this chaotic irrational side
01:05:56 ►
the genius of joyce and to some degree although in a more controlled form Proust and then there were other practitioners
01:06:09 ►
From Faulkner certainly was what they called stream of consciousness
01:06:17 ►
But what it was was it was an ability to Lee listen to the associating mind
01:06:19 ►
without trimming pruning
01:06:21 ►
judging denying it one of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism
01:06:27 ►
between Jung and Joyce
01:06:29 ►
because you would have thought that they would have been comrades in arms.
01:06:36 ►
But Joyce loathed psychoanalysis.
01:06:42 ►
He thought that to use all this material
01:06:46 ►
to elucidate imagined pathologies
01:06:49 ►
was a very uncreative use of it
01:06:53 ►
and that it should all be fabricated into literature.
01:06:58 ►
It’s very hard to surpass.
01:07:01 ►
You know, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people, they, everybody genuflects to Joyce, but very few people plow in the way he did.
01:07:14 ►
I mean, Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer, and there isn’t 20 pages in Gravity’s Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here.
01:07:31 ►
I can understand the impulse to want to get the universe into a book
01:07:38 ►
because it hints at something that we’ve talked about in some of these circles, or whatever they are,
01:07:45 ►
which is that the character of life is like a work of literature.
01:07:57 ►
We are told that you’re supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable,
01:08:11 ►
and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.
01:08:21 ►
I mean, we fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland,
01:08:29 ►
we lose everything, we get terrible diseases, we’re cured of them, or we die of them. But it
01:08:36 ►
all has this strong and strong aspect to it, which physics is not supposed to have but which literature always has
01:08:46 ►
and I think that, I don’t know if it’s true
01:08:49 ►
but I think what Joyce believed
01:08:51 ►
and what I’m willing to entertain at some depth
01:08:55 ►
is the idea that salvation
01:08:57 ►
is somehow an act of encompassing
01:09:02 ►
comprehension
01:09:03 ►
that salvation is an actual act of encompassing comprehension.
01:09:09 ►
That salvation is an actual act of apprehension,
01:09:11 ►
of understanding,
01:09:16 ►
and that this act of apprehension involves everything.
01:09:22 ►
This is why the alchemic before James Joyce and this kind of literature,
01:09:23 ►
the only place where you’ve got these kinds of constructs was in alchemic before James Joyce and this kind of literature the only place where you’ve got these
01:09:26 ►
kinds of constructs was in alchemy and magic the idea that you know through an act of magic the
01:09:37 ►
universe could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself.
01:09:46 ►
Well, then what Joyce is saying is that the novel,
01:09:51 ►
which was unknown in the alchemical era,
01:09:53 ►
the novel comes later, I mean, arguably,
01:09:56 ►
but the real zest for the novel comes in the 19th century,
01:10:01 ►
that the novel is the alchemical retort into which these theories of how things work can be cast.
01:10:13 ►
I think the great modern exponent of this, although now dead,
01:10:18 ►
and certainly one who owed an enormous debt to Joyce, was Vladimir Nabokov,
01:10:26 ►
especially in Ada.
01:10:32 ►
Ada is his paean of praise to Finnegan’s Wake, basically.
01:10:34 ►
And the idea tacked in there
01:10:36 ►
is the idea of causality
01:10:39 ►
and ordinary causuistry.
01:10:43 ►
See, what all these people are saying, I think,
01:10:47 ►
and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well,
01:10:51 ►
is that we are somehow prisoners of language
01:10:56 ►
and that somehow, you know,
01:11:00 ►
if we are prisoners of language,
01:11:02 ►
then the key which will set us loose
01:11:05 ►
is somehow also made of
01:11:08 ►
language what else could fit
01:11:10 ►
the lock so
01:11:11 ►
somehow an act of
01:11:13 ►
poetic
01:11:14 ►
leisure domain
01:11:17 ►
is necessary
01:11:20 ►
and Joyce
01:11:22 ►
in Finnegan’s Wake I mean he didn’t
01:11:24 ►
live to argue the case
01:11:25 ►
or to work it out
01:11:27 ►
he died shortly after
01:11:28 ►
but this comes about as close
01:11:31 ►
as anybody ever came
01:11:32 ►
to actually pushing the entire contents
01:11:37 ►
of the universe down
01:11:38 ►
into about 14 cubic inches
01:11:41 ►
Joyce and Proust had one meeting and supposedly Joyce said to
01:11:51 ►
Proust, I’m too young for you to teach me anything. Are you all familiar with the
01:11:59 ►
remembrance of things past? Well it could hardly be a more different work of literature. I mean, it is
01:12:06 ►
stately and cinematic, and you always know where you are and the characters are defined. It’s an
01:12:14 ►
old-style novel, but there are places in it where he just takes flight and prefigures the kind of writing that Faulkner and Joyce were able to do.
01:12:28 ►
As far as psychedelic influences, I don’t know that there are arguably any.
01:12:37 ►
Joyce lived in Trieste for a while and taught English.
01:12:41 ►
He may have been, as as a habit to a of Paris he
01:12:46 ►
may have been familiar with hashish he probably had some familiarity with
01:12:52 ►
absent but I doubt that it was a lifestyle for him I think that the whole
01:13:03 ►
of the 20th century is informed by this hyper-dimensional understanding.
01:13:09 ►
And that, you know, Jung tapping into it in the 20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists even earlier,
01:13:28 ►
in Zurich, the Surrealists, even earlier the Ecole de Pathophysique, L’Entremont Jury, all of these people.
01:13:40 ►
It’s what it’s about, the 20th century, is this, well, McLuhan’s phrase comes to mind,
01:14:05 ►
the Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects created by print, you know, the classes, the conce’t want to say dying because civilizations aren’t animals,
01:14:08 ►
but we are living in an age of great self-summation
01:14:13 ►
when what we look back at
01:14:16 ►
is basically since the fall of Rome,
01:14:21 ►
there has been an unbroken working out of certain themes.
01:14:28 ►
Scholasticism, the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses,
01:14:34 ►
Christianity, always presented as somehow a rival to science,
01:14:41 ►
is in fact paves the way for science.
01:14:44 ►
There would have been no science
01:14:46 ►
had there not been William of Ockham
01:14:48 ►
who was a
01:14:49 ►
14th century nominalist theologian
01:14:52 ►
really
01:14:54 ►
western civilization
01:14:56 ►
has had a thousand years
01:14:58 ►
to work its magic
01:14:59 ►
and now
01:15:01 ►
there is
01:15:04 ►
a summation underway and I don’t certainly presume, at least not this evening, to judge it.
01:15:11 ►
How do you place a value on an entire civilization? in the same way that when a person dies,
01:15:25 ►
their entire life passes before them in review,
01:15:30 ►
when a civilization dies,
01:15:33 ►
it hypnagogically cycles the detritus
01:15:39 ►
of centuries and centuries of struggle to understand.
01:15:45 ►
And someone like Joyce, I think,
01:15:47 ►
just brings that to an excruciating climax
01:15:51 ►
because it’s all there, you know.
01:15:57 ►
It’s all there, from the smile that tugs
01:16:00 ►
at the lips of the woman in the Arnolfini wedding
01:16:04 ►
to quantum physics,
01:16:07 ►
to what Moliere said to his niece in the 15th letter,
01:16:12 ►
and so forth and so on.
01:16:15 ►
And the task is to hold it in your mind.
01:16:20 ►
I think it was William James who said,
01:16:26 ►
if we don’t read the books with which we carefully line our apartments,
01:16:32 ►
then we’re no better than our dogs and cats.
01:16:36 ►
And, you know, too often this is lost sight of.
01:16:42 ►
And the point of it, it’s not simply that we are
01:16:45 ►
esthetes, literateurs,
01:16:47 ►
and that here in the twilight of the gods
01:16:49 ►
we should sit around
01:16:51 ►
reading James Joyce.
01:16:53 ►
That isn’t the point.
01:16:54 ►
The point is that this is the distillation
01:16:57 ►
of our experience of what it is
01:16:59 ►
to be human, and it’s out of
01:17:01 ►
these kinds of
01:17:03 ►
distilling processes that we can launch some
01:17:07 ►
kind of new uh new dispensation for the human enterprise because we we have played it we have
01:17:18 ►
played it out it’s a it’s uh it’s now a set piece, all of it.
01:17:27 ►
I mean, when I listen to rock and roll now,
01:17:30 ►
it’s interesting to me, but it has the completedness of polyphony.
01:17:36 ►
It’s a done deal somehow,
01:17:40 ►
and we’re looking backward and we’re anticipating.
01:17:44 ►
And the purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past
01:17:48 ►
and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future.
01:17:53 ►
And this book, by being at first so opaque and so challenging to aesthetic canons and social values,
01:18:08 ►
challenging to aesthetic canons and social values eventually emerges as a very prescient insight into our circumstance. The Ballad of Finnegan’s Wake has hundreds of verses and
01:18:17 ►
in an Irish pub it can keep people going all night long.
01:18:27 ►
It’s a celebration of complexity and of the human journey
01:18:30 ►
and Joyce doesn’t judge.
01:18:34 ►
I mean, you know,
01:18:36 ►
it says somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake,
01:18:38 ►
here in Moy Cain,
01:18:40 ►
which is the red light district of Dublin,
01:18:42 ►
here in Moy Cain we flop on the seamy side,
01:18:46 ►
but up Neant, prospector,
01:18:50 ►
you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.
01:18:54 ►
So if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.
01:18:58 ►
That’s that passage about death.
01:19:00 ►
Here in Moycane we flop on the seamy side,
01:19:03 ►
but up Neant you sprout all your worth and
01:19:07 ►
woof your wings it was a very optimistic uh uh transformative sort of vision
01:19:15 ►
somehow complexity is what is the ocean we have to learn to surf yes that’s the river and that’s the psychedelic side of it
01:19:27 ►
I mean imagine that you can get
01:19:29 ►
63,000 different words in here
01:19:31 ►
tell a story
01:19:33 ►
and have all the articles
01:19:34 ►
common articles and modifiers
01:19:36 ►
operating normally anyway
01:19:38 ►
it’s
01:19:41 ►
and then it’s very optimistic.
01:19:45 ►
I mean, Molly Bloom’s speech is probably the single most optimistic outpouring in all of 20th century literature.
01:19:57 ►
Not that there was much competition.
01:20:02 ►
Yes, yes, the final affirmation, yes.
01:20:07 ►
Sam Beckett, Nobel Prize winner, genius in his own right,
01:20:12 ►
but secretary to James Joyce for many, many years,
01:20:16 ►
and passionately in love with Joyce’s tragically schizophrenic daughter.
01:20:24 ►
You know, you want an unhappy story,
01:20:27 ►
the story of Sam,
01:20:29 ►
you’ll find out why Sam Beckett is not exactly laughing all the time in his room.
01:20:35 ►
A very, very complex relationship to Joyce’s schizophrenic child.
01:20:41 ►
Joyce’s family life was not very happy.
01:20:44 ►
I think he had a wonderfully sensuous life with Nora.
01:20:49 ►
But I don’t know what it would be like to be the guy who wrote this book and live with
01:20:54 ►
a woman who thought you would be better off as a saloon singer.
01:20:59 ►
Not exactly a saloon singer.
01:21:02 ►
I mean, he did, but still.
01:21:02 ►
Not exactly a saloon singer.
01:21:04 ►
I mean, he did, but still.
01:21:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:21:13 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:21:17 ►
Well, thank you, Bebe.
01:21:20 ►
And in case you haven’t heard me mention this before,
01:21:24 ►
that lovely Australian-accented voice you just heard is none other than Black Beauty,
01:21:26 ►
the host of BB’s Bungalow
01:21:28 ►
on the dopefiend.co.uk
01:21:30 ►
network. And if
01:21:32 ►
you haven’t checked out the Cannabis Podcast
01:21:34 ►
network at that URL,
01:21:36 ►
well, you don’t know what you’re missing.
01:21:38 ►
There are half a dozen or so podcasts
01:21:40 ►
there, all of which I
01:21:41 ►
listen to regularly. So
01:21:43 ►
thank you, BB and friends, for all you do in
01:21:46 ►
podcast land. It would sure be a lonely place without you. Now, in order to get started on the
01:21:53 ►
next segment of this talk, I’m going to try to keep my announcements here kind of brief, and we’ll
01:21:58 ►
catch up on the rest of the news from the tribe in my next program. But there are a few quick things
01:22:03 ►
that I do want to mention right now.
01:22:05 ►
And the first one is that the other day
01:22:08 ►
Gary Fisher gave me a folder that contained
01:22:10 ►
a dozen or so of his research papers
01:22:12 ►
that haven’t yet been digitized
01:22:14 ►
and published on the Internet.
01:22:16 ►
And while I haven’t yet had the time
01:22:18 ►
to read any of them,
01:22:19 ►
their titles are very intriguing.
01:22:22 ►
Things like Psychedelic Drug Usage,
01:22:28 ►
Sociological and Soci-political considerations,
01:22:33 ►
personality characteristics ascribed to marijuana users,
01:22:35 ►
milieu of marijuana use,
01:22:39 ►
multiple drug use of marijuana users,
01:22:41 ►
the legalization of marijuana, views of several Populations of Users and Non-Users,
01:22:47 ►
and Ecosystems’ Approach to the Study of Dangerous Drug Use and Abuse, with special reference to the marijuana issue.
01:22:55 ►
And at least three or four other papers are also about some early cannabis studies,
01:23:01 ►
most of which were published in scholarly journals in the early 1970s.
01:23:06 ►
Now, the reason I’m mentioning them now is that there simply is no way I’m going to have
01:23:11 ►
the time to rekey them into digital format for posting on the web.
01:23:15 ►
And I don’t feel right about waiting for a year or so to get these papers online.
01:23:20 ►
So if any of you good typists would like to volunteer to do this work, I would be happy to mail them out to you to process as your time permits
01:23:29 ►
but I should warn you that some of these papers are quite long
01:23:32 ►
and have detailed tables in them that are going to be rather tedious to type
01:23:37 ►
at least it would be for me
01:23:38 ►
so if you’re interested in looking into this
01:23:42 ►
you can try to reach me via email at lorenzoatmatrixmasters.com.
01:23:48 ►
However, right now, the only sure way to reach me is through the Facebook email system.
01:23:54 ►
So far, I’ve been able to keep up with those messages on a weekly basis, and there’s no spam filter there to give you a problem.
01:24:01 ►
And as you know, you can find me on Facebook under my full name, Lorenzo Haggerty.
01:24:06 ►
And that’s H-A-G-E-R-T-Y, one G.
01:24:10 ►
Another thing I’d like to mention today is that yesterday I spoke with Sasha Shulgin,
01:24:15 ►
who told me that Ann is doing fine after having what she told me was a roto-rooter job.
01:24:22 ►
And I’m sure she would appreciate any white light you can send her away.
01:24:27 ►
But right now, all is well, and she should be home from the hospital by the time you hear this podcast.
01:24:33 ►
So, Anne, we wish you a speedy recovery and look forward to the next time you stop by the salon for another one of your wonderful talks.
01:24:42 ►
another one of your wonderful talks.
01:24:48 ►
And finally, I want to let you know that I will be speaking at the Oracle Gathering that is going to be held from June 12th through the 14th.
01:24:52 ►
I’ll post a link to this event with the program notes for today’s podcast,
01:24:56 ►
but since you probably aren’t at your computer right now,
01:24:59 ►
I’ll go ahead and read a little bit from the OracleGatherings.com website. And that’s Oracle Gatherings, plural, O-R-A-C-L-E-G-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-G-S dot com.
01:25:12 ►
And here’s a small idea of what these incredible events are about.
01:25:17 ►
Founded in 2001, the Oracle Gatherings is a series of multimedia events, workshops, and forums created by a collective of participating artists,
01:25:29 ►
growing to include hundreds from all over the Northwest, Canada, and beyond.
01:25:34 ►
The events draw artists of every genre, including DJs, musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, video artists, circus performers,
01:25:43 ►
and culinary artists who share in creating
01:25:46 ►
the fullest experience possible.
01:25:48 ►
Those who have been to an Oracle Gathering have come to expect ceremony, music, dancing,
01:25:53 ►
tarot card readers, yoga, meditation, massage, art installations, and ritual theater.
01:26:00 ►
This formula is what sets these gatherings apart from all other theater, club, and art events.
01:26:06 ►
By infusing spirit and celebration, many people have found an open, inviting community waiting for them in the Oracle.
01:26:14 ►
This summer brings us the last of the original tarot card series, the 23rd Gathering of the Oracle, The Fountain, June 12-14, 2009.
01:26:24 ►
The Fountain, June 12-14, 2009 Now the location for this event has not yet been announced,
01:26:29 ►
but I can tell you that it will be within a few hours drive from Portland, Oregon.
01:26:34 ►
My wife and I and several of our close friends will be there,
01:26:38 ►
and if there is any way you can make it yourself, I know you won’t be disappointed.
01:26:42 ►
I was only able to make it to one of their previous events
01:26:46 ►
and it really took me by surprise.
01:26:48 ►
Blew me away, in fact.
01:26:50 ►
And this final gathering
01:26:52 ►
promises to be even more spectacular
01:26:54 ►
since it will be held outdoors.
01:26:57 ►
The best way I can
01:26:58 ►
think of to describe an
01:27:00 ►
oracle gathering is to call it
01:27:01 ►
Mind States Meets Burning Man,
01:27:04 ►
but without the extreme conditions we face on the playa, of course.
01:27:08 ►
So, if you are still trying to find the others, well,
01:27:11 ►
this is where a lot of them are going to be on June 12th through the 14th of this year.
01:27:16 ►
I’m already sensing that this will be one of the legendary gatherings
01:27:20 ►
that we’ll be talking about for many years to come.
01:27:23 ►
And I hope to see you there.
01:27:25 ►
But if you do plan to attend, please don’t wait too long
01:27:28 ►
to get your ticket, because it could very well
01:27:30 ►
sell out fast.
01:27:32 ►
Well, that’s about enough
01:27:34 ►
of my chatter for today, and
01:27:35 ►
I’ll be back as soon as I can with the
01:27:38 ►
second part of the talk we just heard.
01:27:40 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo
01:27:42 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:27:46 ►
Be well well my friends