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Coincidance.Pdf I mention, as the most salient characteristics (of the collective unconscious) chaotic multiplicity and order; duality; the opposition of light and dark, upper and lower, right and left; the union of opposites in a third; the quaternity (square, cross); rotation (circle, sphere); and finally the centering process and a radical arrangement that usually followed some quaternity system . C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy The mome rath hasn't been born that can outgrabe me. James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival TABLE OF CONTENTS Fore-Words: Into the Labyrinth 3 Coincidance, PART ONE: Synchronicity and Isomorphism in Finnegans Wake 5 Werewolf Bridge 29 The Motherfucker Mystique 31 Mammary Metaphysics 37 Jazz Haiku 63 How to Read / How to Think 65 How to Read / How to Think Afterwards 73 Shrapnel 75 Why Do You Live in Ireland, Dr. Wilson? 77 The Poet as Defense Early Warning Radar System 81 Coincidance, PART TWO: Death and Absence in Joyce 87 Introduction to Three Articles from THE REALIST 105 The Doctor With the Frightened Eyes ........ ....... ...... 109 Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis 117 The Married Catholic Priests' Convention 129 Self-Reflexive Surrealist Haiku 137 The Godfathers and the Goddess 139 The Physics of Synchronicity 147 Coincidance, PART THREE: Semper as Oxhousehumper 157 Interview with Sean MacBride 175 Religion for the Hell of It 191 Comix and Cut-Ups 205 No Waters in Cherry Valley by the Testicles 209 Shrapnel 233 Coincidance, PART FOUR: The Hidden Variables 235 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Doctor Willi the Frightened Eyes; Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis; and the Married Catholic Priests' Convention; were originally published in The Realist, and are reprinted with permission of the publisher. [Subscriptions to The Realist are available at $23 for 12 issues—Box 1230, Venice, CA 90294] The Godfathers and the Goddess and Religion for the Hell of it were originally published by Hot Press, Dublin, Ireland, and are reprinted with their permission. We acknowledge with gratitude, the permission for reprinting additional material, whose official grants were received post-press time. These publishers will be specifically noted in subsequent printings of Coincidance. FORE—WORDS Into the Labyrinth Like many another wild and anarchistic wanderer of our shattered times, I spend a lot of time asking myself questions that are officially classed as "nonsensical" by the Cambridge custodians of linguistic analysis. I ask, for instance, why are there 12 eggs in a grocer's box and 12 citizens in a jury box—or why Nagasaki is mentioned in conjunction with uranium in a book published in 1939—or why attitudes toward the female breast correlate closely with attitudes toward war and conquest. Naturally, as the Cambridge group warns, such nonsense questions lead to nonsense answers. Some of the nonsense answers that have amused and delighted me are collected in this anthology. If there is a thesis hidden in these random explorations, it might be that nonsense has its own meanings and that Lewis Carroll, the fantasist, was just as wise as Charles Dodgson, the logician, who happened to inhabit the same body as Carroll. Or it might be that nonsense and poetry are inescapable parts of human experience as long as we have two hemispheres in our brains, one logical and the other intuitive. Or it might be that dialectical Marxism (Groucho variety) can answer questions that sane sober people can't even ask in the first place. I have added a running commentary, here and there, which sets these pieces in their historical context, expands them, adds new thoughts, or just exemplifies the sad fact that, like most writers, I cannot resist any opportunity to explain my explanations. 3 1 COINCIDANCE: PART ONE Synchronicity and Isomorphism in FINNEGANS WAKE The original version of this essay appeared in Fortean Times for Spring 1983. In rewriting and enlarging the piece for this book, I have expanded the thesis to make this a bridge to the later "Coincidance" essays which deal with synchronicity and isomorphism in art and science generally, with special reference to quantum mechanics and genetics. Perhaps no novelist in history has been as concerned with synchronicity as James Joyce. As Samuel Beckett—a great fellow novelist who knew Joyce intimately—wrote, "To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps unstatable rule ... It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than either of these, it is a perception of coincidence." Over a hundred synchronicities appear in Joyce's Ulysses, a novel describing an ordinary day in Dublin ("a day when nothing and everything is happening," as Edna O'Brien wrote recently). When Joyce feared that he might die without finishing Finnegans Wake, he selected James Stephens to complete it, not on any literary grounds per se, but because Stephens had been born on the same day as Joyce (2 February 1882) and in the same city (Dublin)—and 5 6 COINCIDANCE also because Stephens had the same first name as Joyce (James) and had a last name which differed by only one letter from the first name of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's self-caricature in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is in many ways an extension and enlargement of the forbidden and"unthinkable"areas of human experience first explored in Ulysses. It is more "difficult" than the earlier book, much more "obscene," more experimental in styles, much funnier, and contains many, many more synchronicities. As Ulysses was the anatomy of one day in Dublin, Finnegans Wake is the encyclopedia of one night in Dublin. Where Ulysses has a normal day-light protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who travels through real streets, Finnegans Wake has a multiple protagonist, abbreviated as in Joyce's notebooks; not a "character" in the normal sense, this system-function, , wanders through the labyrinths of alternative realities. In explicating this system- function, I shall try to indicate why Yositani Roshi once said, "There is nothing special about Enlightenment. You do it every night in your sleep. Zen is justa trick for doing it while awake."Finnegans Wake is another trick for doing it while awake. The "paranormal" aspect of the synchronicities we shall be studying can be "explained" in various ways, including the Fundamentalist Materialist's favorite non-explanation or pseudo-explanation, "mere coincidence." My own preference, as shall become more clear as we proceed, is along the lines of Yositani's identification of dream processes with those things we call "mystical" or "occult." As the psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald wrote in New Dimensions of Deep Analysis, the so-called "paranormal" is very normal: We have seen time and again that despite their apparently capricious, haphazard nature ("paranormal" events) are governed by the same laws which apply to the dream, to the neurotic symptom and to unconscious processes in general. This was also the view of Freud in his famous essay "On the Uncanny" and of Jung in all his writings. Since a dream conventionally requires a dreamer, Joyce as early as 1923 (one year into the writing of the book, which required 17 years) selected the name Earwicker for the waking ego of the protagonist. This is the point at which most Wake scholarship has gone wrong: since Earwicker is the waking ego, exegetes have thought Earwicker is the protagonist, but he is only one part of the protagonist. E or Ego or Earwicker is only part of the system-function , which is the total protagonist, as we shall see. But before investigating , let us look at E or Earwicker. Joyce reputedly found the name "Earwicker" on a tombstone in Sidlesham, COINCIDANCE 7 England, while on holiday. In Stephen Hew, Joyce's autobiographical Stephen Daedalus (later to become modernized into Stephen Dedalus*) said that an artist could find an "epiphany" or revelation even in a clock on a storefront; in Ulysses, Stephen (now Dedalus) defined "God" as "a shout in the street." It was consistent for Joyce to find deep meanings in a casually encountered tombstone. He found a great deal in the name "Earwicker." What follows is neither correct nor consistent etymology: Joyce believed the unconscious has no either/or logic and uses every possible or thinkable meaning. Earwicker might derive from Eire-Weiker, dweller in Ireland. The Middle English Weiker, dweller, is related to the surving wich, dwelling place, as in Dunwich, Greenwich, Norwich, etc. and is also cognate with Latin vicus, a way or road. Coincidence has already appeared, because Joyce had planned from the beginning to base Finnegans Wake (hereafter FW) on the linguistic theories of Giambattista Vico, whose name also derives from vicus. To commemorate this first wonderful synchro-mesh, the word "vicus" appears in the first sentence of FW: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Earwicker sounds much like "earwigger" and Joyce's dreamer, a Protestant, seems to suspect that his Catholic neighbors maliciously pronounce it that way behind his back. The earwig is reputed in folklore to cause dreams by crawling into the sleeper's ear, so the association Earwicker-earwig is appropriate for a book of dreams. The earwig is also an insect, and FW is crowded with insects, including the Ondt and the Gracehoper in a celebrated passage, but also featured are fleas, lice, bedbugs, butterflies and others. As Fritz Senn has noted, "insects" is often a disguise for "incest" on the Freudian level of the dream. Earwicker is a publican who owns an inn in Chapelizod, a West Dublin suburb fronting onto Phoenix Park. The only other well known novel about Chapelizod is Sheridan Lefanu's The House by the Churchyard, in which a character named Hyacinth O'Flaherty fights a duel in Phoenix Park because of a misunderstood conversation about earwigs.
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