part0009

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 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 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 just a 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:

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.

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

or Earwicker.

Joyce reputedly found the name "Earwicker" on a tombstone in Sidlesham, England, while on holiday. In Stephen Hero, 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."

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 surviving 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:

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 c haracter named Hyacinth O’Flaherty fights a duel in Phoenix Park because of a misunderstood conversation about earwigs . O’Flaherty appears to be killed in the duel, but later rises, just as Finnegan, in the bar-room ballad from which Joyce took his title, appears to die and then rises again. Thus, Lefanu's novel is coincidentally linked to Joyce's by the earwig theme, the Chapelizod-Phoenix Park locale and the resurrection motif.

Hyacinth O’Flaherty has another link with the resurrection theme; one of the hundreds of dead-and-resurrected gods discussed in Frazer's classic Golden Bough was named Hyacinth.

But "Hyacinth" was also the code-name for Lord Alfred Douglas in a homosexual poem by Dubliner Oscar Wilde; Earwicker's dream partially concerns repressed homosexuality. And the house by the churchyard in LeFanu's novel suggests Kierkegaard, whose name means "churchyard" in Danish. Kierkegaard was a compulsive masturbator and suffered chronic fears that this would lead to insanity. When the protagonist of FW is "on the edge of selfabyss" on page 40, this refers to both "self-abuse" (a nasty Victorian term for masturbation, which should more properly be called self-enjoyment) and Kirkegaard's favorite metaphor of the Abyss. But biss in German is to bite, and this brings us back to "agenbite of inwit," the medieval term for bad conscience which Stephen Dedalus uses to describe his own Catholic super-ego in Ulysses.

Earwicker (whose full name is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and whose initials appeared in Howth Castle and Environs, by the way) is not only a Dubliner but etymologically-punningly linked to the earliest Gaelic name of Dublin, Baile atha Cliath , which means town of the hurdles. Hurdles are wicker bridges. But the early Celts practiced human sacrifice by burning prisoners of war in large wicker structures and, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, we seem to be close to the roots of Anglo-Saxon wicce , which means turning (like one of Vico's historical cycles) or dancing, and thus we also approach wicca-craft or witchcraft.

In the course of the dream, H.C. Earwicker is repeatedly attacked by neighbors intent on lynching him for his (real or fantasized) sexual "sins." These nightmarish sequences always refer, through puns, to the ancient Celtic rituals of human sacrifice in wicker baskets. Thus, on the level of the Freudian unconscious (one meaning of Joyce's

), these sequences reflect personal sexual guilt, while on the level of the Jungian collective unconscious (Joyce's

), these are genetic memories of ancient Celtic religion. That wicker is etymologically related to manger (see your etymological dictionary) links Earwicker to Christ, who "died for our sins"—the best known scapegoat-god in our Western civilization. It is moderately curious that the anthropological link between Christ and the ancient Celtic human sacrifice is the theme of a film, made nearly 30 years after Finnegans Wake was published, called The Wicker Man.

Earwig in French is perse-orielle . Joyce sometimes calls Earwicker Pearse O'Reilly, punning on this, but Pearse and O'Reilly were two of the Irishmen shot by the English for instigating the Easter Uprising in Dublin, 1916. Easter Uprising, of course, brings us back to the Resurrection theme.

In fact, Padraic Pearse, the principle architect of the 1916 Uprising scheduled it for 23 April 1916, which was both Easter (and thus a symbol of Resurrection) and also the anniversary of Brian Boru's defeat of the Vikings at the battle of Clontarf (23 April 1014) and thus a symbol of Irishmen casting out foreign invaders. The guns for the Uprising were slow in arriving (Sir Roger Casement was caught smuggling some of them in, and hanged for it) so the "Easter" Uprising occurred on Monday 24 April 1916; but Joyce knew Pearse personally, and once walked out of a Gaelic class Pearse was teaching because Pearse said the ancient Irish bards were better poets than Shakespeare. Joyce could never stand that kind of chauvinism. Pearse is commemorated many times in FW , as part of Pearse O'Reilly (earwig) and by the many patrick-peatrick puns. (Patrick is Ireland's patron saint and a peat rick is the stack of peat with which the poor in Ireland heat their homes.)

thus refers to Padraic Pearse, the peat rick in a poor Irishman's back yard, the cathedral of St. Patrick in Dublin (of which, more later), and the pun on which the Catholic Church alleges to be founded—Tu est Petrus , in Latin or "Thou art Peter," in English. It is also the pea-trick by which language in FW says more than Logical Positivists think language can ever say.

The title of FW comes from an old bar-room ballad, in which, as we have already mentioned, Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier, has too much to drink, falls from his ladder, is pronounced dead, and is taken home for a Wake. In typical Irish fashion, the mourners get roaring drunk, start to fight, and heave whiskey bottles at each other; one whiskey bottle hits the coffin, and the “corpse" sits up crying, "Bad luck to your souls, did you think me dead?" This is an Irish folk-equivalent of the myths of Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Jesus, etc.—all of the dead and resurrected gods (including Hyacinth) in Frazer's Golden Bough. To make the implicate explicate, Pearse and O'Reilly refer to both Earwicker, because their names mean earwig in French, and to Resurrection, since they were part of the Easter Uprising.

Earwicker’s name also contains an ear , and it has been commonplace in Joyce criticism for 60 years to note that Joyce was the most aural of modern writers, and the most musical. (In 1904, he came in second to the great John McCormack in a singing contest, and would have come first, the judges said, if he had not refused the sight-reading test.) As Joyce's eyesight failed, his prose became even more ear-oriented, and Brancusi portrayed him in 1932 as a spiral, symbolizing the inner ear; Joyce's father, seeing this sketch reproduced in a Dublin newspaper, said drily, "Jim has changed a great deal since moving to Paris." The threat of blindness became more and more real as the writing of FW went on—"it darkles (tinct! tinct!) all this our funnanimal world." The type of man that young girls should be leery of, we are told in Shaun the Postman's sermon in Book Three, is "about 50," like Joyce in the middle of the writing and has "scummy eyes" about which he makes "certain references to the deity."

Blindness as an alleged result of masturbation, and as the punishment of Peeping Tom in the Lady Godiva legend, were much on Joyce's mind in those years, one gathers. Tim Finnegan in the ballad and Peeping Tom easily blend in dream-logic (Tim = Tom) and both get merged with Atum, the Egyptian god who created the universe by masturbating. Tom Sawyer and Doubting Thomas are also linked with Tim-Tom-Atum in some of Joyce's puns: Tom Sawyer because he associated with Huck Finn (who is Finn, again—see?) and Doubting Thomas because Joyce, an Agnostic, found him the most appealing of the apostles.

There seem to be only two incidents in FW , although they go through so many variations and permutations that they eventually link to all the major themes of art, science and philosophy.

The first incident, which probably occurred at 11:32 in the morning of the day before the dream—or that's my guess as to why the number 1132 keeps recurring throughout the book, something no Joyce scholar has yet satisfactorily explained—happened when Humphrey C. Earwicker, while crossing Phoenix Park, felt the need to retire to the bushes to answer a call of nature. After taking his pants down, the misfortunate man suddenly noticed two young girls (aspects of the

duality in Joyce's notebook, about which more later) who had retired to the bushes with similar needs. Maybe something else happened; maybe it didn't. We never know. Whirling around, Earwicker saw three British soldiers (aspects of the

trinity we will come to know well) who were watching whatever the devil did happen. (This detail, the British soldiers, dates the otherwise timeless dream as sometime before 1922, when the British withdrew their troops from Ireland—although they remained, and still remain, in Northern Ireland.) Joyce describes Dublin as a "gossipocracy"—a description I believe after five years in the place—and the dream has the neighbors, told of the incident by the soldiers, accusing Earwicker of every possible "moral" offense, and some impossible ones, starting with voyeurism and exhibitionism and proceeding with nightmare logic through masturbation, making homosexual overtures to the soldiers, murdering the soldiers, cannibalistically eating them, and so on, up to and including plotting to murder the king, or the pope, or both. As in that other archetypical 20th Century masterpiece, Kafka's The Trial, it is absolutely impossible for the reader to decide what, if any, of all this guilt has a basis in fact and what is just Freudian fear and fantasy.

In the second incident, which certainly happened exactly at noon—"high twelve" to Freemasons—Earwicker, still in Phoenix Park, but obsessed with anxiety, encountered either a tramp who asked the time, in one version, or a gunman who tried to rob him, in another version; but in any case, instead of giving the time or his wallet, Earwicker—at least in the dream memory of the encounter—launches into a passionate defense of his sexual orthodoxy, denying vehemently that he had homosexual impulses or has committed incest with his teenage daughter (an aspect of Joyce's I function, which reconciles

and

). In both versions—the tramp or the gunman—the clock strikes noon just then, symbolizing the death of the Widow's Son in Freemasonry. (FW has many hints that Earwicker is a Freemason. Friends in Ireland assure me that it was impossible to be a publican in Dublin in Joyce's time without being a Freemason, since the brewers and their salesmen were all Freemasons and so were the cops, usually. Dublin was Protestant-dominated until the coming of the Free State in 1922.) The death of the Widow's Son, of course, points forward to his resurrection when a new Freemason is "raised" at High Twelve (midnight).

The girls in the bushes appear to have been urinating; by Freudian displacement, this becomes Noah's flood (the pee is also present in "thuartpeatrick," by the way). The three soldiers then become another of Joyce's

functions, namely Noah's three sons—Shem, Ham and Japhet— who saw Noah naked after he got drunk, as the three soldiers probably saw Earwicker with his pants down. Of these three, Noah cursed only Ham, because the other two averted their eyes.

Ham (the meat) derives from the pig; and the pig appeared on the Irish ha'penny, a coin which crossed the bar in Earwicker's pub continually. (It was the price of a half pint of porter, the cheapest kind of beer, before World War I.) The male pig, or boar, was "sacred to Adonis" in Greece—which probably means, as Robert Graves has noted, that the Stone Age boar-god got incorporated into the composite figure which became Adonis. Curiously, Shakespeare, who wrote Venus and Adonis, had a boar's head on his Coat of Arms (but we will come to that). Ham also suggests Hamlet, and Shakespeare also wrote a play about that melancholy Dane, but Earwicker's full name is (remember?) Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and Humphrey, believe it or not, derives from Hamlet. (See Brendan O’Hehir's Gaelic Lexicon to Finnegan's Wake) According to one version of the Hamlet legend, Hamlet did not die when he killed his uncle (father substitute) but left Denmark and became a governor of Dublin during the Danish occupation.

Some eccentrics believe Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Be that as it may, the linkage from Ham to Hamlet to Bacon to the boar's head on Shakespeare's Coat of Arms to the boar who killed Adonis to the dead-and-resurrected god is perfectly clear in dream-logic, however perplexing to the Rationalist. Joyce plays endlessly with these linguistic coincidences; for instance when an American hog-caller denounces Earwicker as "York's Porker" in Chapter Three, this refers to Shakespeare's Coat of Arms with its boar's head, to Bacon (who lived at York House), to the boar-god who became Adonis, etc. and eventually links into the whole theme of Ham, Noah's flood, urination, Noah drinking and the drinking at Finnegan's Wake. (The ballad is called Finnegan's Wake; Joyce's book is called Finnegans Wake. The missing apostrophe creates another pun, which Joyce explained to friends as a warning to the ruling classes: the oppressed rise, eventually, in every historical cycle.)

But Joyce's symbol for the composite protagonist of FW was

remember? If

is the unconscious Ego or Earwicker,

appears to be the Freudian unconscious,

is the Jungian "collective" unconscious (or Sheldrake's "morphogenetic field") and

is, then, the non-local consciousness which Buddhists call "Buddha mind," Taoists call "no-mind," and Occidental psychology has not yet recognized, except in Timothy Leary's writings on the non-local or quantum circuit of the nervous system. We will enlarge on these brief descriptions as we proceed, but for now it is interesting, or alarming, to note that Earwicker's "sin" in Phoenix Park is associated by Joyce with the infamous Phoenix Park murders of 1882 (the year Joyce was born, coincidentally).

These murders (of British officials) were committed by the Invincibles, an Irish revolutionary group headed by one Joe Brady, but Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, was implicated in them by letters produced by the journalist, Richard Pigott. The first of these incriminating letters began.

Because of these letters, Parnell was eventually brought to trial, but was acquitted when his counsel asked Pigott to spell the word "hesitancy." When Pigott misspelled the word as "hecitancy," and it was pointed out that the word was misspelled that way in the letters, Pigott fell into confusion and incoherence, becoming totally unconvincing to the jury, and the letters have ever since been considered forgeries. It is curious that, wherever Joyce began in constructing the synchronicity labyrinth of FW , the misspelled word "hecitancy" has the initials of his dreamer, HCE, and Pigott links in with the pig-Ham-Hamlet-Bacon motif, while the salutation "My dear E," connects to Joyce's symbols for the four major levels of the psyche:

. Even odder, Richard Pigott committed suicide after being repudiated by the court, and his son was, at the time, a classmate of Joyce's at Conglowes Wood, a Jesuit "college" (grammar school, in American terms) near Parnell's home. Joyce doesn't do much with "Conglowes" in FW , but "Wood" links to the theme of Swift's Drapier Letters, often mentioned; these letters denounced the debased coinage issued in Ireland by a royal charter given to William Wood on 16 June 1723. Curiously, 16 June was the day in 1904 immortalized in Joyce's Ulysses; Joyceans celebrate 16 June every year as "Bloomsday." On 16 June 1804, Parliament ordered the building of the Martello Towers in Ireland, in one of which the first chapter of Ulysses begins, and on 16 June 1955 Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, died.

One of the many references to the Phoenix-Park-Pigott-Parnell scandal in FW occurs on page 16:

You spigotty anglease? . . . Has? Has at? Hasatency ?

But, since the Pigott-Pig-Ham-Bacon-Hamlet theme is interlinked with Shakespeare, it is interesting that Shakespeare's parents were named John and Mary, as were Joyce's. "Sure, there's only that Shakespeare fellow left to beat," Nora, Joyce's wife said, explaining her understanding of what Jim was doing after Ulysses.

Shakespeare is considered homosexual or bisexual by many commentors; Earwicker worries that the British soldiers think he was making sexual overtures by lowering his trousers. But Earwicker's disgrace occurred, remember, in Phoenix Park (like the 1882 murders); Joyce identifies the exact spot: "By the magazine wall. Where the maggies seen all." The magazine, partially destroyed by the I.R. A. in 1922 but subsequently rebuilt, was earlier the subject of the very last poem Jonathan Swift ever wrote:

Swift was the Dean of Saint Patrick's (thuartpeatrick) and is traditionally called "The Dean" in Dublin folklore. Due to the Dublin brogue, this is pronounced "the Dane," so we are back to Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane and the Ham-Pig theme, alas; but Swift had very ambiguous romantic involvements with two ladies who were, coincidentally, both named Esther and who are thus another of Joyce's

polarities—Esther van Homerigh and Esther Johnson. Swift's desire for privacy, or his morbid secrecy—take your pick—was so great that all the scholars who have written on his life have failed to determine the exact nature of his relationship with either of these ladies. (Some think both relationships were Platonic, some that one was but the other wasn't, some that both were sexual, etc.) Since Joyce believed (as he wrote in a letter) that Ireland, like Sicily, is ruled by omerta (silence), Swift is a fit symbol of the Irish people's (or any colonial people's) obsession with hiding what they are doing.

At this point, the equation seems to be: Swift =

= the guilty man in the Freudian bushes; the two Esthers =

= the two girls in the bushes; and, remarkably, the three soldiers =

= Peter, Jack and Martin in Swift's Tale of a Tub. But Peter, Jack and Martin, in Swift, symbolize respectively the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran religions (Peter = thuartpeatrick. Jack = John Calvin, Martin = Martin Luther) and Christianity has become three forms of evasion of Freudian guilt, which may or may not be what Swift had in mind.

Contemporary with Swift and also Irish was Lawrence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. Joyce commented in a letter to Harriet Weaver that Swift and Sterne should have changed names, because Swift's writings were stern and Sterne's writings were swift. Swift and Sterne are thus versions of Joyce's Cain/Abel dualism, or

, the male or yang equivalent of the female or yin

polarity. The Swift-Sterne oxymoron appears dozens of times in FW) e.g., "he sternly struck his tete in a tub . . . (and) swiftly took it out again," "the siamixed twoatalk used twixt stern swift and jolly roger," etc. Joyce may or may not have known the coincidence that Swift's predecessor as Dean or Saint Patrick's in Dublin was also named Stern; but Joyce was aware, and commented in another letter to Ms. Weaver, that die Sterne in German not only means "the star" but also glaucoma—the eye disease from which he himself was suffering while writing FW .

Joyce, in fact, first played with this English-German pun (Sterne/star/ glaucoma) as far back as 1918 when he wrote "Bahnhofstrasse," a poem describing his first hideously painful glaucoma attack on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich:

Glaucoma comes from the Greek, glaucis, shining, and is an epithet Homer habitually applies to the eyes of Athene, who was originally an owl goddess and is usually shown with an owl in Greek statuary. Athene was the goddess of juries, and we will come to know the twelve jurors (O) in FW intimately before the end of this book; for now it is enough to note that when they first appear, as mourners at Finnegan's wake in chapter one, they utter "a plethora of ululation." To ululate etymologically means to moan like an owl—a typical example of the psycho-archeology of Joyce's style in which the Stone Age totem broods over the modern 12 jurors. (We will later ask why eggs are sold by the dozen and the Zodiac also has twelve "houses" …)

But Lawrence Sterne, the other half of the Swift-Sterne polarity, has many synchronistic links to FW , all exploited hilariously and mind-blowingly by Joyce. Lawrence Sterne, as we mentioned, wrote Tristram Shandy; Howth Castle in Dublin, an important symbol in FW , was built by Sir Tristram Amioricus St. Lawrence. There is a Lawrence Avenue in Howth, and another in Chapelizod where Earwicker has his pub. The patron saint of Dublin is St. Lawrence O'TooIe. There is another Dublin in Lawrence County, Georgia; its motto, "Doublin' all the time" is a Joycean pun and appears on the first page of FW ; it was founded by Peter Sawyer (thuartpeatrick) who gets mixed up with Tom Sawyer by Joyce and thus leads us back to Finn, again—Huck Finn, that is. But we will come to that.

Among the books Joyce owned in 1920 (now in the possession of Cornell University) was Plutarch's On the E at Delphi. Delphi, of course, was the place where an oracle, intoxicated on wine and strange drugs, descended through the various levels that Joyce symbolizes

and

as; Plutarch argues that the sign over the door of the Delphic temple,

really meant

, which in Greek had the meaning "I am." This, of course, is coincidentally the name God gave Moses in Exodus. Joyce's version is on the first page of FW :

nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatric k

Ignoring for the moment that Joyce's mistress, Nora Barnacle, seems to have gotten into the text (nora voice), mishe mishe puns on the voice from the burning bush (from afire) calling the prophet in Hebrew: Moishe, Moishe (Moses, Moses in English). But in Gaelic mishe mishe means "I am, I am" and this is what the voice called itself when Moses intelligently wanted to know to whom he was speaking. ("Mishmosh" was Lewis Carroll's original title for "Jabberwocky" and that brings us to Humpty Dumpty, who shall play a large role in these notes shortly.) It is just another coincidence that Padraic Pearse, author of the Irish Declaration of Independence, whom we have already encountered a few times, wrote a poem beginning Mishe Eire (I am Ireland) which is now engraved on the entrance to Dublin Castle.

We seem to have entered a Strange Loop. If Joyce began constructing this synchro-mesh with Plutarch's ideas about the

at Delphi, the eventual link to the 1882 Phoenix Park murders and the Pigott forgeries (beginning "My dear E") is remarkable; if Joyce started with Pigott's forgeries, the link to Delphi is remarkable; but he seems to have started with the tombstone saying "Earwhicker" in Sidlesham . (How did Ham get in again?) Several times in FW a speaker clears his throat by saying "Aham"—which is Sanskrit for "I am" and brings us back to both Moses and Delphi, but "A ham," one of Joyce's alternative spellings, also links back to the Ham-Bacon-Shakespeare coincidences.

However, we were talking about Lawrence Sterne and Tristram Shandy awhile back (and Tristram St. Lawrence who built Howth Castle). Tristram is the Gaelic form of Tristan. In the legend of Tristan and Isolde, there are two Isoldes (

)—Isolde the Fair and Isolde of the White Hands. This makes a nice isomorphism with Swift and his two Esthers, and also with the two Alices of Lewis Carroll, as we shall see later. Meanwhile, Isolde the Fair was a native of Chapelizod, where FW is set; Chapelizod is corrupt Anglo-Gaelic for Chapel of Isolde. When Joyce writes

he includes both Tristan and Isolde of the White Hands, who lived in Armorica (northern France) and part of the name of the builder of Howth Castle (Sir Tristram Armoricus de Saint Lawrence). Immediately following is "laurens county's gorgios" which gives us the rest of the builder's name (laurens, lawrence) and locates the other Dublin, which is in Lawrence County, Georgia. If there are two Isoldes, two Esthers, two Dublins, we will soon encounter other twins (Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Caster and Pollux); on the Freudian (

) level this refers to the two girls in the bushes of Phoenix Park; on the Jungian level (

) it refers to a basic polarity which (we shall soon see) creates an isomorphism between FW and such diverse systems as Cabala, I Ching and quantum physics.

But Swift, incidentally, had a pet name for Esther Johnson. He called her Stella, which in Italian means "star" and links back to the Sterne (German, star/glaucoma) symbolism, Joyce's eye problems and Tristram Shandy . . .

Shakespeare, Swift and Sterne, already in synchronistic mesh with FW , all have S as the first letter of their names. Joyce named his autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus, which begins and ends with S . Ulysses begins with an S ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .) and ends with an S ("yes I said yes I will Yes") The letter S in Joyce's notes for FW symbolizes the serpent in Eden but also stands for a mysterious figure, usually called Sanderson or Sigurson but sometimes varying to Mahan and Behan and even to Pore Old Joe in the Black Spiritual, who is both an aggressor (the Norse invaders of Ireland) and a victim (the servants and slaves of all history). Only God and James Joyce understand this mysterious S business, and Joyce is dead and God isn't telling.

Both incidents in Earwicker's nightmare—the one involving the 2 girls and three soldiers, and the one involving the beggarman or thief—took place in Phoenix Park, remember. Joyce is careful to establish that the beggar-or-thief is brunette and that Earwicker is blonde, which eventually links in with the story of Brian Boru, Ireland's medieval liberator, who was blonde and was murdered (on 23 April, 1014, remember) by a brunette Viking named Brodar. The pun brodar-brother further links this to Cain and Abel, as we shall see.

Meanwhile, the "cad"—Joyce's usual name for the threatening figure in the park, which leaves ambiguous whether he was beggar or thief— addresses Earwicker as "ouzel fin," which is corrupt Gaelic for "my blonde gentleman." Phoenix Park itself is an Anglicization of the original name, finnischce pairc ("field of bright waters"). The finn in finnischce means bright, or shining, or blonde, or fair, depending on context. We are back to Finn, again—not just Huck Finn but Finn Mac Cool, the ancient Irish hero, whose name means "blonde son of the servant woman." Finnegan in the resurrection ballad is, by this dream-logic of puns, Finn Again or the ancient hero returned: "Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Finn again" is on page 7. Did Joyce begin with Finn Mac Cool and work his way to the link with finnischce pairc or start with the park and work his way to the hero? It fits together wonderfully in either case, especially since "cad" suggests Cadenus, in Swift's Cadenus and Vanessa, a poem written for Esther von Homerigh (Vanessa)—which suggests Venus in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and brings us back to the boar-god and Ham-Bacon-Hamlet.

Finn Mac Cool's wife, Graunia, eloped with a handsome young warrior named Dermot. The aged Finn pursued them from Ulster all the way to the hill of Howth on Dublin Bay. Thus we come back again to Howth Castle and Environs, the de Lawrence family who have dwelt there since 1170, Sir Tristram de Lawrence who built the castle, and Lawrence Sterne and Tristram Shandy. Here synchronicity merges with isomorphism, for the legend of Tristan-Isolde-King Mark is so similar to the triangle of Dermot- Graunia-Finn that some scholars think that the Finn cycle was the model for the later and more famous Romance.

Joyce, in fact, has filled FW with isomorphs of this Eternal Triangle, which in the symbolism of his notes books is

. Here are a few of the actors who repeat this structure, which Bucky Fuller would call a "knot" or "coherent synergy":

Finn is coincidentally-linguistically tied to Finnegan, Phoenix Park, Huck Finn and the cad's greeting to Earwicker, "ouzel fin." Tristan is coincidentally-linguistically tied to Sir Tristram, Howth Castle and the tree-stone combination we shall soon encounter. King Arthur, whose name means "bear," is tied to the ancient Celtic bear-god we will meet often, and to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and Sir Arthur Guinness, the brewer, who plays a large role in FW . Hamlet brings us back to the Ham-Bacon-pig cycle.

In the "Tavern" chapter, almost the geometrical center of FW, this

struggle becomes identified with the ancient rituals of bride-capture, in which the husband (

) seizes the bride (

) and is pursued by her father (

) until captured, whereupon he pays the bride-fee and the union is blessed; see Frazer's Golden Bough again. Gershon Legman, curiously, has found this pattern surviving in the risque jokes about the honeymoon couple (

) whose love-making is interrupted by the rude man in the lower berth (

); see his amazing and hilarious Anatomy of the Dirty Joke. Before the end of the "Tavern" chapter, Joyce links the peril involved in the

relationship with the ancient rituals (see Frazer again) in which a handsome stranger (

) is invited to copulate with a temple priestess (

) and is then killed, his body being scattered over the fields to make the crops fertile. In this "knot," then, we have both Hierogamy (sex magick or the alchemical marriage) and Human Sacrifice, on the Jungian level (

) of psycho-archeology, while on the Freudian level (

) Earwicker is again suffering symbolic punishment for his real or fantasized sexual "sins."

But Finn Mac Cool's last name sounds like cul, which is French (and Latin) for ass-hole, the part of Earwicker evidently most visible to the three soldiers in the Phoenix Park incident. When Joyce writes "how culious an epiphany," he puns on cul and cool , caricatures his own doctrine that anything can be an ephiphany or revelation to the artistic mind, includes again the initials, HCE, of the dreamer and has a buried hint of the misspelled "hecitancy" in the Pigott forgeries.

Cul is also part of O felix culpa , a phrase from the Mass for Holy Saturday, meaning "Oh happy sin." This refers to the Fall of Adam and Eve, which is paradoxically happy because it provoked the Incarnation and Redemption. Thus, fall and resurrection (a la Tim Finnegan) is again invoked: Holy Saturday precedes the Easter Uprising.

When Joyce addresses Earwicker as "foenix culprit" on page 23, we have the sin in Phoenix Park, the Invincibles killing English officials in the same park, the sin of Adam and Eve (felix culpa ) and the cul-cool semantic system. When Earwicker addresses the jury later as "fellows culpows," he is implying that all men are sinners or fellow culprits (as in the hymn, "In Adam's fall /we sinned all"); he is also making a Freudian slip and admitting he enjoyed what happened ("happy sin"); and the cul-cool pun is still there. In the children's games of Chapter Nine, primitive fertility rites are re-enacted—this was Norman Douglas's interpretation of children's games, by the way and the chant "May he colp her, may he colp her, may he mixandmas colp her" is eminently suitable for a pagan sex ritual. Unfortunately, that is genetic memory only (

) and on the Freudian level (

) Irish Catholic guilt has gotten in again: the chant contains the Catholic prayer "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa " (my sin, my sin, my most grievous sin). Cul and cool are still there.

When the multiple

becomes "Old Fing Cole," he combines Fin Mac Cool with Old King Cole, who called for his fiddlers three, as Earwicker's exposure of his private assets summoned guilt in the form of the three soldiers,

Returning to the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, although Charles Stewart Parnell escaped conviction in that case when Pigott's letters were discredited, Parnell fell (and fell hard) a few years later, when he was named as co-respondent in a divorce suit by a Captain O'Shea. Parnell and Mrs. Kitty O'Shea had, in fact, been lovers for many years, without any objections from the Captain, who had romantic interests of his own, and most historians believe O'Shea decided to sue for divorce only when persuaded by Parnell's political enemies in the English Establishment. Be that as it may, part of the evidence against Parnell was documentation that he and Mrs. O'Shea had shared a hotel room under the names "Mr. and Mrs. Fox." Thus the fox-hunt, another paleolithic blood sacrifice, recurs again and again in FW , always linked to puns on Parnell or O'Shea, and often to the rhythm of the fox-hunting ballad, "John Peel" (which also contains a pun on nudity if you think about it). The fox-hunt theme, however, is also linked with Oscar Wilde, who was disgraced and destroyed when his homosexuality was revealed only a few years after Parnell was destroyed for adultery. Wilde links to the fox-hunt theme, of course, because he once described that barbaric pastime as "the uneatable pursued by the unspeakable." Joyce has about a hundred versions of this in FW , of which my favorite is "The Turk, ungreekable in pursuit of armenable," which combines Wilde's joke with the Turkish-Greek-Armenian wars of the 1920s, and reflects the fact that most Europeans think Greeks are especially prone to homosexuality, whereas Greeks claim the Turks are worse cul prits.

The synchro-mesh here is that Parnell and Wilde were both Irish, both were hugely popular until they were in the forties, both were disgraced and destroyed for their sexual irregularities, both are linked to the fox—and, curiously, both lived at one time or another on Stephen's Green in Dublin; we have seen that Stephen was a magic name to Joyce. St. Stephen is called Stephen Protomartyr because he was the first Christian martyr; his feast day is December 26 (the day after Christmas) and in Ireland and England, rural folk still celebrate the day curiously, by capturing a wren and carrying it through town singing, "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds / St. Stephen's day was caught in a furze." The wren is nowadays kept in a cage and released after the festivity; as recently as the first edition of the Golden Bough, Frazer reported that the Stone Age custom of killing the wren still prevailed. When all Dublin turns out to sing a song denouncing Earwicker in Chapter Two, it is called "the rann, the rann, the king of all verse," with a pun on the wren sacrifice. (A rann is an ancient Celtic verse-form.)

In Joyce's early short story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," one of the characters compares Parnell to the Phoenix, the Egyptian bird of resurrection, which is said to rise reborn from its own ashes. The equation has become Phoenix Park = phoenix as symbol of resurrection = Parnell as Crucified Saviour. What rose from Parnell's martyrdom was the bloody holocaust of Easter Week 1916, as Irish nationalism reasserted itself more violently than was the case with Parnell's passive resistance tactics three decades before.

Earwicker was seen by three British soldiers, who are popularly called "Tommy Atkinses." (This links back to the Tim-Tom-Atum system, of course.) One of the witnesses against Wilde was a male prostitute named Fred Atkins. Naturally, FW combines both Tommy and Fred into a composite Atkins who accuses everybody, and merges with the threatening figure of the brunette cad, or tramp, or thief, in Phoenix Park. That sinister composite figure also includes the ancient Celtic bear-god. "What a quhare soort of a mahan," Earwicker mutters at one point; mahon is Gaelic for bear. Sometimes this figure becomes Norse playwright Bjorn Bjornssen (whose works Joyce admired) because Bjorn Bjornssen means "bear bear-son." Puns on the Latin ursa, bear, also abound, and Glasheen in her Third Census to Finnegans Wake concludes that the bear-god is one of the major figures in FW.

Weston Lebarre, the anthropologist, in his classic The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (published over 20 years after FW ) describes the bear-god as one of the earliest human divinities and says that if you draw a swath a thousand miles wide, starting from the Cro-Magnon caves in Southern France and running up over the North Pole and down through North and South America, you will find traces of the bear-god cult, at various levels of persistence, within that whole area. Many of the Eskimo and Amerindian tribes still celebrate this divinity in ritual, as the Cro-Magnon paintings suggest our ancestors did; throughout modern Europe remnants of the cult are found in folk-lore—the talking bears of Norse legend, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the children's Teddy Bear totem, etc. The reader will begin to understand what I mean when I refer to the

aspect of FW as "psycho-archeology."

This bear-god conflates with Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who fascinated Joyce (and more recently has fascinated Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary) and of course Bruno suggests bruin. A hermeticist and conspirator whose biographer Frances Yates thinks may have invented both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for magick, heresy, plotting against the Papacy and teaching the Copernican theory of astronomy. He is another phoenix, because what rose from his ashes was the classic scientific age of Galileo and Newton.

As a philosopher, Bruno advocated a pantheistic evolutionary dualism which strangely anticipates both Darwin and modern quantum mechanics. Central to Bruno's dialectical dualism is the rather Taoist idea that everything contains and eventually becomes its own opposite (as Phoenix Park contains fire and water, if one combines its English form with its Gaelic original: the Phoenix rises from flame and "finnische" means clear water). In filth, sublimity; in sublimity, filth" was one of Bruno's favorite paradoxes and could almost be the motto of FW .

Bruno signed his works "Bruno of Nola," commemorating his birthplace (a suburb of Naples). Coincidentally, Dublin in Joyce's day had a bookstore called Brown and Nolan. The warring opposites (

) who struggle all through FW go by many names—Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Shem and Shaun, Earwicker and the Cad, Mick and Nick (St. Michael and Satan), Mutt and Jute, Mercius and Justius, Glugg and Chuff, Butt and Taff, Muta and Juva (these last five are all variations on Mutt and Jeff from the comics), the Ondt and the Gracehoper, the Mookse and the Gripes, tree and stone, etc.—but recurrently they are Brown and Nolan, who eventually combine to become Bruno of Nola (

) as tree and stone (life and death) combine to become Tristan (

). In this dialectic, Bruno has been taken apart and put back together again in strict isomorphism to his own philosophy.

Bruno's first name was Giordano. In English, this is Jordan, which is delightful for Joyce. Jordan is the river in which Jesus was baptized, and the river as female symbol is paramount in FW (as we shall see); but in Cockney and Dublin slang, a jordan is a chamber pot, bringing us back to the urination theme.

Bruno also suggests Latin bronn, thunder, and Greek Zeus bronnton, Zeus the thunderer. Zeus bronnton may be totally onamatopoetic, since it suggests the sounds of both rain and thunder. This brings us back to Vico, who believed religion was born of the fear of thunder. It is curious, however, that the cycle Giordano-Jordan-baptism (of Jesus) also brings us back to Vico, whose first name, Giambattista, means John the Baptist. (It is also curious that Vico was contemporary with Swift, and William Butler Yeats believed Swift invented the same historical theory as Vico independently.) The "tauf tauf" in "tauftauf thuartpeatrick" also links to Vico as John the Baptist (Giambattista) because "taufen" in German means to baptize, while the stuttering effect of "tau. . . tau. . . thua" suggests both Parnell and Lewis Carroll, who were both stutterers. Similar stuttering runs through the book, always linked with masturbation anxiety, as is explicit in the "Stuttering Hand" on page 4.

Vico believed that language, along with religion, was inspired by thunder, the first "words" being attempts to "talk" to the terrifying Thing in the sky that he claims frightened primitive humanity into forming magical circles and tribes.

Thunder strikes ten times during FW. The linkage here is thunder-Vico- vicus-Eirweiker-Earwicker.

Like Joyce himself, Vico had a morbid fear of thunder, induced by some childhood trauma. Vico's trauma is unknown; Joyce's was a governess who told him thunder was the sign God was about to strike a sinner with lightning. (When asked once how a man of such moral courage could be afraid of thunder, Joyce replied drily, "You were not raised an Irish Catholic." Vico was raised, like Bruno, a Neapolitan Catholic.)

Like Finnegan in the ballad, Vico once fell off a ladder, was pronounced dead, and startled his mourners by sitting up in his coffin. Even more like Finnegan, when he finally did die, Vico had a funeral service of appalling violence, as his admirers and detractors got into a brawl which turned into a riot. (They were disputing whether he was a heretic and should or should not be buried in a sanctified Catholic cemetery.)

Like Joyce, Vico believed that poetry arose out of creative etymology ("incorrect etymology," in Academese). Like Joyce—and also like Whorf and Korzybski—Vico believed a radical change in language could alter our perceived reality-tunnels. (Is that happening yet, dear reader?)

All through the long night of FW, the 50ish Earwicker struggles against the young Cad, King Mark battles to get Isolde back from the young Tristan, Finn Mac Cool pursues his bride Graunia and her young lover Dermot, and Ibsen's Master Builder (sometimes almost a masturbator in Joyce's "siamixed twoatalk") struggles against the younger architects who are replacing him. Vico, who had a long legal battle with his own son, said before Freud that revolutions were rebellions of sons against fathers, and his historical dialectic influenced Hegel and Marx.

Nineteen years before beginning FW , Joyce taught school in Dalkey, County Dublin, which has a Vico Road. Seventeen years before FW , Joyce taught in Trieste, which has a Via Giambattista Vico.

Vico said that every verbal coincidence was a poem showing a new reality. Joyce, who derived his name from Latin and French roots for "joy," liked to remind friends that Freud in German also derives from freude , joy. The phrase, "his pseudojocax axplanation," in Chapter Four, reminds us that our word for joke also comes from the Latin root for joy, which might have interested the author of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. (The double ax in jocax-ax suggests Minos, which had the double ax as its symbol and where Daedalus, Joyce's prototype, built the labyrinth.)

Let us consider this entire svnchronicity network in relation to one of the minor characters in FW, General Pierre Cambronne (1770-1842). All that most people know about Cambronne, and all that concerns dreaming Earwicker, is that, when asked to surrender at Waterloo, Cambronne replied with wonderful brevity, "Merde. " This is enough to make him a powerful symbol.

The first time the thunder strikes (on page 3) it includes the letters konnbronn—" which contains Latin bronn , thunder, and sounds like Cambronne. The thunder's crash is then dream-distorted into Finnegan falling from the ladder, Humpty Dumpty falling from the wall, the fall of the Wall Street stock market in 1929 and an ambiguous "great fall of the offwall," which includes all these (and the walls of Jericho?) and suggests defecation (offal). This quickly becomes the battle of Clontarf, in which the Irish, led by Brian Boru, defeated the Vikings, led by King Sitric.

Both "Brian" and "Boru" sound enough like bruin to recur often in connection with the bear-god and Bruno. The battle of Clontarf, I hope you remember by now, occurred 23 April, 1014, and the 2 girls and 3 soldiers are there, hiding, in the date. More wonderfully, Brian was blonde, like Earwicker and Finn, and Brian was killed by a Viking named Broder, who was brunette, like the Cad in the park who afflicts our misfortunate hero all night long. Brodar and killing, of course, suggest brother-murder and bring us back to Cain and Abel (

) . . .

A tour guide takes us around Clontarf (on the north side of Dublin Bay), blending Brian Boru's death with the fall of Humpty Dumpty and Earwicker's defecation in the park: "He was poached on that eggtentical spot ... Load Allmarshy . . . Onheard of and umscene . . . erde from erde."The List phrase is mingled English/German for "earth from earth" but it contains an elided merde that brings us back to General Cambronne again; the Freudian concept of war as anal sadism is strongly implied, as are recent ethological discoveries about excretion as a territorial marker.

Cambronne continues to appear in various guises throughout: "Brum! Brum! Cumbrum!" cry the cannons at Waterlook page 9. "Cumbrum, cumbrum," they repeat on page 134. On page 421 we find: "Sept out of Hall of that, Ereweaker with the Bloody Big Bristol. Bung. Stop. Bung. Stop. Cumm Bumm. Stop. Come Baked to Auld Aireen." Here General Cambronne mingles with Earwicker's territorial mark in Phoenix Park, the possible etymology of Earwicker from Eire-weiker with its link to vicus and Vico, and the strains of "Come Back to Erin," a meaningful song to the exiled Irish writer of all this. A Bristol, of course, is Cockney slang for a pistol, which dream-fashion has been taken from the Cad in the park and transferred to the victim; but a pistol is an obvious symbol to Freudians. General Cambronne's defiant cry of "merde " at Waterloo fits neatly into all this because, among other things, Phoenix Park has a Wellington Monument, dedicated to the victor of that battle, and water-loo ties in with the river-urination theme, loo being Cockney and Dublin slang for the toilet. (The reason there is so much Cockney slang in Dublin is that so many Cockney soldiers were stationed there for so many centuries.)

The anal General Cambronne theme gradually merges with the case of an anonymous Russian General about whom Joyce heard from his father, John Stanislaus Joyce. (In the unconscious one General = another General.) It seems that John Joyce knew a certain Buckley, who served with the Royal Fusiliers in the Crimean War, and was involved peripherally with the Charge of the Light Brigade, that epiphany of military heroism and stupidity. On another occasion in the same war, Buckley caught sight of a Russian General in a field and was about to shoot him when the General lowered his pants to take a crap. It made the man look so "human." Buckley said, that he couldn't shoot. When the General finished and pulled his trousers up, however, he became an Enemy Officer again and Buckley shot the poor bastard dead.

In Joyce's version, Buckley shoots the Russian General for the crime of "homosodalism," an ambiguous phrase to say the least of it. Various Atkinses are involved, invoking Tommy Atkins and the three soldiers in Phoenix Park and also Fred Atkins, the male prostitute in the Wilde case. Also involved are Brown and Nolan, who were actually two officers at the Charge of the Light Brigade; conveniently for Joyce, this brings us back to Brown and Nolan's bookstore in Dublin and the dialectic of Bruno of Nola. Buckley's gun fires twice: "Cabrone! Combrune!" We are back at Waterloo with General Cambronne, but the brunette Cad in the park is back, too, and with him echoes of the bruin or bear-god, and the brunette Brodar who killed Brian Boru. Since Buckley is from the Galic root for youth and Joyce emphasizes the General's old age, we are also back in the tangles of the Oedipus complex again.

Joyce tells the story in a parody of the style of Synge's black comedy. The Playboy of the Western World. That is coincidentally appropriate because the Synge play deals with a man who claims to have killed his father, and that man happens to be named Christy Mahon; Christy suggests the dying-rising god again, and Mahon, remember, is Gaelic for bear. When the Russian General becomes a "Brewinbaroon," we are back to Brian Boru at Clontarf, but also encountering another repeating figure in FW, Sir Arthur Guinness, the brewing baron (brewin baroon) whose first name, Arthur, brings us back to the bear-god since arth is an old root in Indo-European longues meaning bear, and links into Artemis, whose name means bear and who was both a bear goddess and a bare goddess (in the Acteaon legend). Arthur also ties Arthur Guinness in neatly with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, bringing us back to Waterloo, and King Arthur, bringing us back to the isomorphism of Arthur/Finn/King Mark as

figure, Guinevere/Graunia/Isolde as

and Launcelot/Dermot/Tristan as

. Sir Arthur Guinness also had two "warring" sons (

) who got into a feud over ownership of the brewery, linking him to Adam with his feuding sons by isomorphism; and the name Guinness, the invaluable O’Hehir tells us, is an Anglicization of Gaelic Mac Angus , which means son of Angus and coincidentally links to Isolde the Fair, who was the daughter of Angus.

When Jute tries to pass one of Wood's debased coins to Mutt in Chapter One, the latter says he would prefer real money, just as Swift did in Drapier's Letters, and Jute claims "Ghinees hies good for you," which implies that English coins (guineas) are good for Ireland. By Chapter Seventeen this has become "Ghenghis is ghoon for you," with an invocation of the Mongol warrior. Behind both phrases is the advertising slogan seen everywhere is Ireland, "Guinness is good for you."

The Russian general's death is part of a cycle which Joyce calls "eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can." This includes Vico's historical cycle and its Hegelian/Marxian derivatives, Humpty Dumpty again, the Orphic egg of creation, Darwinism and the permutated initials of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (who perhaps suspects his Catholic neighbors of distorting his first name to Humpty as he evidently suspects them of twisting his latter name to earwigger. It is a bitter burden to be a Protestant in Holy Catholic Ireland.)

If the all-inclusive

is simultaneously man (Earwicker/Adam/Finn etc.), mountain (Howth Hill,

) insect (earwig) and egg (Humpty Dumpty), he is a walking text of evolution. His story includes "weatherings and marryings and buryings and natural selections," which combines Darwin with Vico's cycles again. When Isobel, his pubescent daughter, tries to justify her dawning sexuality, she evokes "the law of the jungerl" and calls on the great evolutionist in the tones of a popular Irish song: "Charley, you're my darwing." (Charley, you're my darling, still popular in Ireland today hymns Bonnie Prince Charley and the tragic, gallant, foolish Jacobite crusade; but Charley the Chimp was a popular attraction in Phoenix Park zoo in Joyce's day. Perhaps HCE's middle name is Chimpden to remind us of his, and our, evolutionary forebears.) The patriarchal ego of Earwicker or

tries to restore Irish Puritan values, urging the young lady to improve her mind with decent literature, such as The Old Curiosity Shape and Doveyed Covetfilles, two Freudian slips that, alas, only reveal his own guilt. When the Ondt (the earwig having split in two as the warring Ondt and Gracehoper) asks a bee to "commence insects" with him, more of the truth seems to be leaking out. Fortunately, being also a flower

is a Hyacinth, remember, and can therefore find relief—is it not perfectly natural for a hyacinth to be seen "pollen himself" in the Spring?

One of the more mysterious characters in FW is a shadowy Eugenius. He seems to contain Eugene Aram, the man who first proved Gaelic is an Indo-European language and who also had an unfaithful wife, like King Arthur, Finn and King Mark—and Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. Eugenius, however, also contains Eugene Schaumann, a Finn (ouch!) who happens to have shot another Russian General, Ivan Bobrikoff, on 16 June 1904. Since Schaumann was an anarchist and Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, was also an anarchist, Stephen is humorously accused of the assassination in the Cave of Winds chapter of Ulysses, which takes place on 16 June 1904.

The reason Joyce picked that date to immortalize in Ulysses long puzzled critics and commentators; we know now, due to Joyce's letters, that it was the day on which he and Nora Barnacle first had sex, of a sort. (He wanted to have intercourse. Nora, a 20-year-old virgin from Galway, compromised by masturbating him.) There are Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin every year on 16 June and, as Stan Gebler Davies has remarked, it is mind-boggling to think how the 95% Catholic population would react if they ever understood fully what they are commemorating.

Curiously enough, Joyce first met Nora in front of Oscar Wilde's old house on Merrion Square. Wilde brings in the homosexual theme again and Merrion suggest Marion (Bloom's wife) and Marian, a Catholic adjective to describe shrines or churches sacred to the BVM or Blessed Virgin Mary. All of this gets tangled beautifully in Ulysses. In Chapter Three, walking toward the Pigeon House on Sandymount Strand, near the place where Nora masturbated our Immortal Author, Stephen Dedalus thinks of a blasphemous joke about the Virgin Mary trying to explain to Joseph that she was not unfaithful with another man but only with a pigeon. In Chapter Thirteen, Bloom masturbates on the same spot, while a teen-age virgin, Gerty McDowell is flirting with him, and Joyce intercuts their antiseptic sex (exhibitionism and voyeurism) with a ritual to the Virgin in the nearby Church.

Somehow the Holy Ghost, the symbolism of the dove or pigeon, and the Pigeon House have become emblems of Irish sexual frustration and Bloom's masturbation a parody of Immaculate Conception. ("Timid onanism they call purity," Joyce wrote of his countrymen in a letter. Nietzsche's The Antichrist, quoted in Chapter one of Ulysses, contains the memorable aphorism, "The Immaculate Conception maculates conception.")

Oscar Wilde, who keeps popping up in all these synchronicity clusters, was the first proponent of the theory that Shakespeare was homosexual. Wilde was also called "a great white caterpillar" by Lady Colin Campbell, and Wilde as caterpillar often gets blended with Earwicker as earwig in Joyce's "mooxed metaphors."

Brian Boru died on 23 April, 1014, and Shakespeare died on 23 April, 1616. Shakespeare was also born on 23 April, 1565, a meta-synchronicity that will concern us later in this chrestomathy.

A mysterious voice cries "More pork" several times in FW. This is probably, on the

level, a memory of a customer in Earwicker's pub the evening before the dream, but it links to the Ham-Bacon-Shakespeare theme, and Moore Park was the place where Swift first met "Stella" (Esther Johnson). In Gaelic Padraic mor, pronounced pork moor, is Saint Patrick, hut can also refer to Padraic Pearse, the author of "Mishe Eire," the Irish Declaration of Independence, and the Easter Uprising.

Nora Barnacle's voice appears on the first page of FW linked with Padraic Pearse, St. Peter, Moses at the burning bush and the pun on which the Catholic Church alleges to be founded:

All these coincidences mesh into one another in an endless Strange Loop that makes FW a model of the interconnectedness of all things asserted by Bell's Theorem in quantum mechanics, 26 years after FW was published. (We will return to that eerie subject.) Thus, Richard Pigott is linked to Shakespeare, not only by the Ham-Hamlet-Bacon puns, but by the fact that Shakespeare had a boar's head on his Coat of Arms. The 2 girls (

) and 3 soldiers (

) in the park are isomorphic to Dublin's own Coat of Arms which has 2 dancing girls and 3 castles (military symbols). 2 and 3 suggest the death dates (23 April) of Brian Boru and Shakespeare. Ireland is a living synchronicity, having 4 provinces divided into 32 counties and also having been converted to Christianity by St. Patrick in 432 A.D. If

is both Hamlet and Humpty Dumpty, he easily becomes a "homlette" and the association ham and egg points forward to breakfast when the dreamer finally wakes. When Joyce wants to link cuckolded King Mark with Mark Twain, he not only has the link Mark-Mark but also the Finn-Mark isomorphism (both were cuckolds) and the fact that Twain sounds like twin bringing us back to the twins Cain and Abel (

) who become unified

who is also Tristan.