part0027

A is the first letter of most European alphabets and is thus associated with beginnings or origins. The Hebrew A is pronounced aleph and spelled ALP by Cabalists writing in English, ALP being the English equivalent of the spelling of aleph in Hebrew, which is, in full a leph- l amek- p e. Cabalists have found many mystical meanings in this A or ALP, but not nearly as many as Joyce finds in FW .

ALP is Joyce's abbreviation for Anna Livia Plurabelle, the anima figure who combines all women and all rivers. In Joyce's notebooks ALP is symbolized

, which is pronounced delta in Greek, a nice coincidence since rivers have deltas and the Greeks traditionally regarded

as a symbol of the vagina. ALP or

is thus a pure yin force in the Chinese sense, female and watery at once.

Anna Livia Plurabelle takes her name, in part, from the Dublin river, Anna Liffey. Livia Svevo, wife of Joyce's friend Italo Svevo, was also told that she was a partial model for ALP, and Joyce scholars have found the Roman Empress (and poisoner) Livia also included in ALP. This last is appropriate because as Joyce's anima, ALP should be the female part of his own personality and his middle name was Augusta , due to clerical error. (His parents intended Augustine, but the clerk was Irish and these things happen.)

Plurabelle (or sometimes Plurabella) seems more simple and just means "many beauties" or "many women" in Joyce's mixed Latin-Italian. However, it also includes a reference to Vico's repeated phrase "O pura et pia bella" (Oh pure and holy wars), an expression used often in his Scienza Nuova and entirely typical of his Neapolitan trickiness. Norman O. Brown in Closing Time takes the phrase at face value and thinks it expresses religious piety, but J. Mitchell Morse in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake thinks the expression contains veiled irony and as much sarcasm as Vico dared to show with the Inquisition looking over his shoulder. As somebody said, it is hard to translate Vico into English because English is a basically honest language.

Anna Livia Plurabelle is thus a very feminine and yin symbol, containing its own opposite—the yang (or macho) warfare imagery that links Vico to the brawl at Finnegan's Wake in the ballad. (Similarly,

or HCE, Joyce's male or yang force, has a hidden female element, as in "Hag Chevychase Eve," where he has become bisexual. Chevychase invokes bear-goddess and huntress Artemis, or the virgin; Eve is the mother of us all; and Hag is the Crone or Wise Woman. We thus have the three aspects of the ancient Moon Goddess, virgin-mother-crone, within the male HCE.)

Permutated, ALP becomes APL which brings us back to the apple in the Garden of Eden, the Fall theme and Adam and Eve who are always lurking below the surface from the first sentence onward; "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's . . ." (For instance, "a turn" page 7, with Adam mixed with Atum; "eddams . . . aves" page 69, "Hoddum and Heave" page 296, etc. etc. Especially delightful is "atoms and ifs," page 455, where quantum indeterminacy appears.) APL, however, also forms the initials of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland.

As is well known, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) loved Alice very warmly but perhaps not wisely—not wisely enough to avoid the speculations of Freudians. Thus Alice and Lewis Carroll link to the "incest" or Paedophilia theme in FW , as well as to Humpty Dumpty, the warring twins theme (Cain and Abel or

and

, who appear in Carroll's masterpiece as Tweedledum and Tweedledee), and the "nat language" which Joyce and Carroll both employ for non-aristotelian modes of mentation. It is appropriate that "Jabberwocky," Carroll's most Joycean verse, is recited by Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland but was originally published under the title "Mishmosh." (Nor avoice from afire belowsed mishe mishe . . .),

Alice first appears with the initials ALP and her family name, Liddell, on the second page of FW

he a ddle l iddle p hifie annie (emphasis added)

She recurs hundreds of times, and is even in the famous prankquean riddle, "Why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?" Alike is Greek for Alice, and "like as two peas in a pod" suggests the warring twins (

) again, while "I am" brings us back to the E at Delphi and the voice from a fire that bellowed Moishe Moishe and then identified itself as I AM . Coincidentally, Dodgson invented the mathematical symbol

, which Joyce uses for nonlocal consciousness. (Of course on the E or ego level, "why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease" just echoes customers in Earwicker's pub calling for a pint of porter, please.)

Charles Dodgson, the rationalist-mathematician, and "Lewis Carroll" the fantasist and child-lover, are often presented as one of Joyce's Jekyll-Hyde or split man teams (

) but on one occasion they get expanded into a full triplicity or

system: "Dogfather, Dogson and Coo," which sounds like a British partnership company but invokes the Holy Trinity—Father, Son and Pigeon. We are back at the Pigeon House again, where Stephen Dedalus thought of Mary's bizarre sexual coupling with the Pigeon and Bloom masturbated while virginal Gerty McDowell exhibited her bloomers (a verbal synchronicity). After the "immaculate" (no touching) sexual encounter of Gerty and Bloom, Bloom wrote in the sand, I AM A — and stopped. We will never know if he was going to write A VOYEUR, in shameful confession, or ALONE, in anguish (or maybe even A JEW in defiance?) In any case, he accidentally wrote "I am aleph" in Hebrew or "I am alpha" in Greek and thus invoked Revelations 1:11, "I am alpha and omega, the first and the last, saith the Lord." This 1:11 business turns out to be more curious than we realize at first, even if we note that it is connected with Bloom's son, who died at age 11 days, Shakespeare's son Hamnet who died at 11 years and the 22 (2x11) letters in the Hebrew alphabet or the 22 words in the first sentence of Ulysses.

If ALP and APL invoke all this, the LAP, a further permutation, invokes the LAP where a Freemason wears his apron, as in Aleister Crowley's BOOK OF LIES, Chapter 54, in which some Freemasons guess that the lost Mason Word is AMO, whose number is 111, and some guess that it is LAP which also has the number 111. (By Cabala, AMO=A which is 1, M which is 40, and O which is 70, 1+40+70=111, while LAP=L or 30, A or 1, and P or 80, and 30+1+80 also=111.) William York Tindall, a Joyce scholar who likes to count, has noted that many of the long sentences in FW have 111 clauses. Anna Livia Plurabelle's untitled "mamafesta" in Chapter Five has 111 alternative titles; when sad, she is described as "wan wan wan"; in Chapter 8, she has 111 children. Most books on Cabala hint at transcendental meanings in the fact that the Hebrew A or aleph=ALP=111 when spelled in full as aleph-lamek-pe. I think Crowley is hinting in Chapter 54 of The Book of Lies that the Mason Word also=111 by Cabala, but it is curious that Joyce often identifies ALP with the number 54, because she is basically Anna Liffey and in Roman numerals LIV=54. (But as "livvy" on the bottom of the first page she is Mark Twain's wife, Olivia, whom he called "Livvy," as well as being the Roman historian, Livy, who inspired Vico's theories of class war, which in turn inspired Marx, who is usually involved in Joyce's King Mark/Mark Twain puns.)

Joyce combines that Freemasonic lap theme with the Marriage Ceremony in the "Tavern" chapter of FW , which happens to be chapter 11:

Delta (

) as a symbol of the vagina here combines also with Hamlet's notorious puns to Ophelia on lap meaning vagina and "nothing" meaning 0 or another symbol of the vagina. The 0 and its role as link between Leibniz's binary and I Ching is a subject to which we will return.

But we started from ALP and that word features prominently in a famous, oddly Joycean passage from Marx: "The weight of the past presses down on the brains of the living like—" Like what? Marx wrote "Alp ," which in German can mean a nightmare or a mountain. Some translators make this "like an incubus" and some say "like an Alp." Since FW is a nightmare in which a mountain (Howth,

) is a prominent character, and since Joyce lived in Switzerland near the Alps for many years, this is all wonderfully appropriate.

We are not quite finished with the ALP-APL-LAP system yet. Another permutation gives us PLA, which is Dublin slang for Portlaois Lunatic Asylum, which many of Joyce's contemporaries predicted would be his ultimate destination. (Carl Jung, on first looking into FW , said it indicated "either mental illness or a degree of mental health inconceivable to most people." Salvador Dali, the painter whose work so often resembles Joyce's prose; liked to say, "The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.")

There are at least two tributes to Dali in FW . Joyce's "furloined notepaper" combines Poe's purloined letter with Dali's fur-lined teacups and bathtubs (and our animal anatomy: fur-loined). I also think Joyce's accusation that Earwicker was guilty of "covert meddlement with the drawers of his neighbor's safe" conflates the commandment against coveting one's neighbors wife with Dali's quite Joycean painting of a lady who had wooden (bureau) drawers where she should have ordinary lingerie drawers. Incidentally, Dali was as preoccupied with the fact that his first name, Salvador, means Savior in Spanish as Joyce was with the fact that his name implies a joyous one or one who makes jokes.

The second letter of most European alphabets is B and if you put our A and B together you get AB, or ab , which is the Indo-European root for "river," and appears in the name of the Punjab in India as well as in the Gaelic origin of Joyce's (or Dublin's) Anna Liffey, which is spelled abhe life and means "dark river." It also appears in numerous rivers between India and Ireland, including (by way of Grim's b-v switch) Shakespeare's Avon. We can't seem to get away from the "riverrun" with which FW begins, but that word probably owes something to Coleridge's

The ab root may or may not be historically linked to Abel, but it is linked in the unconscious, and thus we are back to the battling twins again—Shem the Penman and Shaun the Postman, Cain and Abel,

and

, Mutt and Jeff, Dodgson and Carroll, Jekyl and Hyde etc. These begin to seem like the two hemispheres of the brain, as discovered long after Joyce finished FW. As "cainapple," Joyce unites the Cain/Abel opposites, just as "the Hindu Shimar Shin" incongruously present at the battle of Waterloo unites them in their Shem and Shaun incarnations and Bruno of Nola unites them in their Brown and Nolan polarity. Ab also suggests Abraham—and Abraham and Sarah appear almost as often as Adam and Eve in FW as male/female or yang/yin archetypes.

Sara in Sanskrit means "salt" and this may explain why the Abraham/Sarah puns are especially thick on the closing pages of FW, where the freshwater Anna Liffey ( AB , river) mingles with the salt water ( sara ) of Dublin Bay. Abraham Lincoln, who also appears, had a patriarchal name, a patriarchal beard and presided over the American Civil War, a magnified battle of brothers, or Cain and Abel Writ Large, or the brawl at Finnegan's Wake as a recurrent historical pattern. Ulysses Grant finally won that war for Lincoln and had appeared already in Ulysses as a living synchronicity with the title (Molly Bloom remembers seeing him on a visit to Gibraltar). The hard-drinking author of the disreputable Ulysses seems to have had a strange sympathy for the hard-drinking and disreputable Ulysses Grant, who appears as a "Grant, old gardner" in one part of FW —blending with Adam, whom Tennyson called "the grand old gardner"—and whose name is also cunningly hidden in "grand u proar s tyle" (emphasis added) and several other Joycean arabesques you might enjoy discovering for yourself. The Blue and the Grey of the Civil War also appear frequently, but ultimately appear part of the Glues and the Gravys—two odd family names Joyce noted in the graveyard at Sidlesham where he found the Earwicker tombstone.

If Abhe life is identified with Eve in the opening clause of FW ("riverrun, past Eve and Adam's. . .") this is also fortunate, since Eve in Hebrew means life (as Adam means earth ).

The "Anna" got into "Anna Liffey" because the English did not understand the Gaelic abhe (pronounced more like awa) but is quite appropriate for Joyce's purposes. Anna, in the New Testament, was the grandmother of Jesus and thus, in Catholic theology, the grandmother of God, which makes her a good symbol of that which is most ancient and primordial. The Tuatha de Danaan, early inhabitants of Ireland, worshipped a goddess named Danu, seemingly cognate with Diane-Artemis (the bear goddess who was a bare goddess) and also with the ancient Near Eastern goddess Anu and the Egyptian Nuit. Considering these and other etymologies, Robert Graves in The White Goddess concluded that "Anna" is the best of all alternative names for the ancient Moon Goddess, who combines virgin, mother and crone.

The "Anna" root also appears in the Russian, Anastasia, which means "resurrection" and fits perfectly into the symbolism of FW. As usual, when you look for synchronicity, synchronicity looks for you. While Joyce was writing FW in Paris a woman surfaced there who claimed to be the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia. She appears on page 28 Gaelicized as Anna Stacey, but then Anna Liffey becomes Judaized on page 253 as Hannah Levy. Each of Joyce's "characters" is a local example of a non-local function, as all women are aspects of the non-local

A and B in Norse, meanwhile, are Ask and Embla, which mean Ash and Elm and are also the names of the Adam and Eve of Norse mythology. They appear on FW page 4 in the lovely Freudian/Jungian cluster,

elms leap where a skes l ay. P hall if you but will, rise you must (emphasis added)

Although Joyce has given it a detumescence/ retumescence reference, the second line echoes McPherson's Fingal , a Scots version of the Finn MacCool epic: "If I must fall, my tomb shall rise."

ABC or Hebrew Aleph-beth-gimmel recurs constantly in FW , usually symbolizing the "three quarks" of page 383 (

) who later got incorporated into quantum mechanics by Nobel laureate Dr. Murray Gell-Mann. "Alfred, Bertie, Charlie" and similar disguises usually conceal these three who include the warring twins (

) and their reconciliation (

), but specially delightful is Abraham Bradley King who is three in one, being a real Lord Mayor of Dublin whose initials suggest the ABC team, and whose name opens with the pregnant ab root. As Joyce comments, "It's as semper as oxhousehumper." Since Latin semper = eternal, this means simple as ABC or eternal as ABC or eternal as the Hebrew letters aleph-beth-gimmel, which mean ox, house and camel. The camel becomes a "humper" in remind us of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Humpty Dumpty.

But by now we should be ready to examine the family relationships between Joyce's major system-functions:

The underlying principle of FW seems to be the non-local

or the class of all possible minds, cognate with the Chinese no-mind (wu shin ) or the Tao. When non-local

appears in space-time it takes the form of the polarity of male or yang

energy and female or yin

energy. The first sentence, to look at it again, shows these yin/yang polarities neatly:

Eve and Adam are human forms of the yin/yang balance; the river Anna Liffey and Howth hill are geographic forms of the same polarity (the Chinese consider rivers yin and mountains yang); there may even be masculine energy in the rocky "swerve of shore" and female energy in the smooth "bend of bay." This yin/yang runs through the book in countless forms:

FW is already startlingly isomorphic with I Ching. But we have already seen that the male or yang energy takes the opposite forms of

and

, while the female or yin energy takes the opposing forms of

and

(the two Isoldes, the two Esthers, the two Alices—Alice Liddell and Isa Bowman, who played Alice on the stage and also became a subject of great affection to Dodgson/Carroll). This is isomorphic to the origin of I Ching, which is known as King Wen's Arrangement and looks like this

where the cosmology of Finnegans Wake is

The isomorphism of the two systems is the more remarkable because there is nothing in Joyce's letters to indicate that he ever read, or even heard of, the I Ching; but this only repeats the isomorphism, or synchronicity, in which Leibniz also recreated I Ching in the form of his binary notation. As is well known to mathematicians, Leibniz lived long enough to see the first European translation of I Ching and to note the "coincidence" and be astounded by it. It was this isomorphism, in fact, which led Leibniz to postulate a kind of universal logical language below all forms of consciousness, a concept like and yet unlike Jung's "collective unconscious."

The Chinese yang or

is isomorphic to Leibniz's 1 and the yin or

isomorphic to his 0. Substituting the binary symbolism in King Wen's Arrangement we get

The rule by which I Ching was generated out of King Wen's Arrangement is: out of these four elements, make all possible combinations of 3 each. If you will try this with King Wen's elements, you will get the 64 hexagrams of I Ching, since 43 =64. If you try it with Leibniz's terms instead of King Wen's, you get the first 64 numbers of the binary system (0 to 63), because, of course, 43 still=64.

Joyce seems to have known something of Leibniz, since he refers to the Leibniz's monad once, turning it into a confectionary "Prince Le Monade" (lemonade) who appears in a sugary fantasy involving girls in "sundae dresses." More interestingly, on page 261,

and

become "that upright one and that naughty besighed him zeroine," which has a Freudian meaning (phallus and vagina) but also seems to refer directly to Leibniz's 1 and 0. The Chinese yang and yin, of course, reconcile this double-meaning, since they are both mathematical and sexual.

Leibniz predicted modern computers after the isomorphism between his binary numbers and I Ching became clear to him; it was obvious to his fine mathematical mind that such a symbolism could be mechanically reproduced and we would then have something akin to a "thinking machine." It is amusing that those who think computers think (or will soon think) generally consider themselves materialists, while those who claim I Ching thinks call themselves mystics, but if thought is defined in these terms, then both computers and I Ching must be considered to be thinking. (The fact that the human nervous system operates on a similar binary code may account for our occasional impression that humans also think, at least outside the areas of politics and religion.)

The implied thesis of these notes is that Joyce, Leibniz and the authors of I Ching all found this system independently and in different ways because it does, in fact, exist on the level of the non-local "mind" or system (

) underlying all individual minds or Egos (

). This is the I AM or A Ham which appears in Gaelic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and about 60 other languages throughout the pages of FW : Plutarch's explanation of the E at Delphi.

There is one feature of I Ching which appears in Joyce but not in binary—the moving lines (

and

) which transform active yang to passive, active yin to passive, or vice versa. These are, of course, Joyce's non-Aristotelian functions,

as hidden unity behind

and

, and

as hidden unity behind

and

. I am happy to say that the Taoist philosopher and Tai Chi master, Chiang Ling Al Huang, agreed with me about this point when I presented these isomorphs at Esalen Institute in March 1986.

It is amusing (or bemusing) to note that binary and I Ching are not only isomorphic to FW but also, as Martin Schoenberger has noted, to the genetic code. The full details are explained in Dr. Schoenberger's The I Ching and the Genetic Code; for our purposes here it is enough to note the following:

The DNA is made up of two opposite spirals, positive and negative, which can easily be considered isomorphic to I Ching's yin (

) and yang (

), or Leibniz's 0 and 1, or Joyce's

and

. These are bonded by four amino acids—adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, which are usually abbreviated A, G, C, T. If one dares to consider these isomorphic with active yang (

), passive yang (

), active yin (

) and passive yin (

), or Leibniz's 01,11,10 and 00, or Joyce's

and

, then the parallel becomes staggering. In forming RNA messages—the genetic code—the T (thymine) drops out to be replaced by U (uracil) but we still have four elements—A, G, C, U—and if we permutate them by the now-familiar rule, making all possible combinations of three out of these basic four "letters," we get again 43 or 64 "words," which are the 64 elements of the genetic language.

But if the genetic language has two foursomes—the A,C,G,T that bond the DNA, and the A, C, G, U that unwind from this and make the 64 permutations of the genetic language—Joyce also has a second foursome, in addition to his male

and female

The second foursome is symbolized in his notes as X .

X is one of Joyce's most interesting nonlocal functions. Most often it is four judges, one presiding over each of the Four Courts on the river Anna Liffey in Dublin—a building which literally does have four courts, incidentally: one for Dublin city, one for Dublin county, one for the province of Leinster and one for the nation. In many places X becomes the four compass points. North East South West, and it is occasionally the four provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht), the four chambers of the human heart, the four kings of the Tarot or ordinary card decks, etc. As the book moves on, X more and more becomes the four archetypal figures whom Joyce gives the names Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny McDougal.

As Matt, Marcus, Luke and Johnny, X obviously echoes the children’s' prayer, "Matt, Mark, Luke, John, bless the bed that I lie on." As Gregory, Lyons, Tarpey and McDougal the X links to very deep archetypes, as follows: Gregory includes ego and thereby suggests a man; Lyons suggests a lion; Tarpey suggests Gaelic tarf , a bull (with a buried link to the Battle of Clontarf again; Clontarf means bull field); and McDougal conceals an eagle . We thus have the four angels in the vision of Ezekiel—man, lion, bull, eagle—who were, in fact, identified with the Four Evangelists in medieval Catholic art. Matt being shown with a man, Mark with a lion, Luke with a bull and John with an eagle. They appear this way, for instance, in the 8th Century Irish Book of Kells, which Joyce uses as a source of archetypes throughout FW, being especially concerned with the famous "Tunc" page (because Tunc in Latin means both "now" and "then" and thus invokes the Einsteinian Relativity theme, and also because Tunc makes an easily deciphered permutation of what Earwicker was evidently peeking at in the bushes of Phoenix Park.)

Of course, the Catholic Matt-man, Mark-lion, Luke-bull, John-eagle symbolism contains an astrological code. The man is the union of opposites and hence correlated with the water signs, the lion (Leo) symbolizes the fire signs, the bull, Taurus, is the earth signs and the eagle, of course, the air signs. The same symbolism appears repeatedly in alchemical texts and is coded into the Tarot cards in which cups = water, wands = fire, pentacles = earth and swords = air. Bruno was one of the last of the great hermetic philosophers who used this symbolism to express psychological/"metaphysical" propositions which nowadays are more familiar to us as Jung's system of the four basic personality types which each create a different reality-tunnel as they edit experience to fit their own models. The equation is:

Matt Gregory = man = water = cups = Jung's feeling person. The Tarot cups are full of water in most decks; water correlates with the feeling faculty because of its flowing and unstable nature.

Marcus Lyons = Leo = fire = wands = Jung's intuitive person. Some Tarot decks actually show fire spouting out of the wands; fire correlates with intuition because it is an ancient symbol of illumination.

Luke Tarpey = bull = earth = pentacles = Jung's sensational person. Earth correlates with the sensational faculty because the sensational/sensual person is, in vulgar jargon, "earthy" and "materialistic."

Johnny MacDougal = eagle = air = swords = Jung's rational person. The swords = reason because they cut things up as reason dissects things in analysis. Air symbolizes reason because the Rationalist notoriously lives in the clouds and doesn't "have his feet on the ground."

Bruno and the hermeticists generally believed, like Jung, that most people are over-developed in one of these areas and under-developed in the others, and that the path to integration was to learn to balance all four. It has by now become commonplace in Joyce exegesis to recognize that the warring twins,

and

, are two aspects of the nonlocal

, roughly isomorphic to Jung's Persona and Shadow or Freud's ego and id. It seems likely to me that the four X are also aspects of the one E or psychic functions of the dreamer that have been separated and need to be reunified.

To Bruno and the hermeticists, of course, the four X were metaphysical as well as psychological. The cosmology of earth-air-fire-water has such a long history in alchemical-hermetic literature that it hardly needs to be insisted on; Jung has tried to find modern translations for this somewhat archaic system in his Psychology and Alchemy. The traditional system meanwhile lives on and is used by many occult groups still surviving; the reader will find it expounded in most of the works of Aleister Crowley, especially The Book of Thoth.

In researching secret societies for my llluminatus trilogy, I was repeatedly amazed that some analog of Joyce's X function appears in almost all of them, in one way or another. For instance, Freemasonry, the largest and most powerful secret society of all, has four Worshipful Masters who stand at the four corners of the lodge during initiations, just as Joyce's X are sometimes North, East, South and West. (The three quarks,

, curiously, also appear in Freemasonry as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum in the death of the Widow's Son.) The most influential of all modern magick societies, the Golden Dawn, uses four quasi-Freemasonic officers at the four corners of the temple. Witches have their four guardians at the four "quarters" who go by various names—modern witchcraft is an improvised reconstruction of the medieval cult—but usually they are half male and half female. In the largest California witch coven, they are Robin, Orpheus, Marion and Bride—who correspond with man, lion, bull, eagle in one sense, but correspond even more closely with Joyce's

or with I Ching's active yang, passive yang, active yin and passive yin.

This interchangeability of foursomes makes an interesting isomorphism with genetics. The DNA is bonded by the four acids A, C, G, T but the genetic code is created when T drops out to be replaced by U, and the 64 "words" of the genetic code, as we have seen, is based on A, C, G, U, not on A, C, G, T. Perhaps this explains why Joyce gives us two foursomes in the

complex and the X complex. At any rate, the male-female polarity of

does wash over into the X occasionally, and Joyce calls them "heladies" or bisexuals in the Tristan-Isolde chapter, where they become four seagulls spying on the lovemaking of Tristan and Isolde, the three elders spying on Susanna in the Old Testament, and four censors trying to decide if FW is obscene. (That is the chapter that begins with the "three quarks" who later found their way into quantum mechanics via Dr. Gell-Mann.)