Tuesday, June 16, 2015

James Joyce - Modern Psychonaut


“I am convinced personally that Mr. Joyce is a genius all the world will have to recognize.”
– Aleister Crowley, The Genius of Mr. James Joyce

“Joyce’s prose prepared me to enter psychedelic space.”
– Timothy Leary, FLASHBACKS

“(Finnegans Wake is) about as close to LSD on the page as you can get…”
– Terence McKenna, Surfing on Finnegans Wake

“If you’ve never had a psychedelic, reading Joyce is the next best equivalent.”
– Robert Anton Wilson, RAW Explains Everything

“I have read Finnegans Wake aloud at a time when takers of LSD said, ‘that is JUST LIKE LSD.’ So I have begun to feel that LSD may just be the lazy man’s form of Finnegans Wake.” 
– Marshall McLuhan, Q & A

“Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”
– Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion


“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.”
– Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance

“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either
shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”
– James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

I thought it would be fun on the occasion of Bloomsday 2015 to offer up a smattering of James Joyce’s hierarchitectitiptitoploftical influence on the psychonaut counter culture, and hopefully provide a novel context for his great works, which might help them extend beyond the trappings of highfalutin literary scholarship.

Please feel free to explore for yourself:
The collected works of James Joyce

7 comments:

michael said...

These are THE choicest/joicest quotes on Sunny Jim!

Perfect for this, our most non-ordinary Ordinary Day.

Pluri-perfecta-mundo!

Bobby Campbell said...

Thanks very much, OG!

There was one more bit I wanted to include, but figured it wd be best to keep it short for the disinfo crowd, though it can't hurt to tack it on here in the comments:

When the Brothers McKenna made their legendary trip to La Chorrera one of the few supplies they brought with them was a copy of Finnegans Wake, and furthermore, within the context of their resultant visionary experience, Joyce remains peculiarly significant. As reported by Terence McKenna in True Hallucinations:

“Dennis called our attention to the little hen, saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? Only the one who could have fashioned the peculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own punch line: "James Joyce."

Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of the relation of the human mind to time and space and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this corner of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.

‘Jim and Nora,’ as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the Wake was one of these things. It was Joyceaen humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace.”

Toby said...

"Looking back today over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge. And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still––in new relationships indeed, but ever the same motifs. They are all given here, in these volumes, with many clues, besides, suggesting ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends––or by poets to poetic ends––or by madmen to nonsense and disaster. For, as in the words of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: 'utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.'"

Joseph Campbell, on completion of the four volumes of The Masks of God.

Bobby Campbell said...

An awesome and well timed quote!

Thanks, Toby :)

wklaus23 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
wklaus23 said...

Philip K Dick on Finnegans Wake
http://iahuasca.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-last-word-pt1.html?m=1

Chico Garage Door Repairs said...

Interesting thhoughts

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