Steve Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe (Reading from TSOG)

You can support more video like this one for as little as 1 dollar per month @
https://www.patreon.com/stevefly

Also, you can support the everliving bringer of plurabilities Bobby Campbell, here:
https://www.patreon.com/rgc777

Thank You

--Steve Fly

Sylvia Beach interview on James Joyce and Shakespeare & Company (1962)

I find Sylvia's voice unique and strangely soothing, while her conversation on the tale of the tribe proves illuminating.  That it was mostly women who were determined to help get Ulysses published reinforces, to me, the importance of Joyce studies within gender/identity politics in 2018.

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem like a performance by example of male-feminism in literature, and show a great capacity to explore the other in all it's forms and shadows: a modernist, or post-modern tendency toward comprehensive thinking.               

From wikipedia: "In 1956, Beach wrote Shakespeare and Company, a memoir of the inter-war years that details the cultural life of Paris at the time. The book contains first-hand observations of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Valery Larbaud, Thornton Wilder, André Gide, Leon-Paul Fargue, George Antheil, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Benet, Aleister Crowley, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby, John Quinn, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and many others.

After Monnier's suicide in 1955, Beach had a relationship with Camilla Steinbrugge. Although Beach's income was modest during the last years of her life, she was widely honored for her publication of Ulysses and her support of aspiring writers during the 1920s. She remained in Paris until her death in 1962, and was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Her papers are archived at Princeton University.

Waywords and Meansigns Opendoor Edition (Finnegans Wake set to music)

finnegans wake collaboratively set to music


For this 2017 release we gathered over 100 musicians and readers from 15 different countries to set James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music.

Unlike our previous releases, which were both unabridged versions of the Wake, this is an incomplete "open edition", meaning we want YOU to submit your own recording. (Composer Andrea Riley has even written an open score, which you could interpret or perform. Click here to download.)

With releases in 2015, 2016 and now 2017, we have created some 70 hours of audio in total, setting the entire text of Finnegans Wake to music multiple times. Project director Derek Pyle has written about the evolution of the project on our blog.

We love to hear from you, so drop a line and let us know what you think!

Over three hundred people have been directly involved in production of our audio. We dedicate this 2017 edition to all the good people working behind the scenes — all the collaborators, producers, audio engineers, editors, and everyone who supported us.

To everyone who believed in and encouraged the project when it was still a weird little idea, helping us grow in size and in spirit, thank you for fostering what is now a rather large but equally weird idea.

Read more here:

Bloomsday!

The wonderful free online resource Open Culture, today offers a recording of James Joyce reading from Ulysses...

Image found at Mackenzie's Dragons Nest (used without permission)

Ulysses for Dummies - in 18 pictures

Many Happy Returns

Finnegans Wake - an illustrated panorama at The Paris Review

Steven Crow has worked on creating images for each page of Finnegans Wake

Wake In Progress

Nausicaa

Proteus

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

Finnegans Wake, again

Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud 

Set to Music 

31 Hours of Free Unabridged Audio

Here, at Open Culture, you can find the project Waywords and Meansigns

Our own, our very own, Steve Fly took on Chapter 14.   FW III.2

Steve Fly at *Traces du Sacré* exhibition in Paris 2008

Track 14: William Sutton reads pp. 429-42 469-73; Steven 'Fly' Pratt reads pp. 443-68. 

Drums, turntables, guitar, arrangement, production, recording in Amsterdam by Steve Fly. 

Mastered by Tim Egmond at Ei-Complex Studios, Amsterdam

PS: as it happens, Finnegans Wake (at least the first third) became a freak hit book in China a couple of years ago.

Note:    *Traces du Sacré* at the Centre Pompidou still online

Steve Fly

The Library of Babel

Erik Demazieres - Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a wonderful story about the infinite library, a short story you can find here.

Thanks to the wonders of computing, something resembling that fantastic library now exists!

Read about it in The Guardian                                                                     Read about it at Open Culture

Some samples:

Finnegans Wake

RAW

http://www.zonedobsolescenceconcertee.org/

Only Maybe

A Joycean Jinx!

“Being humus the same roturns”

JJ, FW Pg. 18

The sensationalistic tabloid story of Robert Durst has once again surfaced on print and digital front pages the world round. This time thanks to an HBO documentary called “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.” (Bear with me on this!)

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in short, what happened was an extremely rich man’s wife disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the 1980’s, then a close friend of his (Susan Berman) was murdered 2 decades later when she was about to be questioned about the wife’s disappearance, and then he admittedly killed and dismembered a neighbor, but successfully claimed self defense. He was generally regarded as having gotten away with at least 3 murders.

He then agrees to participate in a documentary about himself, proclaiming his innocence and bad luck coincidence throughout, which aired recently to great interest, and concluded by bringing about new evidence, resulting in his current arrest.

What was the new evidence? A misspelled word.

After Susan Berman was killed an anonymous letter was sent to the police informing them of the body’s location.

In the anonymous letter, presumably sent by the killer, Beverly Hills is misspelled as "Beverley Hills."

The documentary crew then discovers a letter that Durst sent to Berman with the exact same misspelling and indistinguishable handwriting.

The documentary crew confronts Durst about this, and he appears to have strange involuntary reactions, all while still maintaining his innocence and bad luck coincidence. And then in a truth is stranger than fiction moment, Durst excuses himself to the bathroom, and forgetting that he is still wearing a microphone, engages in what sounds like a pathological rambling confession.

But it’s really the misspelled word that’s the more concrete evidence, and doesn’t this scenario sound familiar to ye Joyceans?

The Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which features prominently in the dreamscape of Finnegans Wake, along with the attempt of Richard Piggott to frame Charles Stewart Parnell as being involved in and/or supportive of the murders via a series of forged letters.

Parnell was cleared of the charges because Piggott’s misspelling of the word hesitancy as “hesitency” identified him as the author of the letters.

“Hesitency was clearly to be evitated”

JJ, FW Pg. 35

Joyce makes much of this incident and the theme recurs throughout the book, playing into the ambiguity of HCE’s guilt/innocence of the indistinct crime he is accused of.

Curious that in both cases it was an extra letter “e” that did the trick.

So it goes, around and around and around again.

bc

@RGC777

weirdoverse.com

Additionally! My comic "REJECTED" came out on Comixology today.

And also maybe check out: Why “REJECTED” is a bad comic that I hope nobody reads, but I love it anyways!

Waywords and Meansigns: recreating finnegans wake (in its whole wholume)

A spanking new project to record and interpret Finnegans Wake called 'waywords and meansigns' has been launched, and this drummer is very happy to be a contributor (to the second edition) scheduled for release later this summer. This first edition will be in orbit some time in the coming months, and features a diverse international mix of musicians and artists from across a spectrum of the arts.  

"Waywords and Meansigns is an upcoming audio version of James Joyce's famous text, Finnegans Wake, to be read in its entirety. The book will be divided into 17 sections, and there will be a different music/reader/performance group assigned to each section. Featuring established as well as up-and-coming artists, Waywords and Meansigns will offer a version of Joyce's work that is stimulating, accessible, and enjoyable to even the most casual of readers and listeners."

http://www.waywordsandmeansigns.com/about.html

https://www.facebook.com/waywordsandmeansigns


Finnegans Wake by James Joyce had been a fav/ book of Bobs, that he considered the greatest novel of all time. Listen to Dr Wilson cruise through some of the 'Shem The Penman' episode here, deploying his Brooklyn Irish brogue.

Robert Anton Wilson reads Finnegans Wake: Shem the Penman



There are plans for a second and a third edition of the project, so anybody reading this who would like to join this new adventure, please contact: waywordsandmeansigns @ gmail. com

"FW is what I call “The Good Book”, and I’m only half joking.  To me it’s not only the greatest novel ever written, it’s the greatest poem ever written, the greatest detective story ever written, and the most entertaining work in all literature, and as William York Tindall of Columbia says, it’s the funniest and dirtiest book in the world.   People are intimidated by it.  If the publishers just had the sense to put on the cover, “the funniest and dirtiest book in the world - Tindall, Columbia”, it would sell a lot better, and people would make the effort to decipher it.--Robert Anton Wilson.

Joyce's Birthday - and a funny letter he wrote

In celebration of James Joyce's birth date (yesterday) Brain Pickings published a funny letter  that he "wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on June 24, 1921, mere months before Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach."

James Joyce’s Humorous Morphology of the Many Outrageous Myths about Him

How the celebrated author earned a reputation as a lazy coke-head movie mogul with a peculiar clock habit.

NB: Brain Pickings remains a delight, and worth subscribing to (or just exploring).

They also have here, a selection of etchings that Matisse did for a limited edition of Ulysses...

 

And here's another treat:

 

 

 

The Cats of Copenhagen: A Newly Discovered James Joyce Children’s Story

 

ALL SEEING EYES

“These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.”

- Terence McKenna in Riding Range w/ Marshall McLuhan

If we're going to live in a Brave New World / 1984 mashup can I at least humbly request that my Netflix recommendations be a bit more doubleplusgood?

I originally drew the Joyce & Pound / 0 & 1 bit for RAW's now mythic Tale of The Tribe class, in reaction to his observation that (pardon my poor paraphrasing) Pound's The Cantos modeled history as linear progression moving up & down (from inferno to paradiso), and that Joyce's Finnegans Wake modeled history as a cyclic process going round & round (from swerve of shore to bend of bay). With further nudging by his equation that Joyce + Pound + Mcluhan = Internet.  (I may not have that notation exactly right, Mcluhan may have been a multiplier, but you get the idea)

My first exchange with RAW concerned the shape of things to come.  I proposed to him the model of an escalating spiral, to which he said he agreed, though wasn't dogmatic about it. I do find it encouraging though what visual concept results from combining the historical trajectories of both Joyce & Pound...

Excelsior!

bc
bobbycampbell.net
@RGC777

Joyce at the Martello Tower

From the Today in Literature site (although a day late!)  James Joyce - Joyce at the Martello Tower

 "On 9 September in 1904, twenty-two-year-old James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, outside Dublin, with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty..."

Photos of James Joyce territory Dublin, Ireland

Universal Bloomsday!

OK, OK - just maybe 'earthwide' Bloomsday (cf: "why do all the Mr Universe awards get won by earthlings?).

As a monolinguist (UK English), who struggles with many of the complexities of "Finnegans Wake",  I, the bogus one, (not the only individual who posts to this blog) somehow find it heartening to know that the Chinese have recognised something in the text that speaks to them.

I have no idea if Joyce planted gags in the text which only emerge when pronounced correctly in Chinese.  Perhaps he made a really worldwide text (even maybe 'universal', although we await alien translations of the puns and Ur-language).

Very few people have the language resources to tell - with a full overview. Bloomsday in China

Anyway - OM wishes you a delightful and inspiring Bloomsday, wherever you find yourself on 'Sunday 16th  June' (Gregorian calendar).

JOYCEAN ENGINEERING

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!

"When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel."
– JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES

Joyce's Voices

For Bloomsday this year (16 June 2012) the BBC will be handing Radio 4 over to Ulysses. Throughout the day there will be readings of a special adaptation of the text, along with live broadcasts from Dublin (where fans re-enact moments from this complex book. Sadly, this may not prove accessible to all countries.

This will be an edited version, not the 'complete' text which was broadcast in 1982 (which took nearly 30 hours).

The details below are from the BBC Media Centre (without permission) which contains further information.

Here, at a glance, are the main Bloomsday broadcasts on Radio 4:

Part 1 09.00 – 10.30: Saturday Live From the Martello Tower to School
Sian and Richard present a special Bloomsday edition of the show, which will include the first three extracts from the drama as well as discussion and location reports, with input from Mark Lawson in Dublin.

Part 2 10.30 – 11.00 From Bloom’s House, through the Morning Streets, to a Funeral

Part 3 12.00 – 12.30 From the Beach, to a Newspaper Office, into Davy Byrne’s Pub

Part 4 14.30 – 15.30 The Library, Through the Lunchtime Streets, to the Ormond Hotel

Part 5 17.30 – 18.00 In Barney Kiernan’s Pub

Part 6 20.00 – 22.00 From Sandymount Beach at Evening, to the Maternity Hospital, and into Nighttown

22.15 – 23.00: Ulysses Today Mark Lawson chairs a discussion about the abiding popularity of Ulysses and its relevance today, with Declan Kiberd, author of Ulysses And Us – The Art Of Everyday Living; Professor Anne Fogarty, Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School; and others.

Part 7 23.00 – 00.00 From a Cab-man’s Shelter, to Eccles Street and Home

In the week before the Bloomsday broadcasts, Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra will be broadcasting a number of programmes on the theme of Ulysses:

James Joyce had a fine singing voice and sang professionally as a young man. In James Joyce’s Playlist, David Owen Norris and guests will listen to some of Joyce’s favourite songs in the Martello Tower in Dublin where he lived for a time. This will be broadcast on Saturday, June 9th.

On Thursday, June 14th In Our Time will discuss the background to Ulysses, considering its historical and literary context, its themes, contents and style, and the impact it has had since publication. Melvyn Bragg will be joined by Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London; Jeri Johnson, Fellow and Tutor in English at Exeter College, Oxford; and Richard Brown, Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds.

4Extra: Blind Date With Bloomsday – another chance to join Peter White on his Bloomsday visit to Dublin, during which he meets some enthusiastic celebrants. Friday, June 15th.

Follow your Bliss

It seems a shame that Joseph Campbell's lovely thought has lost its power, possibly thanks to the invention of the phrase "bliss-ninny" as an insulting term for New Age, empty-headed optimism.

Judging from various references he made to his own life, he intended it as a guideline about working on things that you love. If you succeed, fine, you also get rewards from society, but if not, at least you have enjoyed your time.

He contrasts that to setting out to 'succeed' - to make money, or achieve celebrity - which, if those rewards do not come to you, leave you with miserable memories of wasting your time on irrelevant things.

Quote from An Open Life

"But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall.

If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one's "bliss" -- the thing that really gets you deep in your gut and that you feel is your life -- doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of."
[...]"...if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way."


In addition to this strategy for life, he also refers to the curious sense of a story that one finds in what had seemed a chaotic life, when looking back. Here, in converation with Bill Moyers:

CAMPBELL: Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.


It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.
All this came back to me, when reading some material of Campbell's on Joyce -

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce

- and how his reading the first lines of Chapter 3 of Ulysses - Proteus (see previous post) - set him off on a different life path.


"INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read..."

Walking Into Eternity

"Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
James Joyce, ULYSSES, Episode 3, Proteus

Falling on Deaf Ears

Written by Bogus Magus w/ Artwork by Bobby Campbell

"...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

We learned many wonderful things on RAW's Tale of the Tribe course, but Giambattista Vico's holistic view of human evolution and development as a cyclic progression, a spiral, really appealed to many of us and deserves further exploration. In spite of living in dangerous times for such thinking Vico perceived, and attempted to describe, history as a whole system, and humans as self-made, just as Darwin would later attempt to sum up how plants and animals formed themselves without a "creator".

Moderns might describe Joyce's fantastic novel Finnegans Wake (which implied this cyclic structure) as a hologram, but Vico might well have described it in the Hermetic or alchemical terms of a Microcosm/Macrocosm, "as above, so below."

BABABADLGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONN
KONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNN
TROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOOR
DENENTHURNUK!

This 100 letter magical word appears on page one and some say it represents a clap of thunder, the Big Bang of Creation. To me it would work equally well as the sound of a slapstick fall (Finnegan falling off his ladder like a ton of bricks) - and, as the main character has fallen asleep, perhaps it could also remind us of a very loud snore.

The Gnostics seemed to think of The Fall (and the Original Sin) not as a human flaw - Adam eating the Forbidden Fruit - so much as something that "god" did. A demiurge fell for the temptation to slow Light down into Matter, to manifest Himself in the blissful void of the Great Mother, to create a world to rule over, and condemn people to a life and death struggle, etc. Confused echoes of this remain in the stories of Fallen Angels bringing humans fire and teaching the arts of civilisation, leading to the loss of an innocent life.

Vico worked with the Inquisition breathing down his neck, so he could not talk of an eternal cycle with no beginning, and had to start from the Creation in Genesis. He implied that after the Flood Noah's descendants wandered for some time, losing their god-given culture and language and degenerating to a bestial life. (Without that pressure to fit the story to The Bible story, we just start with "cave-men" these days, and already know about ancient civilisations rising, flourishing and then falling).

Vico chose to start his description of the cycle with primitive humans immersed in nature, using only a symbolic language of gesture, monosyllables, signs, hieroglyphs and ideograms to describe their experience of the world. Deeply embedded, they viewed the world in a mythic sense, and felt themselves as part of the whole rather than as separate individuals. He thought that they would hold the elements in awe. Storms and the voice of the thunder would impress them greatly, and lightning snaking down might bring them fire with which they could keep warm while huddled in their caves. In the face of such "gods" those brute humans covered themselves with fur, and guiltily retreating to the privacy of caves (a recap of Adam and Eve cowering from God's thunderous anger at their disobedience) so beginning the forming of human culture. The strong alpha males offered protection from predators, outlaws and other threats to the older or weaker, and to their families of women and children. Even if they seemed like giants, ritual may have proved necessary against these greater forces of nature, placating the "gods" and protecting the clan. Primitive religion thrives in the Age of the Fall...


As humans began to build shelters, cities, palaces and churches - develop communities and take up farming - they moved into what he called the Age of Heroes.

They gained more control over the elements, and the powerful either fought or joined in alliances, employing and ruling the poorer and weaker. Pharaohs, Kings and Queens appeared as demi-gods - a manifestation of an unseen deity. Laws, institutions, and rigid beliefs developed to control society. Their language became polysyllabic, and poetic - with the use of metaphor and simile - but few would understand this complex language - much of it remained a mysterious tool in the hands of the Priests and rulers. Rich families would have heraldic crests, flags, and other signs of power. Rules of chivalry and Romance (falling in love) might hold sway, but the social structure kept sharp divisions between rich and poor, as in feudal economies.



When the laws get applied fairly to all they inevitably restrict the abuse of power, and even the rich have to acknowledge and obey them, so gradually the use of logic and articulate common language leads to abstraction, generalization, free discussion, legal argument and rationality. Rigid, traditional values get challenged by a meritocracy and eventually this leads the way to "democracy".

In the Age of the People all have similar rights, although freedom can feel frightening...

This stage, too cannot last, and Vico thought of the next stage (which he called the Ricorso) as a period of confusion and anarchy and self-indulgence. This could pave the way for a return to barbarism, a new upsurge of superstition, a neo-primitive phase, the resurgence of religion in all its forms, and a yearning once more for certainty, and the worship of a strong male authority figure, aka God.

Just as Joyce had written Ulysses to contain all the stories and struggles of humans manifest in one brief day in Dublin, portrayed by ordinary folk, so he structured Finnegans Wake as one long night, with several cycles of sleep and dreaming.

A falling asleep, a dreaming of all the tales of the tribe in all the languages of the world, an endless repetition of human relationships - marriage and a family ruled by the male in the age of gods, the fighting of brothers and the wiles of daughters in the age of heroes, the burial of the father in the age of the people - finally returning to consciousness at the break of day, to start the whole thing over.

We can see the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in Vico's model, and we can see the Roman Catholic Church giving way to Feudal England, followed by the rational Enlightenment, etc. Many people adopted the cyclic theory of history. Marx liked the inevitability he saw implied in the class struggle of the weak to demand and win their rights. He overlooked the fact that we cannot stop at any one phase of the cycle, so the reversion to autocratic Stalinism from the initially "rational" Communism might have disappointed him if he had lived to witness it. Of course, many of us may relish this anarchic period of confusion - but this model stands as a warning of the risks as time rolls on...and a Fundamentalist religious mentality kicks in.

Perhaps we can learn to control how long each part of the cycle lasts? Perhaps McLuhan's prediction of an oral/aural, post-literate, mythopoetic tribe shows one way that we could pass through the current age of change and movement and turbulence and opportunity to enter a mythical and wondrous 'golden age of the gods' , with every man and woman a star, without this time Falling for a Father Figure?

"As his title indicates (FINNEGANS WAKE), he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized."

-Marshall McLuhan

And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.

Here endeth the first lesson.

"The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the..."

(originally published online in Maybe Quarterly #5, and in print in "Maybe... #1")