Michael Johnson on Finnegans Wake

A Special Maybe Night conversation with scholar Michael Johnson by Bobby Campbell :)))

bc: Robert Anton Wilson described the language used by James Joyce when writing Finnegans Wake as holographic prose, an ur-hypertext comprised of multilingual portmanteaus with a branching network of meanings and associations. Indeed it is sometimes easy to find the whole in each part of FW's "chaosmos." Just to start things off with a cannonball into the deep end of the River Liffey...

What are the implications of FW's holographic prose within the fields of General Semantics and/or Linguistic Relativity?

MJ: Whoa, I don't know who's addressed this head-on, or if anyone has, but I'm gonna try. Make a stab, go on a foray, insert some probes, monitor them and see what readings I "take"; chart a passage from Mt. Holograff (location: Everywhen) to the fields of the formidable Polish logicians... 

A hologram instantiates the Hermetic code of "as above, so below." As does, it seems to me, the mathematics of Chaos Theory, and who hasn't already gone into some altered state looking at fractal art? 

To wildly simplify Korzybski, he was interested in uniting the new physics of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics with the everyday citizen's conscious apprehension of the world, and a huge problem was unconscious bias in our perception and the idea that things were static, block-like entities, when according to physics we live in a Heraclitean universe: all is in flux, you can't step in the same river twice, much less stick your finger in the same pie twice. There are a great number of passages in Science and Sanity in which Korzybski shows how nothing is "identical" with anything else, and there's a truly golden passage early on where he demonstrates that even the piece of paper you're reading him on is undergoing chemical changes right where you are sitting now. Not only is everything in flux, but everything has a date, which just passed a nanosecond ago, and...here comes another!: It's gone, too. What the hell is "now"? 

RAW's friend Prof. Carlin was one of our great poets about Time in this regard:

"We try hard to keep track of time, but it's futile. You can't pin it down. For example, there's a moment coming...and it's not here yet...it's still in the future...it's on the way...it hasn't arrived...it's getting closer...here it is...Oh shit it's gone!" (Napalm and Silly Putty, 165)

Okay, so while this is very weird - and the first time I read Science and Sanity I thought, "this new strain of weed is pretty trippy" before I realized I hadn't yet smoked anything - Korzybski's work seems to me more than anything else as a therapeutic approach to language and reality, in light of World War I. He thought we were still thinking like non-human animals, our big brains aren't keeping up with the modern world and if we don't hack language, language will hack us; it has a major downside. To put it wildly mildly. And it's not as if we're going to abandon language; it's kinda what we do. And his magnum opus came out the year Hitler was named Chancellor, 1933. 

So he wasn't drilling in a dry hole. He wants us to fully understand that nothing "is" anything else. He says it over and over again, so much so that Aldous Huxley's writes in his letters to his Nobel Prize-in-Biology-winning brother imploring Julian to read Science and Sanity, in which Aldous calls Korzybski very important but "maddening" in his repetitiousness. Korzybski was writing in his, I think, fourth language: English. His style reflects this not-first-language-ness, but I also think he was just a very hardcore Engineer, extremely well-steeped in Math and Logic. In fact, he argues over 800 pages that mathematics "is" the language that's best able to describe the structure of the world. If knowledge exists, it must have a structure, and math is really good at describing structure. If we can develop a set of gimmicks that sort of mimic the processes of the calculus, but for Everyday Joes and Josephines like us, by gad, he'd do it. And he did. 

But if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you need to practice. Or take a cab. And if you want to think like Korzybski you gotta practice a lot. RAW thought General Semantics was like practicing Zen and that cannabis helped him to observe on Korzybski's Object Level, which is pre-language, but "higher" than the Event Level, which is whirling energies all around us. Once you perceive that you've perceived an event and use language to label what you've perceived you're on the way to "abstracting" from your experience, in which you're going to leave far more out than you'd think. But we all need to abstract to get on in the world, so you may as well get really good at it. That's what most of the book tries to get you to do: to get better and better at "consciousness of abstracting." The more people are conscious of their abstracting, the "saner" the world will seem. 

Korzybski's overall vibe of urgency about the world situation and how we don't know how to control language, which is leading to cultural insanity, has only seemed even more urgent after Hitler/Stalin/fascism/The Bomb/TV/Internet/etc. The general semanticist and media ecologist Neil Postman saw McLuhan's "the medium is the message" as a restatement of what was earlier called the "Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis" - our Linguistic Relativity - and added, "Had Korzybski been as skillful a punster and phrase maker as McLuhan, he might have had a more dazzling impact on the intellectual community." (Teaching As A Subversive Activity, p.105)

Indulge a brief semantic-pedanticism: The universal genius Leibniz had formulated, in the 18th c, the Principle of the Identity of the Indiscernibles, which states that there cannot be separate objects or entities that have all of their properties in common. Korzybski was showing us how this "is" true in light of relativity and quantum mechanics. In the 19th century the British mathematician-logician Augustus de Morgan had recognized, in his book Formal Logic, that the "is" of identity was a huge problem: "The complete attempt to deal with the term 'is' would go to the form and matter of everything in existence, at least, if not to possible form and matter of all that does not exist, but might. As far as it could be done, it would give the grand Cyclopedia, and its yearly supplement would be the history of the human race for the time." - Korzybski quotes this passage in Science and Sanity (pp.750-751 of the 4th ed). Korzybski had tackled this problem..."as far as it could be done."

All of this has left out how trippy Korzybski is to read, both for me and for RAW, who in his Introduction to Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, says he re-read Korzybski stoned on cannabis, all the better to grok the levels of perception we abstract..."in"?

To me, Joyce's Finnegans Wake might be what you see after a few light years traveling in the realms of Linguistic Relativity, which may have gotten started with Chuang-Tzu (currently being referred to as Zhuang Zhou), but for our purposes let's say it visibly "got legs" and started running off into the forest of mirrors we call "reality" with Giambattista Vico, who linked the origin of language with singing and grunting and pointing, then poetry, while thunder plays the role of Angry Sky-Daddy-God. Vico was a major influence on Finnegans Wake. RAW liked to cite the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as the "Vico-Fenollosa-Pound-Korzybski-Whorf-Bandler Hypothesis," as he did near the end of his life in a Maybe Logic Academy course he taught. RAW had included other names in his writings over the years. The aforementioned Postman called it, the "Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan Hypothesis." "Ames" was Adelbert Ames Jr, who expanded on pragmatic ideas about perception but never wrote a book, although Einstein and John Dewey thought he was pretty badass and his work genius. You've seen the Ames Room? Ames developed what RAW called and studied "Transactional Psychology": The world we see is largely inside our head, etc. 

As other purveyors of Linguistic Relativity, I've seen the 19th c. genius Wilhelm Von Humboldt added in here, as well as Buckminster Fuller, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Herder, Goethe, Franz Boas, Nietzsche, and our man Jams Jaws/Germ's Choice/James Joyce. I have a list somewhere in my notes that runs to over 80 figures. Some other time...

George Lakoff and Lera Boroditsky have contributed significantly to aspects of Linguistic Relativity in recent years, among very many others. 

RAW was involved with a small group in Berkeley off-campus that included a lot of radical Linguists, Sociologists, Anthropologists and other weirdos, and he said they were studying "metalinguistics" which is usually related to the Whorf Hypothesis, but I think they were including Leary, McLuhan, Erving Goffman and...anyone who was at odds with Chomsky's hegemony in Linguistics. They were interested in logical paradoxes and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, gestures, body language, and how uncannily powerful metaphors...errr...seem. This would have been in the 1970s. I don't know about you, but when I think of "meaning," much less holographic, hermetic meaning, Chomsky's semantics looks like a Void. Meaning: I don't think his linguistics programs could account for all the "meaning" he found when he read between the lines of State Dept memos in his work as one of the great critics of the State, versus his syntax über alles Linguistics work at M.I.T. One world didn't translate into the other. Not for me, at least. 

(I love and admire Noam Chomsky and will cry when he dies; he's definitely a culture hero for me but I'm simply not as impressed with his long term Linguistics program as ten million other intellectuals seem to be. What am I missing? We ought not bow to his formalist linguistic work simply because we admire his moral courage as an intellectual. I wish I could dig Noam's linguistics, but I don't and it's a drag.  Chomsky would no doubt respond, as he did to colleagues who disagreed with him on this: "You completely fail to understand what I said." Or some variation on that. Hey, I tried, Noam. One time in an interview someone asked him about Orwellian use of language by politicians, religious leaders, and advertisers and he said that was more about "Pragmatics", so go read about that if you're interested. I'm thinking right now of the volatile dust-ups he had with George Lakoff, a former Chomsky acolyte, whose work makes WAY more sense to me, as a person who cares about how language works not only in the personal cognitive sense but also socially. See the newer edition of Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistic Wars.)

There was a time in the US, after WWII, in which General Semantics or certain techniques that came out of GS, was taught fairly widely in schools, but that went away. (Quick: find the referent in "Make America great again." Now tell us all about it.) Is it a conspiracy theory for me to say that advertisers, Big Religion, both political parties and the Business Community wanted it gone? Okay, then I'm a conspiracy theorist with this case. Around the same time Korzybski waned, Chomsky's computer-code recursive syntactical works that don't have anything to do with the citizens protecting themselves against predators gets big, at least in academe. Was it driven by Physics Envy? The "formal logic" they forced on us as undergrads was weak tea indeed, compared to General Semantics.

I personally find it embarrassing now when I read "experts" in Linguistics who try to debunk Linguistic Relativity, because I find the Soft Whorfian claims - that the structure of our language influences our thinking - indisputable. The Strong Whorfian says our language determines what we can and can't think about or even perceive, and that seems too strong a claim to me. 

When I think of RAW's thinking about Joyce and Finnegans Wake and holographic prose, I turn to the psychedelic (to me) essays in Coincidance: A Head Test. What was Wilson trying to argue for in those essays on Joyce? There's the surface arguments: what any hip intellectual would come away with there. Then there's - maybe? - an argument subtly hidden that Joyce had somehow managed to tap into some planetary intelligence that was superhuman, and this linked up with RAW's heretical ideas about Evolution: Yes, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of genetics plus Darwin's natural selection theory, was scientific...but not quite enough. The lacuna was yawning. How do proteins know how to fold into those intricate 3-D shapes so they can dock on receptors? How did Life begin on the planet? And if non-organic matter became organic: let's see the fire. Enough smoke. We've been waiting. There seems to be something vital or wholly Other that Biology/Chemistry/Physics can't get at in the evolution of Life and Intelligence. Whether that's some Neoplatonic object pulling us toward it, pulling toward the Ur-hologram or the thing that radiates and shines intelligence and light on all beings, or Bruno's erotic universe, something like Orgone, or Teilhard's Omega Point, or possibly has to do with Bell's Theorem or morphogenetic fields or any number of such Objects like one or all of these Things, I don't know. I think Wilson thought Joyce had some similar views, although I'm not going to dogmatize about it. And neither would RAW. 

So, the implications you ask about would seem to me to have to do with transcendent Intelligence immanent in (this?) universe. That's the esoteric read I get from RAW on Joyce and Finnegans Wake. The exoteric interpretation I see most strongly was: Both James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson were very weird Irish characters of considerable genius that no test measures. They were both near madness but stayed creatively fecund to the end. There's a passage in a letter Joyce wrote to his son Giorgio from 1934. Joyce worked hard for 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and wrote, 12 years in, to Giorgio: "I work every day at my big long wide high deep dense prosework." Could it all just be...hard work? Maybe, but it seems, like RAW's take on Neo-Darwinism, that there's gotta be more. 

Both Joyce and Wilson wrote about what they knew. The trouble is that few of us knew what they knew, and hence we are guessing about RAW on FW and Joyce indeed will keep the scholars busy for a thousand years or until we burn or blow ourselves up, insomnia or not. 

To the extent Intelligence Writ Large is "made of language" as Terence McKenna thought, it would seem to "be" instantiated in this transcendent, great Whatsit. Maybe a morphogenetic field, but what's knowingly, intelligently pulling on that? It could be the most boring, mundane system imaginable, and all these to-date fictional but Cool Ideas are just what people like us need to spice up our collective invention of "deep reality"? Or to what extent - hang with me here, this is brilliant - are all those ideas, like Omega Point, morphogenetic fields, quantum telepathy from Entanglement, an erotic and holographic universe filled with Orgone, etc: to what extent are these ideas "real"? I mean, some of us live with these objects, mentally, for a long time. We play around in their "spaces." We use them in countless What If? scenarios. We imagine what it would be like for them to be more Real. I think RAW was right and we do live inside of books. All of us. (Maybe?..)

When it comes to holography, it's possible in principle to make a hologram out of any wave...well, what about the "pilot wave" of David Bohm and Louis De Broglie and the holographic universe? At some point the implicate order becomes explicate, or everything we've ever known and perceived. There must be some interface between implicate and explicate, that can be characterized. There might be some interaction there...Did James Joyce have a hotline to this Source? If so, how? Who else had a direct line to the Source?

I know I sound like I just smoked a bomber of 35% sativa, but really, I only read books and think about ideas, although I will now leave this topic to smoke said bomber.

bc: Do you think the emergent properties of language within Finnegans Wake are more of an invention or a discovery?

MJ: Another slider, high and tight, but I can't lay off it. Gotta take a cut. 

I got on my swami turban and bogus seer regalia, dimmed the lights, fired up the sandalwood, gazed into a crystal ball bought at a gimcrack market, did a few bongs, and tried to summon Jeem his own self. Finally, he showed. I asked the invention/discovery question. A cryptic transcript of what was said, in his brogue genuine, viz: 

"The one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Joyce out!" 

And poof! he was gone. (FW, 33)

The easy answer - and the most accurate? - is that it seems when we discover something it's a sort of by-product of already trying to "uncover" something else, while when we invent something, this is in the framework of not being aware of the Tradition of other artists who went before us, and especially others who influenced us. We try to forget how much of an impact others have had on us and pretend to light out for the territory with only our honed skills and wits, but Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" seems always present in some way. And discovery leads to invention; invention to discovery. This seems like a version of the easy/obvious answer. I'm making semantic distinctions that should be considered idiosyncratic. But I do think invention maybe seems like a stronger case, so I'll try to argue for invention.

I wonder who was the first to pun. No doubt it was WAY before writing. But there's Joyce's knowledge, and then there is his wordplay, which takes punning to some whole level many magnitudes beyond what anyone else had done. When you pun in twenty languages is that discovery? I think it seems more like an invention. Joyce finishes Ulysses and embarks on Finnegans Wake and a grand schema of Schriftspiel: a writing game. How to project that world? Well, if the world is made of language, why not emphasize how far-out you can get with language? Etymology and fossilized poems, deeply intertwixing metaphors, neologisms and portmanteaus for days in an eternal night, a "monomyth" of scads of layers, herstory, history, ourstory, a spirit of ludic joy and hilaritas pervades throughout. With periodic lapses into jocoseriosity.

But now I'll revert to one of Joyce's big influences, Vico (1668-1744), who had this idea, verum factum: what's true and what we can possibly know are only those things humans made. So: invention. Vico cannily leaves Nature and Its laws to God; we can't truly know that stuff 'cuz we didn't make it. 

But we humans made language, history, poetry, art: these are things we can truly know. Robert Anton Wilson thought Vico was the first modern Sociologist. Another time he credits him with being the first Anthropologist. I find both claims tenable. And when it comes to social epistemology, too many accounts of the sociology of knowledge leave out Vico. One of the most influential High Kultur texts for me is Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise In the Sociology of Knowledge, which has persuaded me in a significant way not only that we construct reality but they describe the micro-details about how it's done. A similar book of essays by total wiggy thinkers was The Invented Reality, which only solidified these methods of humans inventing reality. Not discovering. Inventing. Anyone who's immersed in Robert Anton Wilson will like both of these books, and he cited Berger and Luckmann a few times. See Ernst von Glaserfeld's piece in the latter book, "An Introduction to Radical Constructivism" for more insight into RAW's takes on perception/"reality" and transactional psychology. Glaserfeld doesn't mention RAW, but check out the idea of "radical constructivism" and note similarities and differences between RAW and Glaserfeld. Or not. Have you gone putt-putt golfing lately? Had a wedge salad? Sat naked in a bathtub filled with cold Roosevelt dimes? Put in a bid on a llama?

I find it a bit weird - wonderfully so - that one interpretation from quantum theory, which would have to do with interpreting Nature in the finest-grain sense, is the Copenhagen Interpretation put together by Niels Bohr, with help from friends like Werner Heisenberg. The equations of quantum mechanics constitute, by far, the most successful physical theory ever, you wouldn't be reading this on your Gadget if it didn't work, but what the hell does Copenhagenism "mean" about how Nature works? Copenhagenism - at least one formulation of it - says we can only know what our equations and formal schemes "say" about Nature (I'm capitalizing it because sometimes I like being in the 18th century), so we are always at least one-remove from knowing Nature. This seems to back up Vico. And while Many-Worlds has been gaining on Copenhagenism among PhDs in Physics, Copenhagenism is still the most widely-held interpretation of the Schrodinger Wave Equation.

Interestingly, Vico's "verum factum" seems strongly isomorphic to Korzybski's "the map is not the territory" too. Maps are human artifacts and only describe the territory by leaving out an enormous amount of it, in order for other humans to gain a purchase on some aspect of knowledge. The effective map-maker must be very conscious of what she's abstracting from. I think a fascinating frame for Finnegans Wake is as a "map" of consciousness: of human consciousness from the Lower Paleolithic to now. What did Joyce leave out? (Answer that in your own time.)

Vico's verum factum seems like one of those ideas that was either discovered or invented by humans like Vico in order to 1.) get at something basic to epistemology, and 2.) delight stoner-intellectuals like mostbunall of you reading this, right where you are sitting now.

In Korzybski's last writing - he died while editing it, in 1950 - "Language In The Perceptual Process", collected in a book titled Perception: An Approach to Personality (ed. Robert R. Blake), he quotes Dr. Alexis Carrel on the topic of "the inescapable characteristic of living":

"To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and sculptor." From a Vichian standpoint this implies that "we" made/invented/constructed ourselves. Michelangelo said he saw the finished statue in the hunk of marble and he merely had to chip away at the marble that wasn't needed. I paraphrase that genius. "Are" we really like that? If so, it would seem urgent as all get-out for every one of us to visualize what we want to "be" and get to chippin' away: verum factum-like. We will have to deal with the suffering best we can, but the show must go on.

Verify dem factors! 

"Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear." (FW, 76)

I fouled it off down the 3rd base line and out of play. Hooked it just left of the foul pole. 

bc: Given that the trio from Erik Davis' High Weirdness, Terence McKenna, Philip K Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson, all share an almost supernatural reverence for James Joyce, and Finnegans Wake in particular, is there an inherent Joycean or Wakean quality to the psychedelic spirituality that emerged from the 1970's counterculture?

MJ: I love that book by Erik Davis you mention! The subtitle is "Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies." I'm trying to sell more books here, if only because I want more people to talk to...like you! That book was basically Davis's PhD dissertation in Religious Studies at Rice University. But Davis writes really well, and all these wiggy ideas don't come off as academic mire. He's a PhD, but quite accessible, if ridiculously learned and thoughtful. Even if you're not a huge fan of any of the three guys, but you love 1970s history, this book is for you! (But you are ALL enthused by Joyce and/or PKD, RAW, and Terence, aren't you?)

There seems something eerily prescient about Finnegans Wake with regard to psychedelics. When you first immerse yourself in FW, you're never the same after-words. (Ha!) And, aye, there seems something inherently Wakean about "reality" after you've turned on. But I can't pontificate about it, because I really can't put my finger on it with any surety. But I will speculate, wildly, as one will. Suffice: find a person who truly digs reading FW and loves talking about it but who also says they've never gotten high: that person may as well have had a profound acid trip or four, right? I mean: they's our peeps.

Leary said that reading Joyce had prepared him for "psychedelic space." Albert Hoffman had synthesized LSD in 1938 but didn't know what he had yet. Finnegans Wake is finished and presented in 1939. Joyce dies in 1940. The war against fascism - which at that time was considered undesirable by Unistatians, O! I wax nostalgic! - begins a race to weaponize the energy in the atom. The physicists demonstrate that a controlled nuclear chain reaction can work, on a converted squash court underneath a football stadium in Chicago, December 2nd, 1942. Hoffman takes the lysergic acid diethylamide down off the shelf in as the Sandoz labs in Switzerland to tinker with it again on 19 April, 1943 and accidentally ingests some, or it's absorbed by the skin, who knows, but anyway: the Bicycle Ride for Eternity.

Somewhere in my notes I've compiled lists of writers who drop quotes from FW into their texts to illustrate some point they're trying to make. Some of you may have noticed: there's a quote to cover just about anything you can think of. I know I sound like some nine-year-old boy watching sleight-of-hand at the Magic Castle: but how did he do it? How did Joyce do it?

Norman O. Brown uses a lot of quotes from FW - have a look at Closing Time for example - but did he ever trip? I don't think so. One of the greatest psychonauts of the 20th century, Dale Pendell, studied under Brown at UC Santa Cruz and wrote a very engaging book about his discussions with him when they hiked together in the Santa Cruz area, called Walking With Nobby. Terrific book. I get the feeling NOB thought mind-manifesting drugs were out of bounds; they were Dionysian, which was what we need, but he was still uneasy. He knew about Pendell's proclivities and seemed to agree to disagree on the topic. But here's the thing: Brown seems psychedelicized to me, in all of his books. 

McLuhan quotes from FW a lot: no way did he ever drop acid though. And yet I find him deeply trippy. Michael Horowitz said that McLuhan was the most profound influence on Leary. Leary, McLuhan, RAW, Terence, and Joyce were all involved with the Catholic Church at some point in their lives. What does that mean? Not sure, but I was brought up default pagan, went to my Catholic-convert grandma's church when I was 17 or so, and I found it really weird. The scene, the Latin, the lighting, the windows, the music, the garb: I had no idea what was going on, but it was very weird to me. That's all. Further experiences with the Catholic trip have only made things look weirder to me. The child fucking and Hitler-backing and Inquisition and Mafia and fascist money laundering through the Vatican Bank, massive land-grabs, the burning of Bruno, the "hellfire sermons" aimed at children, inculcating terror and alienation over basic bodily desires, as recounted in every ex-Catholic novelist's books at some point... it seems there are some down-sides to it, too. 

Some people - like Bucky Fuller and Ezra Pound too - seem to have psychedelic minds even though they never tripped. Hell: JS Bach and Leonardo, too! (BTW: Why does writing enthusiastically about psychedelics seem like a too-male thing? Or am I missing something? Melissa Cargill seems like one of the most underrated chemists of the 20th century: studied Chemistry at Berkeley, teaches Owsley about making the pure stuff. Nick Sand and Tim Scully...But Cargill! Sasha Shulgin was a mentor, too, somewhere in there...Where are all the fantastic female writers on psychedelics? I like Sadie Plant's Writing On Drugs. Name a few more.)

But your query has to do with 1970s counterculture. It seems to me that, once I tripped, I saw everything slightly differently, and I remember realizing - this was long before I'd read books about psychedelics - that I was now in some vague secret society, and I began to look for signs in the works of others: maybe they had tripped too? But then I sort of realized I'm projecting most of the time. Or: a lot of the time. If some book or artwork or music or director felt trippy in a certain sense, they must have been initiated, too. And the wild thing is, I think there just are psychedelic minds who have never tripped. For a while this vexed me, but now I really dig it. I suspect the psychedelic mind is inherent in human potential, and some people just turn on in other ways. (Read Wilson on the 5th, 6th and 7th Circuits.)

The math-y aspect of this is that: in the 1960s and 1970s psychedelics were widely available. The population explosion called by demographers the "Baby Boom" generation did shrooms or LSD, even potent cannabis, and were never the same: they saw through a lot of social games. Or a large subset of a larger set did. What's interesting about the three guys you mention: only Terence was a Boomer. I think he was born right at the beginning of it. But PKD was born in 1928 and RAW in 1932: they were Silent Generation guys. But they were artist-intellectuals, and already deeply weird - at minimum very bookish and alienated as teenagers in Berkeley and Brooklyn - before they ever got "experienced" to allude to one of my favorite guitarists.

So, I think of those artists whose work blew us away: psychedelics definitely aided their creative output, but I'm never really quite sure, because so many artists throughout history that I deem fantastic and psychedelic: there's precious little evidence they ever tripped. 

I often think of PKD: psychedelics seemed a bit much for him. And yet few writers of the 1960s and 1970s seem trippier than him. I tend to think his amphetamine use did him in, but the output was huge. This brings up two questions around this topic that I find interesting.

One: does being obsessed with ontology and with an ability to convey your ontological obsessions in a non-technical way just make you trippy? PKD's fixation on What Is Real? may not have required mind-manifesting drugs. His novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) is super-psychedelic, but he wrote that before he ever did LSD! He had merely read a lot about LSD before that. Can a certain type of reading allow for experiences that are wholly Other? Do we "trip" when deeply engaged with fiction? I suspect: yes. Entraré: to enter a "space" in Italian. We suspect some of us do this far more vividly when reading in fictional spaces than most others. I do think we can all get better at "entering" the text, and maybe you just dedicate more of you attention, over longer periods of time, and you inhabit books in deeper ways. It is not "mere entertainment." PKD was presumably reading mostly non-fiction about psychedelics, though. Still: maybe readin's readin'.

I don't know. Terence's use and play with Neoplatonic and gnostic ideas seemed already psychedelic, but I think he was 11 when the famous Life magazine article by Wasson came out in 1957, the one where he followed his mom around the house in Paonia, Colorado, saying "This is what I want to do!": he was already weird. And Wilson documents his reading of very-conservative writer Russell Kirk's review in National Review of Huxley's Doors of Perception around 1960-61 and his subsequent experiments with peyote in 1962; he'd already written a deeply trippy piece on Joyce and Taoism that was written in 1958 and published in 1959; he later commented on the piece, "Sure sounds like an Acid Head wrote it, doesn't it?" (Email To The Universe, 85)

Two: how do certain mental illnesses that many wildly creative types evince converge with this "psychedelicized mind" that I posit here? I mean, just for example, I was riveted by Kay Redfield Jamison's study, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and became convinced that our culture would have suffered profound losses had some cure for mania been found in the 18th century. And my gawd: what if homosexuality hadn't existed? We'd be fucked! The weird, the "mentally ill" creatives, and the gays: holy shit! They form a ridiculously outsized contribution to profound art and the aesthetic pleasures of life in general. Jamison, a PhD Clinical Psychology, had herself struggled with manic episodes, and recounts them.

All of which further complexifies and spaghettifies your original question. Sorry!

So: does the psychedelic 1970s counterkulch seem that way 'cuz of blotter and shrooms, or do people who are already genetically predisposed to Weird Thought gravitate to psychedelics, and it's like a long-lost rich uncle has embraced them? Leary seemed to think we were a genetic caste. I'm uneasy with that because of the nature via nurture equation, but I don't really know. It's something I think about, in some way, almost every day.

A good place to dig for more (meaning: better) insight into your wiggy Q would be places like reception of Finnegans Wake by disparate communities. This literature seems inchoate and scattered at the moment, not to mention often buried in academic libraries that don't lend out their stuff to non-academic readers like myself. An academic Joycean named Tim Conley put out The Varieties of Joycean Experience in 2021. I was interested in reading this because supposedly he thought RAW one of the weirdest interpreters of Joyce, and because there might be some insight around your 1970s counterculture question in it. One library I have access to in California bought one copy of it. They wouldn't lend it out when they acquired it because it was new, and their policy was to let their university students and staff have first dibs. It was promptly marked as "missing" in the catalog the next time I looked. Consequently, I've never seen it. It's out in paperback now for $35. The hardback is $125. This is what we're up against. (That, and some even more dire situations, as of November 2024.)

Bobby: What is your take on this Q?

bc: I think, in terms of actual causal influence, that the High Weirdness of the 70’s would have happened with or without Joyce, and that it’s really tough to discern between qualities that are Joycean/Wakean and Psychedelic. (Which maybe highlights the neuro-semantic aspect of the psychedelic experience, and perhaps even the impact of holographic prose on perception, but I digress!)

There’s also perhaps a kind of a retrocausality involved in this, where early psychonauts, who experienced psychedelic states of consciousness, looked back for antecedents of this new paradigm, landed on Joyce and Finnegans Wake, and then re-interpreted it in that context.

So as much as FW maybe influenced the wave of High Weirdness, that same wave has circled back and influenced FW by providing a new lens of interpretation and a new demographic of readers/explorers.

Personally, I went from sitting in a hut in the Amazon jungle watching “forest television” on Yagé to just one week later being assigned to read Finnegans Wake by Robert Anton Wilson for his 8 Dimensions of “Mind” class at the Maybe Logic Academy.

So for me the High Weirdness / Finnegans Wake influence is pretty direct and literal!

Also, in terms of history, we have the actual, literal, sequence of events, the impossibly complex network of causes and effects that lead events to undergo the formality of actually occurring, to abuse an Alfred North Whitehead quote. And then there’s the stories we tell using fragments from that network of cause and effect, which we call history.

I think of Terence McKenna as one of the world’s greatest storytellers in this genre. Terence seems, in hindsight, to have been a kind of transmedia reality star. And in his self-constructed mythology, the Experiment at La Chorrera is his origin story, the starting point from which his cosmic giggle timewave oeuvre proceeds, and who is cast in a central role in this infinitely tall tale? Of course, James Joyce and Finnegans Wake!

Dennis McKenna revealing James Joyce as the divine architect of the McKenna Bros “True Hallucinations” adventures is one of my favorite plot twists ever!

Is it literally true? Certainly not! But when they printed the legend that’s what went in the record.

Now with PKD, I’m unsure about that line from The Divine Invasion:

"I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era;" etc, etc.

Is this just a line in a fictional novel? Or is he actually expressing high regard for FW?

IDK. I sent the question to Erik Davis. If he responds I’ll add it to the discourse!

I have two more questions if you don't mind fulfilling the law of fives :)))

bc: Famously, Joyce omitted the apostrophe from Finnegans Wake to turn the title into a statement, an observation, a warning to the ruling classes that in every cultural cycle the oppressed eventually rise up. The Finnegans wake up. ( I won't here ask about Elon Musk's fear of the "woke mind virus," but I could!) Given Joyce's usage of Vico's cycle of ages as the organizing structure of FW, where would you put this awakening in that cycle? Or does it represent the breaking of the cycle?

(Also! Just to sprinkle a soupçon of Crowley in the mix... Oz Fritz has been tracking the cross connections between AC & JC, and something I've been wondering is if Vico's Ages and Crowley's Aeons are essentially analogous?)

MJ: The question about what the title Finnegans Wake means seems to me too often neglected. A title, a statement, an observation, a warning...a reveille to wake up? My long-dead dad was a great whistler, pitch-perfect and fast, and would wake us up for elementary school by whistling "Reveille" while rapidly flipping the light switches on and off, reeking of aftershave. He'd then do a Strother Martin (the vicious prison guard from Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is...failure to...commun-cate") imitation as we woke, gooey-eyed, in our bunk beds: "C'mon boys! Ya need ta git!"...flipping switches still... "off t' that yonder school o’ yers! Heee hooo!" Dad thought this was hilarious. It did get us up and out of bed. It was very effective. His whistling of "Reveille" was alarmingly accurate, not to mention loud. (He grew up in Pasadena, California, and was not a military man, quite far from it, but watched a lot of westerns on TV and in movies. He was quite far away from sounding like Strother Martin in everyday life.)

We woke. And rose. Back to Wake...

Without the apostrophe it seems - given Joyce's politics as covered by a scholar like Dominic Manganiello, whose book Joyce's Politics covers quite a lot - like a claim for solidarity among all of us. There's a word that's become rapidly, sadly archaic: solidarity. RAW commented on Manganiello's book in a letter to Kurt Smith, how Joyce "combined individualist anarchism, pacifism and Blake into a unique political stance all his own." Here it sounds like us Finnegans might've been secondary in Joyce's politics, but the way I currently read it: us Finnegans waking was Joyce's "public" politics; the Blake/pacifism/individualist anarchism his private concern, as much as politics can "be" "private." Note RAW's "all his own." As if it's on par with Joyce's negotiations with Thomist aesthetics. What does it mean to have constructed a unique politics? I'll leave that to better minds than mine. I recall Chomsky defining politics: "Who gets what." Joyce was a poet and so a seducer, not an assaulter, so his politics would never be set out in explicit terms. We have to read between the lines, which makes this topic trickier and much more fun.

But then we must think about and read and ponder and cuss and dis-cuss history - even just 1940-now - and in my opinion the story of us Finnegans as being aware of our political and social...agency?...seems kinda dire right now. We don't seem to feel like we're bound to all the other Finnegans right now. Ain't got no solidarity at the moment, and so, speaking for myself, I long to wake from the nightmare of the US in the 21st century.

And then of course we must ask: Why the lack of solidarity? And How are things different elsewhere. (A Where question in addition to a How Q.) And maybe Who might have had it within their interests for us to be polarized, atomized, alienated, friend-starved, cubicle-d, clueless, disparate, road-raging, barking up all the wrong trees, etc. When did this turn capital bee Bad? Or does "stuff happen"? Does some chaotic fractal working in history, driven by accelerating information-flows, when planets and world-societies get to our point in their histories, just drive this kinda thing in this Cycle, and we cluelessly describe it post-hoc with imaginative maps? I tried to stay in touch, in community-feeling, and solidarity with a lot of Finnegans. In Ulysses Mr. Deasy tells Stephen Dedalus that maybe all this sadness and cruelty and imperialism was solved by the idiotic question-begging "Perhaps history is to blame." Classic d-bag answer. Mistakes were made. And my riff on the chaotic fractal feels like a paraphrase of that, so pretend you never read it. Any one of us can legit feel like we lack agency within the social sphere, but as a mass of Finnegans in solidarity, we must diagnose and treat why we abdicated to billionaires, or even accepted the idea of billionaires in the first place. When I go down the Freudian road I find I repress...

Or am I just totally biased as an olde timey - all-workers-unionized Leftist living in Dumpy "Unique Estates of Amessican"? (FW, 105). I am biased as all get-out. 

What would a Finneganian solidarity look like? Will we rise again ("from the dead") or is it over and we've centrifugally spun out to some whole other epoch, a breaking away from the Vichian cycle? Go 'head and whittle your whisky 'round like blazes; Imma just keep lying here for a million years. I don't think I have any unique insight here; I no longer know, and what I thought I knew has just been dashed, off the precipice, on the rocks below, in shards. We Finnegans must come to grips: we might be "duddandgunne" (FW:25), noewheremore, Finiche! (FW: 7).

I'd like to think I'm "woke." I see nothing bad in being "woke," as it's called now. How would I define it? Well, as something like becoming evermore aware to the suffering of others, a thematic variation on the Golden Rule, even sumpin' to do with Buddha, adopting the language of what people want their self-descriptions to match - it's rather little of them to ask, no huge effort for me that I can see - and of extending my sense of a moral feeling of who is "we" when we make "we" statements. I also think it means knowing the score on some basic things, like none of us has a say in how much the Pentagon is given every damned year. Or the dollar amount in white collar crime vs. the standard Eyewitless News depiction of crime. Some of us were born on third base, more on second, even more on first, and, most unfair lineup card: a lot were born with two strikes against them, still at the plate, or struck out and long gone, sent down to the minors. (I got caught stealing in a rundown between first and second: long story.) The seemingly omnipresent pretending that we're all born at home plate is something I see as one of the great fatuous ideas that permeates inhuman Unistatian politics. 

That "race" is bullshit, basically. It's deep historical global migration of genes under differing environmental conditions giving rise to a panoply of phenotypes and that's pretty much it. All else divides/conquers Finnegans.

That one's social identity and status as a primate seems indeed important, but not nearly everything. 

A few other things. Wee things, doncha know...

In my utopia, and, I daresay in Joyce's, solidarity is bigger than my identity as a "cis-white-male" or whatever the designation would be this semester. Yea, I'm privileged. But I worry about paying the utility bills. If you're a genderfluid BIPOC? Cool. But you're still a fellow country-person and we want the same basic things, right? I want you to flourish, I will help if I can, but we should be able to meet, eye-to-eye, Finnegan to Finnegan.

In this I'm heavily influenced by the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who was born in 1931 and died about six months after RAW did. Rorty even thought we should channel our ethnocentricities by, for example, not saying (and believing) things like, "It's really horrible what's going on in our inner cities. We should help the blacks more." Rorty says, no: Those people are Americans. And we Finnegans ought to feel shame about how some Americans are living, and try to do better. That's the solidarity thing. Harness our ethnocentricity in ways like that. (Rorty, as far as I know, never mentioned Finnegans Wake. He seemed to prefer Nabokov or Orwell.)

If I sound ridiculously dated, it's because I began negotiating my values a long time ago, they've shifted here and there, but they no longer seem recognizable in this world. I feel like some guy in 2024 who waxes on about how great Gunsmoke or Abba was. Completely backward. As a totally out-of-step Klown I dare to say: women should have the legal right to decide what to do with their own bodies and it's WAY more important than anyone's legal right to own a military assault rifle. I'm completely out of step with the new direction. It's hopeless for me. I'm a walkin' talkin' book-readin' feminist-dude anachronism. Who's probably high now, as you read me. 

Confucius say: Man who stand on top of toilet: High on pot.

And I'm ANTIFA AF. (Hey anti-antifascists: you don't get to root for Rick and Ilsa and Victor Laszlo. Sorry, but you have to root for Major Strasse. And know that you're flippin' the bird to Grandpa and his time at Anzio/Guadalcanal/Iwo Jima/Midway/Luzon, etc. Live your values! Be consistent! Be happy! You just won the election!)

But here's the problem with Woke, as I see it: All the "woke" issues should be seen as secondary to all the issues we Finnegans have had for a long time: unionizing, a fair wage, news that's not owned by billionaires. A social safety net. Meaningful work - whatever that is, now - and a social society where people meet, mediated by their clothes and language. (At times, without clothes, but this goes beyond my ambit.) Or what was an Economy for? Who was it for?

Rorty was very adamant about this and I agree: around 1965 the humanist intellectuals in our universities turned away from the old Finnegan ideas about solidarity: Vietnam, racism, imperialism: we were irredeemable. It's not worth saving. Tear it all down. And I say: yea, that was all Bad Shit, but we can't stop trying to be better. Or else you give up on the country and right wingers laugh at you and you lose elections. And all that happened. Not much Finnegan-Solidarity coming out of the Humanities or English Departments. It's far too much Foucaultian-based ressentiment, histrionics, and jargon. (Ain't got a beef with M. Foucault, just with how he was used.) That jit needs to change, like yesterday. And yet I smell the stale stench of inertia emanating from the insular Groves. (Or how I imagine academia is: I am not educated: no degree.)

Just to be clear: no fucking way is Elon Musk a Finnegan. Trump is about as far away from being a Finnegan as you can get. No one who has billions is one of us. TFG/TCG was bequeathed $413 million from daddy, used it to buy casinos, and the very stable business genius somehow lost money at that. That he's a "thing" means a lot of Finnegans have lost their way, and in geologic time it took nanoseconds. At some point you bought a second vacation home, cornered "the murketplots" (FW: 352), syndicated with well-dressed goons, and now pay more for private security in a month than most of us earn in a year, and live behind gates: you're no longer a Finnegan. Good riddance. I'd even say if you've got $10 million or more in assets you're probably a big part of the far smaller set of Non-Finnegans but I don't even want to go into All That, here, now. 

I welcome push-back on my excommunication from Finnegandom and these...people. Joyce said something about his Finneganian audience, paraphrasing from memory: my consumers: are they not also my producers? Here Comes Everybody was gist, so maybe I'm wrong here.

I think Gandhi and MLK had a line on something hot with the Satyagraha, although I have long felt the deep wisdom in the supposed Zen anecdote I may have first read from RAW:

Zen student: O Zen master: what is world peace?

Zen master: Two drunks fighting in an alley.

I didn't know of Oz Fritz's project to link Crowley to Joyce: fantastic! I can't wait to check that out. No one's done it, and if I had to pick one person to get that conversation started it would be Oz.

Quick bc edit! Two of Oz Fritz’s pieces on Joyce/Crowley:

Folds and Overlaps between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake

The Hermetic Transmission of Francois Rabelais

As far as Vico's cyclical model, it's difficult for me to not see us as in...wait for it...the second barbarism stage. Or: a new barbarism stage. I don't think I will personally make it out of this one. Bet the farm on me not getting out. I don't see myself living in a renewed primitive state...except in my own mind. What would be some hallmarks of a New Primitive Age, 21st or 22nd century? Here's where I always clashed a bit with RAW. I mean, I think I really do understand his enthusiasm for Hi Tech. And it would be easy to list really great things that have come out of this Epoch, but I agree with the Frankfurt School guys in many ways: the Techne needs Telos. The Frankfurt guys saw a huge lack of human-needs-based Telos at work. RAW and Leary did have a Telos: space cities, immortality, drugs to eliminate stupidity, everything omniephemeralized so that it was faster, smaller, cheaper, and could do more. And Wilson wrote a lot about things like a Guaranteed Annual Wage, negative income tax. Today you see actual pilot programs for Basic Income. Or: WTF did we build a technological economy FOR? 

I mean, I'm writing this on my ancient MacBook Pro, and I love this fucking thing. I do have a "smart" phone. I hardly use it, though. I'm not on Facebook or Xitter or any of the big anti-social media platforms, and I like it that way. 

A more fully-fleshed-out Telos for me would be the elimination of hunger and homelessness and billionaires (tax them at a graduated rate like the 1950s, under commie-Republican Eisenhower), education and health care for all. Renewable energy: finally accomplished! Ya know, the little things. Who thinks this is not desirable? Okay, then who thinks it's not possible? Why? Have you looked under the hood? Checked the fuses? Multiplied by 1/137?

I don't believe any of the Agitprop that comes out of Silicon Valley anymore. They will not do a fucking thing for the poor, which I define as almost all Finnegans, or more than not. And the sooner Elon Musk moves to Mars the better. Very early on I got the feeling they tended to be Geeks. I like Geeks. And Nerds. Usually they're harmless, and if you get them talking about their passions, it can be fun and informative. I had no idea the Ethos of Silicon Valley was For Me To Win, It's Not Enough; Others Must Lose. And guys like Musk seem like 9-year old boys to me, ethically. Get thee to Mars ASAP, Musk! I feel I was made for Earth and am happy here loving "plants and birds and rocks and things," but if other Finnegans want to relocate to the Red Planet, cool. 

I'm really old, but I love riding my bicycle anywhere I can. I dig the conscious states in bicycling. Saving fuel and being green and doing aerobic exercise is fine, but I dig the qualia of riding. I like to go slow in life. What's the damned hurry? "He who dies with the most toys wins" is a perfect slogan for the citizen under NeoLiberalism. Many Finnegans fall and fell prey. I understand how speed is a rush, I really do. Maybe vary your velocities? Follow your fastball with a changeup.

Cars have been a scourge, let's take the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face. Scads of personal freedom have been afforded by the automobile, and they should still exist, but my gawd: that whole scene with the roads and oil and noise and death and pollution and alienation and - gasp! - finding parking has not made us happier or healthier. More mass transit, practically free. I'm thinking like how I personally think a Finnegan could or should or ought to think. You will have differing ideas. But how much can they clash if we're true Finnegans? I like pluralism: tell me what you want. I'm listening, but if you start to go on about climate change is a "liberal hoax" I will bid a hasty adieu. My wants list is long and I'm impatient with institutions that promote needless suffering. Like the way our prison system works. Or the Supreme Court.

All these basic ideas about how Finnegans might desire a better world I stole from a bunch of someones smarter than me. Some smart-assed Finnegans who're better wired than I am.

You know another thing that I think would be a hallmark of Finnegan-thought? That all things SEX (and aye: "gender") are a private matter. If you want me to call you They, cool, just cut me some slack so I can break a lifelong habit. Crime is crime; I have no problem with the laws as they existed up to the day Trump's SCOTUS decided to take away rights from women. Why is this so hard to come to grips with? It's not like the Fetus People actually care about the Fetus when it actually becomes a Human. I mean, c'mon! What's that line from Arch-Finnegan George Carlin? When you're a fetus you're sacred, but the moment you're born you're fucked? (You will thank me for withholding my palaver on the deep roots of misogyny, which would be maybe 1.5 times as long as the rant you're reading right now.)

I support Adam and Steve in their relationship. Alex and Kelly, too. If someone never felt like they were born in the right body, and they've really thought it through, how the fuck is it any of my business? Transition the hell outta that phenotype and then dig the more harmonic you! That's a whole series of consciousness states I will never know. We can do those operations and use those drugs. We've gotten good at it. Human felicitousness! Who wants to be trans is a non-issue for me. I daresay 4 of 5 Finnegans agree? So politely fuck off, Karen. Or Gov. Abbott.

It seems needless to say it, but no Finnegan thinks the State should be able to tell any of us what we can and can't do when exploring our own consciousness. As long as no one is hurting anyone else: Finnegans Bake. Finnegans Trip. Some Finnegans abstain. Hey, I'm hip to your kink.

I have ridden this soapbox for all it's worth. Your Q was about Finnegans maybe waking and I simply think it doesn't matter all that much unless Finnegans have solidarity with other Finnegans. Hence, the rant. Plz xcuz my ABCED-mindedness?

As to the where-R-we on the Aeon/Cycle/Epoch/Era-Ages, I will say that Uncle Al's Aeons and Johnny Vico's Cycles seem analogous enough; but all my life I've been interested in Wild-Assed Models of History. Timewave Zero and the ingress of novelty via the I Ching? Takes the cake for sheer tripsy Rube Goldberg inventiveness. Its machinations are marvelous to behold. And his Irish gift of gab activates my endocannabinoid system. I listened to McKenna talk and it stoned me. My gawd Terence's whole spiel around that is entertaining AF to me. I had a look at The Fourth Turning, which seems definitely analogous to Vico, though finding out Steve Bannon is a big fan took some shine off. And Hesiod maybe started all this. Was it Eliade who first sent us the memo that more cultures think of their history as cyclical than our unidirectional arrow flow in the West? Maybe it was Toynbee. (HG Wells? Hegel?)

The Jumping Jesus Model makes maybe more sense than anything, though it seems to downplay the cyclicality riffs. Ditto the discrete epochs in the future. But acceleration? Man, I feel it Every. Damned. Day. And Meine Göttin! RAW was right: with acceleration comes Chaos. Which increases every day, because of increased unpredictability, due to logarithmic info-flows throughout the social sphere. Hard 'n fast, ladies 'n germs. Acceleration up a hockey-stick ying-yang. 

Maybe only the direst of Great Dyings can gain anyone a reprieve, and no one wants that. Or maybe some do: with all the income inequality - Oxfam said the richest 1% got twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together, 2021-2023: no doubt because they work really hard; they're smarter than us Finnegans. 

Pffffffffffft! 

Somewhere in FW he uses the term "politicoecomedy" and if I recall, he was referring to his own book. I prefer at times to think it our world. And what's the difference?

Anyway: the unsanely rich need MORE, clearly. "Having an actual life" is not exactly what they do. And sooner or later, they're gonna want our...land? Whatever. They clearly will believe they need it - gotta win - and what they obviously don't need is us Finnegans. Soooo...Fully Autonomous Targeted AI-Drone Killings of the Poor, anyone? Hey, it would seem that Scenario was tailor-made for plausible deniability. Or maybe you don't need that anymore; it's Old Skool. Now you just appoint corrupt judges, for the same reason a dog licks his own junk. (<---my gawd I lack couth!)

On that deeply sardonic-castic note, I move on to yer last Q.

bc: I've come to suspect that with Finnegans Wake James Joyce intended on creating a new sacred text. Literally! Not a parody, satire, or commentary on holy books, but actually the thing itself.

What do you think Joyce hoped to accomplish with FW?

MJ: The humorous aspects of the book makes the entire Thing "jocoserious," as I see it. 

Joyce was so "fuckin' weird" - as RAW said - that I can't help but suspect he knew he was writing something that would be seen as a distillation of himself, his outlook, and his aesthetics, which were...fuckin' weird, indeed. I think he accomplished this. Overwhelmingly. He no doubt read other authors and their language games in what we now call High Modernism (but to him was just "writing"), and parts of Ulysses are as experimental as anything in Finnegans Wake, but inventing a dream language in a entire book spanning one night in which the dreamer is in touch with all of history and is Everyone and sometimes "inanimate" objects in an all-at-once-ness really took the cake. He made me see how the way words look can be alienated from how they sound and mean, and for that alone I'm forever grateful. There was a strong whiff in the experimentation in the air when he composed FW (roughly 1922-1939) and he knew all the other gamers, and he just blitzed everyone. No one even came close. I suspect there was a competitive aspect. 

'Cuz humor and virtually all its forms seems most baked-in to Joyce's cosmology, his "serious" sacred text would seem to require the spirit of massive jest, or so it seems to me. And let's face it: Birth, Life, Death, History: it's hilarious! If some people don't get it - who even READS his "claybook" these days, anyway? - then fuck 'em if they can't take the cosmic giggle factor aspects. If FW is a Holy Book, it's the first with humor at (or near) its core. What took us so long? 

Jung thought Ulysses could be a new Bible for the "white race." I don't think he got near grokking FW. Joyce uses "Mamalujo" and seems to be in a religious lineage that extends at least back to Blake, but every god and goddess and religion in the world shows up in Finnegans Wake, it seems. Is it a holy book for a select group of counter-culturalists, extending back to the 1930s? And what will be FW's destiny? Part of me wants to play the part of Zhou En-Lai, who (the story seems dubious but makes good copy) was asked by Kissinger about his opinion on the French Revolution, and Zhou supposedly said "It's too soon to tell." Maybe the fate of Finnegans Wake is too soon to tell.

But I'll now adjust my tone knobs. Midrange...volume...can't seem to ever find the balance levels...do you like reverb?

No but seriously: who even reads books these days? Much less High Modernist stuff? Much less experimental prose? I once read an article around 15 years ago: some librarians were interested in who still reads all those 900 page novels from the 19th century like Bleak House, War and Peace, Les Miserables (Signet ed. of mass market paperback: 1488 pages), Brothers Karamazov, The Count of Monte Cristo, Middlemarch, etc? Well, academics, because it's their job and often they admit they don't enjoy these books...and secretaries, bus drivers, househusbands, box-office attendants, accountants and other weirdos like the kinds of people who might read this email-interview. Certain types of people read those books, to this day, when the hordes are constantly checking their Facebook status and can't remember what it was like to sit quietly and live inside a dense text, because they have lost their attention spans, they have abdicated a major peninsula of their autonomy, or never had a pre-Facebook attention span to begin with, thinking of the date and the rise of "smart" phones and how those kids are coming of age. (Do they focus well for hours on end in "first person shooter" scenario games? Hey...that's just...ducky, kid.)

Right now some RAW fans are reading Moby Dick together online. But in a sold-out stadium of 67,000 sports fans, maybe 17 have read any one of these books because they just wanted a "good read." I just made up that number, it's probably high but so am I, but suffice: the massive dwindling of readings of serious dead-tree fat books is a thing. (q.v: The prior question and us living in a Vichian Neo-Barbarism Age.)

And those books, while long and rich in characterizations, ideas, four-page-long descriptions of the wallpaper in the sitting room, social drama, whathaveyou, are not written in a private portmanteau-brimming dream-language that demands mega-wattage from the reader and her powers of decipherment. So: if Joyce wanted to write a Holy Book, and I think he did: the question is: how many ideally insomniac readers did he think he'd have? And furthermore, did he care if the number would be recedingly small? He had gotten feedback from his peers, with Ulysses über-fan Ezra Pound complaining of the "circumambient peripheralization" of the Thing. 

The artistic avant were mostly his fans. Would that characterize his current readers? I suspect today's "avants" are mostly just fed up Strange Ones, "sensitive types", intellectual outlaws, nocturnal mandarins, prodigal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-poets, unemployable crackpots currently surrounded by 3,300 books on diverse subjects, inveterate list-makers intractable, AWOL mathematicians living in a friend's mother's basement and learning Bossa Nova guitar, do-it-yourself sociologists, those whose perversities are extra polymorphous, statuesque maidens entering graduate management accreditation, abstruse comic book artists, sound engineers well-versed in cabala, those who always use their turn signals, once-promising drop-outs from Art History graduate school, those who obsess over what happened before the Big Bang and worry if Time never began or will ever stop and who also catch themselves daily wondering what it's like to "be" the opposite sex, women "of a certain age," people with an overweening urge to obtain a penny farthing bicycle, those who habitually read words backwards and forwards, readers of different books about the battles of Contarf and Boyne and Rathmines that number in the double-digits, malcontents highly disaffected, sex workers who can run intellectual rings around all their clients, those who've sought clemency and deferments and pardons and stays and dismissals and postponements a rather large handful of times, humans who have fallen asleep in the public or university library too often to count, certain street-corner chefs reeking of hash, fans of Luigi Serafini and/or The Urantia Book, bohos of varying income, followers of Patrick W. Shakespeare, highly literate down-and-outs, someone who once heard the term "police blotter" and immediately thought of a little hit of acid with the image of Sting on it, capricious ne'er-do-wells who hope to "match wits" with the Author, virtuoso brewers, brick-hauling day-laborers hoping to find representation, devoted fans of Kandinsky and Scriabin and Nabokov, one writer who thought it funny he'd invented a character who was born on September 3rd, 1752, first generation Chinese immigrants with high IQs who sound like Valley bros, euphuists, hardened criminals who never hurt a flea, softened criminals who have hurt a flea, aristocratic slovenly unkempt slouchers, people like "Arthur Gopnik" in the Coen Bros film A Simple Man: the brother of the main character, who works privately in a cramped little notebook in suburban living rooms in Minnesota on his "Mentaculus" which is a mathematical theory of everything, those "on the spectrum," those most at home "in the theater," persons who this very day are thinking about Ethnomethodology and how to score some 2C-B, those who wonder "what I did I do to deserve this" and really mean it, human-like entities who are under the radar and getting away with it, and, to rip-off Jack Spicer, ones whose "vocabulary did this to me." 

Aaaaaaand: YOU! (I jape. "I kid! I kid because I love," to quote Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky's son.)

The question of readership seems weird to me, but so do those hardcore Finnegans Wake fans. Hey, I know I'm weird AF and frankly I'm cool with it. At times I wonder if there's a series of genetic mutations we all have in common. I mean: are there more enthusiastic adherents of DMT or of FW? I'd honestly like to know.

And what does it "mean" to read Finnegans Wake for pleasure, much less as a Holy Book? I have finished it. I will never finish it. Of course you know what I mean. No one has "read" Finnegans Wake like you read a John Grisham novel. (Maybe?) We never finish the watery circular Finnegans Wake, which is one of Its symptoms. I suspect we are one of Its symptoms, aye. And I don't know what that means. Sometimes I feel like Finnegans Wake has dreamed us into being, in some sense. But...but...that makes me sound crazy. I withdraw my statement, your honor.

Jury? Please disregard that previous statement. (And don't think of a waltzing zebra, either.)

In neurobiology there's a term: anosognosia. It's a condition in which a person with a disability is unaware of having that disability due to the underlying physical condition that gave rise to that condition in the first place. Sorta like an organic version of Dunning-Kruger. I don't mean to offend anyone by suggesting a medicalization of our Finnegans Wake-reading weirdness, but maybe there's a smidgen of something there. And if so, what of it? 

The pioneering neurobiologist Norman Geschwind discovered that people with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were very often excessively religious, displayed hypergraphia, have "sticky" personalities and preferred conversations to go on for a long time, often with repetitions, had lower or higher-than normal sex drives, and an intensified mental life. (What? Why is everyone staring at me? Hand to Goddess I've never had an epileptic attack! Or were you picturing Joyce in your mind just now? No evidence of TLE with JJ; lots of eye issues, though.) And Geschwind had published on this novel insight into organic brain dysfunction, but, as one story I read - was it from Sapolsky? - a hotshot intern thought that Geschwind might have prematurely shot his wad on this, and did an intake with a patient and went back to Geschwind and said, "Uhhh...that new patient with TLE is not interested in religion at all." Meaning: yo, Teach: you might be wrong about TLE. Geschwind was startled and had the intern take him to the patient. Geschwind asked him, my intern here says you're not religious? No, the patient said. Geschwind then asked "Why?"... and the patient went off for an hour about how many theological texts he'd read closely, fine points in Martin Luther, how Buber's answers about the ways of God to Man were inadequate and why, certain aspects of Paul Tillich, etc. So: definitely "excessively religious" but in an interesting way. Wish I could've seen the look on the intern's face. 

None of us have temporal lobe epilepsy, right? (That's as far into the neurobiological woods as I want to get with us and our reading of Joyce.) 

But still, there seems to be an elite small few of us. We enjoy: wordplay, puzzles, poetry, spotting recondite references, consulting secondary and tertiary texts (major aid for me was air-dropped by Roland McHugh, John Bishop [great!], Campbell-Robinson, James Atherton, Adeline Glasheen, Bernard Benstock, John Gordon, and William York Tindall, to nick the surfaces), and the impossibly grand scope of FW's universality. If I came across "maji" or "wavu" in the text - and they're there - sorry, but I never would've guessed they're Swahili for "water" and "net." I need some secondary sources, at least some of the time. I have never sat down to learn Swahili, so sue me.

(I still haven't gotten to Edmund Lloyd Epstein's book: did you like it? Sound off in den Kommentaren! There's another one I wanted to read but haven't seen: Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake, by Margaret C. Solomon: lemme hear from those who gave this one a whirl? Any other hidden gems, exegetes? Maybe I should email Peter Quadrino...)

Perhaps it should suffice to say Joyce came up with something so rich and weird that it would delight the hyper-semantically-flexible who were a lot like himself. We are also people who are aware of what we want to do with our "free time." Because that muthah of a book demands of our hours non-insignificantly. And we seem to be hyper-aware of all the things we don't want to do with our time...I'm thinking right now about that moment I fell in love with Socrates. In an early dialogue, he has smart youth following him around Athens, and they hit the agora, the outdoor marketplace, and at one point Socrates says, "Oh! How many things there are that I do not want!" I paraphrase from memory...

Robert Anton Wilson told me his highest value in a book is its "inexhaustibility" which certainly fits FW; in an interview with someone else he said he much preferred "puzzles to be worked on" over "puzzles to be solved." So: the indeterminacy of the book must be something we all dig. It seems the Great Mass recoils from uncertainty. It seems history is to blame. No but seriously: Maybe we weirdo-Finnegans like our indeterminacy in specific dosages. And we titrate like champs. 

Many readers have used metaphors when talking about FW that make it seem Wholly Other. Terence McKenna said FW "is a book that, in some sense, tries to climb into the world and be instead an autonomous event system." (Archaic Revival, 51) Here we get a sort of Flatland metaphor in which a book moves into the next dimension "up." And it also makes the book into an event, and sort of like the uncanny alien-info-thing, which is PKD's territory, although he lets anyone squat there for free.

When we imaginatively increase the literalness of a book climbing into the world to become the autonomous event system it wanted to be, the only two reactions would be ones deeply related to religion: fear and awe. It's also eldritch to the max. Unheimlich, even.I don't think I even need the book to climb into an event-level dimension to get transported, even sense transcendence, swirling around down by the ankles and up the spine. Not always, but in some reading-sessions...

Has there ever been someone who genuinely read FW, taking the time to understand it on some appreciable level, then said, "Meh. It's okay. There were a few parts that made me chuckle. Talk about a slow book! He knows a lot about myths, I'll say that! I related to Shem. But I prefer Robert Ludlum." ? (Maybe?) The idea of that seems unlikely to me, because the book demands such deep immersion, for many years. Or perhaps I lack imagination.

Do certain of us desire a dizzying complexity to get lost in? Ecstasy comes from ek-statis: "standing outside of oneself." Vertigo seems adjacent. Do you do that when reading deeply? Direct religious experience, when described, has as one of its hallmarks a discrete mental departure from everyday reality. In a sense, those who still can pay attention and read books - any books - get "lost" in the text. (Roland Barthes had the lovely phrase: "luxuriate in the text.") We find later that we were so engrossed we forgot about everything else in the room. It's a non-ordinary state, and highly valued by some. I jones for it every day, and you can see me testify, brothers 'n sistuhs, in these spaces. Could there be some sort of continuum by which some get "way more lost" than others? Is this experience with texts far more intense, given the reader and their "yoga" (Sanskrit: to yoke or unite) with it? And do said readers cop a religious experience from it? I think so, based on testimonies other than my own. This should set some readers to recollecting in tranquillity, etc, etc, etc. 

Take your time...

I realized just now I waxed on about the phenomenology of reading for Question #2, above: on the 1970s counterculture. I guess it's just exceedingly interesting to me.

The most famous Holy Books have all kinds of stories around their readers that suggest a sort of mania: people who memorize the Qu'ran. Those who learned to read but pretty much only read the Bible for an entire lifetime, and any mundane story you have for them about local gossip can be linked to a line, citing chapter and verse. But FW seems textually so weird that only an elite few stick with it, and I mean "elite" here in the most special pleading sense I can muster. What does it mean to try to read a profound book written in an opaque manner? It seems different to me than reading the Upanishads or Vedas or Sutras or Qu'ran in translation. Kabbalah seems like a text about a series of texts, with a series of operations needed to derive a welter of possible meanings, and this is, I think, getting at FW. Same neighborhood? And yet, the differences seem vast.

In Terence McKenna's essay on the exceedingly weird Voynich Manuscript, which is still not-cracked, author(s) unidentified, he draws on Structuralism and calls that book a "boundary text" to read: an unreadable book that you're trying to read. (Currently, it's thought to have been put-together around 1420, in Northern Italy, author(s) still unknown. Radiocarbon dating of the paper was done long after Terence's essay-talk on the Voynich.) He also cites The Necronomicon as a boundary text, although there, Terence, I suspect, might be having us on. But FW is readable. We have all "read" it and made sense out of passages. At first it feels onerous, but it's not completely impenetrable, you'll find. And you get "better" as you develop reading strategies for working with the Thing.

Rather than structuralism and boundary/unreadable texts, I'd cite Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information. If a text is completely unreadable - it now looks like the alphabet-like symbol system the Voynich was written in was mostly decorative, so it probably won't be cracked - it's mathematically isomorphic to "noise." In the Voynich the artwork is very, very strange. Cryptographers who had helped crack the Nazi Enigma Code have had a go at the "writing" in the Voynich and came up short. When you can't make out the first thing in a text, despite world-class cryptanalytical chops, you're looking at "noise" in the system: a dead channel of static, snow, pretty symbols that add up to worse than gobbledygook. Relax, and look at the writing in that weird book as filigree. In Shannon's sense this noise is far too much information and nothing can be predicted. FW is not that. Joyce actually wanted to say something; we'd just have to work. The book itself seems vastly ludic, so in our "work" at making sense of it, it would seem that our strategies might need to match some sort of "playful" wits with Joyce. One I use is to read it aloud, with a lame Irish brogue. I've heard those recordings of Joyce reading, and I try to channel that sound.

How individual readers of the Wake have prepared for it is always interesting for me to hear about. It would seem we're screwed without reading ourselves into a basic grounding in Irish history, etymology, world mythology, folklore, comparative lit, pre-1950s psychology, and linguistics, just for starters. Just to get the door slightly ajar. Here we have a text that can lead to an entire education. One must give oneself over to this education, which seems related to a quest and this in turn seems related to the "religio" question.

For actual decipherable text you must have redundancy in the mathematical sense. I don't wanna get off here on Shannon's Information Theory, but he did bring up C.K. Ogden's  Basic English, which was an attempt to bridge massive gaps in understanding and communication among even the least-educated people, and to blow down the Tower of Babel, figuratively. Shannon writes, "Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high. This is reflected in the expansion that occurs when a passage is translated into Basic English. Joyce, on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content." (found in The Codebreakers, by Kahn, 745) 

What Shannon means with redundancy, compression, and expansion is how a text can be manipulated and still retain its message; a simpler way to think about it is that texts with a low information content become predictable to a given reader, while texts of high information demand more from the reader and it's nearly impossible to guess the next words in the sentence as you're reading it. FW would be at the apex of difficulty, the information level so high that it verges on "noise" but never really achieves it, although the wild card is what the particular reader brings to the table. That Shannon writes FW is "alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content" we perhaps construe he was no fan.

This discourse of digital information theory and FW often shows up in books about FW. Of course! But it also shows up in books on consciousness, early architecture of computer systems as developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, attempts to measure and model creativity, and many other places. In 1964 Timothy Leary published "The Effects of Test Score Feedback on Creative Performance and of Drugs on Creative Experience," in which he posits computers as improving "games" but "only a living organism possesses consciousness from which spring new games." (Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years, 120) Try telling that to Sam Altman and his posse. In this paper Leary links Joyce's "lexicographical experiments" of using "innovative manipulations of a rather impoverished set of verbal symbols" into texts dense with meaning. Leary goes on to link the types of experiments Joyce was doing with the cut-up/fold-in methods of Gysin and Burroughs. 

More recently - Or: I Remember the 90s -  the philosopher Daniel Dennett had posited a "Joycean Machine" that could simulate the kinds of things that went on in FW. This was all around computers and AI getting at a model of consciousness. Which included daydreaming. With hindsight, I'm dubious, but Dennett has a goodly amount on this Joycean Machine in his book Consciousness Explained, which many of us read as soon as it came out and called it Consciousness Explained Away...

The odd-seeming digital-computer-consciousness riffs about FW have always seemed to me, in some sense, like groping for connections when they aren't "really" there. And yet, I have been convinced by Wilson of the value of discerning isomorphisms - similarities of structure - between seemingly disparate discourses. And then, of course, reading itself seems really fucking Weird: we use 26 little symbols/letters to represent the sounds we make when we talk, and those symbols combine to make "words", which, together with a handful of punctuation marks supposedly can convey any possible thought. On the face of it, the idea seems ludicrous. Are these written words the "same" as the ones we speak? Naw, man: they take on a life of their own when set down visually, by someone with a pencil, or stylus, or pen, or MacBook Pro. To read is not the same as to have a conversation. For one, the movements of the eyes are completely different when you compare. Probably a bigger deal in setting these two forms apart is what is going on in the brain when you sit alone with a text, eyes moving right to left in industrial linearity across the page, decoding the letters/sounds/words into "pictures" in your head and then interpreting them, virtually all at the "same time," versus a conversation. Which one is more like prayer: reading or a conversation? This seems to have vast implications, but I will leave this line dangling...

(Apologies to our Chinese friends, who read up to down, and those readers of Hebrew: left to right. Hey, I can at least gesture towards DEI.)

Joyce seems to be everywhen: In 2012 - a looong time ago - William Gibson published a series of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor. In one he recounts his reading of synthetic biologists who made a self-replicating genome and inserted a line from Joyce in it: "That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurement of mutation. So James Joyce's prose is now being very strongly pummeled into incoherence by cosmic rays." (43-44) (The line was "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" from A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Because why pick something from FW, which already looks like it has been bombarded by cosmic rays and undergone mutation?)

In Richard Preston's book Panic in Level 4 there's an New-New Journalistic essay about two Russian brothers - the Chudnovskys, who seem related to de Selby in some way in my mind, but they're "real" - in New York, who linked together a bunch of computers working in parallel and spent a lot of money and space on cooling them, as they set the network to work out pi to as many digits as possible. Doing that is their whole life. "Mathematicians who have visited Gregory Chudnovsky's bedroom have come away dizzy, wondering what secrets the scriptorium may hold." And it's either in Preston's book or some other article about the Chudnovskys that they proffered: if you assigned letters to numbers in pi, eventually it would write the book "about the sea" that Joyce was said have been planning after FW. Hey, I'd read that.

One could go on and on with this. In RAW's Coincidance: A Head Test he essays a tackling of FW. The book seems like an alien intelligence not unlike Terence's, but Wilson probes at this intelligence from multiple angles with morphogenetic fields, Bohmian holographic universe model-metaphors, Bell's Theorem, etymology, brain hemisphericalization, Leibniz and binary code and computers and I Ching...on and on and it's really the trippiest writing on FW I've ever seen. He had long wanted to write the book, thought no one would be interested, and he'd have to sell copies on street corners. The feeling I get is Joyce making a sort of transcendent Golem, the forerunner to Frankenstein and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice." The wise Rabbi Loew of Prague made the Golem out of mud or clay ("If you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs [please stoop!] in this allaphbed! Can you rede...its world?" FW:18-19) and earthly matter, animated by rituals and Hebrew incantations. When the Rabbi put a piece of paper with lines from the Torah in the Golem's mouth, it spoke. There are very many stories about the Golem, but It's made out of the lowest matter and yet lives and speaks! And for Wilson, "something unknown is doing we know not what", to quote Sir Arthur Eddington, who explained Einstein early on. But RAW thought that "something" may have to do with Intelligence, working evolutionarily in a way we haven't yet been able to pin down. It might be the wellspring of creativity. How ironic that It had released its metaphorical spores and gave rise to Finnegans Wake! In McLuhan's wild-ass "Laws of Media", near the end of his life, he's waxing on about how one media "obsolesces" another. An example: "Money speeds transactions and gives rise to uniform pricing systems, obsolescing haggle and barter and much of the human relation to commodities." And no matter what, "obsolescence" is not the end: "Obsolescence is not the end of anything; it's the beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of taste, of art, of eloquence and of slang. That is, the cultural midden-heap of cast-off cliches and obsolescent forms is the matrix of all innovation." (Essential McLuhan, 379-380) This profound biological book/machine of alien intelligence, the innovative Finnegans Wake, can be made of...trash. Profound levels of knowledge, aye. But also: found objects. A "midden-heap." And yet It speaks. "Cast-off cliches" and "slang" take on new dimensions in FW. And it's as if Joyce was directly connected to this alien intelligence/eternal boon of midden-heap sources. (Or: he just worked really hard at concocting a long Irish joke.)

Or at least that's my esoteric reading of RAW's esoteric reading of Finnegans Wake. A very short version, at least. I remind myself and the Reader that the Latin etymological roots of "religion" are to bind/bond, obligation and reverence. FWIW.

Dear Bob Campbell: Thanks so much for letting me blow long-azzed solos like late Coltrane here! You gave me the basic chords and let me go off. I'm very much interested in your own take on Finnegans Wake as a religious text. Care to chime?

bc: What an honor and a pleasure! Thank you so much for pushing these ideas forward so definitively that you’ve undoubtedly hit a long fly ball back to deep left center field, back, back, and that ball is outta here! HOME RUN!

For anyone that’s found themselves following breadcrumbs along the pollen path of the tale of the tribe, this is a WARP ZONE!

In regards to Finnegans Wake as a religious text, I’d also have to appeal to the etymological roots and invoke the Joseph Campbellian idea of religion as “religo,” a linking back, linking back the phenomenal person to a source, the mystery from which we emerge, presumably to which we return, and that which we maybe never actually leave!

I’d say whatever gives you that feeling of connection counts as a religious text, and to my tastes, FW seems especially well suited to this type of reading experience, and I suspect Joyce designed it that way very intentionally.

I must have originally picked up the idea from Toby Philpott, in 2005, when we worked on a Tale of the Tribe piece about FW & Vico called Falling on Deaf Ears, which ends with the line: “And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.” But it really took damn near two decades to actually sink in! 

Though if indeed Joyce intended on writing a sacred text with Finnegans Wake, certainly he envisioned a new kind of holy book, something that would resist dogma, central authority, and belief itself. FW issues no commandments, but rather invites direct participation in the mystery.

Given Joyce’s annoyance at WWII for distracting people from reading FW, I’d guess he hoped for a more immediate and large-scale recognition, but clearly he also built this thing to withstand centuries of scrutiny, and the long con has only barely kicked in.

Though, for the record, I see no imperative here! No need to evangelize. I wouldn’t bother recommending FW to the disinterested. It doesn’t need converts, or prominence, or success, it already exists! Fully accomplished and available for enjoyment by whomsoever wishes.

Simply finding the others, exchanging ideas with like-minded Wakeans, and making resources available for further edification seems like the name of the game to me.

FW entered the public domain in most of the world back in 2012, (natch!) and will do so here in the states in 2035. I know I have a vision for something I want to do with Finnegans Wake once the rights become free and clear, and probably others do as well!

(D.B. Weiss, of Game of Thrones TV adaptation fame, wrote a brilliant dissertation called Understanding the (Net) Wake, where he opens up Umberto Eco’s can of worms about FW being an “open work,” with fascinating implications for the future of art!)

I’d never seen that McKenna quote about FW as an autonomous event system!

What a perfect sentiment for Maybe Night! The original premise of which combines the Robinson-Campbell proposition of the Winter Solstice as the date of the dream in FW with McKenna’s hypothesized 12/21/12 timewave novelty singularity. (Also, that RU Sirius quote about the future getting determined by events rather than ideas.)

IDK if Maybe Night will successfully make it all the way to autonomy, but that remains the goal. Maybe someone phone up Ireland and tell them I found another Bloomsday in the pocket of an old coat. Certainly the pubs in Dublin wouldn’t want anything to do with that!