Video: Binaries & Bibliomancy: Finnegans Wake as the Western I-Ching

(contributed for Maybe Day 2020 http://maybeday.net/)

This essay was originally presented at the 2019 James Joyce Symposium in Mexico City and earlier this week I recorded it as a video for the virtual Maybe Day celebration on July 23rd celebrating the work of Robert Anton Wilson. "Binaries & Bibliomancy" essentially builds upon the theories presented in Wilson's great book Coincidance where he outlines an isomorphic relationship (in mathematics, systems that are parallel in form) between the I-Ching and Finnegans Wake. In my piece I talk about the machinery of these two distinctly different classics, how both books are built as thinking machines, always up-to-date, always encouraging open readings. The Wake advertises itself as a book of "Opendoor Ospices" (FW p. 71) allowing for open-door readings and "Ospices" or auspices, consulting for prophecy much like the I-Ching. As Finn Fordham described it in his book Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, "Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching."

Robert Anton Wilson Day was officially declared to be July 23rd by the mayor of Santa Cruz, California. John Higgs wrote a great article in The Guardian years back describing what RAW Day is all about. I enjoy the Santa Cruz connection with RAW because our Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group has a lot of Santa Cruz links. We've had multiple longtime members from Santa Cruz who became good buddies of mine, the host of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Santa Cruz is also an old pal of mine, I got to visit up there and attend their Wake groups multiple times. Robert Anton Wilson also had a Finnegans Wake reading group in Santa Cruz for many years. Last time I was there I got to hear stories from folks who knew RAW and also knew Norman O. Brown, the legendary UC Santa Cruz professor, scholar, and theatrical Wakean.

I want to thank Bobby Campbell (https://bobbycampbell.net/) for putting together the amazing virtual tribute to RAW with contributions from a talented group of RAW readers. There's some incredible visuals, writings, comics, and videos over at the 2020 celebration of Happy Maybe Day. I also got to participate in a live panel with the contributors that was a really inspiring and informative time, really enjoyed it and grateful to be a part of this event.

Latest Examples of Reading the News inside Finnegans Wake

"News, news, all the news." - FW p. 28.21

"old the news of the great big world" - FW p. 194.23-24

Ever since the coronavirus shut everything down, our local Finnegans Wake Reading Group transferred to online conferences and since the reading group is one of the most fun and fulfilling things going on for many of us right now, we shifted our twice-monthly meetings to now meet every week. The online venue allows us to branch out and bring in people who are outside of Austin, so now we regularly have people joining us from California, Ohio, and even Taiwan. It's been extremely satisfying having these weekly gatherings and doing digital group excavations of pages from Finnegans Wake.

One aspect of being involved in a regular Wake reading group that always intrigues me is how, without any intention on our part, we always manage to encounter material on the page we're reading that seems to speak directly to what is happening in the news that day. I've written about this phenomenon before (most notably when the Wake seemed to offer commentary on our Trump predicament), it is a quality about Finnegans Wake that has interested me for a long time, ever since the first time I attended a Wake reading group many years ago in Venice, California where the guy sitting next to me made a bunch of notes about contemporary references on the page we were reading. The upcoming Super Bowl, Bush and Cheney, oil wars in the Middle East, it was all there on the page. My mind was blown.

Oddly, these synchronicities never stop popping up. Like I said, these connections happen when you aren't looking for them. Finnegans Wake simply cannot help itself, it always has something to say about the news. I want to give you three examples from the last few weeks of our reading group to show you what I mean.

- Usually we read one page per meeting, but when we were on page 66 we found it to be so dense and overflowing with allusions and references and topics for discussion that we split that one page into three separate sessions. So in our last session we read the final paragraph which begins with "The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist's art..." and so on. We spent about two hours unpacking just that one paragraph and what we took from it, if I remember correctly, was that the paragraph was saying even though somebody was in a coffin it was an illusion in the sense that their legacy was only just beginning, their legacy would go on to have a life of its own, giving birth to new cycles of life (through their memory, through their children and their descendants, etc) even while their body was left to decay, consumed by subterranean creatures and reduced to ashes. This is an important theme throughout James Joyce's work, that absence can be the greatest form of presence, that the dead take on a more powerful life after death. Of course, it so happened that the day we read this passage was the day of George Floyd's memorial service where he was mourned as he lay inside a golden coffin. And George Floyd, in death, has now become an incredibly powerful figure, a name known across the world, the impact of his tragic killing has sparked an enormous uprising intent on societal change. I think of Floyd's sweet little daughter sitting atop the shoulders of Floyd's friend Stephen Jackson and proclaiming "Daddy changed the world!"

- The following week we were reading page 67 which features a special constable or policeman taking the stand in a trial and giving an eyewitness account of some occurrence in the book. At one point while the policeman is speaking, Joyce uses the phrase "he guntinued." The presence of this constable character opened up a whole discussion about police and the history of policing, which apparently originated from British colonialism and the need to keep colonial subjects in line. Of course, this discussion about the police and their history sprung up amid the backdrop of heated debates going on in the United States about the need to reform our police system. In a bizarre coincidence, the passage on 67 with the policeman features the phrase "You are deepknee in error, sir" which we couldn't help but connect with the horrific image of the policeman Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly ten minutes until he died.
(I should also mention that this same passage with the policeman and subtle appearances of police violence featured the word "tailliur" which conjures up Breonna Taylor, the young black woman who was killed while sleeping in her home in Louisville, Kentucky.)

- The most recent one really struck me as being uncanny. While we were reading page 68 we stopped at this sentence and chewed on it for a while: "Nor needs none shaft ne stele from Phenicia or Little Asia to obelise on the spout, neither pobalclock neither folksstone, nor sunkenness in Tomar's Wood to bewray how erpressgangs score off the rued." It is a very dense and difficult sentence to unpack, but there are some good clues in there. That word "stele" refers to a type of ancient monument, a stone slab with inscriptions. You've got an obelisk, another monument, in there. The portmanteau word "pobalclock" combines two Irish words which basically translate to "folk stone" and there is "folksstone" following right after "pobalclock." Fweet mentioned that there is a stone pillar monument in the town of Folkestone in England marking the spot where Saxon invaders landed on the shores. You see where this is going? The sentence essentially says we don't need monuments to mark where the invaders landed, we don't need to recognize those "erpressgangs"---a word combining the German erpressen meaning "to blackmail or extort" and also press-gangs which were groups that kidnapped men and forced them to enlist in the military. All of this stuff rung an uncanny echo with the ongoing debates in the United States about removing statues and monuments that commemorate Confederate generals or slave owners or other historical figures known for their roles in perpetuating America's history of bigotry and racial oppression. Page 68 is very rich and fascinating, there's a lot to it, but for me it was pretty mind-blowing to come upon this sentence about statues and monuments and how we don't need them if they're commemorating invaders and oppressors in the midst of what is happening in America right now. Finnegans Wake never disappoints.

BBC Program "Free Thinking" Devoted to Finnegans Wake

To commemorate Bloomsday this year, the BBC radio program "Free Thinking" devoted a whole episode to discussing Finnegans Wake. I was pleasantly surprised at how great this discussion came out. The show features host Matthew Sweet discussing the historical facts and notorious idiosyncrasies of Joyce's final novel with Joyce scholar Finn Fordham, novelist Eimear McBride, and lecturer Eleanor Lybeck. They toss out favorite individual words from the Wake, speculate on why it was written in such an obscure language, collectively savor the book's unique delights, and read a few passages aloud. Most fascinating to me about the discussion is Finn Fordham's insights, as he's one of the premier Wake scholars in the world today and an engaging speaker. I was thrilled that he chose to recite the atomic explosion passage from the Butt & Taff episode at the heart of the text. That's about as rich and silly yet scientific and prescient a passage as you will find in Finnegans Wake.

On that note, I must admit that I was thunderstruck upon hearing the host bring up the I-Ching in relation to Finnegans Wake because I just presented my paper entitled "Binaries & Bibliomancy: Finnegans Wake as the Western I-Ching" at the annual Joyce Symposium in Mexico City a few days prior to the program being released. Not that there's any causal connection there, of course, it just struck me as a synchronicity that took on even more significance when Finn Fordham responded to the host's inquiry by dismissing the notion that Joyce designed the book to have oracular powers.

I can tell you that I am very, very excited about the material in my "Binaries & Bibliomancy" piece and I can't wait to share it with you all. I've been researching this subject for a few years now and spent six months writing the paper. The Wake & I-Ching have been strange bedfellows for a while but I found some fascinating concrete links between the two as well as myriad resonant echoes that enrich Joyce's text. The presentation I gave in Mexico City received some stunning responses from those in the audience, many of whom were veteran Joyce scholars. I am currently in the process of finalizing the paper (which contains more than double the material I shared in the presentation) to try getting it published somewhere. In the meantime, if you'd like to check out my presentation I will share a link of a video of the talk after the jump below.

Baseball in Finnegans Wake?

George Herman Ruth pitching for the Red Sox, circa 1915.

"Holy cow!" 

- Phil Rizzuto

Being that Baseball and Finnegans Wake are two of my favorite things in the universe, naturally I've tried to seek out connections between the two from time to time. Years ago at my other blog I speculated on connections between Joyce and Baseball focusing specifically on Ulysses (which led to a mention on ESPN.com!), but lately I've been contemplating whether there are any significant connections between Finnegans Wake and Baseball. The Wake contains everything and Baseball was certainly very popular during the years (1923-1939) while Joyce was composing his all-encompassing book, therefore Baseball must be in the Wake someplace.

Finnegans Wake features dozens of very specific references to cricket, including many names of star players (see pgs. 583-584), there are also clusters of soccer and rugby references---but what about Baseball? Well, there is at least one verifiable (and very interesting) allusion to Baseball in the Wake and a few other more vague ones.

The most obvious Baseball allusions occur in chapter 5 amid the long, rambling, dream-distorted archeological inquiries into what exactly the text of Finnegans Wake actually is...or is not: "it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it." (p. 118) Similar to a Baseball diamond, the Wake is a square around whose four sections one advances until completing a full circle around the square (Joyce: "It's a wheel I tell the world. And it's all square"), ending and beginning again at "riverrun." I've mentioned before how the run in riverrun, the word the Wake starts and ends with, coincides with a run in baseball indicating a cyclical journey around the square completed by returning across home plate.

Here's the most obvious Baseball reference in the Wake, from page 119:

"...after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our leftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that... things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour..."

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this little cluster and it also opens the rest of the text up to other Baseball-related readings. It sounds like a left-handed pitcher kissing the ground for luck before flinging a baseball over home plate at someone trying to reach at the ball with their hands clinging to a bat, hoping to come out ahead in this quarrel. The word "homoplate" is a pun on home plate and omoplate, a Greek word from physiology that literally means "shoulder blade." That carries a little extra relevance for Baseball junkies since a pitcher's shoulder is such a regular part of Baseball talk these days with hurler's arms so often injured and surgically repaired. The phrase "a good ground kiss to Terracussa" could be a ground ball that kissed the earth (hit toward the shortstop perhaps? hence the SS in "Terracussa"?). A stat head like me can't help but notice the fascinating synchronicity in the way the Wake describes the efforts of Baseball players "for wars luck." The most authoritative advanced statistic measuring Baseball players is called WAR (or WARP, for Wins Above Replacement Player). A simple and cynical observation of Baseball would be that it's a battle between WAR and luck, i.e. established reliable statistics versus the dice-roll of luck inherent in each pitch. In Baseball, anything can happen.

"juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed"...or a Baseball scorecard.

If we follow the Wake's advice to "Wipe your glosses with what you know" (p. 304) we can begin to read other appearances of Baseball in its pages. A couple lines after "our leftoff's flung over our home homoplate" the phrase "ten to one" could be giving the score of a ballgame. And the aforementioned "riot of blots and blurs and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings" now sound like inscribings in a Baseball scorecard recording the outcomes of a ballgame. I envision the pitcher versus hitter duel being invoked in this line on the previous page: "the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators." Prior to our lefty delivering the pitch across home plate, the pitcher and catcher are communicating in sign language, deceiving the opponent and deciding on the next pitch using "changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns." (p. 118)

The lefty flinging a pitch over home plate takes on new meaning in the context of a potential Baseball reference two pages prior. Page 117 mentions the Broadway hit No, No, Nanette with "Highho Harry" in the same sentence. Fweet and John Gordon's annotations both suggest this is referring to Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee who, according to legend, sold off his star player Babe Ruth to the Yankees in order to finance his 1919 musical No, No, Nanette. I've long felt there must be a reference to Babe Ruth somewhere in the Wake because he was such a huge global celebrity throughout the 1920s and '30s. The No, No, Nanette stuff is certainly compelling. John Gordon's notes suggest "our leftoff's flung over our home homoplate" might indeed be a reference to Babe Ruth, who was a left-handed pitcher for the Red Sox before "Highho Harry" sold him to the Yanks. Another reference to No, No, Nanette appears on page 567 surrounded by some Baseball-sounding terms like "buntingcap" and "glover's greetings" and "streamer fields." (It's worth noting as well that the song "Tea for Two," which recurs frequently throughout the Wake, is from No, No, Nanette.)

On the topic of left-handed pitchers in Finnegans Wake, I must mention the piece I wrote after Kansas City Royals pitcher Brandon Finnegan made his debut in the major leagues. The lefty donned the number 27 for the Royals and if you open to page 27 of the Wake you'll find mention of "a blue streak over his bourseday shirt" which fit well for the kid whose #27 jersey had "FINNEGAN" written in blue letters. Even better, if you go to page 327 of the Wake it seems to proudly mention the pitcher, "our goodsend Brandonius." As of this writing, Brandon Finnegan has flamed out and is now pitching out of the bullpen in the minor leagues. In Baseball circles he is an afterthought, or what the Wake might call a "bullpen backthought." (FW p. 359) Yes, the annotations suggest that is indeed a "bullpen" reference that Joyce took from Baseball lingo.

And here's one more, a line I don't think has been noted by the scholars as a reference to Baseball but certainly sounds like one to me, from page 213: "number nine in yangsee's hats." The New York Yankees ("new yonks" FW p. 308) launched into the public consciousness during the 20s and 30s, mainly thanks to the exploits of Babe Ruth, so perhaps this is referring to ballplayers in Yankees hats, with "number nine" appropriate for nine players on the field.

Lastly, I must mention another convergence of my two favorite things, Baseball and Finnegans Wake, that comes from Peter Chrisp's fantastic blog post about the poet Delmore Schwartz. Delmore was a devoted Wake head, known to carry along a tattered copy of the book everywhere he went, scribbling annotations on every page. He was also a huge baseball fan. One anecdote mentions Schwartz sitting in the stands at the Polo Grounds, watching a New York Giants ballgame while jotting annotations into his copy of Finnegans Wake (my love for this story is immeasurable). I wonder if he thought to look for Baseball references in the book.

Mathematicians Confirm: Finnegans Wake is Fractal

While constructing Finnegans Wake, James Joyce boasted, "I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world."

In studying the intricate designs of the Wake, one realizes this statement applies to many different aspects of it. The book is a living machine, cranking out fresh meanings, references, and connections every time you engage with it. It was published nearly 80 years ago yet somehow its material can always apply to the present day.

It was also, as I've written about recently, engineered as a rotating reconstruction of the Earth.

And its entire framework, from the most minor details to the overriding structure, is fractal. Devoted Wake-heads have always been aware of this, but now some physicists and mathematicians examining literature have confirmed the Wake's fractal fabric.

From The Guardian:

“The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” said Professor Stanisław Drożdż, another author of the paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal Information Sciences."

fractal (n) - a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.

"find, if you are not literally cooefficient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd!" - FW p. 284  

Finn Awakens: The Influence of Finnegans Wake on Star Wars

Be sure to go check out eminent illustrator and Joycean Bobby Campbell's newest blog post connecting the dots between Finnegans Wake and Star Wars.

Here's a snippet:

The latest installment in the Star Wars saga, Episode VII, includes 2 potential high-profile references to the monomythic source material. The episode title The Force Awakens is a pretty simple jump from Finnegans Wake, and it’s an even smaller leap of logic to Finn, the stormtrooper turned rebel hero. Of course, these may be merely coincidental creative decisions, but it’d be cooler if they weren’t!

In the world of Wakean synchronicities and bizarre anachronisms, these are completely valid observations. Somehow Finnegans Wake is always current, "as modern as tomorrow afternoon" (FW p. 309).

An alternate title for the new Star Wars film could have been Finn Awakens.

The main criticism being lodged against the new film is that it essentially repeats the story of the very first Star Wars installment. This is reminiscent of what's going on in Finnegans Wake where the same story with the same essential players or archetypes is told and retold in different versions of the same thing, "one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same." (FW p. 5)

The theme of the younger generation taking over from their elders is also a prominent feature of The Force Awakens and is a core theme in Finnegans Wake where the sons unite to topple their father.

(SPOILER ALERT: The final scene of The Force Awakens also takes place on an island off the coast of Ireland.)

Finnegan Wakes! as a Royal

"A being again in becomings again." - Finnegans Wake p. 491

I'm pleased to report that Finnegan has reawakened and is participating in this year's World Series.

A young hard-throwing southpaw named Brandon Finnegan is pitching out of the bullpen for the Cinderella story Kansas City Royals. "A kingly man, of royal mien" (FW p. 68) baseball's new Finnegan "our goodsend Brandonius" (FW p. 327) will become the first player ever to participate in both the College World Series and the Major League Baseball World Series in the same year. A scant five months ago the 21-year-old kid was sitting in a college classroom here in Texas.

Finnegan was selected 17th overall out of TCU in June. The 21-year-old made 13 minor league appearances (five starts) split between High-A Wilmington and Double-A Northwest Arkansas before being promoted to the majors in September. Finnegan was the first 2014 draftee to earn a big league promotion. http://nesn.com/2014/10/brandon-finnegan-could-make-history-play-two-world-series-in-same-year/

Surprisingly, Mr. Finnegan is the first ever representative of the Finnegan tribe in MLB history. (There's been a few Finnegans in the minors, none of them named Tim though.)

"Our goodsend Brandonius" (FW p. 327) is wearing jersey number 27.

Through the bizarre magic that Finnegans Wake always creates, if you open to page 27 of the book you'll read: "a blue streak over his bourseday shirt."

And we find "Brandonius" on page 327.

James Joyce laughs.