Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 99
with human and pre-human "memories" unknown to the conscious
(Earwicker-Ego). The heroes of Ireland are all there: Parnell and O'Connell
and Silken Thomas Fitzgerald and Brian Boru; and so are Napoleon and
Charlemagne and all the emperors of Rome; and the Hebrew prophets and
Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Adam and Eve; and Confucius and
Buddha and Mohammed; and all the dead-and-resurrected gods of Frazer's
Golden Bough: Tammuz and Adonis and Hyacinth and Osiris and Attis and
Dionysus, etc.; and chimpanzees and other mammals and salmon and
whales and insects and trees and flowers. On this level, Finnegan's Wake is like
The Outline of History and The Origin of Species talking to each other in rich Dublin
brogues.
It is of this level of being that Freud wrote, mystified, "The unconscious is
not aware of its own mortality," and Aleister Crowley, more perceptively,
wrote, "The unconscious is aware of its own immortality." Joyce also
identifies this with mountains because mountains symbolize eternity
and, coincidentally, is the Chinese ideogram for "mountain"; he also
identifies with the Hebrew identified by Cabalists with the descent of
"spirit" into "matter," an occult metaphor which is understood by Christian
Cabalists to refer to the incarnation of God in Jesus and by pantheistic
Cabalists to mean that the history of life itself is the autobiography of God.
Chinese is pronounced shan, Hebrew is pronounced sheen (and usually
spelled shin) and Finnegans Wake contains a Shaun, a postman,* who is
perpetually trying to deliver a letter containing undefined good news. The
letter was found in a garbage-heap which becomes, in turn, Dublin, an
archeological dig, all human history, and itself or the living presence of
our dead ancestors.
The fourth function, , of the system-function seems to have been
named only twice before Joyce (the Buddhists call it "void" and the Taoists call
it wu-hsin or no-mind) although described by all mystics. To use the Taoist
metaphor is no-mind because it is the class of all possible minds, which is
not a mind for the same reason that the class of all possible mammals is not a
mammal. It is speaking of this level that mystics say such "paradoxical"
things as existence and non-existence are the same, the real is the unreal, all
is illusion but the poplar tree in the courtyard is Buddha, etc. Obviously,
here ordinary language breaks down and Joyce was compelled to invent his
own language to write Finnegans Wake.
Quantum physicists, meanwhile, have gotten beyond ordinary language
'* Shaun the postman is a character in Dion Boucicault's 19th Century melodrama, Arrah
na Pogue. The Gaelic title means "Nora of the kiss' and coincidentally invokes Joyce's life
companion, Nora Barnacle. Dion Boucicault suggests Dionysus, one of the dead-andresurrected
gods who haunt finnegans Wake: and there is a Finnegan in Arrah na Pogue, too