Coincidance - Principia Discordia

10 COINCIDANCE
since moving to Pans." The threat of blindness became more and more real
as the writing of FW went on—"it darkles (tinct! tinct!) ail this our
funnanimal world." The type of man that young girls should be leery of, we
are told in Shaun the Postman's sermon in Book Three, is "about 50," like
Joyce in the middle of the writing and has "scummy eyes" about which he
makes "certain references to the deity."
Blindness as an alleged result of masturbation, and as the punishment of
Peeping Tom in the Lady Godiva legend, were much on Joyce's mind in
those years, one gathers. Tim Finnegan in the ballad and Peeping Tom easily
blend in dream-logic (Tim = Tom) and both get merged with Atum, the
Egyptian god who created the universe by masturbating. Tom Sawyer and
Doubting Thomas are also linked with Tim-Tom-Atum in some of Joyce's
puns: Tom Sawyer because he associated with Huck Finn (who is Finn,
again—see?) and Doubting Thomas because Joyce, an Agnostic, found him
the most appealing of the apostles.
There seem to be only two incidents in FW, although they go through so
many variations and permutations that they eventually link to all the major
themes of art, science and philosophy.
The first incident, which probably occurred at 11:32 in the morning of the
day before the dream—or that's my guess as to why the number 1132 keeps
recurring throughout the book, something no Joyce scholar has yet satisfactorily
explained—happened when Humphrey C. Earwicker, while crossing
Phoenix Park, felt the need to retire to the bushes to answer a call of nature.
After taking his pants down, the misfortunate man suddenly noticed two
young girls (aspects of the duality in Joyce's notebook, about which
more later) who had retired to the bushes with similar needs. Maybe
something else happened; maybe it didn't. We never know. Whirling
around, Earwicker saw three British soldiers (aspects of the trinity
we will come to know well) who were watching whatever the devil did
happen. (This detail, the British soldiers, dates the otherwise timeless dream
as sometime before 1922, when the British withdrew their troops from
Ireland—although they remained, and still remain, in Northern Ireland.)
Joyce describes Dublin as a "gossipocracy"—a description I believe after five
years in the place—and the dream has the neighbors, told of the incident by
the soldiers, accusing Earwicker of every possible "moral" offense, and some
impossible ones, starting with voyeurism and exhibitionism and proceeding
with nightmare logic through masturbation, making homosexual overtures
to the soldiers, murdering the soldiers, cannibalistically earing them, and so
on, up to and including plotting to murder the king, or the pope, or both. As
in that other archetypical 20th Century masterpiece, Kafka's The Trial, it is
absolutely impossible for the reader to decide what, if any, of all this guilt has