Coincidance - Principia Discordia

160 COINCIDANCE
Anna Livia Plurabelle's untitled "mamafesta" in Chapter Five has 111
alternative titles; when sad, she is described as "wan wan wan"; in Chapter 8,
she has 111 children. Most books on Cabala hint at transcendental
meanings in the fact that the Hebrew A or aleph=ALP=lll when spelled in
full as aleph-lamek-pe. I think Crowley is hinting in Chapter 54 of The Book of
Lies that the Mason Word a!so=lll by Cabala, but it is curious that Joyce
often identifies ALP with the number 54, because she is basically Anna
Liffey and in Roman numerals LIV=54. (But as "liwy" on the bottom of the
first page she is Mark Twain's wife, Olivia, whom he called "Liwy," as well
as being the Roman historian, Livy, who inspirec Vico's theories of class
war, which in turn inspired Marx, who is usually involved in Joyce's King
Mark/Mark Twain puns.)
Joyce combines that Freemasonic lap theme with the Marriage Ceremony
in the "Tavern" chapter of FW, which happens to be chapter 11:
Him her first lap, her his fast pal, for ditcher for plower, till deltas twoport.
Delta ( ) as a symbol of the vagina here combines also with Hamlet's
notorious puns to Ophelia on lap meaning vagina and "nothing" meaning 0
or another symbol of the vagina. The 0 and its role as link between Leibniz's
binary and I Ching is a subject to which we will return.
But we started from ALP and that word features prominently in a
famous, oddly Joycean passage from Marx: "The weight of the past presses
down on the brains of the living like—" Like what? Marx wrote "Alp,"
which in German can mean a nightmare or a mountain. Some translators
make this "like an incubus" and some say "like an Alp." Since FW is a
nightmare in which a mountain (Howth, ) is a prominent character, and
since Joyce lived in Switzerland near the Alps for many years, this is all
wonderfully appropriate.
We are not quite finished with the ALP-APL-LAP system yet. Another
permutation gives us PLA, which is Dublin slang for Portlaois Lunatic
Asylum, which many of Joyce's contemporaries predicted would be his
ultimate destination. (Carl Jung, on first looking into FW, said it indicated
"either mental illness or a degree of mental health inconceivable to most
people." Salvador Dali, the painter whose work so often resembles Joyce's
prose, liked to say, "The only difference between me and a madman is that I
am not mad.")*
* There are at least two tributes to Dali in FW. Joyce's "Purloined notepaper" combines
Poe's purloined letter with Dali's fur-lined teacups and bathtubs (and our animal
anatomy: fur-loined). 1 also think Joyce's accusation that Earwicker was guilty of "covert
meddlement with the drawers of his neighbor's safe" conflates the commandment
against coveting one's neighbors wife with Dali's quite Joycean painting of a lady who