Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 161
The second letter of most European alphabets is B and if you put our A
and B together you get AB, or ab, which is the Indo-European root for
"river," and appears in the name of the Punjab in India as well as in the Gaelic
origin of Joyce's (or Dublin's) Anna Liffey, which is spelled abhe life and
means "dark river." It also appears in numerous rivers between India and
Ireland, including (by way of Grim's b-v switch) Shakespeare's Avon. We
can't seem to get away from the "riverrun" with which FW begins, but that
word probably owes something to Coleridge's
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
In fact, the original Alph or Alpheus ran through Arcadia in Greece,
which means "the place of the bear-god" and brings us back to that ursine
archetype again. But Alph or alpha is just the Greek version of the Hebrew
aleph or ALP or Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle . . .
The ab root may or may not be historically linked to Abel, but it is linked
in the unconscious, and thus we are back to the battling twins again—Shem
the Penman and Shaun the Postman, Cain and Abel, and , Mutt and
Jeff, Dodgson and Carroll, Jekyl and Hyde etc. These begin to seem like the
two hemispheres of the brain, as discovered long after Joyce finished FW. As
"cainapple," Joyce unites the Cain/Abel opposites, just as "the Hindu Shimar
Shin" incongruously present at the battle of Waterloo unites them in their
Shem and Shaun incarnations and Bruno of Nola unites them in their
Brown and Nolan polarity. Ab also suggests Abraham—and Abraham and
Sarah appear almost as often as Adam and Eve in FW as male/female or
yang/yin archetypes.
Sara in Sanscrit means "salt" and this may explain why the Abraham/ Sarah
puns are especially thick on the closing pages of FW, where the freshwater
Anna Liffey (AB, river) mingles with the salt water (sara) of Dublin Bay.
Abraham Lincoln, who also appears, had a patriarchal name, a patriarchal
beard and presided over the American Civil War, a magnified battle of
brothers, or Cain and Abel Writ Large, or the brawl at Finnegan's Wake as a
recurrent historical pattern. Ulysses Grant finally won that war for Lincoln
and had appeared already in Ulysses as a living synchronicity with the title
(Molly Bloom remembers seeing him on a visit to Gibralter). The harddrinking
author of the disreputable Ulysses seems to have had a strange
sympathy for the hard-drinking and disreputable Ulysses Grant, who
had wooden (bureau) drawers where she should have ordinary lingerie drawers.
Incidentally, Dali was as preoccupied with the fact that his first name, Salvador, means
Saviour in Spanish as Joyce was with the fact that his name implies a joyous one or one
who makes jokes