Coincidance - Principia Discordia

14 COINCIDANCE
but the other wasn't, some that both were sexual, etc.) Since Joyce believed
(as he wrote in a letter) that Ireland, like Sicily, is ruled by omerta (silence),
Swift is a fit symbol of the Irish people's (or any colonial people's) obsession
with hiding what they are doing.
At this point, the equation seems to be: Swift = = the guilty man in the
Freudian bushes; the two Esthers = = the two girls in the bushes; and,
remarkably, the three soldiers = = Peter, Jack and Martin in Swift's
Tale of a Tub. But Peter, Jack and Martin, in Swift, symbolize respectively the
Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran religions (Peter = thuartpeatrick,
Jack = John Calvin, Martin - Martin Luther) and Christianity has become
three forms of evasion of Freudian guilt, which may or may not be what
Swift had in mind.
Contemporary with Swift and also Irish was Lawrence Sterne, author of
Tristram Shandy. Joyce commented in a letter to Harriet Weaver that Swift
and Sterne should have changed names, because Swift's writings were
stern and Sterne's writings were swift. Swift and Sterne are thus versions
of Joyce's Cain/Abel dualism, or , the male or yang equivalent of the
female or yin polarity. The Swift-Sterne oxymoron appears dozens of
times in FW) e.g., "he sternly struck his tete in a tub ... (and) swiftly took it
out again," "the siamixed twoatalk used twixt stern swift and jolly roger,"
etc. Joyce may or may not have known the coincidence that Swift's
predecessor as Dean or Saint Patrick's in Dublin was also named Stern; but
Joyce was aware, and commented in another letter to Ms. Weaver, that die
Sterne in German not only means "the star" but also glaucoma—the eye
disease from which he himself was suffering while writing FW.
Joyce, in fact, first played with this English-German pun (Sterne/star/
glaucoma) as far back as 1918 when he wrote "Bahnhofstrasse," a poem
describing his first hideously painful glaucoma attack on Bahnhofstrasse in
Zurich:
Ah, star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Glaucoma comes from the Greek, glaucis, shining, and is an epithet
Homer habitually applies to the eyes of Athene, who was originally an owl
goddess and is usually shown with an owl in Greek statuary. Athene was
the goddess of juries, and we will come to know the twelve jurors (O) in FW
intimately before the end of this book; for now it is enough to note that
when they first appear, as mourners at Finnegan's wake in chapter one,
they utter "a plethora of ululation." To ululate etymologically means to
moan like an owl—a typical example of the psycho-archeology of Joyce's