Coincidance - Principia Discordia

240 COINCIDANCE
to time-oriented arts like music ( ), with the eventual synthesis of both
into Joyce space-time prose ( ) being gently hinted.
In the "Tavern" chapter, pages 309-382, the story of Buckley and the
Russian General is told at length; but Joyce intercuts this with hundreds of
other battles from other epochs of history, with special attention (of course)
to Ciontarf and Waterloo. Curiously, there is a strong quantum mechanical
theme running through this catalog of war and violence, and some of it
seems very eerily prescient for a book published in 1939:
On page 313, is "blown to Adams," dragging us back to Genesis again
but foreshadowing nuclear war. On page 333, this comes back in the phrase
"split an atam" (which again evoked Atum creating the universe by
masturbating). On page 339, somebody speaks in "lipponene longuedge"
which can only be Nipponese language, to say "Sehyoh narar, pokehole sann."
If this is Japanese, it says "Sayanara, Pookah-sann" (Farewell, honorable
Pookah) the Pookah being an ancient Celtic rabbit-god which, oddly,
became Puck in Shakespeare. If one looks at the mixed Yiddish and Norse
roots, of course, this sentence is also saying, "See the hunchbacked fool,"
which is also appropriate to the context in which a hunch backed sailor is in
conflict with a greedy tailor, and I think the s-t transformation of sailor to
tailor suggests Einstein's s-t (space-time) equations. On page 349 we have
"the charge of the light barricade" combining Buckley's adventures in the
Crimean War (the charge of the light brigade, which involved Brown and
Nolan, remember?) with Einstein's e = mc 2 and the acceleration of particles
in a cyclotron. The sentence just before this on page 349 contains "guranium"
which is a flower, the geranium, with a heavy dose of uranium, the trigger
of the atomic bomb. All of this is explicable on the basis of Joyce's study of
what physicists were talking about before he finished his book in 1939,
although the Japanese reference is distinctly spooky. What the Rationalist
will find most annoying, however, is the reference, within this long atomic
chapter, on page 315, to "nogeysokey." I don't know what that can mean
except Nagasaki. . . .
Joyce's second fourfold function, X, which signifies water, fire, earth and
air or Matt, Mark, Luke and John or the compass points, etc. is also an
interesting isomorph with modern physics which recognizes four forces
constraining all quantum systems:
1. The strong force;
2. The weak force;
3. The electromagnetic force;
4. The gravitational force.
It will be profitable to consider now the rest of Joyce's system functions,
since we are at this point fully aware that they are not merely "characters" in