Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 241
the normal novelistic sense but basic categories of Mind and perhaps of
Universe (if there is any sense in distinguishing the two.)
is a symbol that has so many meanings most Joyce scholars have been
totally baffled by it. It is, among other things, Finnegan's coffin and the bed
in which Earwicker lies dreaming all through the book. It is also Phoenix
Park, and the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark and the battlefield of Waterloo
and any place and every place. The best description of , I think, is to call it a
localization within space-time wherein the nonlocal functions are temporarily
manifest. That is, systems or archetypes like and etc. function
everywhere and everywhen (that's what nonlocal means, after all) but is
an Einsteinian (space-time) cross-section of these atemporal aspatial
patterns or archetypes. Joyce may have used the symbol , because it has
four sides, to represent the four dimensions of space-time.
To say it otherwise, and and and and all the other nonlocal
functions we have been considering appear in the cross-section called
Genesis as Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. They appear in the cross
section of 7 Ching as yang and yin and active yang and passive yang. They
appear in Dublin as Earwicker and his wife and their two twin sons. They
appear in genetics as the two coils of DNA and the first two bonds, A and C.
Wherever one takes a cross-section of any sort ( ) these nonlocal functions
must appear, if they really are nonlocal.
One reason the Dublin, Ireland/Dublin, Georgia parallel appears so
conspicuously on the first page of FW is that Joyce is intent on making the
reader see that is a variable in FW. The normal waking mind, that is,
perceives one cross-section (or reality-tunnel) at a time; the dreaming
mind can be in several is simultaneously. This is partly why Yositani Roshi
said we all achieve Enlightenment in our sleep and Zen is just a trick for
doing it while awake.
Unless I am very much mistaken, Joyce has taken great care that never
has a single value in any of its appearances; it is always at least two-valued
(like the Schrodinger state vector). Thus, in the opening words, which we
know well by now, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." is simultaneously
Merchant's Quay in Dublin where the river Anna Liffey passes the Church
of Adam and Eve and also the Garden of Eden where four rivers flowed past
the original Adam and Eve. In the tavern chapter, analyzed above, is the
Crimea, where Buckley shot the Russian General, but it is also every other
battle in history, and, evidently, Nagasaki. Even at Finnegan's Wake in
chapter one, is only Finnegan's coffin part of the time; the mourners speak
in the tones of the jurors in the later trial scenes, so is also the Four Courts
in Dublin where Earwicker's sexual offenses are minutely examined.
If at any point, the reader thinks that is one specific space-time crosssection,
a little analysis will show, in the multi-linguistic puns, that another