It appears that James Joyce is continuing his critique of Western religious experience in Finnegan's Wake. As in Ulysses, he is
addressing our fall from the Eden of prehistory, where our interrelationship with the natural world and the godhead was closer and more personal.
It was easier to have a close ecstatic experience, an epiphany if you will, with the divine creativity when the entire landscape was imbued with
the essence of that deification. When the great trees, which marked the sites of 'pagan' cathedrals, were still inhabited with the accumulated
energy and memory of that reverential interaction, in this we revered life and the processes of creation. When we could look out at the ocean or
along the rivers and see the source of life, the aqua vitae, which made our continued survival possible we touched a vital part of what
made our life and all life possible. We saw these waters as being invested with a life, a will, and an intelligence of their own, through which we
could contemplate our own meandering evolutionary progression. How far we have fallen. We have to get back to the garden before the whole
damn house falls down around our ears.
This shift from an animistic mentality is evident in language. As in the 'pyschodynamics of Gaelic prepositions', the agency is placed on the
object instead of residing wholly in the subjective experience. This is corroborated, as Charlie says that the "verbs of being are irregular, late,
and pieced together", and that they relate to active verbs. In distancing ourselves from the active natural world we have denuded our language
with mere relationships instead of the active participation and the agency of living. This has caused an atrophy in our ability to feel fully and to
relate what we feel from our experiences. Not unlike the loss of our synaesthetic ability to play with our experiences in a way that broadens the
connections between our sensual tools as well as our interconnection to our environment.
The discussion of the term tropical as being relative to the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and in their turn relative to the Greek words for the
'quarter days' in the agricultural or 'pagan' tradition sparked my interest. It really is 'the big secret', this study of the language or word roots. I had
not looked into the meanings of the words solstice and equinox. Their meanings are as close to the observation of astronomical activity as one
can get…'stationary sun' and 'same as night' respectively. And yet our ancestors were acutely aware the importance of these phenomenon in
relation to their agricultural life cycle. It is no wonder that so many of these ancient temples, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the
Yucatan are aligned so as to take advantage of these astronomical occurrences. Today the Hamburglar looks under the cabbage leaf for a burger
and food comes not from the ground but the grocery store - and the small farm in America becomes yet another endangered species clear cut at
the hands of greedy multinational corporations.
Two other references piqued my curiosity. The first was the manifestation of force, which came from the rubbing of amber on a piece of paper,
which will in turn magnetize the amber. From this Charlie suggested that another way to discover the evolution of language patterns was to
observe the trade routes, as they were the primary means of exchange between disparate cultures. Along the same lines (pardon the pun) the
other reference was to the Rothschilds and how they came to dominate the financial markets during the Napoleonic wars. The use of signal
towers for military purposes is a common form of information gathering. The Rothschilds use of them for financial gain was revolutionary and
highly profitable as well. Proving the maxim for the coming millennium, that knowledge is power is money (until we get rid of money, that is).