What was the literacy message Joyce was trying to convey to audiences of Bible verse Romans 11:32 ? - This song speaks that message.
Lemmy community: James Joyce Experience, Dublin Day, Dublin Night.
The metaphors exposed, the connections made, the merging, the joining, the medium waves, the nightmare of history of our Pale Blue Dot, from which we all try to awaken - and we all try to World Wide Wake.
This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses—the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way.
In Joyce’s next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs. It is 1132. It occurs as a date, for example, and inverted as a house address, 32 West 11th Street. In every chapter, some way or another, 1132 appears. When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, “What the dickens is this number 1132?” Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon, and he thinks, “The law of falling bodies, 32 feet per sec per sec.” Thirty-two, I thought, must be the number of the Fall; 11 then might be the renewal of the decade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—but then 11, and you start over again. There were a number of other suggestions in Ulysses that made me think, “Well, what we have here is perhaps the number of the Fall, 32, and Redemption, 11; sin and forgiveness, death and renewal.” Finnegans Wake has to do with an event that occurred in Phoenix Park, which is a major park in Dublin. The phoenix is the bird that burns itself to death and then comes to life renewed. Phoenix Park thus becomes the Garden of Eden where the Fall took place, and where the cross was planted on the skull of Adam: O felix culpa (“O Phoenix culprit!” says Joyce). And so we have death and redemption. That seemed a pretty good answer, and that’s the one I gave in A Skeleton Key.
But while preparing a class one evening for my students in comparative mythology, I was rereading St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and came across a curious sentence that seemed to epitomize everything Joyce had had in mind in Finnegans Wake. St. Paul had written, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” You cannot be so disobedient that God’s mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. “Sin bravely,” as Luther said, and see how much of God’s mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. This idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life.
What was the literacy message Joyce was trying to convey to audiences of Bible verse Romans 11:32 ? - This song speaks that message.
Lemmy community: James Joyce Experience, Dublin Day, Dublin Night.
The metaphors exposed, the connections made, the merging, the joining, the medium waves, the nightmare of history of our Pale Blue Dot, from which we all try to awaken - and we all try to World Wide Wake.
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Skywalker Ranch California, 1987
George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch California interview, 1987, age 83 Professor Joseph Campbell of women’s university Sarah Lawrence College (Campbell also married a Joycean, his wife Jean):
This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses—the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way.
In Joyce’s next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs. It is 1132. It occurs as a date, for example, and inverted as a house address, 32 West 11th Street. In every chapter, some way or another, 1132 appears. When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, “What the dickens is this number 1132?” Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon, and he thinks, “The law of falling bodies, 32 feet per sec per sec.” Thirty-two, I thought, must be the number of the Fall; 11 then might be the renewal of the decade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—but then 11, and you start over again. There were a number of other suggestions in Ulysses that made me think, “Well, what we have here is perhaps the number of the Fall, 32, and Redemption, 11; sin and forgiveness, death and renewal.” Finnegans Wake has to do with an event that occurred in Phoenix Park, which is a major park in Dublin. The phoenix is the bird that burns itself to death and then comes to life renewed. Phoenix Park thus becomes the Garden of Eden where the Fall took place, and where the cross was planted on the skull of Adam: O felix culpa (“O Phoenix culprit!” says Joyce). And so we have death and redemption. That seemed a pretty good answer, and that’s the one I gave in A Skeleton Key.
But while preparing a class one evening for my students in comparative mythology, I was rereading St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and came across a curious sentence that seemed to epitomize everything Joyce had had in mind in Finnegans Wake. St. Paul had written, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” You cannot be so disobedient that God’s mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. “Sin bravely,” as Luther said, and see how much of God’s mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. This idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life.