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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: gnosticism (page 4 of 4)

Finnegans Wake and Little, Big

I purposefully read Beckett’s Watt after Proust to clear away ideological detritus. After Finnegans Wake, I didn’t sense any particular residue, so I chose to reread John Crowley’s brilliant and unique Little, Big, not realizing that its approach is in some ways opposite that of the Wake.

The two books don’t seem to have any special relation, and I don’t know anyone that’s claimed a place for Joyce as one of Crowley’s major antecedents. (I see more of James Branch Cabell and Charles Kingsley than Joyce, for example.) But with the Wake floating in my mind, there was one polar difference that weighed on me the entire time I was reading Little, Big, which I’d loosely put as gnosticism vs. physicalism.

Now, I’m a bit biased here because my Wake teacher is an avowed enemy of gnostics (his criticism in a nutshell: “They just make shit up!”) and so had something of a vested interest in reading an anti-gnosticism into Finnegans Wake, but even on the surface level, the Wake is a very physical and visceral book. It’s most obviously present in Joyce’s obsessive scatology and descriptions of near-every bodily functions, which eventually make the book clinical enough that all disgust and fetishism fall away, and you might as well be reading about the sexual proclivities of moths. But as I said last time, Joyce isn’t one to deal in ephemeralities: there is little theology or eschatology in the Wake. When religion is invoked, it’s often with direct relation to the physical or the historical.

Little, Big (and for that matter, much of Crowley’s work) not only sets itself to discussing the reality behind the appearance, but does so in a rather gnostic matter. The subsequent Aegypt books make this connection explicit, but it’s certainly there in Little, Big, in which a set of the privileged are allowed mysterious, ineffable access to a world within a world that exists consubstantially with ours.

One look at Finnegans Wake and it seems like mysticism. But Joyce is almost devoutly quotidian: the things he repeatedly, obscurely analogizes are the very basics of the world and more importantly, the known: male, female, parents, children, birth, death, day, night, sex, education, work, play. The most realistic scene (in
III.4) appears to concern a pub-owner and his family, and the
situation as far as I can discern it is hardly anything more unusual than Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses. If anything, it’s more normal, as there’s far less information given to make these people unique. The pub-owner, named Porter, is a Protestant Irishman and well-respected citizen leeading an typical middle-class life. Joyce loads the scene up with the usual allusions and such, and I take from it that this scene is to be put on an equal footing with all the complications and mysteries have gone before. The message: This is it. This is the world for all to see and all that anyone can see.

It’s hardly so clear-cut, of course, and the heavy use of the Egyptian Book of the Dead are one of the most prominent mythologies that seem to negate Joyce’s physicalism. But as I read it, these mythologies chiefly analogize the physical, monistic reality around us, rather than alluding to some Other realm, just as Bloom’s hallucinations in Nighttown explore his brutal reality. You’re welcome to disagree, but the sense I get is that language and the physical are the two realms at work, and Joyce’s problem isn’t the lack of correlation between one and the other, but the overlapping and overloaded correlation between the two.

Little, Big, on the other hand, purposefully portrays the world-as-we-know-it through a gauzy haze, abstracting New York as “the City” and only vaguely referencing massive events of upheaval in this world, as though to emphasize that the characters are already in process of leaving this world and entering another. Little, Big repeatedly invokes the unexplainable and mysterious motivations in showing the encroaching Otherness in the familiar world. The basic illusoriness of the physical is even more present in Engine Summer, and I think that Crowley enjoys using the concept to show how stories and conceptions of the world trump any certainty about the world itself, using fairy tales as one of his key metaphors. And ultimately, I think Joyce prefers to use the tales to serve the world, rather than the other way around.

Supposedly the hyper-obscure debate between Bishop Berkeley (note the “Ding hvad in idself” reference to Ding an sich) and Saint Patrick near the very end of Finnegans Wake describes the triumph of materialism over Platonic-styled idealism, but I won’t pretend to have much idea of what it means. But consider Giordano Bruno, who figures heavily in both Crowley and Joyce’s worlds. For Crowley, it’s the gnostic/hermetic tradition that Bruno embodies, with his memory arts and mystical reality therein. At least to my eye, Joyce doesn’t reference those aspects often, at least nowhere near as much as the near-constant references strewn about to Bruno’s cosmology and the physical, natural homogeneity of the universe. (Bruno was quite creative and disparate in his philosophies and heresies!) I think he was quite happy having his hands full with the world as we know it.

I don’t really have a preference for one approach over the other, but amazing how Joyce made me forget about non-monistic accounts of reality. Amazing Joyce’s utter presence in this world.

[Thanks to those who responded. I will address your comments soon!]

Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas

 S A T O R
 A R E P O
 T E N E T
 O P E R A
 R O T A S

One common translation is “Arepo the sower holds the wheels at work,” but if there does exist one authoritative meaning, it’s been buried among many dubious others.

1. Webern

The square above is inscribed on Webern’s gravestone. Webern had some peculiar obsession with it, since by this dissertation, he dropped it in lectures, and the structure of his Concerto, op. 24 is apparently derived from it. The only definite characteristic I know of is the (multi-dimensional) symmetry, but this quote from a letter cryptically elaborates on what he was after:

You ask about the shape: at the center [of the song] are the the words “Because he fell silent on the cross, we must go after him, in all seriousness of bitterness, our breath follows him.” What went before is now repeated backwards. Repeated. All shapes are similar and none are the same; thus, the chorus points to the secret law, to a holy riddle…. But the fact that it was just these words that constitute the center of the musical shape came about of its own accord– indeed it could not have been otherwise.

The words to the song are Hildegard Jones’. The translation I have gives the lines as “Because it [the Word] fell silent on the Cross we must follow it,” and the subtext is the equation of God and Word. The Jewish Webern was probably less interested in the Biblical implications than in the notion of the center, and of having a piece lead in and out of a central, exalted point rather than having a differentiated start and end. I.e., from the center flows its surroundings, which do not form a circle, but a multiplicity of paths to the center.

2. Osman Lins

Osman Lins constructed the entirety of his book Avalovara around this square, with each letter representing a different concurrent plotline, environment, and/or lover. The book was then structured by superimposing a spiral on the square, which makes a full rotation fourteen times before converging on the middle ‘N’. The path from outside to center is equated with an explicitly Christian movement from perception to immanence, dialogue to unity, and impurity to purity. The book ends with a the narrator, who is possibly insane (it’s a rather abstruse book), being elevated to the Garden of Eden with his quasi-divine lover and turning his back on what is evidently Augustine’s City of Man.

Translator Gregory Rabassa provides a helpful essay on Avalovara. Lins is explicit about seeing the word square as a circular entity, abandoning the linear reading as far as I can tell. But it’s certainly a weighted circle, and the spiral causes its traversal along neither line, and nor any path given by the reflection of the letters per se. The geometry of the book does not work; not in two dimensions, anyway.

3. Rome
Andrew Hughey gives a history of the acrostic. Its main “hidden” feature is that it can be rearranged to form two “PATERNOSTER”‘s with an overlapped ‘N’, leaving out two ‘A”s and ‘O”s, which, in a fiddly and lexicographically weird stretch, could be read as alpha and omega. (This page gives a far more unbelievable anagram.) It was first discovered in the Pompeii ruins, but has since been found from Britain to Egypt, maybe further. The “secret Christian handshake” interpretation seems reasonable, but pagan and Roman interpretations exist, and it’s more than possible that the meaning has evolved over the millenium in which the square was used. This classics-list page gives the rough outlines of what’s known and what’s not.

What’s interesting, though, is that the alpha/omega Pater Noster interpretation undercuts the square’s own design, giving a differentiated beginning and end (without, but especially with, the ‘A”s and ‘O”s) and the center loses all meaning except as a stopover from beginning to end, which is all part of the undifferentiated “PATERNOSTER.” This a very convenient allegory for the evolution from gnosticism to orthodoxy and the ensuing death of esoteric gnostic traditions. It also leaves the symmetry and multiple paths open to non-Christian interpretation for those who don’t take the anagram approach. The word square is lost with the anagram, which removes the entire apparent rationale for the set of letters. Whichever way you go, relating the two versions is self-defeating.

Addendum

The scholar Malcolm Stewart offers a more informed analysis of the origins and usage of the word square:

“… fiddly and lexicographically weird” – the Alpha/Omega interpretation? No. Latin had no equivalent for omega and “o” was often used. This came forward into medieval church latin from which we still have a carol with a verse:

“O and A and A and O
cum cantibus in choro
let the merry organ go
benedicamus Domino, benedicamus Domino.”

Pater Noster was not a phrase exclusive to Christian usage, it was a known term. Sometimes used of Jupiter, sometimes even of the Emperor. But it almost certainly is Christian taken together with the A and O. And almost certainly was an acrostic to reveal/hide christian affiliation. The fish sign took two people to make – you made a curved line casually on the ground with a toe, if the other person didn’t add the other curve you kept mum. This too I think was a recognition signal of the kind that could be displayed fairly securely.

One can contrive all sorts of other possibilities. For instance if you decode the square according to current numerology you find all vertica and horizontal lines add to 19 = 1 (by casting out the 9. 19 itself has a sacred numerical pedigree in the ancient world owing to the metonic cycle). However that can’t apply becuase Latin didn’t have some of the letters that lead to the numeration involved so the sums can’t be like that. Contrivances …

The Pater Noster AO solution is elegant, uses without any spare leftover parts, three Christian elements. The Phrase, the Cross and the AO. It’s conclusive … though we all like to think that something further may be hidden ….

An ad hominem indication of what the square encodes is simply to ask people who’ve come across it and solved it forĀ themselves what the found in it. I’m one of the many who have done this (years before the existence of the omniscientĀ www.) It’s always the Pater Noster reading.

I find his case compelling, but there is part of me that still holds out hope for a generative usage of the square in the style of Giordano Bruno. The acrostic explanation does not hold enough of the square’s symmetry to be fully attractive. Consequently, I’m more drawn to Lins and Webern’s symbolic usage of the square.

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