How can we compare nothing to
something?
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
), but by the relatively more ordered ontology excluded as the world presenting itselfto (and through) consciousness.
The asymmetry between wakefulness and sleep implies that sleep derives from wakefulness, presupposes the state of being awake in a way that being conscious does not imply or derive from being asleep.
Seemingly it is death, as thelimitofconsciousness,thatimpliesorderivesfromconsciousness.
Withinsleepwe lose our ability to posit ourselves as subjects (Gilson's role for being as existence), and thus we are submerged in an ontology, a universe whose opposing limit is the reality of consciousness.
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? Awake we gain the world because we can posit it as real and find ourselves within it, as ours to be lost, and thus threatened by death. Sleep functions as both an analogy for our waking state (it is our experience) but also as an image or mock experience of death. Heraclitus in order to show how sleep becomes a way into death shifts our mode of inhabiting the night from seeing (opeopev) to touching, affecting (owtxsxai):
A person in [the] night kindles (owtxexai) a light for himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches (artxsxai) that which is dead, though [himself] alive, [and] when awake touches (artxexai) that which sleeps. 6
We have shifted from the mind to the body, looking for how we are limited as substance, as stuff and such. The first fragment writes us as a limit of death, wakefulness is more fully a ground for our being, and thus its limit is not sleep, but death; here death is written as thelimitofourbeingawakeandasleep. Thesymmetryofthisformulationdescribesthe limits o f what we are as something more like the grammatical limits Wittgenstein invokes in the Tractatus: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" (5. 6). My language and my world limit me, I do not limit them. Rather I enact and embody them as mine. Thesymmetrybetweenlanguageandworld,betweendeathand/orsleepandour living can only be maintained if we ignore the way they posit us as subjects determined by theselimits. Theselimitsare,however,alwayslimitsorganizedaroundan'I',asaformal limitwithoutcontent. ThisT,aswhatisatstakebothwithinandastheselimits, constructs a fundamental asymmetry between all posited states o f being.
Thetheologyofdeath,forexample, inTheEgyptianBookoftheDead, becomes following this analogy in the Wake, a theology of sleep, where HCE, the erstwhile male
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? hero, "the first pharaoh Humpheres Cheops Exarchas . . . subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland" and its "nekropolitan nights" (62. 21-25). When we are lost to the world we are limited by that very loss; when we regain the world we find that we have actually regained ourselves as that which is to be limited or lost. To fall asleep is thus to become a metaphysician: we learn every night that the application o f criteria determines what counts as real, and that these criteria as they construct an ontology construct ourselves as real. What is made real here? Not a 'thing' at all, but consciousness, mind, unconsciousness, meaning, or whatever other vague term or description of the mental stances that allow the intentionality of our language to pick out both something in the 'world' and 'ourselves'. The limits of our states of consciousness are thus death and waking reality; sleep lies twisted behind these, limited by the others but not limiting them.
The relationship between these limits expresses itself through what we sometimes call time. If we explain these relations as a function of changes between states, we find ourselveswithsomethinglikeAristotle'scharacterizationoftimeinthePhysics. Aristotle argues that time requires a stable substratum in relation to which change can become apparent: [time is seen to exist only as an effect]. This stability is built into the physics of existence by defining time as "not number with which we count but the number o f things which are counted"(Phys. 220h. 8). Finnegans Wake is a kind of commentary on this hypostatizing o f identity as the criterion o f being within time. This commentary constructs a non-representational metaphysics in order to embed minding "in the Nichtian glossery
which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of
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? the world . . . in the lexinction oflife. . . this daylit dielate night ofnights" (83. 10-27). How does one become oneself, let alone into the world or into marriage or friendship, if time takes it all away? Aristotle says,
In time all things come into being and pass away; for which reason some called it the wisest o f all things, but the Pythagorean Paron called it the most stupid, because in it we also forget; and his was the truer view. It is clear then that it must be in itself. . . the condition ofdestruction rather than ofcoming into being (for change, in itself makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally o f coming into being, and o f being. (Pfrys. 222b. 17-23)
Before this time peal we lie "lossassinated by summan" (241. 02), adding someman or something into someman(thing), "in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension o f the unity in altruism through stupefaction"(604. 33), a search, the first on a list, ending with "death and life are these" (605. 03). One cannot escape either counting or summan or stupe/acrion (is this the state o f being dead to the world or being defined as a fact? ): what do the 'facts' in our sleep point to?
Finnegans Wake attempts to rediscover the wisdom o f time without forgetting our losses, turn counting into becoming, "for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being-please read this mufto--is becoming in its owntowneyeball"(523. 10-12). ConvertingAristotleintothe"sinseoftheworld" means converting Aristotle into Augustine and Aquinas and then both of them into Anna Livia
Plurabellae (ALP) and ALP into her mate H. C. Earwicker (HCE) and HCE into his sons Shem the penman into Shaun the spaceman and into their sister Issy (whatever she might
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? seeasherself)andsoonintoathousandandonevisages,etc. Thesevoicesand authorities, however, do not organize a Waste Land. What we count as our becoming must include our investment in language as under threat of nonsense, of our own loss and becoming through language: "Why, wonder o f wenchalows, what o szeszame opem, v doer s t doing? " (333. 01-02): why would meaning get mapped onto sex? and throughout it all our world waxed and waned. This language is a provocation to ask and an invocation in asking how to invest, embody, represent, describe, express, call, inhabit, project, exchange, determine oneself in language? What limit is there to these verbs?
10. 2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues"
The "lexinction o f life" at night and in ourselves and the logical grammar providing its purchase on ourselves and the world will seem in the Wake a picture of
every person, place and thing in the chaosmos o f Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey as moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhom (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds ofthe anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changably meaning vocable scriptsigns. (118. 21-28; underline added).
The darkened world ofthe Wake blurs the meanings ofwords into "three score and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), and in so doing fades the defined limits o f meaning associated with a particular identity. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge and of
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? definition: "mayhisforeheadbedarkenedwithmudwhowouldsunder! ",andinthis divide into identities (20. 16). Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
The riddle setting the world into "chaosmos" is between the "hare and the turtle pen" racing across the paper, the substratum in relation to which change, or rather the words become visible. The between, the beginning and the end, from which and toward which the hare and turtle whirl along describes an infinite regress as the words or the meaning before us "wham. . . [b]ut whim", an interpretive gap, a "fantsy", between us and the text that frustrates any seemingly ordinary understanding of a sentence or the book.
The force ofZeno's paradox ofthe hare and rabbit running themselves into infinities is not simply logical (for the paradoxes can be made to disappear). The paradox embodies our necessary commitment to forms of differentiated identity (or grammatical distinctions), which we understand as descriptions of the forms determining our experience, our very real sense oftime as loss and thus as unwisdom, that marks the emotional, social, and metaphysical boundaries between land and sea, ourselves and others, and the past and present articulated in The Waste Land. In that world the question of time can be posed as How does a moment and an identityjump from itself into being something else? The gap between two moments, between two identities, must be built in
the substanceless action of becoming, through which being reaches beyond itself. Within the Christian pattern o f creation being generates becoming in order to conserve identity as the fundamental ontological unit. In the Wake Joyce inverts this relationship, such that
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? being, the substance of one's own identity, one's own body, "by its corrosive sublimation" becomes "one continuous present tense integument" (185-86. 36-01): being sublimed into the ordinary, into the body lost in sleep which is the mind lost in time. Joyce immersed himself in the intangible "now," in which all things take place. This "now" is the gap between identities; it is the night time "hole affair" ofFinnegans Wake: the "lapses lequou asousiated with the royal gorge"( 151. 28-9). One o f the central mysteries within this "seemetary" of the night is not only how the "trapped head" pulls himselfinto the world of consciousness, but analogously how and why identities are created within this flux o f the present; what is the mechanism of movement from identity to identity, the movement, which Aristotle defines as time, from before to after? In this other people offer themselves not only as limits to our own desires, power, identity, but as versions of our own unconscious.
In the face o f this loss, this "noughttime", Finnegans Wake demands from us a theology,asifthenothingnessdemandedofGodcreation. Theologicalexegesisis predicated on defining what are essentially ontological relationships, the most fundamental ofwhich is the relationship between being and becoming inscribed within conceptions of creation. Change within these conceptions, to the degree that they can be translated into something like Zeno's paradoxes, functions through the transformation o f one moment, one identity, into another. Matter within the Wake becomes "Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together. . (434. 21). Matter as a set ofpoints or identities is negated in its substance but not in its form. Why only this? The logic of negation configures matter,
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
If we are to enter into the theology of the Wake, then we must remember a theology ofthe bible, following the Wake's command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the bible "[w]ith tears for his coronaichon, such as engines weep, Was liffe worth leaving? " (230. 24-25). The logic of creation reenacted in Genesis 1through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process o f
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? separation, from the earth and the waters to Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise,andfromGod. ThemetaphysicsofGod'sactions,hiscreating,isequivalentto the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function of God's initial acts. The theological possibilities that allow Paul Tillich to claim that sin is separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
The pressure of nocturnal nonsense in Finnegans Wake constructs a "Theoatre" (587. 08) o f "one continuous present tense integument" (185. 36-186. 01). Time becomes a God-theater,atheology. Inordertounderstandhowweareembodiedwithinthistime- theology, we must learn how we transform counting, the succession o f moments we perceive as time during the day, into becoming, into time as a creative flux. This transformation is exposed as the "noughttime" described and enacted within Finnegans
Wake, where matter becomes "on the whole only holes tied together. . . " (434. 21). The darkened world of the Wake blurs the meanings of words into "three score
and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), where the identity o f a word dissolves into a plurality of meanings. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge, and of definition: "may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder! " (20. 16), and in this divide into identities. Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but "the creative becoming of being as a continuous becoming," and yet such a claim does not
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? meananythingtous. IfthisclaimabouttheWakeistrue,itcannotbetrueinthisform,it cannot mean anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The difference lies in how we invest ourselves in these two statements. We cannot invest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize itassomethinglikeourworld. Andyeteverythinginthetextresistssucharecognition.
When we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit o f how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance o f the umbrance" (220. 30; underline added). This "cyclology" describes both Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake and our psychology. This cyclic history and psychology, wedded to logic and the following "is", reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end, where we are ourselves. But in the Wakean "sinse o f the world" (83. 12) "the first riddle o f the universe" is "when is a man not a man? . . . --all give up? --; when he is a . . . Sham" (170. 03-24). In Finnegans Wake we are ourselves by not being ourselves. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows ("umbrance") o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing, but not our existing as ourselves, as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non- existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless, insubstantial present that opens up the possibility o f substance in our consciousworld. Thus,the"cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow"heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" (473. 8),
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? "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility ["ifs"] o f matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends": "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhere in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive," a future constructed out of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation to objects, which do not exist within the future now. Thus our very being is constructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of"ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). 7 Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the conceptofeven. Theoddnumbers,however,measuretheabsenteven. Onemightcall this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing both in and as the Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace" (FW12. 10), face and phase into, nothingness in sleep
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? and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness of nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness o f sense, is another way o f answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a "sham" and a whim ("It wham. But whim I can't remember" [FW493. 17]).
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals oftime", in order to determine the measure ofthe present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline of befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition of the "now" characterized as a form of being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes, what Wittgenstein might call, different language games. What do
we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition of time "as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"(3. 7. 11). 8 For Augustine, iftime is the measure of "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Conf.
Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
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? In the nocturnal world ofFinnegans Wake our everynight practices rewrite the theology ofthe Bible, following the Wake's own command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the Bible "[w]ith tearsforhiscoronaichon,suchasenginesweep, Wasliffeworthleaving? "(230. 24-25). The logic o f creation reenacted in Genesis 1 through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process of separation, of the earth from the waters and of Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise, and from God. The metaphysics o f God's actions, his creating, is equivalent to the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function o f God's initialacts. ThetheologicalpossibilitiesthatallowPaulTillichtoclaimthatsinis separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
10. 3 "Renove the Bible": the logic of creation in Genesis
Some years before Joyce "writhefiilly rate in blotch and void," YHWH floated the
wor(l)d on the deep (Ps. 24. 1,2) and "the earth was without form and void" (Gn. 1. 2). In the Priestly description of creation in Genesis, God does not exist within the text prior to his creative acts. His identity is empowered solely through his own creation and His possession o f the series in which he is defined as an origin: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"(v. l). God's first creative act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous effect, create time. In both Hebrew and in English one can distinguish three grammatical readings o f this opening phrase:
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? 1) verse 1 is a subordinate temporal clause to v. 2 and v. 3: one would translate this as 'when God began creating. . . the earth was a formless void (v. 2). . . then God said(v. 3). " Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) proposed this interpretation, defending it on "the order ofthe acts of creation," for water must have been created first, as its existence is not explained when it first appears in v. 2 9
2) v. 1isamainclausedescribingthecreatioexnihiliooftheprimalchaos described in v. 2.
3) v. 1 is an independent main clause describing the total creative act. It, therefore, has a disjunctive relationship with the succeeding two verses, which cannotberesolved. Itrepresentsaseparatetheologicaltradition,whichhasbeen
juxtaposed with what is primarily a Babylonian myth, and serves to introduce the Priestly description ofthis myth.
Any resolution o f this ambiguity requires and constitutes a theology o f creation. Any theology "fundamentialy" built across or within this unclarity begins in untangling versions of identity, conceived by Augustine, in his Confessions, as "constant eternity" (XI. . x [12]) and, in my interpretation o f the text, as a-temporal forms o f created being.
Verse 1 does not describe the process of creative transformation from nothing into something, but it describes the creation of the primary identities of being by God. The origin of "the heavens and the earth" lies in the agent of creation, not in the material substance or non-substance, the beingness or non- beingness, of what existed before. God
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? hasnottransformedonestateofbeingintoanother. Ascreationisgenerated,atthis point, solely from and by the agent o f creation, the text, in effect, dissolves the "before," and substitutes a node of power, God, as a mathematical origin. But as an origin without a before, God becomes enmeshed within the series o f moments which can unfold only from his own power, and in relation to his own identity as "origin. " This series, however, is actualized within the temporal succession of God's creative acts. Time is present without being created; God is present without creating time; being is present as the logos of power, distinct from flux.
The ontological pattern ofverse 1, erasing all movement, all flux, in the static identity of created being, shifts and is re-constituted into a potential ontology of temporal flux and becoming, a dynamism of substance, in verse 2. The "spirit of God" opposes the "deep": "Theearthwaswithoutformandvoid,anddarknesswasuponthefaceofthe deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters" (v. 2). In its nature, water is opposed to the qualities of created being, and is even described as encroaching on God's creation in Jer. 5. 22 and Ps. 104. 7-9. And yet it appears to have physical presence, which is understood to be a (non)presence: it is formless being. The opposition between the "spirit o f God" and the "waters" represents a 'potential' conflict between the negative actuality o f deconstructed chaotic (non)presence and the Spirit's positive creative potential to construct forms of being. The creative principle, the "Spirit of God," has become disassociated from God himself and thus has become an element within the metaphysical
universe in which being "exists. " God's spirit is spatially limited in relation to chaos, that is,
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? it is not infinite, for it moves in relation to this chaos and in relation to the physical (non)presence o f the waters.
Within verse 2, Spirit does not interact with, or alter the form of the deep, or of the waters. The formless nature of being does not change or alter its identity or position. Being, therefore, exists without being involved within the dynamics of temporal change. Movement, and hence change, is solely a function of spirit, transversing through and withinspace. Temporaldynamismis,therefore,acomponentofGod'sspiritandnotof the physical presence, the chaotic beingness, o f the "waters". The separation o f God's creative presence from God himselfrepresents an ontological crisis. This crisis re-enacts God's creative process, which will increasingly become defined as a process of differentiation, separation and loss. In verse 2, God has lost his creative power to the metaphysical universe o f created being, just as he lost his temporal independence "in the beginning".
The images o f "the waters" and the "Spirit o f God" disappear in verse 3, as does the possibility o f their unification in the recreation o f time in the infinite calculus o f their meeting. Thetextrecastsitselfintheontologyofidentity(non-flux)introducedinverse
1. God reappears; created being reappears. Verse 3 establishes a structural equivalency between the creative process of differentiation and God's verbal commands, the formal cause of created 'reality. ' The process of God's creation becomes a process of verbal identification, where the actual act of creation is the word, the voice, the language of God "And God said, *Let there be light'; and there was light" (v. 3).
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? The text fails to describe a "real" becoming trapped as it is within a hermeneutic circle that establishes the ontological primacy of identity by overlooking the present. Thus God's initial creative act, which begins a series of differentiations, fails to take place within the text. We are told there will be light, and that there was light, but we are not shown the moment when there is light. "Let there be light" looks forward to a moment o f becoming, which is not itself but which it causes by its looking forward. "And there was light" looks backtothebecomingoflightfromwithinacontextinwhichlightalreadyexists: an absent moment of the past is revitalized with the quality of presence found in the present. Creation becomes a form of knowledge, a hermeneutic hypothesis, that structurally excludes the "I am he who is or who am" from the "now" of creation. The "present" of Being (YHWH) is disjunct from the "present" o f His creating, and hence from dynamic becoming and loss. God is consigned to the before and after framing creation. As an integration o f imperative and subjunctive moods, "Let there be" serves as a command that articulates a possibility, a command that frames the succeeding "light" as an effect. This
"Let" frames itself as a subjunctive yet to have happened, before the fact, as if letting loose the light, allowing the light or granting or offering the light to his creation.
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? Awake we gain the world because we can posit it as real and find ourselves within it, as ours to be lost, and thus threatened by death. Sleep functions as both an analogy for our waking state (it is our experience) but also as an image or mock experience of death. Heraclitus in order to show how sleep becomes a way into death shifts our mode of inhabiting the night from seeing (opeopev) to touching, affecting (owtxsxai):
A person in [the] night kindles (owtxexai) a light for himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches (artxsxai) that which is dead, though [himself] alive, [and] when awake touches (artxexai) that which sleeps. 6
We have shifted from the mind to the body, looking for how we are limited as substance, as stuff and such. The first fragment writes us as a limit of death, wakefulness is more fully a ground for our being, and thus its limit is not sleep, but death; here death is written as thelimitofourbeingawakeandasleep. Thesymmetryofthisformulationdescribesthe limits o f what we are as something more like the grammatical limits Wittgenstein invokes in the Tractatus: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" (5. 6). My language and my world limit me, I do not limit them. Rather I enact and embody them as mine. Thesymmetrybetweenlanguageandworld,betweendeathand/orsleepandour living can only be maintained if we ignore the way they posit us as subjects determined by theselimits. Theselimitsare,however,alwayslimitsorganizedaroundan'I',asaformal limitwithoutcontent. ThisT,aswhatisatstakebothwithinandastheselimits, constructs a fundamental asymmetry between all posited states o f being.
Thetheologyofdeath,forexample, inTheEgyptianBookoftheDead, becomes following this analogy in the Wake, a theology of sleep, where HCE, the erstwhile male
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? hero, "the first pharaoh Humpheres Cheops Exarchas . . . subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland" and its "nekropolitan nights" (62. 21-25). When we are lost to the world we are limited by that very loss; when we regain the world we find that we have actually regained ourselves as that which is to be limited or lost. To fall asleep is thus to become a metaphysician: we learn every night that the application o f criteria determines what counts as real, and that these criteria as they construct an ontology construct ourselves as real. What is made real here? Not a 'thing' at all, but consciousness, mind, unconsciousness, meaning, or whatever other vague term or description of the mental stances that allow the intentionality of our language to pick out both something in the 'world' and 'ourselves'. The limits of our states of consciousness are thus death and waking reality; sleep lies twisted behind these, limited by the others but not limiting them.
The relationship between these limits expresses itself through what we sometimes call time. If we explain these relations as a function of changes between states, we find ourselveswithsomethinglikeAristotle'scharacterizationoftimeinthePhysics. Aristotle argues that time requires a stable substratum in relation to which change can become apparent: [time is seen to exist only as an effect]. This stability is built into the physics of existence by defining time as "not number with which we count but the number o f things which are counted"(Phys. 220h. 8). Finnegans Wake is a kind of commentary on this hypostatizing o f identity as the criterion o f being within time. This commentary constructs a non-representational metaphysics in order to embed minding "in the Nichtian glossery
which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of
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? the world . . . in the lexinction oflife. . . this daylit dielate night ofnights" (83. 10-27). How does one become oneself, let alone into the world or into marriage or friendship, if time takes it all away? Aristotle says,
In time all things come into being and pass away; for which reason some called it the wisest o f all things, but the Pythagorean Paron called it the most stupid, because in it we also forget; and his was the truer view. It is clear then that it must be in itself. . . the condition ofdestruction rather than ofcoming into being (for change, in itself makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally o f coming into being, and o f being. (Pfrys. 222b. 17-23)
Before this time peal we lie "lossassinated by summan" (241. 02), adding someman or something into someman(thing), "in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension o f the unity in altruism through stupefaction"(604. 33), a search, the first on a list, ending with "death and life are these" (605. 03). One cannot escape either counting or summan or stupe/acrion (is this the state o f being dead to the world or being defined as a fact? ): what do the 'facts' in our sleep point to?
Finnegans Wake attempts to rediscover the wisdom o f time without forgetting our losses, turn counting into becoming, "for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being-please read this mufto--is becoming in its owntowneyeball"(523. 10-12). ConvertingAristotleintothe"sinseoftheworld" means converting Aristotle into Augustine and Aquinas and then both of them into Anna Livia
Plurabellae (ALP) and ALP into her mate H. C. Earwicker (HCE) and HCE into his sons Shem the penman into Shaun the spaceman and into their sister Issy (whatever she might
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? seeasherself)andsoonintoathousandandonevisages,etc. Thesevoicesand authorities, however, do not organize a Waste Land. What we count as our becoming must include our investment in language as under threat of nonsense, of our own loss and becoming through language: "Why, wonder o f wenchalows, what o szeszame opem, v doer s t doing? " (333. 01-02): why would meaning get mapped onto sex? and throughout it all our world waxed and waned. This language is a provocation to ask and an invocation in asking how to invest, embody, represent, describe, express, call, inhabit, project, exchange, determine oneself in language? What limit is there to these verbs?
10. 2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues"
The "lexinction o f life" at night and in ourselves and the logical grammar providing its purchase on ourselves and the world will seem in the Wake a picture of
every person, place and thing in the chaosmos o f Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey as moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhom (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds ofthe anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changably meaning vocable scriptsigns. (118. 21-28; underline added).
The darkened world ofthe Wake blurs the meanings ofwords into "three score and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), and in so doing fades the defined limits o f meaning associated with a particular identity. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge and of
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? definition: "mayhisforeheadbedarkenedwithmudwhowouldsunder! ",andinthis divide into identities (20. 16). Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
The riddle setting the world into "chaosmos" is between the "hare and the turtle pen" racing across the paper, the substratum in relation to which change, or rather the words become visible. The between, the beginning and the end, from which and toward which the hare and turtle whirl along describes an infinite regress as the words or the meaning before us "wham. . . [b]ut whim", an interpretive gap, a "fantsy", between us and the text that frustrates any seemingly ordinary understanding of a sentence or the book.
The force ofZeno's paradox ofthe hare and rabbit running themselves into infinities is not simply logical (for the paradoxes can be made to disappear). The paradox embodies our necessary commitment to forms of differentiated identity (or grammatical distinctions), which we understand as descriptions of the forms determining our experience, our very real sense oftime as loss and thus as unwisdom, that marks the emotional, social, and metaphysical boundaries between land and sea, ourselves and others, and the past and present articulated in The Waste Land. In that world the question of time can be posed as How does a moment and an identityjump from itself into being something else? The gap between two moments, between two identities, must be built in
the substanceless action of becoming, through which being reaches beyond itself. Within the Christian pattern o f creation being generates becoming in order to conserve identity as the fundamental ontological unit. In the Wake Joyce inverts this relationship, such that
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? being, the substance of one's own identity, one's own body, "by its corrosive sublimation" becomes "one continuous present tense integument" (185-86. 36-01): being sublimed into the ordinary, into the body lost in sleep which is the mind lost in time. Joyce immersed himself in the intangible "now," in which all things take place. This "now" is the gap between identities; it is the night time "hole affair" ofFinnegans Wake: the "lapses lequou asousiated with the royal gorge"( 151. 28-9). One o f the central mysteries within this "seemetary" of the night is not only how the "trapped head" pulls himselfinto the world of consciousness, but analogously how and why identities are created within this flux o f the present; what is the mechanism of movement from identity to identity, the movement, which Aristotle defines as time, from before to after? In this other people offer themselves not only as limits to our own desires, power, identity, but as versions of our own unconscious.
In the face o f this loss, this "noughttime", Finnegans Wake demands from us a theology,asifthenothingnessdemandedofGodcreation. Theologicalexegesisis predicated on defining what are essentially ontological relationships, the most fundamental ofwhich is the relationship between being and becoming inscribed within conceptions of creation. Change within these conceptions, to the degree that they can be translated into something like Zeno's paradoxes, functions through the transformation o f one moment, one identity, into another. Matter within the Wake becomes "Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together. . (434. 21). Matter as a set ofpoints or identities is negated in its substance but not in its form. Why only this? The logic of negation configures matter,
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
If we are to enter into the theology of the Wake, then we must remember a theology ofthe bible, following the Wake's command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the bible "[w]ith tears for his coronaichon, such as engines weep, Was liffe worth leaving? " (230. 24-25). The logic of creation reenacted in Genesis 1through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process o f
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? separation, from the earth and the waters to Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise,andfromGod. ThemetaphysicsofGod'sactions,hiscreating,isequivalentto the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function of God's initial acts. The theological possibilities that allow Paul Tillich to claim that sin is separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
The pressure of nocturnal nonsense in Finnegans Wake constructs a "Theoatre" (587. 08) o f "one continuous present tense integument" (185. 36-186. 01). Time becomes a God-theater,atheology. Inordertounderstandhowweareembodiedwithinthistime- theology, we must learn how we transform counting, the succession o f moments we perceive as time during the day, into becoming, into time as a creative flux. This transformation is exposed as the "noughttime" described and enacted within Finnegans
Wake, where matter becomes "on the whole only holes tied together. . . " (434. 21). The darkened world of the Wake blurs the meanings of words into "three score
and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), where the identity o f a word dissolves into a plurality of meanings. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge, and of definition: "may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder! " (20. 16), and in this divide into identities. Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but "the creative becoming of being as a continuous becoming," and yet such a claim does not
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? meananythingtous. IfthisclaimabouttheWakeistrue,itcannotbetrueinthisform,it cannot mean anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The difference lies in how we invest ourselves in these two statements. We cannot invest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize itassomethinglikeourworld. Andyeteverythinginthetextresistssucharecognition.
When we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit o f how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance o f the umbrance" (220. 30; underline added). This "cyclology" describes both Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake and our psychology. This cyclic history and psychology, wedded to logic and the following "is", reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end, where we are ourselves. But in the Wakean "sinse o f the world" (83. 12) "the first riddle o f the universe" is "when is a man not a man? . . . --all give up? --; when he is a . . . Sham" (170. 03-24). In Finnegans Wake we are ourselves by not being ourselves. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows ("umbrance") o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing, but not our existing as ourselves, as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non- existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless, insubstantial present that opens up the possibility o f substance in our consciousworld. Thus,the"cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow"heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" (473. 8),
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? "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility ["ifs"] o f matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends": "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhere in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive," a future constructed out of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation to objects, which do not exist within the future now. Thus our very being is constructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of"ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). 7 Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the conceptofeven. Theoddnumbers,however,measuretheabsenteven. Onemightcall this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]).
How can we compare nothing to something? Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing both in and as the Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace" (FW12. 10), face and phase into, nothingness in sleep
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? and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness of nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness o f sense, is another way o f answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a "sham" and a whim ("It wham. But whim I can't remember" [FW493. 17]).
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals oftime", in order to determine the measure ofthe present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline of befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition of the "now" characterized as a form of being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes, what Wittgenstein might call, different language games. What do
we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition of time "as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"(3. 7. 11). 8 For Augustine, iftime is the measure of "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Conf.
Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
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? In the nocturnal world ofFinnegans Wake our everynight practices rewrite the theology ofthe Bible, following the Wake's own command to "[r]enove the bible"(579. 10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the Bible "[w]ith tearsforhiscoronaichon,suchasenginesweep, Wasliffeworthleaving? "(230. 24-25). The logic o f creation reenacted in Genesis 1 through 4, unifying the disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual process of separation, of the earth from the waters and of Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise, and from God. The metaphysics o f God's actions, his creating, is equivalent to the effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function o f God's initialacts. ThetheologicalpossibilitiesthatallowPaulTillichtoclaimthatsinis separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.
10. 3 "Renove the Bible": the logic of creation in Genesis
Some years before Joyce "writhefiilly rate in blotch and void," YHWH floated the
wor(l)d on the deep (Ps. 24. 1,2) and "the earth was without form and void" (Gn. 1. 2). In the Priestly description of creation in Genesis, God does not exist within the text prior to his creative acts. His identity is empowered solely through his own creation and His possession o f the series in which he is defined as an origin: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"(v. l). God's first creative act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous effect, create time. In both Hebrew and in English one can distinguish three grammatical readings o f this opening phrase:
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? 1) verse 1 is a subordinate temporal clause to v. 2 and v. 3: one would translate this as 'when God began creating. . . the earth was a formless void (v. 2). . . then God said(v. 3). " Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) proposed this interpretation, defending it on "the order ofthe acts of creation," for water must have been created first, as its existence is not explained when it first appears in v. 2 9
2) v. 1isamainclausedescribingthecreatioexnihiliooftheprimalchaos described in v. 2.
3) v. 1 is an independent main clause describing the total creative act. It, therefore, has a disjunctive relationship with the succeeding two verses, which cannotberesolved. Itrepresentsaseparatetheologicaltradition,whichhasbeen
juxtaposed with what is primarily a Babylonian myth, and serves to introduce the Priestly description ofthis myth.
Any resolution o f this ambiguity requires and constitutes a theology o f creation. Any theology "fundamentialy" built across or within this unclarity begins in untangling versions of identity, conceived by Augustine, in his Confessions, as "constant eternity" (XI. . x [12]) and, in my interpretation o f the text, as a-temporal forms o f created being.
Verse 1 does not describe the process of creative transformation from nothing into something, but it describes the creation of the primary identities of being by God. The origin of "the heavens and the earth" lies in the agent of creation, not in the material substance or non-substance, the beingness or non- beingness, of what existed before. God
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? hasnottransformedonestateofbeingintoanother. Ascreationisgenerated,atthis point, solely from and by the agent o f creation, the text, in effect, dissolves the "before," and substitutes a node of power, God, as a mathematical origin. But as an origin without a before, God becomes enmeshed within the series o f moments which can unfold only from his own power, and in relation to his own identity as "origin. " This series, however, is actualized within the temporal succession of God's creative acts. Time is present without being created; God is present without creating time; being is present as the logos of power, distinct from flux.
The ontological pattern ofverse 1, erasing all movement, all flux, in the static identity of created being, shifts and is re-constituted into a potential ontology of temporal flux and becoming, a dynamism of substance, in verse 2. The "spirit of God" opposes the "deep": "Theearthwaswithoutformandvoid,anddarknesswasuponthefaceofthe deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters" (v. 2). In its nature, water is opposed to the qualities of created being, and is even described as encroaching on God's creation in Jer. 5. 22 and Ps. 104. 7-9. And yet it appears to have physical presence, which is understood to be a (non)presence: it is formless being. The opposition between the "spirit o f God" and the "waters" represents a 'potential' conflict between the negative actuality o f deconstructed chaotic (non)presence and the Spirit's positive creative potential to construct forms of being. The creative principle, the "Spirit of God," has become disassociated from God himself and thus has become an element within the metaphysical
universe in which being "exists. " God's spirit is spatially limited in relation to chaos, that is,
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? it is not infinite, for it moves in relation to this chaos and in relation to the physical (non)presence o f the waters.
Within verse 2, Spirit does not interact with, or alter the form of the deep, or of the waters. The formless nature of being does not change or alter its identity or position. Being, therefore, exists without being involved within the dynamics of temporal change. Movement, and hence change, is solely a function of spirit, transversing through and withinspace. Temporaldynamismis,therefore,acomponentofGod'sspiritandnotof the physical presence, the chaotic beingness, o f the "waters". The separation o f God's creative presence from God himselfrepresents an ontological crisis. This crisis re-enacts God's creative process, which will increasingly become defined as a process of differentiation, separation and loss. In verse 2, God has lost his creative power to the metaphysical universe o f created being, just as he lost his temporal independence "in the beginning".
The images o f "the waters" and the "Spirit o f God" disappear in verse 3, as does the possibility o f their unification in the recreation o f time in the infinite calculus o f their meeting. Thetextrecastsitselfintheontologyofidentity(non-flux)introducedinverse
1. God reappears; created being reappears. Verse 3 establishes a structural equivalency between the creative process of differentiation and God's verbal commands, the formal cause of created 'reality. ' The process of God's creation becomes a process of verbal identification, where the actual act of creation is the word, the voice, the language of God "And God said, *Let there be light'; and there was light" (v. 3).
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? The text fails to describe a "real" becoming trapped as it is within a hermeneutic circle that establishes the ontological primacy of identity by overlooking the present. Thus God's initial creative act, which begins a series of differentiations, fails to take place within the text. We are told there will be light, and that there was light, but we are not shown the moment when there is light. "Let there be light" looks forward to a moment o f becoming, which is not itself but which it causes by its looking forward. "And there was light" looks backtothebecomingoflightfromwithinacontextinwhichlightalreadyexists: an absent moment of the past is revitalized with the quality of presence found in the present. Creation becomes a form of knowledge, a hermeneutic hypothesis, that structurally excludes the "I am he who is or who am" from the "now" of creation. The "present" of Being (YHWH) is disjunct from the "present" o f His creating, and hence from dynamic becoming and loss. God is consigned to the before and after framing creation. As an integration o f imperative and subjunctive moods, "Let there be" serves as a command that articulates a possibility, a command that frames the succeeding "light" as an effect. This
"Let" frames itself as a subjunctive yet to have happened, before the fact, as if letting loose the light, allowing the light or granting or offering the light to his creation.
