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This is one description: "Peena and Queena are duetting a giggle-for-giggle and the brideen Alanah is lost in her diamindwaiting" (FW377. 19-20). Wakean dialogues, where "Now's your never! "(377. 19), do not resolve into the clarity o f a communication, but ratherslipinto"communicantinginthedeificationofhismembers"(498. 21); acommon canting, both singing and nonsense, reforging a body into unity, god-like or statue-like, or at least a remembering of "Dodderick Ogonosh Wrak", Rodderick O'Conner, the last high king of Ireland (c. 1116-98), "on the table round" (498. 23), before Wrack "busted to the wurld at large" (498. 23). The dialogue between Peena and Queena (a giggle-for- giggle), like that between the Elm and Stone, the two washerwoman over and about Anna Livae Plurabelle, crosses beside (paratactically) the lost "brideen Alanah," the bride Eileen Aruna,theIrishHelen,lostbetweentwo-mindswaiting. "[T]hebrideenAlahah"isa version of "Nuvoletta, a lass", Issy, who earlier in the night (FW159. 06-07) "reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads o f drifting minds in one. " Into "one": a diamond-waiting, a purity of soul, impervious to all the but the greatest forces,adiamondweddinglastingastwo-mindswaiting. Whatdoesitmeantobemake one'smindsintoone? Thisisapictureofintention.
How does someone get lost?
"AisforAnnalikeLisforliv. Ahahahah,AnteAnnyou'reapttoapeaunty annalive! Dawn bives rise. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we're last to the lost,. . . "I bring down noth and carry awe. " (FW293. 17-294. 06)
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Eve ("alass") laughs at Adam; and this laugh leaves a girl ("alass"), but this stuttering "la, la, laugh", is itselfthe "antiann" crying (aiaiaiai; a vowel expression) not with the awe that anything exists, but that nothing (no-thing) can be brought into our minds at night (that anything can be negated) and thus this nothing ("noth") can also carry awe.
The distance between the details and a meta-description o f a sentence (between reading and interpreting) is the distance between the "commonpleas" (FW422. 29) and "AUSPICIUM. AUGURIA. DIVINITY NOT DEITY THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES" (FW282. R4; how can we read anything as an example? examples as auguria? ); or "Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine, divases" (FW598. 12). What is the distinction between divinity and deity, and why should divinity be preferred? How is divinity related to a kind o f uncertainty justified by our certitude? And what would be an example of this uncertainty and this divinity? Vico's poetic metaphysics describes how the uncertainty of early peoples caused them to project themselves into their ignorance, such that "he makes the things out o f himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them" [NS405], Uncertainty justified by certitude inverts this poetic metaphysics such that certainty is evacuated into uncertainty: pantheismisreplacedbyskepticism. Certitudecanthereforebeunderstoodtobewhat Cavell calls generic objects, those things about which no questions about their identity arise, and thus our doubt about them questions their very existence and because of their generic quality all objects, and thus the world {Claim o f Reason, 49-86). The doubt here, however, is not about wax or trees or tables. The generic object or target is divinity itself, and not any particular deity.
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Divinity or deity are both manifested, in our interpretations, in Auspicium (the augury o f bird-watching) and augury (in general) (a token and a type; an example and a category). WhatcertaintygeneratesGod? Wecouldanswerthatthecertaintyof ourselves and our uncertainty about the future and the world motivate Vico's poetic metaphysics; or we could answer the uncertainty o f generic objects generates skepticism. But neither o f these can rightly be described as divinity. It is easy to imagine what uncertainty would generate the category o f divinity. But do we imagine that uncertainty and fear could generate the 'actual' world in which we find ourselves uncertain? 1
Between the "piejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the other place" (between the admonition and moral advice [SI. piejaw] o f heaven and the roaring o f Hell), "you have become o f twosome twinminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum ofyour own most intensely doubtful soul" (FW188. 11-17). This is a description of"Shem avic" (I a mhic, my boy), Shem the penman, the artist, the prankster, who in one kind of dialogue between the self and the soul would be the soul in Yeats "A Dialogue of Self and Soul": "Such fullness in that quarter overflows/ And falls into the basin of the mind", asking,atleast,"Whocandistinguishdarknessfromthesoul? "(Yeats,230). InYeats' poem the Self, attached to things and himself"emblematical of love and war" thinks "that shape must be his shape" because he exists as an 'I' that acts in folly toward "a proud woman", "endure[s] that toil ofgrowing up", and is blind to his own soul, which he never responds to or hears. Yeats' "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" is not a dialogue at all. Two aspects of a particular 'I' (unnamed and by default a persona for Yeats) alternate
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speaking, until in the last section ofthe poem "my Self' speaks continuously for four stanzas in a kind o f resignation to blindness and foolishness. Does this non-dialogue describe a psychology? Or what is the claim psychology has on aesthetics?
Shem is become "twosome twinminds forenenst god" ("forenenst gods": over- against god). The dialogue of"twosome twinminds" is addressed in challenge or is caused by being against the gods. What does this confusion between (1) being that which addresses the canopy o f human limits (gods) out o f an internal dialogue and (2) becoming this dialogue (being "twosome") by being against this limit (or limits)? The first case might be a judgment on myselfor on the gods; I might provide descriptions or meanings or interpretations. The second offers a cause for my being, and this cause functions as a principle o f identity. This identity or being (it is not clear which it is) is hidden, discovered, and condemned: hidden by Shem as a revolt against heaven or in the instability o f intention, desire and identity he discovers in himself as himself. And what would the discovery of my own instability mean, my discovery of myselfas these dialogues? Would it be like discovering an engine in my heart? Or a machine in my head? A discovery operates at the limit between what I know and what I do not know, and thus
offers a resistance to my fantasies. It can act as a temporary ground. This discovery, however, moves the hidden form of this dialogue out into something that can be known and therefore judged. And thus Shem must speak his revolt, through his discovery o f his revolt and o f his doubleness (or "twinsome twinminds" (double)(double)= quadruple), and thus be condemned (by himself, his family, his society, his gods). His condemnation names him in four ways: "fool, anarch, egoarch, hireseiarch". He is he who speaks
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nonsense (fool) that maybe wisdom (fool), who revolts against the ground (arche) o f faith and knowledge and community (anarch), who is his own ground and his own kingdom (egoarch), who is the ground o f the sacred (hieratic) and o f heresy (heresiarch) [all doubled].
Shem has become what seems to be a "disunited kingdom"; but there is a confusion between whether his "twosome twinminds" are the effect or a cause o f his being against the gods. Is the next clause a reaffirmation ofthe previous clause, or does it mark a reaction to being hidden, discovered and condemned? : "you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum ofyour own most intensely doubtful soul". Is he fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch outside o f any disunited kingdom (maybe in the daytime unity o f consciousness)? Or can we only understand this plurality through the 'disunited kingdom' he raises on the discovery of what is either a soul whose existence or identity is doubtful. Or if it is already the limits within which this doubt operates, then is it his soul that
doubts? The confusion o f cause and effect allows these two clauses to describe the groundorlimitofagency. Thisagencyismeasuredasthedistancebetweenthe "twinminds" and the "doubtful soul. " The mind is confused into a plurality, a plurality of sensory inputs, desires and fears, memories or possibilities and so on, a plurality determined and expressed in four identities or roles (again a crucial ambiguity) that allows a further self-reflection that constitutes (as an effect or cause) the creation of a domain of self (a kingdom or society of mind) determining or expressing the soul as doubtful.
This kind of doubt can be expressed "Between his voyous and her consinnantesl"; between his vowels (voice and voyage and his acting the voyeur) and her consonants
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(consummation and together-in-sin-bom) (FW485. 10-11). What is between vowels and consonants in a word or between words besides empty space? Wittgenstein has an answer. Theinterlocutor(oneofthe"twosometwinminds"ofWittgenstein)asks"Ifa proposition too is conceived as a picture o f a possible state o f affairs and is said tQ shew the possibility of the state of affairs, still the most that the proposition can do is what a painting or relief or film does: and so it can at any rate not give an account o f what is not the case. So it depends wholly on our grammar what will be called (logically) possible and what not,--i. e. what that grammar permits? " Unlike many of the statements marked offin quotation marks in Investigations, Wittgenstein is not attempting to dissolve the logic of thisdescription(exceptmaybetoremovethe"wholly'). Anothervoicechallengesthe claim that what is possible is determined by grammar by exclaiming "But surely that is arbitrary! " (PI? 520). And is answered, "Is it arbitrary? " Grammar determines one set of possibilities, but it cannot determine the application o f the sentences possible within any grammar o f usage (philosophical statements being an example o f statements that are possible within not only our language but in a domain o f usage, which itself is senseless) :
It is not every sentence-like formation that we know how to do something with, not every technique has an application in our life; and when we are tempted in philosophy to count some quite useless thing as a proposition, that is often because wehavenotconsidereditsapplicationsufficiently. (PI? 520)
A meaningful application, however, is not an interpretive application. A large number of allegories are possible as interpretations of an event, action, statement or text, but not all such allegories are equally probable. Thus Wittgenstein recognizes two limits: the limits
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of grammar ("Essence is expressed by grammar. . . Grammar tells what kind of object anything is" PI ? ? 371, 373) and the limits of application within or as a form of life.
Application for Wittgenstein is primarily normative (and thus he talks o f the originary home o f a word, and adjudicates disputes about this home by asking how we have leant a word or a language game, and describes language games as forms of life basedonagreementinjudgment). Anotherwayofunderstandingapplicationisasa description of our intentional stances or inhabitation of our language. Intentionality is visible through the interpretation of our actions as purposive or directed or about something. Suchaninterpretivepictureofintentionalityisalsonormative,determining aboutness within the context in which something is used or in which someone exists. And yet the criterion of application is used to mark the limit of interpretation, where the meaning of something is functional from within a language game. The need for interpretation arises from the failure ofthe transparency of meaning, as it were from the outside o f a language game (the difference between seeing-as and interpreting. All forms of life, grammar or criteria or normative rules and our practices and our history and our biology, interests, desires, fears and so on are all between "his voyous and her consinnantes". This space (a 'between') is the mark of our animation (the everything that
is required for something to mean).
How do we (as a particular he or she or you or I, at least these) inhabit this
between?
"[Wjhere to go is knowing remain? Become quantity that discourse bothersome
when what do? Knowing remain? " (FW485. 14-15). The distance between "his voyous
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and her consinnantes" is generated by the self-reflexive knowing (voyeur) that moves (voyage) 'going' (an act) into the question "where to go? ", that is, a going by remaining. I hear the rhetoric o f 'where to go' as invoking 'go to hell', which is to remain in the state of sleep or imagination where one can go anywhere and remain where one is, but at the same time lose oneself into fragments. Two pages earlier, the inquisitors in this section in their pursuit ofthe buried father interrogate Yawn (a version ofthe 'saintly' Shaun) who denies his relation to his brother "Seamus" in order to disguise his relation to his father:
Nwo, nwo! . . . I'll see you moved farther. . . What cans such wretch to say to I or how have Me to doom with him? " (FW483. 15-18).
But it is in this vacuum that we find the twinminds, the subjunctive necessities that we "tumupon" or towards which we write or exist.
"Life, it is true, will be a blank without you because avicuum's not there at all, to nomore cares from nomad knows, ere Molochy wars bring the devil era, a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark. . . from the night we are and feel
and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to tumupon" (FW473. 06-11).
The Latin avis ( 'bird' and recall "Shem avic") and the Latin vicus ('street' or 'village') and the Latin vacuum ('empty space') collapse into "avicuum" (as if Keat's Nightingale is gone and the village on the urn empty). Without a bird-sign from heaven life is inauspicious; this augury o f a blank life indicates another movement, "from nomad knows" "to nomore cares". "Nomad knows" is both 'no man knows' and 'a nomad knows'. The opposition of nomad to man invokes an opposition between change (or at least movement) and identity. This tension and movement constitutes the blankness o f life
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which is itself opposed to the possibility o f the future ("ere Molochy wars bring the devil era") that is itself"between a date and a ghostmark". This space "between a date and a ghostmark", "where to go is knowing remain? ", between vowel and consonant is only visible through the failure of the continuity of discourse or language. It is visible in our being creatures who are sometimes awake and sometimes asleep and in language bound by the limits or frames organizing it into sense or the world, and thus in language seen as fragments: "Terrorofthenoonstruckday,cryptogramofeachnightlybridable. But,to speak broken heaventalk, is he? " (FW261. 26-28 ). This "broken heaventalk" directed and figured between God and humans constitutes ianguage not as propositions, assertions, and claims, but as always questions: "But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? How is he? " (FW261. 28-31). How can these questions be answered? "Who in the name o f thunder'd ever belevin you were that bolt? " (FW299. 11-12; Arch, levin: lightening). The thunder following lightening voices the name o f not only the thunderer but o f the 'belevin' (Arch, lightening), the 'being lightening-bolt' or as the source of the sound 'being thunder-bolt'. The god of thunder has 'the name of
thundered', of the past echoed, which is who this bolt claims to be: that thunder or that lightening voicing that thunder; and thus "who in your name would believe you were your name? "
(The instability o f name [here a model o f language's iterability] reflects an ontological instability o f self fragmented in the night: "[F]rom the night we are and feel and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to tumupon". 'To tread' seems synonymous
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with 'to love', or rather the self-love on top of which I pivot all night or all life long. I am pursuing here this pivot as a 'between' words and people and sense. )
Another way of picturing the distance between mind and soul is as between the flash o f lightening and the sound o f thunder, the time when silence communicates not only ourdistancefromtheflash,butseemsapauseintheturningoftheearth: "Whereflash become word and silents selfloud. To brace congeners, trebly bounden and aservaged twainly"(FW267. 16-18). SelfloudpunstheGermanSelbstlaut(vowel),andtherefore identifies vowels as the expression of the self. The flash of lightening becoming the word, as the flesh became, "consinnantes": the consent ("consin) of God to be bom ('nantes') as humanandtobewithsin('consin'). Thelimitbetweenthedivineandthehumanlies thereforeintheflash(Godtoman)andinthesilence(mantoGod). Inhabitingthis between is to "brace congeners", to make or hold some group (or some mind) into an identity ('congener', in the same genus or resemblance); or this is the word of God forming the self into absence and silence except as the receiver (as Noah was) to gather two o f a kind (brace) into a unity (congener).
Stuttering ("broken heaventalk") crystallizes an 'I' out of Wakean language (betraying a stumbling human gait, as Keirkegaard calls it in the second volume of Either/Or [14]) by staying language into further nonsense: "which we do not doubt ha has a habitat ofdoing, but without those selfsownseedlings which are a species ofproofthat the largest individual can occur at or in an olivetion such as East Conna Hillock" (FW160. 09-13). This individual is manifested as a place, Old Conna Hill, and as the inverted HCE. Is finding ourselves not in the world, but as the world (at least at night) "a
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speciesofproof'thatouroriginisours,thatwefoundtheworld?
Self-ownershipand self-generation provides for an entrance into the world, and entrance as the world: "But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses. . . " (FW19. 35-20. 1).
In what is called the ALP chapter, this "world, mind" as it "is, was and will be writing", a "lost histerve"(FW214. 01), that counters the story of the Bible with "In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to the farther? Allalivial, allaIuvial! "(FW213. 31-32). ThisnewstoryisofthemotherAnnaLiviaPlurabelle,the riverof"lethullian","[a]beingagaininbecomingsagain"(FW491. 23). ALPdescribesthe limit between language and time, "[bjetween our two southsates and the granite they 're warming, or herface has been lifted. . . /"(FW209. 08-09). I will analyze this limit between identity and change as a sexual ontology of language in Chapter 10. I want to suggest here that her "becomings again" are part o f a conversation, like that collapsed in the"abnihilisationoftheetym. . . withan. . . fragoroboassityamidwhiches. . . uttermosts confiission" (the roar ofthe voice ofgod and matter mixed with the prayer and confession o f human beings; FW353. 22-25), between "Is that a faith? That's a fact. " (FW199. 33).
The first question ('Is it a faith? ") is asked by the elm. The answer (that is no answer: "That's a fact") is by the stone. The elm and stone are the material forms of two washerwoman on the banks of the ALP, the Liffey, who at the end of the chapter return into the night as elm and stone. The dialogue between elm and stone (animate and inanimate) constitutes or envelopes or limits or is about (there is no way to determine which o f these verbs to use here) Anna Livia Plurabelle, herself the principle o f becoming
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animating the structures o f identity invoiced by Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker in his dissolution and in his memory: "0 tell me all about Anna Livia! . . . Telmetale of stem or stone. Besidetheriveringwatersof. . . "[FW196. 01-03;216. 03-04]). Thisdialogueas what is ALP is also a tale about ALP, a collapse o f expression into being.
This confusion of expression and being or identity (these are also confused here) turns the call between family members into a confession. Justius, the moralizing Shaun's name in debates with his brother Shem disguised as Mercius (Justice and Mercy from English Mystery Plays), challenges his father HCE, calling out to him as "Nayman of Noland"(Nomanofnoland)to'standforth. . . inyourtruecoloursereyoubebackfor ever till I give you your talkingto! " (FW187. 32-35). He then taunts his brother, Shem Macadamson: "Where have you been in the uterim, enjoying yourself all the morning sincy you last wetbed confession? " (187. 36-188. 01). How do we distinguish a sign from an effect? A confession from an act? Can we imagine praying as 'to prize', to lever open (a prize), or as an inquisition into mystery? "Let us pry" (188. 08)-- "We thought, would and did. --Away with covered words, new Solemonites for old Bathsheetbaths! That inharmonious detail, did you name it? Cold caldor! Gee! Victory! (FW188. 25-27) A
confession is as inharmonious detail as he who confesses.
In the Wake a mysterious letter, purporting to reveal the guilt ofHCE, is a version
and one of the prime constituents of the Wake itself: the Wake a "NIGHTLETTER" (FW308. 16) and the mysterious "The letter! The Litter! . . . Borrowing a word and beggingthequestion"(FW93. 22-24). TheLetter(inandastheWake)ortheletters(of the alphabet, of the letter, of the Wake) is picked out of a midden heap by a hen, latter
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transformed into the king of birds as Queen, "Jenny Wren: pick, peck" (Wren, the queen ofbirds; FW278. 12), letters fragmenting the world and then sent through or carried by "Johnny Post: pack, puck", one among many, able to move becomes only a fragment of the world. "All the world's in want and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world's on which to be carrying a letters. . . When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader. Is then any lettersday from many peoples, Dagnasanvitch? (FW278. 16-25).
This list, beginning with "Ten men" is continued a few pages later: "Ten, twent, thirt, see, ex and three icky totchy ones. From solation to solution" [FW284. 16-18; from solitude (It. sola, alone)] to dispersion in a whole. This is how a solution is described: "Imagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls o f the whowl above-beugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of urutteration of the word in pergross" (FW284. 18- 22).
Earlier the solution to "[t]he all-riddle o f it? " was "[t]hat that is allruddy with us, ahead o f schedule, which already is plan accomplished from and syne" (FW274. 02-05). A riddle o f the enveloping facts is always already known in the way that Dasein is always aheadofitselfthatis,itisdefinedasitslimit,asthoseenvelopingfacts. Thecontinual conception of beginnings (arche and genesis) in the Wake is an attempt to make visible what is already and always the case for us at the point when it became this; such beginnings are temporal moments of simultaneous change and repetition (thus the continual rebeginning). The solution to "solation" (being dispersed into aloneness) is
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another return to this beginning built (the interpretation constituting the substance o f what this beginning is in the Wake) out of the twelve apostles reacting (from Judaism to Christianity) to the Death and resurrection o f Christ.
These letters and litters from the Hen, a bird or bard, can tell the tale o f idiots in sound and fury, a second best bed a patrimony of always borrowed language pointing forward, too late or too early, but "Toborrow and toburrow and tobarraw! " (FW455. 12-
13). Isthisadescriptionoranenactmentofourinheritanceofwords?
I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early: and with tag for ildiot repeated in his secondmouth language as many of the bigtimer's verbaten wordswhichhecouldbalbly calltomemorythatsamekveldeve,erethehourof the twattering bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea . . (FW37. 13-18)
Any "secondmouth language" can offer, "saluting corpses, as a metter o f corse" (FW37. 09-10), measuring (meter) time (a matter o f course) as the loss o f ourselves into dead bodies, "not a little token abock all the same that that was owl the God's clock it was"(FW37. 06-07), "could balbly" (Babal and badly) call to memory that same beginning ofevening,sin,andwoman(Da. kveld,eveningandEve). Whatthismomentwasis always formed into interpretations. God's bigtimer verbatim words o f forbidding (G. verboten) are stammered (L balbus) in the twitterlitter, not yet poetry, between the devil andthedeepsea. Thenonsenseofthesewords"tag"thehumanstancetowardtheworld as idiotic awe, an expression oflight and thanks (Da takfor ilden, thanks for the light). Such thanks can be ironic. Such irony can allow us to speak second mouth words as ours.
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This "ildiot" (maybe not yet an idiolect), that is our human stance toward god within our languageconstitutesusas"ildiots"(lesserbeingsspeakinganonsensicallanguage). Oris humanity divided here between 'ildiots' and 'kveldeve'? This stammering ("balby") orders the world and our language into permanence: "accompanied by his trusty snoler and his permanent reflection, verbigacious" (FW37. 12-13). "Verbigacious combines verbigeration, the meaningless repetition o f a word or phrase, and L verbi gratia, for instance. 'Verbigeration' creates the form of identity, a universal, a separation of content from form, from within language. This creates the illusion that meaning accompanies form as an extra component, an addition to sound, as perfume can come to stand for 'me': "My perfume o f the pampas, says she (meaning me)" (FW95. 22). This formal post hoc universal as a limit o f "soundsense" is also the particular o f an example, an example o f anyvoice and of being an "ildiot. . in the twitterlitter". What every instance is accompanied by, however, is the entire system of language, or rather the entire system of senseandthepossibilitiesofnonsensemediatedbyvariousinterpretativestances. Oneof
the possibilities o f being human is the continual possibility o f the need for interpretation. Which is not to say that every sentence requires interpretation.
But then again,
Well even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer's setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it) uncover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blues as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all manking have foliated (earth seizing them! ) from root of some funner's stotter all the soundest sense to be found
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immense our special mentalists now holds (securus iudicat orbis terrarum) . . .
(FW96. 26-33)
A stutter can frame speech as a form of possession, the grating of Moses' recitative againstAron'ssinginginSchoenberg'sOpera, orthegratingatanylimitofanyframe that marks the possibility that the world is a figment by showing that we see it through and asfragments. Thisself-reflection,abetrayalofourlimitationsandoftheworld's instability as a world, is like a "dim seer's setting o f a starchart" that uncovers "the nakedness of an unknown body making a starchart to find the world's order. " Contained within parenthesis as if within a world itself (securus iudicat orbis terrarum), the verdict
o f the world is secure. Secured by what? What is the verdict? (Can anything be secured from within parenthesis? can the world be secured from within the world? )
A survey and overview of this world marks the world's purview, its enacting principle, it's limit, scope and purpose as something ordered as "my world". The algebra (binomial) and the geometry (axioms and postulates) o f these "factionables" is incomprehensible and as inexpressible as by gone days and the ways o f god for a "neuralgiabrown", a brain:
ForasurviewoverallthefactionablesseeIrisintheEvenine'sWorld. Binomeans tobecomprendered. Inexcessibleasthybygodways. Theaximones. Andtheir prostalutes. For his neuralgiabrown.
Equal to = aosch.
P. t. l. o. a. t. o. (FW285. 26-286. 03)
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What does it mean to find Potato and not Plato in these letters? What letters are equal to what word? "Equal to=aosch" is a kind of self-referential paradox. "Equal to" is not equal to anything; if it is understood as '=' which defines a relation not a value; it marks equality it is not itselfa term except in relation to other symbols of relation. If 'equal to' is mentioned in quotation marks it can gain a categorical meaning (with all terms of relation) or generic meaning (with all symbols). The claim here, however, is that equal to is equivalent to an anagram ofchaos (to the anagram itselfor to the 'meaning' as chaos? ). And therefore Plato is a potato. Although this interpretation can seem reasonable(l), especially to a new world Aristotelian, what does it mean? How do we apply this identity?
The following is an identification of an identification of missing what had counted to'one'onceinageneralfailuretocountoneselfasoneselfexceptinthismistake: "the aphasia o f that heroic agony o f recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia o f misnomering one's own" (FW122. 04-05). This is called "the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it ends itself'(FW122. 03-04) This lapse, the failure to address anyone (beginning the Wake in midsentence--"rivemm, past Eve and Adam's") is a loss of identity (in sleep or nonsense or forgetfulness or sin or sense or order) marked by the loss of any beloved (are we attached to the world through suchattachments? ): "theaphasiaofthatheroicagonyofrecallingaoncelovednumber leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one's own" (FW122. 04-06). The loss o f love (Eliot's hyacinth girl) and the agony o f recall, not only o f the beloved but
of loving, is a forgetfulness of who anyone is. Language, just as dreams, is a reminder of that agony, "the cruciform postscript" (FW122. 20) The revision of this script is both our
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forgetting ourselves and the kisses of others into "the life he is to die into . . . lost himself or himselfsome somnione sciupiones" (FW293.