In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the substrate o f apart form
hissheory
whre the Theophil" (163.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
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. "Let" expresses, therefore, the boundary ofthe category ofthe real separate from its physical cause. "Let" marks the category of possibility embodied in both God and his language prior to the category of existence, and thus separates out will from creating and from speaking. Godspeaks'belight'onlywithinthecontextofthepossibilityopenedupbythe force of "Let. . . " The question ofhow our words attach to the world is translated into God as a gap between his willing and his speaking. God's creation functions through our
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recognitionofthecategoriesofbeingbetrayedbyGod'sspeaking. Goddoesnotsay, "Light! " The phrase "And there was light", in describing the effect of God's subjunctive command, admits, instead o f denies, that language cannot speak with the ontological force ofthe sort suggested by, but not expressed through, God's command. God is given a language that can create the world through translating the problem o f reference in human language into an internal division within God.
The light that God creates in verse 3, therefore, does not emanate from any material cause. He creates light before he created the sun, stars, and the moon. In verse 5, this immaterial light and darkness gains a substanceless temporal character and identity: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. " As light is called Day, it becomes Day: a day without any material form or cause. As darkness is called Night, it becomes night: a Night without any substance or material being.
Through the interaction of the substanceless beings of Day and Night, the first temporal cycle is completed: "And there was evening and there was moming"(v. 5). The temporal transformation between Day and Night is not based on an underlying dynamism within the process o f creation, nor within the nature o f "the heavens and the earth. " Changedoesnotariseoutof,norisitcausedby,createdbeing. Thequalityofthisfirst temporal cycle is purely the result ofan opposition in Day's and Night's quality ofbeing, which is translated into time through the alteration o f identity within a temporal frame consisting o f the categories o f day and night.
Change remains purely a function of God's creative power. This power functions through the differentiation of static identities of being; thus, time, at this point, is not
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dynamic. Within the first diurnal 'scene,' the earth, the heavens and the light cannot act, cause or effect themselves or each other. Night and Day are attached to qualities of presence, that is, light and darkness, are not temporally related, but simply differentiated. The identity o f all being in a particular moment alters in character, and becomes another moment. The identity, the integrity, ofbeing is not destroyed, it is simply replaced. Thus, God's creative acts take place in an established temporal cycle, which is based on an alteration in being, from Night to Day, from light to dark, and from evening to morning. Identity remains; only the context in which being is expressed changes. Thus, creation remains a process o f identification, and not a manifestation or an ordering o f an underlying flux. Time exists as God's calling light Day and dark Night. Time is enacted through God's naming, and is a function of the meaning o f Day and Night as opposed to the experienceorrealityofchange. Anoppositiongeneratedoutofatemporalbecoming, however, is fundamentally different from the simultaneous presence of, but formal separation between, the waters and the land. Temporal becoming has been leveled into a single plane oftemporal presence: night and day simultaneously exist. 'God,' therefore, has
erased the syntagmatic becoming inherent within the existential experience ofNight and Day. This flattening is the effect of subliming our language into an "unmoving mover", of forgetting our failure to speak God's actual creating.
Time exists only in God's creating. God's creative acts take place within a temporalsuccession. Godhimselfnevercreatestime. Evenwhenhecreatesnightand dayhefailstodefineamechanismthatwillcausetheirsuccession. Time,however,isnot banishedfromthetext. Theclause"inthebeginning,"whateveritsrelationshipwiththe
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first and second verse, places God's creating within a pattern of succession, which is relative to the future "now" from which the text is written and or/read. Thus the static forms o f being are temporalized simultaneously through God's creating and through the human interpretive description of this act. God and humans, holding the static forms of created being between them, meet in a temporal unity built out of the isomorphic structure defining human experience and divine creating: in a succession of identities. The succession o f days defining God's creative acts establishes syntagmatic becoming as a limitation on God's power, a temporality that God does not create Himself, although he creates the structures through which this change is understood.
In verse 11, God integrates the insubstantial being o f light and darkness within particular material forms ofbeing:
And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament o f the heavens to give light upon the earth". . . and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set then in the firmament o f the heavens to five light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the dark. (v. 14-18)
The sun and the moon "separate the light from the darkness", and therefore "rule over the day and over the night'. The temporal cycle between night and day mirrors the process of creation, in that the function of the heavenly lights is to separate the day from the night. God creates a hierarchical universe, consisting o f material forms o f being, which embody,
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in varying degrees and in different contexts, his power to rule and differentiate 'reality. ' The qualities o f Day and Night are integrated into the material structure o f the universe.
In Genesis, the generative force behind the alteration from Night to Day does not arise from a dynamic temporal quality embedded within the created universe. Temporal change flows through specifically defined identities: time becomes a relational matrix unitingbeingwithinauniversedefinedaccordingtoaprincipleofdifferentiation. God's creative acts divide the universe according to a language and a grammar (a relational pattern), whose locus o f meaning lies within the concept o f being as identity, where what counts as real can be placed into the equation x=y, outside o f any idea o f temporal flux. Thus, God's creative commands divide the external primal universe into identities o f being: being defined and discriminated by difference. He divides the light from the darkness, the "waters from the waters," the land from the water, and the day from the night. These divisions serve to crystallize the nature o f created being and pull the earth from its formless state.
God's actions are themselves contained within a diurnal 'scene. ' God did not create the universe in a single moment of infinite and eternal presence, but in a succession of days. Godcannotcreatebutthroughtime,throughasuccessionofactswhichconstitutea series o f creative moments, expressed diachronically, syntagmatically. God's presence functions through a becoming in time, and, therefore, he cannot create except in time. The disjunction between God, in the before and after, and his creating, in the surrogate present oftextualpresent,allowsforatemporalcontinuitywithoutcreatingtimeasflux. The chaotic "now" in which creation takes place, in which being must exist and be lost, is
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erased by the causal axis leading to us. Time is castrated of its "nows", but survives as a succession of identities formed through a principle of differentiation.
In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the substrate o f apart form hissheory whre the Theophil" (163. 24-25).
The Wake resurrects the elided "now", the eunuch time bereft of its dynamic function, created in Genesis. The Wake translates this eunuch into the feminine ALP; the NewTestament,ontheotherhand,resurrectsthiseunuchasChrist. IntheGospelof John temporal becoming flows through a series of identities, which are united within what willbecometheTrinitarianGodhead. Theprocessofrelatingtwomomentsintime becomes the process of relating the being, i. e. , the identity, of one moment with another. The gap between these two moments corresponds to the substanceless action of becoming, through which being becomes, or reaches, another moment. This is the same gap that provides for the transformation between God and Christ, and which is integrated into the being of both of them. Thus within Christ the gap between the beginning and the end is self-contained and totalized within his identity. Christ is the substance o f his own being, and transcends the intangible space between two moments: he is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end"(Rev. 1. 8). His identity, therefore, defines a process of creation, or temporal becoming. The breath of God becomes transformed into the spirit of life, which is equivalent to Christ. As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but this identity is self-renewed.
Within the Gospel ofJohn, as one ofthe sources for this Trinitarian theology, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within
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the same moment, but within the same identity: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made" (Jn. 1. 1). The Word represents a symbol o f relation, connecting God and man, spirit and flesh in the person o f Christ. They are connected through the symbolic transformation o f their identities,suchthatthecreated,thecreating,andthecreatorareultimatelythesame. Itis primarily out o f this re-conception o f creation within this transformation o f identities that the logic of the Trinity arose, with the subsequent re-conception of the relation between being and identity. One sees this already in Clement o f Alexandria when he interprets the Genesis "In the beginning" to mean "the first-bom" and thus translates it as "In Christ the Son" (,Stromata VI. 7. 58. I). 10
As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but in John this identity is self- contained. Consequently, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within the same moment, but within the same identity. Through this identity, which is Christ, man returns to God: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. " The light that separated the day from night, and represented the creative spirit o f God, re-enters the world, through Christ, as a connective pathway leading to God: "I am the light ofthe world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light o f life". The light o f life is God: "God is light and in him is no darkness at all". Thus, God and Christ are one: "For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell". Light, as the division between the substanceless Day and
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Night, and between the physical day and night, now unifies the creative process o f becoming within the equivalent identities o f God and Christ.
Identity, as the operative mode of relation, reconstructs primary reality within being, and outside o f time. Thus, the temporal pattern o f becoming becomes locked into a conceptualframework,basedonthetransformationbetweenidentities. Theprocessof change between cause and effect cannot be understood in terms of identity. Identity presupposesapermanentrealityofbeing,aspecificidentity,underlyingallchange. Thus, we can only understand every point between the alteration o f one thing into another, in termsofanotherpermanentthing;weonlysee"things"nottheactualityofchange. The transformation o f one thing into another becomes understood as an alteration o f identity, from one "thing" to another, or from non-existence to existence. The process of this change between these identities becomes locked into a temporal structure, where the identityofbeingwithinamomentdefinesthatmoment. Howonemomentbecomes another, or how one thing becomes another, becomes lost in an intangible and inexplicable leap between identities. The Johnniane solution to this separation of identities is to posit identities of substanceless being, which interpenetrate each other and share existence, but
within different conceptual modes ofbeing: they are ofthe same substance, that is, ofthe sameessence,andyettheirmanifestedbeingsremaindistinct. Theinitialpatternof substanceless creation in Genesis is expanded into the underlying cosmological pattern in the spiritual universe o f the first chapter o f John.
Thus, the gap between the identity of one "thing" and another, and between two different moments, merges into the equivalency between the creator, the process of
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creation, and the manifestation of this creation. Thus, the Word is God: it is the act of his creation,anditisChrist. Thisistheunderlyingpatternofbecoming,unitingbeingand time within the symbolic allegory of the Christian universe.
10. 4 Anna Livia Plurabelie
If Christ is "the beginning and the end", where and who and when is the between, or rather the Beta through Psil Consciousness, even as it creates itselfas self- consciousness, moves toward an objective space into which it projects itself or in which it finds the others that populate experience. Consequently, in waking life, just as in the Christian ontology o f creation, that which "lies" between the beginning and the end, that is, the present, exists as an unself-reflexive subject, from which we watch and create objects but which is not itselfan object. Within the Wake, however, the present becomes a kind of existential object modulating continually into a self-reflexive subject that creates a subjective space in which objects disintegrate into their own temporality, into unconsciousness. Thus the Wake deconstructs identity and the connections between things, in order to enter the temporal space of the present, the reality which is "moving andchangingeverypartofthetime"(118. 22-3). This,ofcourse,isthe"reality"ofALP:
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilites, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven. ( 104. 01-03)
The name of Allah and the hallowed name of God becomes the "Ever living", the ever becoming mother, the Turkish ana. She creates "plurabilites" which are not identities but
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a complex of potentialities and possibilities ("pluralities") which open the self to desire and loss and tears, the ability to weep (Fr. pleurer). ALP creates the pluralities of existence. These pluralities are identical to the very process of their creation. Thus, from "plurablities" one can derive "weepable-ness", which is the watery tears o f the river, Anna Livae Plurabella. She is the beautiful ("pluabelle") river that contains and gives life: "Amingst the living waters o f the living in giving waters o f' (462. 04).
These "plurabilities" are the unnamed, unnamable manifestations o f ALP: "Her untitled mamafesta memorailising the Mosthinghest has gone by many names at disjointed times"(104. 04-05). ALPwritesahistory(a"memorailising")oftheimmanent phenomenological "realic" that is herself beneath and between the identities whose end is the Christian God. This "mamafesta" is a mother feast where ALP, the body on which and through which this history is written, becomes the Eucharist, the body and the blood linking identity to identity.
ALP casts herself into the "now," the transitive gap between moments and between identities that the Old Testament tries to ignore and that the New Testament erases in the Trinitarian Godhead:
Between me rassociations in the postleadeny past and me disconnections with aplompervious futules I've boodle full of maimeries in me buzzim and meadears runs sloze.
( 348. 05-08).
ALP first recapitulates the causal axis between before and after defining time in Genesis. If we read [a]plomb as the French Mead', the future becomes permeable to the postleadeny
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past, a future built on the phallic post o f metal that performs futile intercourse (from L. futilis andfutuo) overcoming the present. But beneath the intercourse ofthe past with the
futurewefindALPwithadifferentvisionoftime,evolvingoutofherself: "I'veaboodle fiall of maimeries in me buzzim and medears runs sloze. " "Maimeries" (breasts and memories) fill the gap between past and future. These memories are maimed into sullage. Sullage is the postleadeny past translated into ALP and so maimed (a mangled phallic post), held within her buzzim, and then remembered in the world as the sound of the river. This sound coming after the "woid" introjects itself in the present, "in the muddle is the sound dance" (378. 29), a potent version o f Eliot's failing "reverberations o f Spring" .
In this then we return to ALP's and HCE's "sollemn nupitalism" (599. 12) and their sexual conjugation: "On to bed! (577. 36). The religious seriousness invoked by "Sollemn", must ride through not only sex, but the conflation o f the foul ("soil") and the sublime("sol")asourconstantcondition. Connectedwith"soli"issullage,which,whileit is sewage, is also the fertile silt deposited by a river. Thus the word contains all that is needed for a seed, the fertilized ovum, to grow ("the seeds of light to the cowld old sowls"593. 20). Withintheworditselfthereisanintegrationofthecreativeprincipleof the light, o f consciousness and its differentiations, associated with HCE, and the dynamic processofbecomingassociatedwithALP. Thelightcomponentofthewordrefersthe dawn of Book IV, the light streaming from God and HCE: "Calling all downs to dayne. . . A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded. The eversower of seeds of light to the cowld ole sowls" (593. 02; 19-20). When this light (hce, hce, a repetition approaching identity, and maybe f. haec, this) hits the litters (litter, letters) of the Wake,
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we get a description o f ALP as "sollemn" containing as she does, in one o f Joyce's earlier notebook entries,
seaweed on walls
mud flats
tin cans, dead dogs, old boots all sewage discharged in11
The decayed being o f the past exists concurrently within the river. Thus, we are in a much more dynamic creative reality than in The Waste Land, where being and change function in seemingly different ontological worlds:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
In The Waste Land, the river, the creative force, is relatively impervious to being, as between oil and water, and as such cannot overcome the stasis o f identity, while in the Wake being (HCE) and change (ALP) interpenetrate each other. In Eliot's poem, it is an
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abstract aesthetic reverberation ofsound, the voices oftradition and authority, completely without substance, logic, or essential force, which move from the past into the future through the present. In the Wake, however, the gap between the postleadeny past and the "aplombervious fiitules" consists of a "boodle" of deformed and maimed memories ("maimeries"). (Compare this to the bats with baby faces in The Waste Land).
Joyce is trying to reconstruct substance in order to expose how our ontological commitments proceed through collapsing both the world and ourselves into the deontic (obligation and entitlement) and alethic (necessity and possibility) dimensions o f our language. These maimed memories are contained within the sound itself, which is the word o f the river. Memory exists itself as an expression marking a moment o f time. But for whom? These memories are within the "buzzim" of ALP, which is herself (her bosom) and the sound of the river. ALP exists as sound within the domain of grammar, not within what passes for psychology. Her memories work within this grammar not on herself, the sourceandendofthesound,butonherson,Butt,orShemthepenman, whoishere transformed into ALP: "me awlghul omegrims" (348. 05). or me (Butt) ALP [alpha omega], O Mega: 0 Big; O me grims: 0 me grin/ grim; megrim: migraine: head; Grim as God: o my God! With this call we all, as Christ did when he accused God o f forsaking him, lose ourselves, and a moment is marked by that loss, by that cry. Butt cries out (about) not only his transformation into ALP, not only to "omegrims" with his judgment on himself and his mother "me awlphul", but cries: "and medears run sloze". The waters of the river, of ALP, is made up of others, her children (me dears), her beauties. This sets up a pattern of creation that is simultaneously a collapse of identities (Butt:Shaun:ALP)
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and a manifestation o f identity in others. These tears as they leave ALP form defined identities, drops ofwater:
It was so duusk that the tears o f night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes and sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep no with them. (158. 20-24)
"[A]s we weep no with them"? This disconnection "with them" means in weeping these tears ALP (k)no(ws) them as we might 'no' things at night, as negative spaces, what will later be called "trancitive spaces", so that we are not with them, but they constitute our own loss of ourselves (to sleep or time or death). This is a way of symbolizing what is not there, of seeming to say what cannot be said. While we cannot articulate ourselves as nothing, as dead, as not, and in this sense cannot get outside o f language, we can articulate 'nothing', 'death', 'not'. This articulation, however, cannot work through reference or identity (we cannot answer "what is it? " with "nothing" and mean this "nothing" ontologically). Nothing" emerges at a higher level of abstraction, at the level of meaning within the sentence, at the level o f grammar at which Wakecm nonsense functions. Ourexpressionsoflossbecomebecomingsofform. Butwhathasbecomeofsubstance and our relation to it?
ALP's breasts are maimed into "maimeries" by the children (medears) pulling her into themselves as they run into the future. Her dear tears are formed out o f herself and thrown into the procession "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" ( 254. 17). This is another creation myth, another version of the Bible in two 'sentences'.
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The 'facts' in this new world are letters and numbers, and thus we must read these sentences at that level.
The initial indefinite article is doubled by the succeeding command o f "and" into "aa". These three terms when contracted form "a an' aa", or a stuttered An(n)a. Indeed, in Swedish A and in Danish and Norwegian aa means river. The first and second term in thisserieseachconsistofoneandthreelettersrespectively. Thesecondtermina standard numerical progression of whole numbers, or of moments, or of identities would
consist of two letters. If we read this series numerically, therefore, the elided middle term between one and three arises as the third term as if called forth by its absence. Thus the beginning, "A" (one) and the end, "and" (three), generate the between "aa" (two). The two letter structure is repeated in the fourth term, the two letter "ab". This term does not replicate the doubling o f the initial "A", the origin, but introduces the second letter o f the alphabet and thus redefines the numerical series into an alphabetical series. This series, however, is interrupted, as was the numerical series, by the elision o f the expected "ac" and its replacement with the Latin ad, to, toward. The inclusion of "to" further conflates the alphabetic series with the numerical by repeating the third terms count (two) in the Latin semantic pun (to). This "disconnection ofthe succeeding" ( 228. 17) introduces a preposition o f movement, and thus serves to define the proceeding series by its looking forward. And if this end is not the identity of the mathematical and the alphabetical it might turn us back toward the source o f their mutual generation.
We have read only half-way through the first sentence: "A and aa ab . . The alphabetical numerical series o f this first eight letters is answered, mimicked, copied in the
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last eight letters, and thus emerges as a picture, or rather a schematic o f how we become in our counting in our language. This is the picture:
A and aa ab/ ad /abu abiad.
(8) (2) (8)
The indefinite singularity o f the "a" repeated, sung or strung as a series emerges as a pattern in which the "and" is translated into the mathematical operator "ad(d)". One might imagine our stuttering in sound, as an expression o f a will to speak, to configure ourselves within the world, abstracted into a reflection o f this stuttering into a representation, that is, into a symbolic operator. "Ad" creates an expectation ofan end, a movement toward objective space, seemingly satisfied with the inclusion of the father (Arabic, abu) into the series. Theeightlettersonthissideofthecentral"ad"coalesceintoonlytwoterms: "abu abiad". The second word, "abiad"(white), continues to sound in Arabic. HCE is invoked as the "White Father", the European God, the white imperialist entering Africa,
conquering those countries where Arabic is spoken. The polyphonic confusion o f terms and principles o f progression in the first eight letters is pushed toward an end where the father "abiad[s]", awaits, continues, abides, in tautology. This parody of Christ's claim to
be "the Alpha and the Omega" does not rest on the replication and leveling o f the beginning and end; but describes a beginning moving toward an end: a between.
The eight letter bookends, the past (ALP) and the future (HCE), isolate the toward (ad)asadescriptionofthepresentasakindofsubjunctive. Thesignificanceofthe number eight in the movement from nothingness to creation is described by Augustine in his Confessions. In his dissection of how time gets measured through sound and
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language, Augustine invokes Ambrose's evening hymn, "God, Creator o f all things" , and then analyzes how this phrase describes God's creation from nothing:
'God, Creator o f all things'--Deus Creator omnium--the line consists o f eight syllables,inwhichshortandlongsyllablesalternate. Sothefourwhichareshort (the first, third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the second, fourth, sixth and eighth). . . . But when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold n the short, and how use it to measure the longs, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? . . . They do not exist. . . Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there. (Xl. xxvii [35])
The logic describing the relationship between the short and "single in relation to the four long" syllables recalls Joyce's "odd's without ends", and links this syllable interaction, in Joyce's case letter interactions, with this Creator o f all things: on one side o f "ad" ALP and on the other "HCE". The measuring of time in words, for Augustine, is measuring ourselves, our memory, and therefore a measuring of nothing in relation to the Ideality of God. ThemeaningofJoyce'sversionof"God,Creatorofallthings",inhishymntothe night, forces this Creator both into the missing substance, used by Augustine to describe
time, and into language. Joyce is making time language, and forcing God into grammar. This 18 letter description o f the Wake writes the ABC's as a modulation o f the
tautologically repetitive 'a and a a a' defining itselfas marking a succession of moments(?
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. "Let" expresses, therefore, the boundary ofthe category ofthe real separate from its physical cause. "Let" marks the category of possibility embodied in both God and his language prior to the category of existence, and thus separates out will from creating and from speaking. Godspeaks'belight'onlywithinthecontextofthepossibilityopenedupbythe force of "Let. . . " The question ofhow our words attach to the world is translated into God as a gap between his willing and his speaking. God's creation functions through our
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recognitionofthecategoriesofbeingbetrayedbyGod'sspeaking. Goddoesnotsay, "Light! " The phrase "And there was light", in describing the effect of God's subjunctive command, admits, instead o f denies, that language cannot speak with the ontological force ofthe sort suggested by, but not expressed through, God's command. God is given a language that can create the world through translating the problem o f reference in human language into an internal division within God.
The light that God creates in verse 3, therefore, does not emanate from any material cause. He creates light before he created the sun, stars, and the moon. In verse 5, this immaterial light and darkness gains a substanceless temporal character and identity: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. " As light is called Day, it becomes Day: a day without any material form or cause. As darkness is called Night, it becomes night: a Night without any substance or material being.
Through the interaction of the substanceless beings of Day and Night, the first temporal cycle is completed: "And there was evening and there was moming"(v. 5). The temporal transformation between Day and Night is not based on an underlying dynamism within the process o f creation, nor within the nature o f "the heavens and the earth. " Changedoesnotariseoutof,norisitcausedby,createdbeing. Thequalityofthisfirst temporal cycle is purely the result ofan opposition in Day's and Night's quality ofbeing, which is translated into time through the alteration o f identity within a temporal frame consisting o f the categories o f day and night.
Change remains purely a function of God's creative power. This power functions through the differentiation of static identities of being; thus, time, at this point, is not
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dynamic. Within the first diurnal 'scene,' the earth, the heavens and the light cannot act, cause or effect themselves or each other. Night and Day are attached to qualities of presence, that is, light and darkness, are not temporally related, but simply differentiated. The identity o f all being in a particular moment alters in character, and becomes another moment. The identity, the integrity, ofbeing is not destroyed, it is simply replaced. Thus, God's creative acts take place in an established temporal cycle, which is based on an alteration in being, from Night to Day, from light to dark, and from evening to morning. Identity remains; only the context in which being is expressed changes. Thus, creation remains a process o f identification, and not a manifestation or an ordering o f an underlying flux. Time exists as God's calling light Day and dark Night. Time is enacted through God's naming, and is a function of the meaning o f Day and Night as opposed to the experienceorrealityofchange. Anoppositiongeneratedoutofatemporalbecoming, however, is fundamentally different from the simultaneous presence of, but formal separation between, the waters and the land. Temporal becoming has been leveled into a single plane oftemporal presence: night and day simultaneously exist. 'God,' therefore, has
erased the syntagmatic becoming inherent within the existential experience ofNight and Day. This flattening is the effect of subliming our language into an "unmoving mover", of forgetting our failure to speak God's actual creating.
Time exists only in God's creating. God's creative acts take place within a temporalsuccession. Godhimselfnevercreatestime. Evenwhenhecreatesnightand dayhefailstodefineamechanismthatwillcausetheirsuccession. Time,however,isnot banishedfromthetext. Theclause"inthebeginning,"whateveritsrelationshipwiththe
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first and second verse, places God's creating within a pattern of succession, which is relative to the future "now" from which the text is written and or/read. Thus the static forms o f being are temporalized simultaneously through God's creating and through the human interpretive description of this act. God and humans, holding the static forms of created being between them, meet in a temporal unity built out of the isomorphic structure defining human experience and divine creating: in a succession of identities. The succession o f days defining God's creative acts establishes syntagmatic becoming as a limitation on God's power, a temporality that God does not create Himself, although he creates the structures through which this change is understood.
In verse 11, God integrates the insubstantial being o f light and darkness within particular material forms ofbeing:
And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament o f the heavens to give light upon the earth". . . and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set then in the firmament o f the heavens to five light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the dark. (v. 14-18)
The sun and the moon "separate the light from the darkness", and therefore "rule over the day and over the night'. The temporal cycle between night and day mirrors the process of creation, in that the function of the heavenly lights is to separate the day from the night. God creates a hierarchical universe, consisting o f material forms o f being, which embody,
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in varying degrees and in different contexts, his power to rule and differentiate 'reality. ' The qualities o f Day and Night are integrated into the material structure o f the universe.
In Genesis, the generative force behind the alteration from Night to Day does not arise from a dynamic temporal quality embedded within the created universe. Temporal change flows through specifically defined identities: time becomes a relational matrix unitingbeingwithinauniversedefinedaccordingtoaprincipleofdifferentiation. God's creative acts divide the universe according to a language and a grammar (a relational pattern), whose locus o f meaning lies within the concept o f being as identity, where what counts as real can be placed into the equation x=y, outside o f any idea o f temporal flux. Thus, God's creative commands divide the external primal universe into identities o f being: being defined and discriminated by difference. He divides the light from the darkness, the "waters from the waters," the land from the water, and the day from the night. These divisions serve to crystallize the nature o f created being and pull the earth from its formless state.
God's actions are themselves contained within a diurnal 'scene. ' God did not create the universe in a single moment of infinite and eternal presence, but in a succession of days. Godcannotcreatebutthroughtime,throughasuccessionofactswhichconstitutea series o f creative moments, expressed diachronically, syntagmatically. God's presence functions through a becoming in time, and, therefore, he cannot create except in time. The disjunction between God, in the before and after, and his creating, in the surrogate present oftextualpresent,allowsforatemporalcontinuitywithoutcreatingtimeasflux. The chaotic "now" in which creation takes place, in which being must exist and be lost, is
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erased by the causal axis leading to us. Time is castrated of its "nows", but survives as a succession of identities formed through a principle of differentiation.
In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the substrate o f apart form hissheory whre the Theophil" (163. 24-25).
The Wake resurrects the elided "now", the eunuch time bereft of its dynamic function, created in Genesis. The Wake translates this eunuch into the feminine ALP; the NewTestament,ontheotherhand,resurrectsthiseunuchasChrist. IntheGospelof John temporal becoming flows through a series of identities, which are united within what willbecometheTrinitarianGodhead. Theprocessofrelatingtwomomentsintime becomes the process of relating the being, i. e. , the identity, of one moment with another. The gap between these two moments corresponds to the substanceless action of becoming, through which being becomes, or reaches, another moment. This is the same gap that provides for the transformation between God and Christ, and which is integrated into the being of both of them. Thus within Christ the gap between the beginning and the end is self-contained and totalized within his identity. Christ is the substance o f his own being, and transcends the intangible space between two moments: he is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end"(Rev. 1. 8). His identity, therefore, defines a process of creation, or temporal becoming. The breath of God becomes transformed into the spirit of life, which is equivalent to Christ. As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but this identity is self-renewed.
Within the Gospel ofJohn, as one ofthe sources for this Trinitarian theology, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within
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the same moment, but within the same identity: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made" (Jn. 1. 1). The Word represents a symbol o f relation, connecting God and man, spirit and flesh in the person o f Christ. They are connected through the symbolic transformation o f their identities,suchthatthecreated,thecreating,andthecreatorareultimatelythesame. Itis primarily out o f this re-conception o f creation within this transformation o f identities that the logic of the Trinity arose, with the subsequent re-conception of the relation between being and identity. One sees this already in Clement o f Alexandria when he interprets the Genesis "In the beginning" to mean "the first-bom" and thus translates it as "In Christ the Son" (,Stromata VI. 7. 58. I). 10
As in Genesis, time still flows through identity, but in John this identity is self- contained. Consequently, creative change is both an objectification away from God, and a return to him, not within the same moment, but within the same identity. Through this identity, which is Christ, man returns to God: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. " The light that separated the day from night, and represented the creative spirit o f God, re-enters the world, through Christ, as a connective pathway leading to God: "I am the light ofthe world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light o f life". The light o f life is God: "God is light and in him is no darkness at all". Thus, God and Christ are one: "For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell". Light, as the division between the substanceless Day and
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Night, and between the physical day and night, now unifies the creative process o f becoming within the equivalent identities o f God and Christ.
Identity, as the operative mode of relation, reconstructs primary reality within being, and outside o f time. Thus, the temporal pattern o f becoming becomes locked into a conceptualframework,basedonthetransformationbetweenidentities. Theprocessof change between cause and effect cannot be understood in terms of identity. Identity presupposesapermanentrealityofbeing,aspecificidentity,underlyingallchange. Thus, we can only understand every point between the alteration o f one thing into another, in termsofanotherpermanentthing;weonlysee"things"nottheactualityofchange. The transformation o f one thing into another becomes understood as an alteration o f identity, from one "thing" to another, or from non-existence to existence. The process of this change between these identities becomes locked into a temporal structure, where the identityofbeingwithinamomentdefinesthatmoment. Howonemomentbecomes another, or how one thing becomes another, becomes lost in an intangible and inexplicable leap between identities. The Johnniane solution to this separation of identities is to posit identities of substanceless being, which interpenetrate each other and share existence, but
within different conceptual modes ofbeing: they are ofthe same substance, that is, ofthe sameessence,andyettheirmanifestedbeingsremaindistinct. Theinitialpatternof substanceless creation in Genesis is expanded into the underlying cosmological pattern in the spiritual universe o f the first chapter o f John.
Thus, the gap between the identity of one "thing" and another, and between two different moments, merges into the equivalency between the creator, the process of
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creation, and the manifestation of this creation. Thus, the Word is God: it is the act of his creation,anditisChrist. Thisistheunderlyingpatternofbecoming,unitingbeingand time within the symbolic allegory of the Christian universe.
10. 4 Anna Livia Plurabelie
If Christ is "the beginning and the end", where and who and when is the between, or rather the Beta through Psil Consciousness, even as it creates itselfas self- consciousness, moves toward an objective space into which it projects itself or in which it finds the others that populate experience. Consequently, in waking life, just as in the Christian ontology o f creation, that which "lies" between the beginning and the end, that is, the present, exists as an unself-reflexive subject, from which we watch and create objects but which is not itselfan object. Within the Wake, however, the present becomes a kind of existential object modulating continually into a self-reflexive subject that creates a subjective space in which objects disintegrate into their own temporality, into unconsciousness. Thus the Wake deconstructs identity and the connections between things, in order to enter the temporal space of the present, the reality which is "moving andchangingeverypartofthetime"(118. 22-3). This,ofcourse,isthe"reality"ofALP:
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilites, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven. ( 104. 01-03)
The name of Allah and the hallowed name of God becomes the "Ever living", the ever becoming mother, the Turkish ana. She creates "plurabilites" which are not identities but
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a complex of potentialities and possibilities ("pluralities") which open the self to desire and loss and tears, the ability to weep (Fr. pleurer). ALP creates the pluralities of existence. These pluralities are identical to the very process of their creation. Thus, from "plurablities" one can derive "weepable-ness", which is the watery tears o f the river, Anna Livae Plurabella. She is the beautiful ("pluabelle") river that contains and gives life: "Amingst the living waters o f the living in giving waters o f' (462. 04).
These "plurabilities" are the unnamed, unnamable manifestations o f ALP: "Her untitled mamafesta memorailising the Mosthinghest has gone by many names at disjointed times"(104. 04-05). ALPwritesahistory(a"memorailising")oftheimmanent phenomenological "realic" that is herself beneath and between the identities whose end is the Christian God. This "mamafesta" is a mother feast where ALP, the body on which and through which this history is written, becomes the Eucharist, the body and the blood linking identity to identity.
ALP casts herself into the "now," the transitive gap between moments and between identities that the Old Testament tries to ignore and that the New Testament erases in the Trinitarian Godhead:
Between me rassociations in the postleadeny past and me disconnections with aplompervious futules I've boodle full of maimeries in me buzzim and meadears runs sloze.
( 348. 05-08).
ALP first recapitulates the causal axis between before and after defining time in Genesis. If we read [a]plomb as the French Mead', the future becomes permeable to the postleadeny
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past, a future built on the phallic post o f metal that performs futile intercourse (from L. futilis andfutuo) overcoming the present. But beneath the intercourse ofthe past with the
futurewefindALPwithadifferentvisionoftime,evolvingoutofherself: "I'veaboodle fiall of maimeries in me buzzim and medears runs sloze. " "Maimeries" (breasts and memories) fill the gap between past and future. These memories are maimed into sullage. Sullage is the postleadeny past translated into ALP and so maimed (a mangled phallic post), held within her buzzim, and then remembered in the world as the sound of the river. This sound coming after the "woid" introjects itself in the present, "in the muddle is the sound dance" (378. 29), a potent version o f Eliot's failing "reverberations o f Spring" .
In this then we return to ALP's and HCE's "sollemn nupitalism" (599. 12) and their sexual conjugation: "On to bed! (577. 36). The religious seriousness invoked by "Sollemn", must ride through not only sex, but the conflation o f the foul ("soil") and the sublime("sol")asourconstantcondition. Connectedwith"soli"issullage,which,whileit is sewage, is also the fertile silt deposited by a river. Thus the word contains all that is needed for a seed, the fertilized ovum, to grow ("the seeds of light to the cowld old sowls"593. 20). Withintheworditselfthereisanintegrationofthecreativeprincipleof the light, o f consciousness and its differentiations, associated with HCE, and the dynamic processofbecomingassociatedwithALP. Thelightcomponentofthewordrefersthe dawn of Book IV, the light streaming from God and HCE: "Calling all downs to dayne. . . A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded. The eversower of seeds of light to the cowld ole sowls" (593. 02; 19-20). When this light (hce, hce, a repetition approaching identity, and maybe f. haec, this) hits the litters (litter, letters) of the Wake,
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we get a description o f ALP as "sollemn" containing as she does, in one o f Joyce's earlier notebook entries,
seaweed on walls
mud flats
tin cans, dead dogs, old boots all sewage discharged in11
The decayed being o f the past exists concurrently within the river. Thus, we are in a much more dynamic creative reality than in The Waste Land, where being and change function in seemingly different ontological worlds:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
In The Waste Land, the river, the creative force, is relatively impervious to being, as between oil and water, and as such cannot overcome the stasis o f identity, while in the Wake being (HCE) and change (ALP) interpenetrate each other. In Eliot's poem, it is an
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abstract aesthetic reverberation ofsound, the voices oftradition and authority, completely without substance, logic, or essential force, which move from the past into the future through the present. In the Wake, however, the gap between the postleadeny past and the "aplombervious fiitules" consists of a "boodle" of deformed and maimed memories ("maimeries"). (Compare this to the bats with baby faces in The Waste Land).
Joyce is trying to reconstruct substance in order to expose how our ontological commitments proceed through collapsing both the world and ourselves into the deontic (obligation and entitlement) and alethic (necessity and possibility) dimensions o f our language. These maimed memories are contained within the sound itself, which is the word o f the river. Memory exists itself as an expression marking a moment o f time. But for whom? These memories are within the "buzzim" of ALP, which is herself (her bosom) and the sound of the river. ALP exists as sound within the domain of grammar, not within what passes for psychology. Her memories work within this grammar not on herself, the sourceandendofthesound,butonherson,Butt,orShemthepenman, whoishere transformed into ALP: "me awlghul omegrims" (348. 05). or me (Butt) ALP [alpha omega], O Mega: 0 Big; O me grims: 0 me grin/ grim; megrim: migraine: head; Grim as God: o my God! With this call we all, as Christ did when he accused God o f forsaking him, lose ourselves, and a moment is marked by that loss, by that cry. Butt cries out (about) not only his transformation into ALP, not only to "omegrims" with his judgment on himself and his mother "me awlphul", but cries: "and medears run sloze". The waters of the river, of ALP, is made up of others, her children (me dears), her beauties. This sets up a pattern of creation that is simultaneously a collapse of identities (Butt:Shaun:ALP)
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and a manifestation o f identity in others. These tears as they leave ALP form defined identities, drops ofwater:
It was so duusk that the tears o f night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes and sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep no with them. (158. 20-24)
"[A]s we weep no with them"? This disconnection "with them" means in weeping these tears ALP (k)no(ws) them as we might 'no' things at night, as negative spaces, what will later be called "trancitive spaces", so that we are not with them, but they constitute our own loss of ourselves (to sleep or time or death). This is a way of symbolizing what is not there, of seeming to say what cannot be said. While we cannot articulate ourselves as nothing, as dead, as not, and in this sense cannot get outside o f language, we can articulate 'nothing', 'death', 'not'. This articulation, however, cannot work through reference or identity (we cannot answer "what is it? " with "nothing" and mean this "nothing" ontologically). Nothing" emerges at a higher level of abstraction, at the level of meaning within the sentence, at the level o f grammar at which Wakecm nonsense functions. Ourexpressionsoflossbecomebecomingsofform. Butwhathasbecomeofsubstance and our relation to it?
ALP's breasts are maimed into "maimeries" by the children (medears) pulling her into themselves as they run into the future. Her dear tears are formed out o f herself and thrown into the procession "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" ( 254. 17). This is another creation myth, another version of the Bible in two 'sentences'.
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The 'facts' in this new world are letters and numbers, and thus we must read these sentences at that level.
The initial indefinite article is doubled by the succeeding command o f "and" into "aa". These three terms when contracted form "a an' aa", or a stuttered An(n)a. Indeed, in Swedish A and in Danish and Norwegian aa means river. The first and second term in thisserieseachconsistofoneandthreelettersrespectively. Thesecondtermina standard numerical progression of whole numbers, or of moments, or of identities would
consist of two letters. If we read this series numerically, therefore, the elided middle term between one and three arises as the third term as if called forth by its absence. Thus the beginning, "A" (one) and the end, "and" (three), generate the between "aa" (two). The two letter structure is repeated in the fourth term, the two letter "ab". This term does not replicate the doubling o f the initial "A", the origin, but introduces the second letter o f the alphabet and thus redefines the numerical series into an alphabetical series. This series, however, is interrupted, as was the numerical series, by the elision o f the expected "ac" and its replacement with the Latin ad, to, toward. The inclusion of "to" further conflates the alphabetic series with the numerical by repeating the third terms count (two) in the Latin semantic pun (to). This "disconnection ofthe succeeding" ( 228. 17) introduces a preposition o f movement, and thus serves to define the proceeding series by its looking forward. And if this end is not the identity of the mathematical and the alphabetical it might turn us back toward the source o f their mutual generation.
We have read only half-way through the first sentence: "A and aa ab . . The alphabetical numerical series o f this first eight letters is answered, mimicked, copied in the
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last eight letters, and thus emerges as a picture, or rather a schematic o f how we become in our counting in our language. This is the picture:
A and aa ab/ ad /abu abiad.
(8) (2) (8)
The indefinite singularity o f the "a" repeated, sung or strung as a series emerges as a pattern in which the "and" is translated into the mathematical operator "ad(d)". One might imagine our stuttering in sound, as an expression o f a will to speak, to configure ourselves within the world, abstracted into a reflection o f this stuttering into a representation, that is, into a symbolic operator. "Ad" creates an expectation ofan end, a movement toward objective space, seemingly satisfied with the inclusion of the father (Arabic, abu) into the series. Theeightlettersonthissideofthecentral"ad"coalesceintoonlytwoterms: "abu abiad". The second word, "abiad"(white), continues to sound in Arabic. HCE is invoked as the "White Father", the European God, the white imperialist entering Africa,
conquering those countries where Arabic is spoken. The polyphonic confusion o f terms and principles o f progression in the first eight letters is pushed toward an end where the father "abiad[s]", awaits, continues, abides, in tautology. This parody of Christ's claim to
be "the Alpha and the Omega" does not rest on the replication and leveling o f the beginning and end; but describes a beginning moving toward an end: a between.
The eight letter bookends, the past (ALP) and the future (HCE), isolate the toward (ad)asadescriptionofthepresentasakindofsubjunctive. Thesignificanceofthe number eight in the movement from nothingness to creation is described by Augustine in his Confessions. In his dissection of how time gets measured through sound and
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language, Augustine invokes Ambrose's evening hymn, "God, Creator o f all things" , and then analyzes how this phrase describes God's creation from nothing:
'God, Creator o f all things'--Deus Creator omnium--the line consists o f eight syllables,inwhichshortandlongsyllablesalternate. Sothefourwhichareshort (the first, third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the second, fourth, sixth and eighth). . . . But when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold n the short, and how use it to measure the longs, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? . . . They do not exist. . . Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there. (Xl. xxvii [35])
The logic describing the relationship between the short and "single in relation to the four long" syllables recalls Joyce's "odd's without ends", and links this syllable interaction, in Joyce's case letter interactions, with this Creator o f all things: on one side o f "ad" ALP and on the other "HCE". The measuring of time in words, for Augustine, is measuring ourselves, our memory, and therefore a measuring of nothing in relation to the Ideality of God. ThemeaningofJoyce'sversionof"God,Creatorofallthings",inhishymntothe night, forces this Creator both into the missing substance, used by Augustine to describe
time, and into language. Joyce is making time language, and forcing God into grammar. This 18 letter description o f the Wake writes the ABC's as a modulation o f the
tautologically repetitive 'a and a a a' defining itselfas marking a succession of moments(?
