Book I, Chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake is the ALP chapter. It starts like this:

O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all

It opens with an O, which represents the vagina, but also the zero or nothingness that precedes and underlies all manifest experience (as in the Hebrew Qabalah: zero is like a cosmic egg that cracks open and produces the universe). These first three lines are arranged like a triangle, the symbol of ALP, which can be another symbol for a vagina. Additionally, the number 3 is attributed in the Qabalah to the highest female principle, as 2 is attributed to the highest male principle: on the Tree of Life, it is the purpose of the third sphere is to give form to the raw energy of the second sphere. This is more or less ALP’s role: to take the energy from HCE’s Fall and make something of it, to make breakfast from the broken egg, to gather up the pieces of the Father and pass them on to the children, “resurrecting” the Father by allowing his story of transgression to play out again in the next generation.

The opening triangle lines begin with O — that cosmic egg — and end with all. ALP produces all things from the nothing-egg that precedes the world.

The chapter takes the form of two old washerwomen on the shores of the Liffey gossiping about ALP and her unfaithful husband HCE. They talk back and forth without clear demarcation between their utterances, but it’s pretty easy to follow (as easy as anything is in the Wake):

I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don’t butt me—hike!—when you bend.

These women also *are* the River Liffey, so they’re winding and babbling and “bending” as the river does. They are also a version of the two young girls who seduce HCE in the park, which means they are a version of ALP (who is ultimately the feminine part of HCE, who is a reflection of the original Source, Finnegan — as the second and third spheres of the Qabalah are aspects of the first sphere, and of the 0 that underlies them, as all things in Finnegans Wake ultimately are the dreamer).

They gossip about the events of the novel as they wash out the “dirty laundry” of the characters. Given my last two posts, which argue that the Wake uses clothing as a symbol of the facts of manifest physical existence, through which the eternal archetypes and stories manifest, the washer women are performing a version of ALP’s function: cleaning the worn-out forms of the past so that they might be passed forward to the future in new, but strangely similar, forms:

>Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil!

She’s washed this shirt an infinite number of times before and will wash it an infinite number of times again. The cycles renew and the river washes it all away, and again the wheel of time turns. As I.1 notes, ALP does “all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on.” She creates form out of the raw energy of the fall (“Grampupus is fallen down but Grinny sprids the boord” — notice how “sprids” unites spreads and rids…redemption and fall).

The chapter is full of river puns: the names of hundreds of rivers are worked into the dialogue, suggesting quite strongly that Joyce is not writing merely about Ireland but about humanity itself, whose civilizations for obvious reasons have tended to grow up around rivers.

The washerwomen suggest that ALP sent seven girls (aspects of herself, or rather of Issy, the younger ALP) to seduce HCE, thus making her the cause of the Fall and the source of redemption. They detail how ALP dolled herself up and gathered up all the pieces from the fall to distribute to all their children, who are all of us (presents in her sack, like Santa Claus at “Fillagain’s crissormiss wake,” I.1).

As the chapter nears an end, the washerwomen are getting separated further and further by the river, and it’s getting harder to hear each other over the rushing waters. They sum up our heroes:

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

HCE apparently has breasts, making him a union of male and female perhaps like Eliphas Levi’s drawing of the Devil/Baphomet — the breasts on that drawing are associated with the fourth and fifth spheres on the Tree of Life, which signify manifest matter and motion, and which I would connect to Shem and Shaun, the sons of ALP and HCE, the female and male principles as they exist in the phenomenal world (the “Twins of his bosom”).

With the end of this chapter, we are entering a deeper part of the dream, and Book II, which is about to begin, will be all about the brothers, who battle each other while repeating key parts of HCE’s story.

At the conclusion of the chapter, the washerwomen become transformed into a tree and a stone, symbols of the brothers (as well as obviously parts of the male genitals, with the river or female principle rushing between them). The two girls, in a sense, *are* the two brothers. In the Qabalah, spheres four and five are a reflection of two and three. The brothers are the masculine-ish and feminine-ish polarities of the Dreamer on a lower level.

The washerwomen find it more difficult to hear each other, so they’re each sort of misinterpreting what the other says:

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! 

I like how the refrain of “tell me” morphs into “elm.”

And then the magical ending words of the chapter, which I once was surprised to find on a wall at the subway stop near the NYC Public Library:

Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!