This post reflects on my last post and briefly offers an alternate way of conceiving the equations that I discussed there.

It would help for readers to be familiar with my posts Mental Math and Feeling and Falling. I also build here on my discussion of the Prankquean and Identity.

In those posts, I consider the idea that “things” are an invention of the human mind. The only actual existence is the flux of riverrun, which is constantly changing and cannot be said to be composed of stable things. It is no thing or No-Thing or Nothing (literally beyond our ability to visualize or define; any way that you could represent it would most definitely not be it; even the word “it” is wrong). But our minds project thing-ness onto this flux, creating a relatively stable mental world of discrete entities (including the self).

The posts I link to above explore how these “things” are conventional tools for navigating reality rather than stable essences. Yet, our minds easily become trapped in stories (often about Who We Are and What We Are Owed) that we mistake for essences, the Way Things Really Are. This confused state corresponds to the Fallen World in Joyce’s scheme, while the Redemption corresponds to the processes of escaping from such states, understanding the flux of the universe, and resolving to narrate one’s story differently.

In Mental Math, I pointed out that the equations of II.2 suggest that the Fallen World and Redemption are ultimately equivalent. But they also show how the action of ALP (0) on the brothers can turn the Fallen World (their conflict) into Redemption (their unity) or Redemption into the Fallen World.

The idea occurred to me that a better way of saying this is that ALP here represents the way our minds can see the unity underlying conflict and/or see how conflict is necessary to express unity. ALP thus represents the shifting of our perspective that is necessary for us to understand how the two are equivalent.

An apt comparison came to my mind: reality is like an optical illusion whose appearance changes depending on how you position your eyes.

Is the above image — the famous “Rubin’s Vase” — a picture of a black chalice on a white background or a picture of two white faces in profile on a black background?

The answer is both — or, perhaps more precisely, “it depends on which way you look at it.”

There’s a parallel to the question “Is reality a riverrun flux of No-Thing or is it a collection of ‘things’?”

Depends on how you look at it.

The same is true of any object, any subset of reality. Take the clock on my wall. Is it a single thing? Is it a collection of objects (gears and mechanisms and hands and parts)? Is it part of the room, such that it’s not clear where the boundary is between it and the wall or between it and other objects? (It is arbitrary, after all, for us to decide where its atoms “end” and the atoms comprising the wall behind it or the air around it “begin”)

Which of those views is “correct”? All of them, depending on the frame of reference we’re using — or, rather, the story we’re telling.

It’s the same with the self. Am “I” a single thing? A collection of parts and drives and desires and memories? A part of some larger groups?

It depends. There are many tales told. Life is a series of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and reality. The problem is that so many people are locked into certain stories, taking them to represent essence or stable truth; the problem is that so many people cannot shift into other perspectives.

ALP — the zero in the equation — represents the ability to shift perspectives, to turn our minds differently toward reality (a parallel to turning our eyes differently toward the drawing). It’s the ability to step back and realize that the way we’ve been telling our story of ourselves is just that: a story, something we’re creating, something we could potentially narrate differently. It’s the Prankquean coming to shake us out of our normal way of thinking of ourselves and the world. It’s the text of Finnegans Wake itself, jolting us out of our expectations to encourage us to “read” Joyce’s work differently and, in a parallel way, “read” reality differently.

Of course, none of what I’ve been saying is to deny that in standard, conventional terms, there are true and false statements that can be made about reality. The world may be in flux, but we can abstract some concepts from it that describe our experience with incredible consistency and accuracy. I am in no way proposing that “there is no truth” or that “reality is nothing more than how we decide to talk about it.” I can’t, for instance, start levitating by deciding to “narrate the story of myself differently to myself.”

But I can change the way I think about myself, my life, the world, and others by paying attention to how I narrate these things, figuring out which of my thoughts are legitimate abstractions from reality and which are parts of tales I’m telling, realizing that much of my experience is filtered through these stories, and developing the ability to narrate differently. These are the first steps to changing the way I experience the world and the way I’m capable of interacting with others.

The Wake is one tool among many that may help us cultivate that ability to look at reality differently, to change the angle of our gaze and thereby change the picture we experience.

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Note: after reading this post, it might be fruitful to revisit my discussion of Clothing in Finnegans Wake (Part 3): the naked body (creative process, ability to tell stories differently) corresponds to the Redemptive perspective aligned with riverrun, while clothing (the products of the creative process, works of art and narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world) corresponds to the Fallen World. Shedding a particular set of clothes and starting the cycle anew corresponds to what I’m describing here as shifting one’s gaze toward reality.