Here’s a brief follow up to my last post, discussing a little more about the encounter of HCE with the king in I.2.

During the scene at the beginning of I.2, the king turns to his men (who are versions of Shem and Shaun, while the king is their combined form [the next HCE]). As ever, HCE has “three men in him” (I.5). The text says this is a

triptychal religious family symbolising puritas of doctrina, business per usuals and the purchypatch of hamlock where the paddish preties grow

Often in Finnegans Wake, it is difficult to read conjunctions like “and.” Is the bolded phrase linked to “business per usuals” as part of an appositive phrase describing what the three men symbolize? Or is the bolded phrase indicating something else to which the king turns, along with the two men?

It sort of doesn’t matter because it’s both. The king turns to the two men and to a “purchypatch,” and the purchypatch is simultaneously all three of them or what the three of them symbolize. Why write Finnegans Wake as a dream if you’re not going to take advantage of dream logic, where one thing is many things or everything?

This “purchypatch” — which sounds like “purchase,” implying the zero-sum capitalist fallen world — is a patch of hemlock, which was used to execute Socrates (the philosopher’s death is another manifestation of HCE’s fall). Apparently, the patch of hemlock has shamrocks growing in it: “paddish preties” might also refer to the two temptresses in the Park, and we should recall that I.2 suggests that the story of the encounter with the king may have actually been an encounter with the girls. [“Majesty” –> “maggers” –> “Maggies”; the resemblance between these words and “maggots” also implies an encounter with death. Perhaps the fall of HCE also represents each of us recognizing our mortality for the first time.]

The presence of shamrocks links this scene to the meeting of the Druid with St. Patrick in IV.1. The spelling “hamlock” connects HCE’s fall to Hamlet’s indecision (and the word “hesitancy,” discussed in my last post) as well as the Oedipal anxiety. Hamlet is yet another retelling of the Eternal Story.

When the king jokes about HCE being an “Earwicker,” there is both laughter and silence:

(One still hears that pebble crusted laughta, japijap cheerycherrily, among the roadside tree the lady Holmpatrick planted and still one feels the amossive silence of the cladstone allegibelling: Ive mies outs ide Bourn.)

The Fall divides HCE into two: Shem and Shaun, stem and stone, laughter and silence, joy and sorrow. Even the phrases “One still” and “still one” echo and reverse each other like the brothers.

The phrase “amossive silence” recalls “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” which (appropriately) can be taken two ways: as encouragement to keep going/rolling, or as an encouragement to stay in place. What’s the right thing to do in a situation? Push forward or hold back? This dilemma reminds me of Shem’s in I.7: trying to decide “whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back.” As I discussed in my overview to that chapter, Shem’s investigations into that question bring him into another version of the encounter with the Cad.

As I wrote in that post, “Perhaps it is a false choice between forging ahead and falling back: maybe the best choice is to embrace the present (the Now) as the palimpsest of all history containing — here, now, at this very moment — the wounds and the healing and both and neither — all at the same time.”

So it makes sense that the scene of HCE’s fall contains a phrase that could imply both sides of that “false choice.”

Gladstone was an English prime minister (HCE variant), and a gladstone is also a kind of suitcase with two compartments (which correspond to Shem and Shaun).

Altogether, the part I bolded in the quote from I.2 above suggests something like a stone clad in moss, with a massive silence whose words are all simultaneously legible and illegible with allegations and libel and alibis that apply to the general case (allegermein — German for “general”) of all men (alle menschen).

The mossy stone speaks out of its silence, and it speaks the scandal that comprises our world of experience. In addition to “I’ve been born into the outside world,” its words can also mean something like, I’ve missed out, I have my missus outside, or beware the Ides (of March/April).

And that moss is both hemlock and the place where the shamrocks grow, those symbols of the trinity and the redemption, the letters H C E, human, erring, condonable.

There are several other references to moss in the Wake that would be worth investigating, including calling the New World (the world of the children) Boston Moss, a reference to a mossacre, and ALP in her final speech saying she would lie quiet as a moss (quiet as a mouse) while HCE was with her.

Perhaps I will one day advance the theory that all of Finnegans Wake emerges from a patch of moss.