The following letter ends Chapter II.2:

NIGHTLETTER

With our best youlldied greedings to Pep and Memmy and the old folkers below and beyant, wishing them all very merry Incarnations in this land of the livvey and plenty of preprosperousness through their coming new yonks

from
jake, jack and little sousoucie
(the babes that mean too)

The new year in Finnegans Wake points forward to the future: the Eternal Story of HCE and ALP will be played out again in the world of the children, who will reenact the story in new ways, resurrecting the past. Their yuletide greetings to the Father and Mother of the past are “youlldied,” because the past is gone and buried. Or is it? Those old folks (old folkers/fuckers) will live again in the next generation, and they will have (hopefully) merry incarnations in the new world of the children, the land of the living/Liffey. And throughout their new incarnations as people of the New World (New Year/New York/New Yonks/New Yanks), the Father and Mother of the past will (hopefully) find not only prosperousness but preposterousness as they act out that old story with all of its “yanks” (in the sexual sense as well).

The children “mean to” — they have their own wills and their own lives and their own intentions. But, at the same time, they “mean too/also” — they also mean/signify the archetypes of the Eternal Story, just like their parents.

We are the children. We are the reincarnation of the archetypes and of the past, which had also been its own reincarnation of the archetypes and the past.

Do we have free will? Yes, we are our own people. What we do, we mean to. Do we have free will? No, we can’t help but act out some of the same patterns that the past did — we, too, mean some of the same things that the past did. And in that way, we can often be too mean.

The children’s letter is simultaneously the Letter of ALP, the one that indicts and forgives HCE/Humanity. It is a symbol of Finnegans Wake itself and, more broadly, of art: it issues forth after the monosyllables that close II.2 because those ten syllables trace the process of manifestation. Yet a Qabalistic maxim is that Malkuth (the lowest sephirah, manifestation and experience) is in Kether (the highest sephirah, the first emanation of God or the flux of existence), and Kether in Malkuth, only after another fashion.

This means that the highest and lowest are united. Not in the simplest sense of those words but from a certain points of view. The spirit and flesh are not separate from each other. The Fall is the Redemption, and vice versa — they are simply two modes of viewing the same event, two stories about the same thing. HCE/Humanity’s Fall is an ever-occurring feast, and our indulgence in it is our redemption, our realization that there is, in the end, “Neither a soul to be saved nor a body to be kicked.”

Or something like that.

Happy New Year!