In Finnegans Wake I.1, the Wellington Monument becomes a museum that is also a “museyroom”: a phallic mushroom as well as the home of the muse. It reminds us that history as well as sexuality can inspire art.

I’ll eventually be posting my thoughts on the “Willingdone” paragraph of I.1, but until inspiration strikes, I’ll write a little about artifacts in Finnegans Wake. I’m always put in mind of Indiana Jones declaring to would-be graverobbers that an artifact “belongs in a museum!” The fact that one of the Indiana Jones sequels named his son “Mutt” also amuses me because of the Mutt and Jeff passage in I.1.

In a way, Finnegans Wake itself is a kind of museum, gathering together and displaying linguistic artifacts and cultural references from all around the world. Like real museums, the Wake might be considered either a benevolent display of such objects or a cynical, colonial appropriation of them. In a Wakean spirit, we might regard it as both at once.

At various points in the book, artifacts appear, left behind by HCE from his Fall and gathered up by ALP. Read on for my thoughts, especially about the ways that the letters of the alphabet can be seen as such artifacts.

The broken pieces of HCE are such artifacts, starting with the 14 body parts woven into the first full paragraph of the Wake. Like Osiris, HCE is broken into constituent parts to be reassembled by ALP, who gathers up the pieces of the Fall and distributes them as gifts to her 111 children in I.8. In this way, HCE will be resurrected as a new incarnation: the aspects of humanity represented by Shem and Shaun will recombine, and the guilt and glory of the Father will reiterate itself in new forms and stories, in the next generation, in each of us.

A passage that reminds me of the remnants of the Fall is the end of I.3, when the Cad gets tired of shouting abuse at HCE, who is locked in his house/Stonehenge, and departs after “leav[ing] downg the whole grumus of brookpebbles,” which is itself a version of HCE’s scandalous defecation in the Park. It turns out, HCE/Cad has left “chambered cairns,” or burial mounds — “skatterlings of a stone” — all around the landscape, tokens of his presence that will one day be gathered together when he “wakes from earthsleep”:

Yed he med leave to many a door beside of Oxmanswold for so witness his chambered cairns a cloudletlitter silent that are at browse up hill and down coombe and on eolithostroton, at Howth or at Coolock or even at Enniskerry, a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living. Olivers lambs we do call them, skatterlings of a stone, and they shall be gathered unto him, their herd and paladin, as nubilettes to cumule, in that day hwen, same the lightning lancer of Azava Arthurhonoured (some Finn, some Finn avant!), he skall wake from earthsleep, haught crested elmer, in his valle of briers of Greenman’s Rise O, (lost leaders live! the heroes return!) and o’er dun and dale the Wulverulverlord (protect us!) his mighty horn skall roll, orland, roll.

The “testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living” reminds me of Edmund Burke’s description of the social contract as a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (and it reminds me of Thomas Paine’s critique of this idea as “contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living“). As the archetypal Everyman, HCE binds together all people, living, dead, and not-yet-living, and can provide occasion for questioning what the exact relationship between them should be.

Another major collection of artifacts comes immediately after the Mutt and Jeff passage of I.1, when the letters of the alphabet appear as “curios of signs” of the past, a “middenhide hoard of objects,” hidden in a midden, a garbage or refuse pile, just as ALP’s Letter and the real-life Book of Kells. The “claybook” is Finnegans Wake itself, the midden pile in which this message is found, its letters and words and linguistic artifacts gathered together for us like the garbage of humanity:

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin. Thy thingdome is given to the Meades and Porsons. The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality. But with a rush out of his navel reaching the reredos of Ramasbatham.

I’ve discussed the bolded sentence here, where I reflect on the idea that grasping for permanence in this impermanent world — which I connect to the idea of buying into Platonic ideals and formulating an idea of Selfhood, which is basically the process of telling oneself a story about the self as an essence locked into conflict with others — is the basis for suffering. This emergence into suffering is a sort of “feeling and falling” out of a oneness with the flux of the universe into a debased notion of individuality.

“Absentminded” is here rendered “abcedminded,” with a fallen consciousness full of language, the broken remnants of what was once a cosmic wholeness. Once we conceive of ourselves as separate from the universe, we use language to create images of the world as we see it and try to communicate with others, whom we too often conceive of as fully external to us and opposed to us.

A terricolous vivelyonview this; queer and it continues to be quaky. A hatch, a celt, an earshare the pourquose of which was to cassay the earthcrust at all of hours, furrowards, bagawards, like yoxen at the turnpaht.Here say figurines billycoose arming and mounting. Mounting and arming bellicose figurines see here. Futhorc, this liffle effingee is for a firefing called a flintforfall. Face at the eased! O I fay! Face at the waist! Ho, you fie! Upwap and dump em, Face to Face!

The artifacts here include tools like a hatchet, a chisel, and a ploughshare (rendered an “earshare” because it was used by Earwicker? And we all share in it?); and armed figurines (“billycoose” = bellicose, warlike).

The Fs of “Face to Face” are turned on their side in the printed Finnegans Wake text — I could not figure out how to do that easily here. The first is turned ninety degrees to the right, and the second is turned ninety degrees to the left. The letters perform the figurines being dumped on top of each other. In that position, they look like the number 69, in that old joke that ruled the world long before 6-7 was a twinkle in our collective eyes.

It reminds me of the line in II.1, when Shem, as Glugg, first confronts the girls (Issy) and his brother: “And they are met, face a facing. They are set, force to force.” The Contrary forces of the universe are set against each other, and yet they are drawn to each other (spiritually and erotically, which symbolizes spiritual need).

When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. Here (please to stoop) are selveran cued peteet peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make the tomtummy’s pay roll. Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that’s thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengeance. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons. Owlets’ eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene, and oldwolldy wobblewers, haudworth a wipe o grass. Sss! See the snake wurrums everyside! Our durlbin is sworming in sneaks. They came to our island from triangular Toucheaterre beyond the wet prairie rared up in the midst of the cargon of prohibitive pomefructs but along landed Paddy Wippingham and the his garbagecans cotched the creeps of them pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whatsthats. Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. Racketeers and bottloggers.

In the fallen world, we must use language, in which the little, petty, petite signs do “duty for the whole” and make a kind of hologram or false representation of that whole by trying — and failing — to represent something in the speaker’s mind. By speaking, we try to close the gap between the mental representation of the world in our minds and the mental representation in our interlocutors’ minds, an attempt that can never be fully successful.

Among the letters the above passage discusses, in the context of examining different artifacts or symbols, are A, B, C, D, E, P, R, S, W Y, Thorn (the archaic letter)…the commentary on the letters anticipates, with verbal echoes, the commentary on the appearance of ALP’s Letter in I.5. The phrase “queer and it continues to be quaky” anticipates the ending of ALP’s Letter in IV.1: “Dear. And we go on to Dirtdump.”

All the objects of the fallen world are before us. St. Patrick will come with his garbage can to gather up this refuse and end the dream in IV.1 (it already happened and will happen again….).

The word “balifusion” appears to come from a reference to the ancient Irish alphabet Ogham. In a book called The Story of the Alphabet by Edward Clodd, it says that this alphabet is “divided into four aicmes or groups, each containing five letters: the first aicme, B, L, F, S, N.”

So “balifusion” is those letters with vowels inserted (not unlike the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of god, into which vowels have to be inserted).

It is possible that Ogham was also, or may have been derived from, a system of representing numbers, again much as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet each signify numbers as well as sounds. Symbols of sound and numerals run together as the text of Finnegans Wake suggests that some people divide the universe into many, and some gather up the many into one (they “sum” those divided numbers) — just as in the math problem of II.2. But either way, those calculations (the tally) — that is, the process of joining together and breaking apart — are dependent on our systems of representing the world. Here in this paragraph, those systems of representing the world are the alphabet, just as in II.2 they are numbers and mathematics, but all of these systems symbolize the ways that all of our minds represent the world by constructing images of ourselves and others and narrating stories about the world.

In this way, we all feel and fall into the dream of Selfhood, and its unsatisfying grasping after permanence. At least periodically, we can Wake to more fulfilling experience.