Category Archives: Mystical Blathering

Fights All Over Cuxhaven

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Among the catalogue of rumors about HCE in I.3 comes this sentence:

A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven.

The most interesting thing I learned from the annotations is that Cuxhaven is a real place! It’s a German port where an air-raid was conducted in World War I. On an initial read, I assumed it was a made-up name meant to sound like “cucks haven,” which is an appropriate name for the fallen world in Finnegans Wake.

Read on for thoughts about this haven for “cucks,” which I connect to the idea of the deathbed.

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Didja Hear What I Said, Tone?

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I’ve recently returned to my re-reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I’m finding the final chapter more interesting than ever before — and funnier! I’ve laughed out loud several times reading it, including one scene that I’ll discuss here in this post, a scene in which a strange character repeats himself. I compare it below to a recurring gag on my favorite television show, The Sopranos, and I reflect on the significance of Joyce repeating a moment from his own life, enshrining it in art in a way reminiscent of what William Wordsworth called a “Spot of Time.”

Close readings of Joyce, reflections on life, and fragments of pop culture — all this and more on today’s post!

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The Middle Pillar and Chakras in the Wake

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Coming off my last post about Qabalah, I thought it would be useful to discuss a passage of the Wake in which the yogic “energy centers” of the body appear. This is another piece of occult beliefs that Joyce probably first encountered as part of Theosophy: in some traditions of yoga (that is, Indian systems of mysticism), there are said to be seven energy centers or “chakras” running down the body, along the spinal cord. In Western occult traditions, a similar belief in energy centers was endorsed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which attributed five energy centers to some sephiroth of the Tree of Life, the central column of spheres called the “Middle Pillar.” The idea is that the Middle Pillar is balanced between the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy, just as Tipareth (the central sephirah) balances also the spheres above and below it (and thus is the union of the physical and the spiritual, the human and the divine).

Read on for my discussion of Joyce’s attribution of Irish writers to these energy centers.

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