The movie Backrooms made a splash this month, turning a massive profit on a meagre budget of less than ten million dollars. The film is noteworthy because it was made by a twenty-year-old Youtuber, who was also responsible for a series of short videos about the titular extradimensional space.
This post suggests that Finnegans Wake can be read as a kind of “backrooms,” a maze that underlies reality.
Continue readingThis post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingThe beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”
This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.
Continue readingComing 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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The Suspended Sentence 