My fascination with synchronicity grows more out of Joyce than out of Jung. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are all about synchronicity, and they came out long before Jung ever wrote anything on the subject.
Robert Anton Wilson, 1988 interview
Among the volumes on occult subjects he had in his personal library in Trieste, we find many texts concerning occult matters, like Jacob Boehme’s The Signature of all Things, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, two books on theosophy and discipleship by Annie Besant, a tract on the occult meaning of blood by Rudolph Steiner, a study in French on Spiritism, a volume by Merlin called The Book of Charms and Ceremonies Whereby All May Have the Opportunity of Obtaining Any Object They Desire, a translation of Plutarch’s theosophical essays, a study on Yogi philosophy and oriental occultism, a work by Giordano Bruno and a study on him, and finally several works by Blake and Yeats.23 Joyce remained interested in the occult also in his more mature years. In the Paris library we find a copy of The Occult Review (July 1923) which features essays and articles on the “Practical Qabala,” the “Akasic Records,” and “the alleged communication with Madame Blavatsky.” The Paris library hosts also other books on similar subjects, though not as many as the Trieste library.24 Such a variety of texts would suggest that Joyce’s position towards the occult
was very eclectic, as if the subject were a kind of amalgam of different traditions, all marked by the signature of secrecy. Theosophy, mysticism, magic, spiritism, and the so-called occult science in fact blend together to form a cluster of obscure erudition where Joyce eventually finds useful ideas, helpful in building up what looks literally like a cryptic system. This is consistent with the ways in which scholars use the word occult as an umbrella term.
Enrico Terrinoni, Occult Joyce: The Hidden in Ulysses
On June 16, folks gather to celebrate polymath literary trickster and all-around cantankerous goofball James Joyce and to read from Ulysses in particular. Last year’s last-minute bibliomancy yielded up the esoteric secrets of the banana split, but I missed all the readings. This morning I had the fun to hear the Telemachus/Martello tower episode (1) read at Bloomfield’s Crazy Mocha, and this afternoon caught the Scylla and Charybdis/National Library episode (9) at the Carnegie Library in Oakland. I did my own bibliomancy too, twice again, this time both from Ulysses.
THE FLYBILL
K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY
All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG’S HEAD
Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
pg 510/523 Circe/Night Town episode (15)
K. 11. can also be read as K. K., K2/2K, and 11.11., but to what in Ulysses does Bloom’s talking flybill refer? Round two answers this question and provides another instance of the 11-11/15 mirroring I first picked up [appropriately, given the adjectival use of "treacle" here] in the first Harry Potter novel.
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
Kino’s
11/-
Trousers.
Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kind of places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
pg 150/153 Lestrygonians/lunch episode (8)
First let’s take the rowboat to the First Pennsylvania State Normal School at Millersville, where, in 1881, pedagogy and grammar prof (and future principal and textbook author, PA Teachers’ Association and NEA President, and 33rd degree Freemason) Eliphalet Oram Lyte saw the publication of The Franklin Square Song Collection and his most enduring contribution to human culture: the music (which he may not have actually composed, but adapted) to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. Here’s another adaptation (of the lyrics) by local puppet regent King Friday XIII.
- Propel, propel, propel your craft,
- unforcefully down the liquid solution.
- Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
- existence is merely an illusion.
Lyte fled this illusory existence in 1913.
Pound first heard of James Joyce through Yeats, and contacted Joyce in Trieste in 1913. Joyce was at a low point; his book of poems Chamber Music had been published six years earlier and was his only book in print, and he was in poor financial straits trying to support his wife and two children. Joyce’s difficulties in publishing his collection Dubliners were legendary; it took him almost ten years for the volume to be published without expurgation. Pound was drawn by Joyce’s travails with censorious publishers, and his support resulted in the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a serialization in The Egoist in 1914.
Jesse Rossa, “Joyce, Lawrence and Frost“
This essay on how the magic arts of marketing are used in Ulysses offers further clues.
The most striking thing about the Kino’s advertisement, as an “answer,” is its opacity. This is not language spoken by one human voice in response to another; the words are just there, buoyant and energetic, a quotation from some mysterious and otherworldly source: Kino’s 11/-Trousers. The rowboat serves as a simple metaphor for the peculiar linguistic condition of the phrase, suggesting its quoted, artificial status and its separation from the ordinary give and take of conversation. In the characteristic mode of advertisement, this piece of text is adrift in the natural world, impenetrable and stubbornly detached. Perhaps the boat is also meant to draw our attention to the mobility of the Kino’s ad, since it does in fact wander on the treacly swells of Ulysses, reappearing twice in “Circe” as the gnomic sign “K. 11″ (15.1658, 2633), which Bloom says is “the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran” (15.1656), and then again in “Ithaca,” as an example of “the modern art of advertisement . . . condensed in trilateral monoideal symbols” (17.581-82).(2)
Daniel P. Gunn, “Beware of imitations: advertisement as reflexive commentary in ‘Ulysses.’” 1996
Thanks, Daniel!
The two other references to the ad are
CHRIS CALLINAN
What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran?
BLOOM
Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.
pg. 478/488 Circe/Nighttown episode (15)
and
What also stimulated him in his cogitations?
The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James, the former by his 1d. bazaar at 42 George’s street, South, the latter at his 6½d. shop and world’s fancy fair and waxwork exhibition at 30 Henry street, admission 2d., children 1d.; and the infinite possibilities hitherto unexplored of the modern art of advertisement if condensed in triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility (divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince, to decide.
Such as?
K. 11. Kino’s 11/- Trousers.
House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.
pg. 667/683 Ithaca/Bloom & Stephen at No. 7 Eccles St. episode (17)
Aldebaran, then. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s Annotated Ulysses (which, remarkably, was shelved at the library on Bloomsday) tells us that,
“Subsolar ecliptic” is a phrase no longer in use in astronomy. Callinan’s question in effect means, “What is the angle between a line from the center of the earth to Aldebaran and a line from the center of the sun to Aldebaran?”
and that,
The correct answer to Callinan’s question would have been 0.048 seconds of arc.
but also that,
in the Harvard system of classification of stars by temperature (1890), K would correctly identify Aldebaran as a somewhat cooler than average star.
In fact, Aldebaran is a K5III star (for another 11-15 link), the brightest star and “bull’s eye” of my tropical zodiac Sun sign, Taurus, and the 13th brightest star as seen from Earth. Wikipedia’s Aldebaran page also provides a hypothetical K2
In 1997, a possible substellar companion was reported, with a mass at least 11 times that of Jupiter with an orbital period of around 2 years; however, this has not been confirmed.
and an occult 15.
This star is close enough to the ecliptic to be occulted by the moon. Such occultations occur when the moon’s ascending node is near the autumnal equinox, as will be the case around 2015.
For a running start into the last quotation, note that the Tribe of Ephraim is also linked to the bull, and not just by the ancient Egypto-Israelites.
Ephraim Wales Bull (March 4, 1806 – September 26, 1895) was the inventor of the Concord grape. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Bull moved to Concord in 1836, settling with his wife on a farm next door to Amos Bronson Alcott.
In 1843, Bull began the deliberate process of breeding a grape that could thrive in the cold New England climate. By 1849, having planted 22,000 seedlings, he had created a large, sweet variety from a native species. By 1853, the grapes were for sale, but within several years, competing growers had begun raising their own crops of Concord grapes, purchased from Bull for $5 per vine. Bull saw little profit from the strain after the initial sales.
Ephraim Bull was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1855. In 1893, after a fall, he ended up in the Concord Home for the Aged. He died in 1895. His epitaph reads, He Sowed Others Reaped.
The Rev. James Flynn also died in 1895, as Joyce tells us in “The Sisters”, first of the fifteen stories in Dubliners, but let that go for the moment. I’d next like to focus on the terms “trilateral” (as quoted by Gunn, above) and “triliteral” (as printed in my reprint of the 1961 edition [see notes on pagination, below]). Joyce substituted the word “trilateral” for “infernal” in Finnegans Wake according to this “Genetic Exegesis“, which makes sense considering the Trilateral Commission’s infernality. While the TLC is very goal-oriented, and there is, fortunately, only one of them, calling it or its symbol
“monoideal” (in category theory, “monoid” refers to a category with a single object) would be rather a stretch, however much it seeks a future in which the category “government” contains a single globe-girdling bureaucracy.
We also find the TLC (footnote 11) rubbing shoulders with Joyce in this Journal of Allied Health publication. As for “triliteral”, the term applies both to three-letter word roots in Semitic languages and to the third type of Egyptian hieroglyph, which represents a three-consonant sequence (like TLC or, say, CFR in English). The example given after the K-2/11-11 is “House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.” and Bloom encounters/hallucinates Keyes (for whom he was working on an ad until his drunken editor intervened in the Aeolus episode [7]) in Nighttown.
BLOOM
(Solemnly.) You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
ALEXANDER KEYES
When will we have our own house of keys?
BLOOM
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival, with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.
pg. 479/489 Circe/Nighttown episode (15)
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to contrast Bloom’s Utopian scenario with that of the Trilateral Commission and to answer the questions, “Which one is more ridiculous?”
One last bit of Q&A, then I’m out:
What did I discover upon exiting the Carnegie Library?
That the front tire of my bike had deflated.
What did I do about it?
I walked it from Oakland to Kraynick’s in Garfield, across Penn Avenue from a convenience store called…
K-2.
Happy Bloomsday & cuídate!
NOTES ON PAGINATION
Page numbers preceding the “/” are from the Random House 1934 edition, the first official American edition of Ulysses, which, hilariously (to me, though maybe not so much to Joyce), was set from an inaccurate 1929 pirated edition. An accurate US edition (the one I’ve quoted from and the source [by way of Random House's June, 1990 First Vintage International Edition, which includes the 1934 page numbers parenthetically in the margins] of the page numbers following the “/”) based on the one Joyce commissioned Stuart Gilbert to edit for The Odyssey Press in 1932, wasn’t printed until 1961.