Following on from the post about Robert Anton Wilson here's another synchronicity. Last month, on the way to visit the Wake locations in the Phoenix Park and Chapelizod, I went to see the Leonora Carrington exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art.
I wasn't expecting to find anything related to Finnegans Wake here. But in Room 7, I came across this painting, 'The Burning of Giordano Bruno'.
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was the Robert Anton Wilson of his day, a man who thought so far outside the standard 'reality tunnels' of the time that he was burned at the stake as a heretic. His ideas were seen as so dangerous that he was gagged at his execution, to stop him talking to the crowd.
Carrington's painting is full of occult symbols, reflecting Bruno's interest in hermeticism.
His most startling idea was the idea that the universe is infinite, and our earth is just one of countless inhabited worlds:
'The universe is infinite
with matter as we know it extending throughout;
the universe has no borders nor limits;
the sun is just another star;
the stars are other suns,
infinite in number and in extent
with an infinity of worlds (like our own) circling them.
In the universe
there is neither up, nor down, nor right, nor left
but all is relative to where we are
there is no centre;
all is turning and in motion,
for vicissitude and motion is the principle of life;
earth turns around its own axis even as it turns around the sun
the sun turns too around its own axis'
Julia Jones, A Primer to Giordano Bruno
This belief in many inhabited worlds was heretical because it undermined the central Christian event of the incarnation – would Jesus have to be crucified in all these other worlds too?
Bruno was also very rude about the Catholic Breviary (book of rites):
'The person who compiled the breviary is an ugly dog-fucked cuckold, shameless and the breviary is like an out-of tune lute, and in it there are many things that are profane and irrelevant, and therefore it is not worth reading by serious men, but ought to be burned.'
Testimony of Fra Celestino, a fellow prisoner of the Inquisition, quoted by Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher Heretic
'You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.'
Bruno to the inquisitors
Bruno was rehabilitated in the late 19th century, and in 1889, his statue was erected in Rome's Campo De Fiori, where he was executed. An inscription on the base says, 'To Bruno - the century predicted by him - here where the fire burned.'
Joyce, in Rome in 1907, witnessed a Church procession in honour of Bruno:
'The procession in honour of the Nolan left me quite cold.'
to Stanislaus Joyce, 1 March 1907, Selected Letters, p151.
Bruno, born in Nola, called himself 'il Nolano' (the Nolan).
James Joyce discovered Bruno when he was studying Italian at University College, Dublin.
In A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus discusses Bruno with his Italian tutor, Father Charles Ghezzi:
'Other wrangle with little round head rogue’s eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan.…He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow.'
Stanislaus Joyce has a good story about his brother's love of Bruno:
'He thought seriously of abandoning his university studies and going on the stage....He sometimes took a theatrical paper called, I think, The Stage and chose his stage name, Gordon Brown, a choice which bore witness to his admiration for Giordano Bruno, whose philosophical essays he was reading at that time.'
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 1958, p132
'No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.'
'The Day of the Rabblement', 1901
'Joyce had kept the reference to 'the Nolan' advisedly...so that readers of his article should have at first a false impression that he was quoting some little known Irish writer...so that when they discovered their error, the name of Giordano Bruno might perhaps awaken some interest in his life and work.'
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 1958, p153
‘Is it not strange, then, that Coleridge should have set him down a dualist, a later Heraclitus, and should have represented him as saying in effect: 'Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion'?’
'The Bruno Philosophy', The Daily Express, 30 October 1903.
Explaining the philosopher's roie in the Wake, Joyce wrote:
'His philosophy is a kind of dualism - every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion.'
Joyce, Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 27 January 1925, Selected Letters, p 305.
Joyce describes the idea in the Wake, referring to Nicholas of Cusa who developed it before Bruno:
'Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and...this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese!' 49.33
The philosopher's name reminded Joyce of Dublin's leading bookseller and stationer Browne and Nolan's of 24-5 Nassau Street. The connection was fitting because Browne and Nolan published religious texts.
Joyce illustrates the coincidence of contraries by splitting Bruno the Nolan into the two booksellers:
'— Dearly beloved brethren: Bruno and Nola, leymon bogholders and stationary lifepartners off orangey Saint Nessau Street, were explaining it avicendas all round each other ere yesterweek out of Ibn Sen and Ipanzussch. When himupon Nola Bruno monopolises his egobruno most unwillingly seses by the mortal powers alionola equal and opposite brunoipso, id est, eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola.' 488.04-11
Fweet lists around fifty appearances of this Browne/Nolan motif.
The coincidence of contraries is first explored on page 92, at the climax of the shaggy dog story of the trial of an Irish peasant, Festy King, accused of taking an unlicensed pig to a fair. The accused, Pegger Festy, has just made a clumsy defence speech which causes everyone in court to burst out laughing, apart from the chief witness, the Wet Pinter:
'The hilariohoot of Pegger's Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter's as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.' 92.07-11
The hilarity/hooting laughter evoked by Pegger Festy's winding up of his speech contrasts with the sad tone of the Wet Pinter. The pair are opposites 'polarised for reunion' by synthesis.
In Joyce's text, the witness is hailed by the girls in the court as Shaun ('Show'm the Posed' 92.13). Festy King, who emits a huge fart, is reviled as Shem ('Shun the Punman!' 93.13).
Joyce is using Bruno's motto 'In tristitia hilaris hilaritate tristis' ('In sadness cheerful, in cheerfulness sad'), which appears on the title page of his play The Candlemaker.
On their first appearance in the book, the twins are called 'Tristopher and Hilary' 21.12.
Bruno is paired with another Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico, in a Latin passage on page 287 (Joyce uses Vico's cyclical theory of history in the Wake). Here's the translation from McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake:
'Come without delay, ye men of old, while a small piece of second-grade imperial papyrus, concerning those to be born later, is exhibited with more propriety in the Roman tongue of the dead. Let us, seated joyfully on jars of fleshpots and beholding in fact the site of Paris whence such great human progeny is to arise, turn over in our minds the most ancient wisdom of both the priests Giordano and Giambattista: the fact that the whole of the river flows safely, with a clear stream, and that those things which were to have been on the bank would later be in the bed; finally, that everything recognises itself through something opposite and that the stream is embraced by rival banks.' 287.20
Finding the philosopher of Finnegans Wake in the Museum of Modern Art might not be enough to count as a synchronicity. But in a glass case directly underneath Leonora Carrington's painting, without any explanation1, there was a copy of James Stephens' novel of Irish folklore, The Crock of Gold.
In 1927, James Joyce, despairing of his ability to finish the Wake, asked James Stephens to do it for him.
His reason for choosing Stephens was synchronicity!
'How Joyce made this discovery I don't know, but he revealed to me that his name was James and mine was James, that my name was Stephens, and the name he had taken for himself in his best book was Stephen: that he and I were born in the same country, in the same city, in the same year, in the same month, on the same day, at the same hour, six o'clock in the morning of the second of February. He held, with a certain contained passion, that the second of February, his day and my day, was the day of the bear, the badger and the boar. On the second of February the squirrel lifts his nose out of his tail and surmises lovingly of nuts, the bee blinks and thinks again of the Sleeping Beauty, his queen, the wasp rasps and rustles and thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte, the robin twitters and thinks of love and worms. I learned that on that day of days Joyce and I, Adam and Eve, Dublin and the devil all shake a leg and come a-popping and a-hopping, yelling here we are again, we and the world and the moon are new, up the poets, up the rabbits and the spiders and the rats.'
James Stephens, 'The James Joyce I Knew', The Listener, Oct 24 1940 (quoted in Ellmann's biography)
1 It was probably there to reinforce the exhibition's claim that Carrington, who was English but had an Irish mother, was a Celtic artist.
I wasn't expecting to find anything related to Finnegans Wake here. But in Room 7, I came across this painting, 'The Burning of Giordano Bruno'.
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was the Robert Anton Wilson of his day, a man who thought so far outside the standard 'reality tunnels' of the time that he was burned at the stake as a heretic. His ideas were seen as so dangerous that he was gagged at his execution, to stop him talking to the crowd.
Carrington's painting is full of occult symbols, reflecting Bruno's interest in hermeticism.
His most startling idea was the idea that the universe is infinite, and our earth is just one of countless inhabited worlds:
'The universe is infinite
 |
| Bruno's statue in the Campo de Fiori |
the universe has no borders nor limits;
the sun is just another star;
the stars are other suns,
infinite in number and in extent
with an infinity of worlds (like our own) circling them.
In the universe
there is neither up, nor down, nor right, nor left
but all is relative to where we are
there is no centre;
all is turning and in motion,
for vicissitude and motion is the principle of life;
earth turns around its own axis even as it turns around the sun
the sun turns too around its own axis'
Julia Jones, A Primer to Giordano Bruno
This belief in many inhabited worlds was heretical because it undermined the central Christian event of the incarnation – would Jesus have to be crucified in all these other worlds too?
Bruno was also very rude about the Catholic Breviary (book of rites):
'The person who compiled the breviary is an ugly dog-fucked cuckold, shameless and the breviary is like an out-of tune lute, and in it there are many things that are profane and irrelevant, and therefore it is not worth reading by serious men, but ought to be burned.'
Testimony of Fra Celestino, a fellow prisoner of the Inquisition, quoted by Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher Heretic
'You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.'
Bruno to the inquisitors
Bruno was rehabilitated in the late 19th century, and in 1889, his statue was erected in Rome's Campo De Fiori, where he was executed. An inscription on the base says, 'To Bruno - the century predicted by him - here where the fire burned.'
Joyce, in Rome in 1907, witnessed a Church procession in honour of Bruno:
'The procession in honour of the Nolan left me quite cold.'
to Stanislaus Joyce, 1 March 1907, Selected Letters, p151.
Bruno, born in Nola, called himself 'il Nolano' (the Nolan).
James Joyce discovered Bruno when he was studying Italian at University College, Dublin.
In A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus discusses Bruno with his Italian tutor, Father Charles Ghezzi:
'Other wrangle with little round head rogue’s eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan.…He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow.'
Stanislaus Joyce has a good story about his brother's love of Bruno:
'He thought seriously of abandoning his university studies and going on the stage....He sometimes took a theatrical paper called, I think, The Stage and chose his stage name, Gordon Brown, a choice which bore witness to his admiration for Giordano Bruno, whose philosophical essays he was reading at that time.'
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 1958, p132
'No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.'
'The Day of the Rabblement', 1901
'Joyce had kept the reference to 'the Nolan' advisedly...so that readers of his article should have at first a false impression that he was quoting some little known Irish writer...so that when they discovered their error, the name of Giordano Bruno might perhaps awaken some interest in his life and work.'
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 1958, p153
THE COINCIDANCE OF CONTRARIES
Bruno is named in Finnegans Wake more than any other philosopher. The big idea that Joyce took from him was the 'coincidance of contraries' (49.36), which he discovered in 1903, in J.Lewis McIntyre's Giordano Bruno, which he reviewed:‘Is it not strange, then, that Coleridge should have set him down a dualist, a later Heraclitus, and should have represented him as saying in effect: 'Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion'?’
'The Bruno Philosophy', The Daily Express, 30 October 1903.
 |
| Coleridge footnote to Essay XIII in A Friend, 1837, p121 |
Explaining the philosopher's roie in the Wake, Joyce wrote:
'His philosophy is a kind of dualism - every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion.'
Joyce, Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 27 January 1925, Selected Letters, p 305.
Joyce describes the idea in the Wake, referring to Nicholas of Cusa who developed it before Bruno:
'Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and...this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese!' 49.33
The philosopher's name reminded Joyce of Dublin's leading bookseller and stationer Browne and Nolan's of 24-5 Nassau Street. The connection was fitting because Browne and Nolan published religious texts.
Joyce illustrates the coincidence of contraries by splitting Bruno the Nolan into the two booksellers:
'— Dearly beloved brethren: Bruno and Nola, leymon bogholders and stationary lifepartners off orangey Saint Nessau Street, were explaining it avicendas all round each other ere yesterweek out of Ibn Sen and Ipanzussch. When himupon Nola Bruno monopolises his egobruno most unwillingly seses by the mortal powers alionola equal and opposite brunoipso, id est, eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola.' 488.04-11
Fweet lists around fifty appearances of this Browne/Nolan motif.
'The hilariohoot of Pegger's Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter's as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.' 92.07-11
The hilarity/hooting laughter evoked by Pegger Festy's winding up of his speech contrasts with the sad tone of the Wet Pinter. The pair are opposites 'polarised for reunion' by synthesis.
In Joyce's text, the witness is hailed by the girls in the court as Shaun ('Show'm the Posed' 92.13). Festy King, who emits a huge fart, is reviled as Shem ('Shun the Punman!' 93.13).
Joyce is using Bruno's motto 'In tristitia hilaris hilaritate tristis' ('In sadness cheerful, in cheerfulness sad'), which appears on the title page of his play The Candlemaker.
On their first appearance in the book, the twins are called 'Tristopher and Hilary' 21.12.
Bruno is paired with another Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico, in a Latin passage on page 287 (Joyce uses Vico's cyclical theory of history in the Wake). Here's the translation from McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake:
'Come without delay, ye men of old, while a small piece of second-grade imperial papyrus, concerning those to be born later, is exhibited with more propriety in the Roman tongue of the dead. Let us, seated joyfully on jars of fleshpots and beholding in fact the site of Paris whence such great human progeny is to arise, turn over in our minds the most ancient wisdom of both the priests Giordano and Giambattista: the fact that the whole of the river flows safely, with a clear stream, and that those things which were to have been on the bank would later be in the bed; finally, that everything recognises itself through something opposite and that the stream is embraced by rival banks.' 287.20
Finding the philosopher of Finnegans Wake in the Museum of Modern Art might not be enough to count as a synchronicity. But in a glass case directly underneath Leonora Carrington's painting, without any explanation1, there was a copy of James Stephens' novel of Irish folklore, The Crock of Gold.
In 1927, James Joyce, despairing of his ability to finish the Wake, asked James Stephens to do it for him.
His reason for choosing Stephens was synchronicity!
'How Joyce made this discovery I don't know, but he revealed to me that his name was James and mine was James, that my name was Stephens, and the name he had taken for himself in his best book was Stephen: that he and I were born in the same country, in the same city, in the same year, in the same month, on the same day, at the same hour, six o'clock in the morning of the second of February. He held, with a certain contained passion, that the second of February, his day and my day, was the day of the bear, the badger and the boar. On the second of February the squirrel lifts his nose out of his tail and surmises lovingly of nuts, the bee blinks and thinks again of the Sleeping Beauty, his queen, the wasp rasps and rustles and thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte, the robin twitters and thinks of love and worms. I learned that on that day of days Joyce and I, Adam and Eve, Dublin and the devil all shake a leg and come a-popping and a-hopping, yelling here we are again, we and the world and the moon are new, up the poets, up the rabbits and the spiders and the rats.'
James Stephens, 'The James Joyce I Knew', The Listener, Oct 24 1940 (quoted in Ellmann's biography)
1 It was probably there to reinforce the exhibition's claim that Carrington, who was English but had an Irish mother, was a Celtic artist.
That "Burning of Giordano Bruno" painting is fantastic.
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