Introducing Islam in Finnegans Wake

A Fragment from "Introducing Islam in Finnegans Wake" By Aida Yared

While writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce jotted down abbreviated entries in some fifty notebooks1 that he took great care to preserve. The entries are mainly fragments of sentences from books or newspapers that Joyce was reading - or that were being read to him, scraps of conversations, and personal thoughts or commentaries. Their study is essential to our understanding of Joyce’s last published work.

When a given Notebook entry was incorporated into his Work in Progress, the Irish writer was in the habit of crossing it out with a colored crayon. Pages 103-110 of VI.B.45, that deal with Islam, are among the Notebooks pages most heavily marked in this fashion: they can be deciphered only when viewed through an orange-red filter, the color of the crayon used by Joyce in deleting the entries. Their source can be traced back to The Story of Mohammed, a biography of the Islamic Prophet by Edith Holland.2VI.B.45 was compiled, according to Danis Rose, in Jan-Feb 1938.3 By that time, Joyce was very familiar with Mohammed and the Mohammedan religion. His reading on the topic, as evidenced by his note-taking, spanned the period during which he was working on Finnegans Wake.

He owned a copy of the Koran in a French translation by J.-C. Mardrus,4 and took notes from its first few pages in 1926 (VI.B.12.137).5 Other works he had closely read include the Encyclopædia Britannica (article Mecca, VI.B.24.209-216) in 1929-31; The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad by Stanley Lane-Poole (VI.B.31.45-69)6 in April-November 1931; and Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,7 which has extensive marginalia on "the manners and customs of Moslem men," and to which Joyce intermittently turned from 1922 to 1939 (Notebooks VI.A, VI.B.28, VI.B.32 and VI.B33). Additional notes on Islam are scattered throughout the Notebooks, and include a sizeable cluster on Islamic rituals (VI.B.31.180-182), taken from a source that is still untraced.

Joyce inserted numerous details of Mohammad’s life and creed - including the origin and structure of the Koran, into Finnegans Wake, where they appear as important components of the framework and collective unconscious of the book.8 The notes from The Story of Mohammed were the closest in time to the publication of Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce probably took them in the first half of January 1938, as they were used in the revisions of II.3§4-5 for transition (January 18, 1938; JJA 54.253), the second set of Book I galleys (received by Harriet Shaw Weaver on May 16, 1938; JJA 49.287-288), and II.1-II.3§1 galleys.
http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/Holland99.htm

Bucky Living Through Chemistry and Planetary Synergy

Bucky Living Through Chemistry and Planetary Synergy

Buckminster Fuller developed a game he called 'world game' that gives the players the opportunity to manipulate and 'play' with the global 'planetary' life-support systems, putting players in the most powerful positions of world power and sharing the agency to change policy and trade and spending within specified territory. Players can experiment with various strategies for creating a healthy co-operative relationship with other players, and with luck a 'planetary synergy' of shared, interconnected resources and intelligence.

Alternatively you can play a more realistic and popular strategy of secretive deals and even 'war' if you like, a strategy including force, coercion, and massive waste of resources, and often severe injury and loss of human life, civilian casualties, torture, rape and pillage. But in a virtual physical-game space.

The world game allows individuals and/or groups to play with various strategies, to promote 'Killingry' or 'livingry' to a greater or lesser degree. From playing the game, and with luck, the players can learn by experience that co-operation and sharing of resources and intelligence makes for an efficient and 'synergetic' planetary system.
Private, secretive and closed systems lead to conflict, miss-communication and often 'war'. I hope this defines a punch line that leads me into a specific glossing and focus for a possible 'future world game' scenario: i.e. world-around drug tolerance and 'legalization', and an end to the failed and failing war on some people who use some drugs.

Using the Global Internet to collect data and statistics we can calculate, through statistical analysis the optimum strategy in any game? But do Governments and major corporations also do this calculating, albeit with a different data 'set' to the average citizen of earth and with the agency to implement their calculations in any specified territory. It seems to me that some have access to secret or private information, and others do not, and therefore the probable outcomes are spoiled by this disproportionate representation of information, and we have an unfair, unbalanced game. At this point I would ask the reader to consult Wikileaks for a huge information update for the Global 'world game' scenario, and consider once more Hagabard Celine's Law: National Security is the chief course of national insecurity" or "The more laws they pass, the more criminals they create."

Steve'fly agaric 23' Pratt
Amsterdam, 25th December, 2010.

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers

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ISBN13: 9780195079104ISBN10: 0195079108 Paperback, 240 pages

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Description

Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village , one of his last collaborative efforts, applies that vision to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network.

When McLuhan's groundbreaking Understanding Media was published in 1964, the media as we know it today did not exist. But McLuhan's argument, that the technological extensions of human consciousness were racing ahead of our ability to understand their consequences, has never been more compelling. And if the medium is the message, as McLuhan maintained, then the message is becoming almost impossible to decipher.

In The Global Village , McLuhan and co-author Bruce R. Powers propose a detailed conceptual framework in terms of which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood. At the heart of their theory is the argument that today's users of technology are caught between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand there is what they refer to as Visual Space--the linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world; on the other hand there is Acoustic Space--the holistic, qualitative reasoning of the East. The medium of print, the authors argue, fosters and preserves the perception of Visual Space; but, like television, the technologies of the data base, the communications satellite, and the global media network are pushing their users towards the more dynamic, "many-centered" orientation of Acoustic Space.

The authors warn, however, that this movement towards Acoustic Space may not go smoothly. Indeed, McLuhan and Powers argue that with the advent of the global village--the result of worldwide communications--these two worldviews "are slamming into each other at the speed of light," asserting that "the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously."

Employing McLuhan's concept of the Tetrad--a device for predicting the changes wrought by new technologies--the authors analyze this collision of viewpoints. Taking no sides, they seek to do today what McLuhan did so successfully twenty-five years ago--to look around the corner of the coming world, and to help us all be prepared for what we will find there. 

 

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/25965/subject/FilmMediaPerformingArts