“I tried every way I knew to imagine, “What the dickens is this number 1132?” Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon”

  • RoundSparrow @ .ee@lemm.ee
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    21 days ago

    Skywalker Ranch California

    Summer of 1986 or Summer of 1987
    Age 82 or Age 83

    "That is the whole problem of the Grail stories, compassion for the wounded king. And out of that you also get the notion that Abelard offered as an explanation of the crucifixion: that the Son of God came down into this world to be crucified to awaken our hearts to compassion, and thus to turn our minds from the gross concerns of raw life in the world to the specifically human values of self-giving in shared suffering. In that sense the wounded king, the maimed king of the Grail legend, is a counterpart of the Christ. He is there to evoke compassion and thus bring a dead wasteland to life. There is a mystical notion there of the spiritual function of suffering in this world. The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion. This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses—the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way.

    In Joyce’s next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs. It is 1132. It occurs as a date, for example, and inverted as a house address, 32 West 11th Street. In every chapter, some way or another, 1132 appears. When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, “What the dickens is this number 1132?” Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon, and he thinks, “The law of falling bodies, 32 feet per sec per sec.”"

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    21 days ago

    “Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

    University Of Toronto … Marshall McLuhan