The reading stopped at "... (obs of epiwo)." (611.24)
Last week we stopped at "The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn." Actually we (they, the Irish?, the world?) are (were) waiting for him (St. Patrick)! He came to Ireland in the 5th century. That he came is explained here in the conversation between Muta and Juva, whom we had met earlier on page 16 incarnated as Jute and Mutt. Typically another arrival is reported here to complicate matters. Of the arrival of the Archdruid/Bulkily/Balkelly/Burkeley. Buckley, we remember as the one who shot the Russian general. Berkeley is the 17/18th century Irish philosopher. So the pages have much of Berkeley's Theory of Vision woven into them. So the connection of the happenings of the 5th and 18th centuries is perhaps a way to show that history happens in cycles, as Vico said.
To me personally, the most interesting sentence on these pages is at the top of page 610: O horild haraflare! McHugh interprets this as 'Harald Fair Hair, the 1st king of Norway.' BUT, when we heard that ild means fire in Danish, the word haraflare took a totally different meaning for me. Hara is another name of the Hindu god, Shiva. He is also represented as Nataraja, the king of dance. Nataraja holds a flame in his top left hand, and a small drum in his top right hand. With the flame (fire) he destroys the world, with the waves of sound emanating from his drum, he recreates the world. Thus he is a - perhaps the - symbol of destruction and creation, of history and civilizations happening in cycles. It is this idea of Vicovian cycle that is after all behind Finnegans Wake!
The Nataraja icon is perhaps the most well known statue of India. For example, Carl Sagan (1934-1966), the astronomer at Cornell University uses Nataraja as the inner cover illustration of his 1980 book, Cosmos. The neuroscientist, V. S. Ramachandran, Professor at the University of California San Diego, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, discusses this icon in his 2010 book, The Tell-Tale Brain. He refers to it as the symbol of cosmic dance!
Last week we stopped at "The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn." Actually we (they, the Irish?, the world?) are (were) waiting for him (St. Patrick)! He came to Ireland in the 5th century. That he came is explained here in the conversation between Muta and Juva, whom we had met earlier on page 16 incarnated as Jute and Mutt. Typically another arrival is reported here to complicate matters. Of the arrival of the Archdruid/Bulkily/Balkelly/Burkeley. Buckley, we remember as the one who shot the Russian general. Berkeley is the 17/18th century Irish philosopher. So the pages have much of Berkeley's Theory of Vision woven into them. So the connection of the happenings of the 5th and 18th centuries is perhaps a way to show that history happens in cycles, as Vico said.
To me personally, the most interesting sentence on these pages is at the top of page 610: O horild haraflare! McHugh interprets this as 'Harald Fair Hair, the 1st king of Norway.' BUT, when we heard that ild means fire in Danish, the word haraflare took a totally different meaning for me. Hara is another name of the Hindu god, Shiva. He is also represented as Nataraja, the king of dance. Nataraja holds a flame in his top left hand, and a small drum in his top right hand. With the flame (fire) he destroys the world, with the waves of sound emanating from his drum, he recreates the world. Thus he is a - perhaps the - symbol of destruction and creation, of history and civilizations happening in cycles. It is this idea of Vicovian cycle that is after all behind Finnegans Wake!
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| 11th century Chola bronze from the Met, NY |
