8/06/2009

Adamsterham letters: Pound and Joyce.

Adamsterham letters: Pound and Joyce.
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and the Cantos of Ezra Pound are examples of a single artists global perspective of humanity, and the language of the humanity tribe.

Both books are important for any NEW Word Order between different cultures, their hierarchy of values and a new unified foundation upon which these differences can be accommodated, shared and mixed into the diversity of world humanity. The multicultural and co-operative open societies we must learn to cohabit.

Both psycho-somatically and geo-politically, open-source-flow of LANGUAGE processing and communications are critical for a healthy co-operative open society.  F.W and the Cantos pry open the barrels of world language and give us our “Tale of the Tribe”; a tale of humanity – warts and all - that dislocates and relocates history into a new language of truth beauty and meaning beyond the linear - Aristotelian based - alphabetic cipher.
In particular, Finnegans Wake and the Cantos introduced by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson in his book COINCIDANCE--amidst C.G Jung, physicist David Bohm and the usual tribe of colourful characters whom RAW invokes using his own special species of writing--he presents evidence, which i now interpret to suggest that “Finnegans Wake” in particular, and Pound’s “Cantos” behave as special kinds of writing – Tales of the tribe? – that somehow increase the synchronistic experiences of those who come into contact with them - almost as if spooky entities are invoked by reading and/or speaking words aloud.
A spooky kind of intelligence seems to live in the poetry itself, a time-traveling entity here to inhabit the non-locally perceived space-time manifold of human observers, to the degree that they are paying attention to the text and to their own surroundings. The two flip polarity and the narrator is suddenly describing the present, as the individual observer perceives it, probably due to the effects of hologramic prose’ i guess, which can seem spooky and wonderful at the same time. Deja Vu’?

Both books are striking to me as a total revision of the English language, of which i am a native speaker - and both came as a shock to what i perceive to be familiar texts, poems, histories, novels and literature up until that point.

The books seemed totally alien to me at first, impossibly complex like a crossword fortress of foreign symbols & esoteric syntax; all fucked up words, beyond recognition etc,. But with the help of a reading group and some fantastic teachers, a search engines i came to decipher some of the text, or i became confident in sharing my rather wild observations about what i was reading based largely on the locally interactive method by which such “world encyclopedias” operate. Synchronicity strikes.
I feel that the sense of weird synchronicity increases when one is interacting with any such specially attenuated--world epic-encyclopedic (Tale of the Tribe)--and the method by which one creates such a work, is by no means something you learn in school. More in the tradition of music, it seems to me that the creation of such masterpieces that radiate a magical quality of--spooky action at a distance--are successful as works of art and poetry, so powerful and universal are the themes and language deployed that they can be overwhelming in their precise and personal way of interacting with the individual and the tribe. Masterpieces within the ancient Hermetic tradition.
Unlike most religious texts and socially binding contracts these unique poems charged up with a global language reflect the story of his-story, as told and/or annotated by one author. A single unified individual who serves as the scribe of the tribe, the one who puts down what really happened, the one who invents a whole new style and develops a whole new language that aims to include all humanity and the biosphere under its parasol.

The artists provoke and poke you and pull your coat tails, trying to get you to see and read again, making you think and even forcing the reader to expand their linguistic palate if they really want to “know” something about the book and the world within which it breathes. Who, when, why, how, where are difficult to locate at first, you have to almost just read blind at first, like a kind of braille reading but without any prior experience with reading braille.

You have to feel and breathe with these texts and then, i bet you, if you just continue something will jump off the page and begin YOUR particular reading, an illuminated detail, an epiphany and a synchronicity will follow if you pay attention and keep an open mind. The rewards from reading in this way and from reading both these books in combination with internet search engines and vast document archives, and, if you can dig it, writings of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, you have a platform,an axis, a foundation for tackling the alphapocalypse of culture and language that i perceive to be moments away, and in synchrony with the singularity i call timewave 6012.
I propose that the new global and multicultural perspectives and daily interactions with such encyclopedias of humanitas’ increase the likely-hood of experiencing the synchronicity phenomena in your life i guess. A strange statement, but this reflects my own experiences with these two texts, not just Dr. Wilson's Joyce/Pound synchromesh; and i feel that with the added resource of global internet i can present some of my findings and add a little to the field of Joyce and Pound scholarship within the great lineage of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson. A new beginning.
You can read about my encounters with Finnegans Wake and Cantos in my other blog posts, and the following is meant to be an update and further glossing of the two books based on my current physical location in Amsterdam, NL.

John Adams is a major figure within Pound’s Cantos, and this is why both Stourbridge and Amsterdam appear in the Cantos – John Adams visit to Europe during the 1780’s during which time he encountered the banking and trade chiefs of Holland and England, among other countries and wrote things about florins, Pounds, Guilders; who distributes them and how. Pound weaves writing of American presidents together, writing and thoughts critically compared, all about Europe, empire, commerce, war and banking. All with Chinese equivalences, Persian equivalences, Roman, Greek, German and Egyptian equivalences, all dancing together on the page, wrestling to make sense of the world at war, world commerce, world empire and a world language flexible yet precise enough to contain it all in a single text by a single author.