STOURBRIDGE in 'FINNEGANS WAKE' by James Joyce & 'CANTO LXVI' by Ezra Pound

STOURBRIDGE IN 'FINNEGANS WAKE' & EZRA POUND'S CANTO LXVI.
Steven James Pratt aka' Fly Agaric 23.

Two Pears, one Ram chained to a bridge?

The Tale of the Tribe class was hosted by the Maybe Logic Academy and led by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson. The group focused on two major texts of the 20th Century: The Cantos of Ezra Pound and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, both of which Dr. Wilson suggests require mastering, or at least reading, before entering into the 21st Century of hypermedia.

During the 8 week class I would often copy/paste images and hyperlinks to illuminate fragments from these two texts. This process gave me the general impression that the communications within both FW and The Cantos were maximally compressed, and CONDENSED like mp3 files.

I discovered that with sufficient attention and magnification of focus utilizing various webnet tools provided freely on the World Wide Web, a much richer and wholesome technicoloured reading experience emerged.

“I wish Mr. Pound would tell us what he believes,” T.S Eliot lamented in 1932. In Make it New (1933), Pound answered tersely, “I believe the Ta Hsio.” This would seem to settle the matter: Ezra Pound was neo-Confucian.”--Robert Anton Wilson, The Goddess of Ezra Pound, Illuminati Papers, 1980.

Finnegans Wake' by James Joyce, and The Cantos of Ezra Pound exhibit mind like qualities, I have found. Text and ‘reality’ processors sucking in history, even today, maybe tomorrow, but these books have stood the tests of time, and still stand up today as masterpieces of language literature and history, true and tested 'tales of the tribe'. The bar has been set so high that we are still trying to reach it.

Prophecy has a kind of reverse effect of immortality, that may lead to everyone being ‘right’ all the time, but them equally everyone being ‘wrong’ all the time. Getting beyond ‘being’ then might be a good idea for life in the bardo data stream, the digital holographic ‘process’ we experience today in 2010.

Much of the special synchronistic material I have found in the these texts derives from the work catalogued by Robert Anton Wilson in the Joyce/Pound scholarship running throughout every piece of his extraordinary works. I recommend them all highly, especially Quantum Psychology, Coincidance, Cosmic Trigger and the Schroedingers Cat Trilogy.

My collection of relative Epiphanies and most meaningful synchronistic' encounters are the beginnings of my Joyce/Pound research and practice, inspired by Bob and deployed throughout my blogs over the last five years or more.

In August of 2005, I discovered to my astonishment that ‘Stourbridge’ was brewing nicely within Finnegans Wake, right there, slap bang on page 184. Since then I have used this message to me, from James Joyce, as a meaningful enough synchronicity to base my more far-out ideas about Finnegans Wake, and hypertext.

Bonded Warehouse, Stourbridge. 2009.

There is a sister/brother town, or living museaum place called ‘Sturbridge’ in Massachusetts, New England, U.S.A. It was settled in 1729 and officially incorporated into the Union in 1738 E.V. Today the Rotary Clubs of Stourbridge and Sturbridge are twinned and regularly visit each other, but I doubt they are aware of this literary connection with Ezra Pound, James Joyce and with John Adams, who I am sure they do know a bit about, being the second president of the United States, and first Vice President.

From, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

"Of course our low hero was a self valeter by choice of need so
up he got up whatever is meant by a stourbridge clay
kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse for the sake of akes (the
umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree)"
- Finnegans Wake, part 1, Episode 6. Page 184.

A ‘Lithargogalenu’ maybe derived from the greek lithargyros: a monoxide of lead ore, or dross left after smelting lead, if so, that fits with the local glass and pottery industries around the Stourbridge area. But the word ‘clay’ brings us to the major contributing factor as to why folks settled in and around Stourbridge and why pottery, smelting and the glass industry flourished, the special clay enabled greater experimental conditions for innovating the arts and crafts and industrial applications of ‘fire’ clay.

From Ezra Pound’s Canto LXVI

"and i went in a post chaise
Woburn Farm, Stowe, Stratford
Stourbridge, Woodstock, High Wycombe and back to
Grosvenor Sq" - Canto LXVI, line 30, Page 380.

Canto LVXI by Ezra Pound, page 380.

After some Googling through wikipedia and environs and some traditional book worming I discovered the diaries of John Adams and that he visited England and wrote about his travels in great detail, as a prolific writer, compared with the modern scripted puppets.

It appears from his diaries that he visited Stratford, Birmingham and Worcestershire while on cultural exchange trips. The historical fact that John Adams, the second president of the United States of America was impressed enough to write beautiful verse about Stourbridge and environs interests me deeply, both as a lover of poetry, and of history.

This geographical and historical precedent provides the precise kind of space/time portal of discovery I was waiting for, a link to my biological place of origin and cultural identity with the ‘tale of the tribe’ or two of its major characters and both of their Magnum Opus.

Another word that punched me in the front teeth within the ‘Stourbridge’ Canto LXVI is "Dudley" that is the name of the Metropolitan Borough in which Stourbridge is situated ever since ‘Dudley Borough’ swallowed up Stourbridge into its sovereign state, back in 1974 (54 p.s.U).

Before this date Stourbridge was incorporated into the ancient parish of Oldswinford, that is featured in the doomsday book and the Magna Charta.

Dudley Metropolitan Borough is presently the 2nd most populated town in the United Kingdom and still mushrooming in 2010. Further research led me to discover that Pound was probably referring to William Wade Dudley (1842-1909) a soldier in the American civil war, a sly lawyer and slick government official, a Republican campaigner and a "crooked" electioneer (Election engineer).

In my excitement I thought he meant the brute Robert Dudley, the guy with the castles and the land named after him and his dynasty of Dudley’s. John Dee was Robert Dudley’s uncle, a fact that I find of historical significance due to Dee’s influence on the re-discovery of American and the British Empire.

Another name for the compounded regions around Dudley used colloquially is the ‘Black Country’, so named according to Occult folk-lore, due to the clouds of toxic pollutants and by-products from the 18-20th revolution taking place, or the industrial variety, in the back garden of the Midlands, England. What I interpret today, through the gloss of a gloss of Pound’s Cantos, rampant exploitation and privatization of what is naturally abundant in nature, such as water, gas, oil, vegetation and minerals. Who distributes it, how?

" this 41st section repeals MAGNA
CHARTA the 19th chapter
as follows the words: NO FREEMAN...to... by his peers
and the law of the land
Whereon said Lord Coke, speaking of Empson and Dudley,
the end of these two oppressors
shd/ deter others from continuing the like”
--Ezra Pound, Canto LXVI.

Lord Coke (1552-1634), the colonial entrepreneur and jurist appears in Pound's "Tale of the tribe" as a heroic entity providing a clear exhibit of a mind in history that Pound could anchor his pirate ship poem to, a balanced weight for the latter Cantos.

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving". - Lao Zi

At the end of Canto LXVI another word jumped off the page at me: “Shires” This appears on the last but one line of the poem. Shires is used today to identify many rural areas in England, Australia and America, i.e Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire etc.

Readers of J.R.R Tolkien will be familiar with the Shires and their rural context from his popular tales and ubiquitous fictional folk law. Pound's Cantos process and interact through the reader with a similar ‘ubiquitous relationship between mankind and Nature, but Pound in a very different mode to Tolkien, albeit a metaphysical, imagist, ideogramic mode of representation and juxtaposition in the language of poetry. A new language of meaning, a new historic synthesis of world cultures and scripts and texts all mixed up together, like Finnegans Wake in this respect, but unlike Joyce’s ‘nat language’.

By brilliantly harpooning various fragments from many different cultures, often rare and bloody notes collected from the rubble of war and decay around him, Pound brews up a swirling cloud of exhibits that happened to catch ‘Stourbridge’ in its net.

"By another clause (in our Charter)
that the great and general court or assembly
shd/ have power
to erect judicatories courts of record
and other courts
to determine pleas processes plaints actions etc
whereby a law (2 William III) have established etc
and in Edward IV this Beauchamps commission
was, for the uncertainty, VOID
By letters patent and under great seal
in all shires, counties palatine and in Wales
and any other dominions
- Canto LXVI, Page 386.

Stourbridge Town Center. Photo by Fly.

To enact the pushing and pulling forces on the word and sentence to make a literary vortex, may come from turning two valued polarities upon themselves. Joyce and Pound are both masters of casting thousands of shades and subtle tones a rainbow spectrum of light, full and bursting that can shatter and refract any two valued conclusion that may lead to historical certainty.

Poetic ambiguity and multi valued logic systems emerge in the mind of the reader and the tribe of readers and speakers, the vortext of twisted history spins a full turn of human DNA change, civilization unwinding the cosmic ages, coming and going in cycles, chapters, sagas and ragas.

The "Hologramic" process appears wonderfully well detonated within Dr. Wilson's book: "Coincidance: A Head Test." He sometimes calls this phenomena "Holographic prose" but it often escapes identification itself because of its ubiquitous presence, like atomic particles and the question ‘what if?’

Wilson has incorporated vast amounts of illuminated historical details using his own methodological historicism and his holographic writing to the Universe all-at-once.

"Fly Agaric 23: Could you explain a little bit about your holographic prose?

RAW: No. I'm struggling to write a whole book about
that right now and can't imagine how to
condense it. Besides, it's the hardest
part of my work to translate...
I'll give you two related samples from the Illuminatus and see what you
can make of them: "They shall come to gno gods."
"They shall come to gnu godz."

I wish to highlight the positive attributes of historical revisionism as a tool through which poetry becomes a portal for a new kind of Group Cultural Archeology, a social uprising of readers, writers and scholar activists, a network of like minded, and free spirited individuals, a little bit like the 'wikipedia' community of info-phobes. Write on.

Brierley Hill is another local town in the Dudley Borough and turned up some interesting ‘brier’ tuck, when searched as a word in Finnegans Wake, for example:

Triss! Only trees such as these such were those, waving there, the barketree, the
o'briertree, the rowantree, the o'corneltree, the behanshrub near
windy arbour, the magill o'dendron more. Trem! All the trees
in the wood they trembold, humbild, when they heard the
stoppress from domday's erewold. –James Joyce, FW, page 588.

By Steve James Pratt, Stourbridge, England 2006.
Edited in Amsterdam, 2008 & 2010.

Fly @ the Ten Arches, near Stourbridge

Sources:

• The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing
• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce. Faber & Faber
• The Tale of the Tribe, Micheal Berstein, University Press.
• The Adams Papers, Harvard University Press.
• Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson. New Falcon.
• The Illuminati Papers, Robert Anton Wilson. Ronin Press.
• Illuminatus Trilogy!, Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson,
• Wikipedia.com
• 76' One World and the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Forrest Reed.

Here is a link to the STOURBRIDGE wikipedia entry I edited to include this literary Joyce, Pound, Stourbridge link.

In popular culture

Stourbridge appears in two great works of poetry from the 20th century: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and The Cantos of Ezra Pound.

“

Of course our low hero was a self valeter by choice of need so up he got up whatever is meant by a stourbridge clay kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse for the sake of akes (the umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree)

”

- James Joyce Finnegans Wake, part 1, Episode 6. Page 184

“

and i went in a post chaise Woburn Farm, Stowe, Stratford, Stourbridge, Woodstock, High Wycombe and back to Grosvenor Sq

”

- Ezra Pound, Canto LXVI, line 30, Page 380.
Joyce's interest in Stourbridge is self evident from the passage quoted above and Stourbridge found its way into Pound's The Cantos via John Adams the second President of the United States, whose diary entry from 1786 Pound translated into his own epic poem.

GUNS AND DOPE PARTY

"THEY'LL TAKE AWAY MY MEDICINE WHEN THEY PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM THE PILL BOTTLE" G U N S  &  D O P E  P A R T Y.

http://www.maybelogic.com/gunsanddopeparty/

http://rawilson.com/

Tsar's Marathons

From the Telegraph:

The idea, they say, is to hold regular 'Tsar's Marathons' starting and finishing at the city's so-called Church on the Blood which was built on the site where Bolshevik executioners shot Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918. Runners would head for a monastery where the bones of the murdered Romanovs were found and then loop back to the church again.--ww.telegrap

I might go into training for this, fits with my skull and bones 'international' swimming team. Just do it.

The two BLOOMS and Schroedinger's Jew

'concerning the genesis of Harold' --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pg. 30.

Harold Bloom recently wrote an article for the New York Times called 'The Jewish question. British Anti-Semitism', where he reviews a book by Anthony Julius. When Harold gets around to Joyce he seems to me to imply that the 'jewish ambiguity' that Joyce radiated from 'Poldy Bloom' is a defect, or something that makes 'Poldy' less memorable that Shakespeare's Shylock, and Charles Dickens 'Fagin'. Furthermore he goes on to label Shakespeare with the USURER
patch.

"Dickens created the second most memorable Jew in his superb Fagin. There is no third figure to compete with Shylock and Fagin, not even Joyce’s Poldy Bloom, whose Jewishness is disputable anyway, marvelous as he is.

How does one estimate the lasting harm done by Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s egregious Jews? Himself a usurer, Shakespeare must have known how much he had invested in Shylock. Is that why he punishes the Jew with such ignoble humiliation"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Bloom-t.html

The James Joyce scholar, Dr. Robert Anton Wilson posted an insightful and brilliant 'thought of the month' on Bloomsday, 2001, that looked at the question of 'Jewishness', from the perspective of Joyce's fictional character 'Leopold Bloom', and founder of General Semantics
----

:Alfred Korzybski.

I feel that RAW made an important observation about 'essence' and how 'Jewishness' like 'Isness' can be interpreted differently within different cultures and different 'language' structures, some that may preserve 'essences' of being, or provide a more flexible immediate 'plurality of being'.

I am sad to be reading the great Harold Bloom, who seems to be missing the 'humanitas' and 'Union of being' that I feel Joyce displayed, concerning the 'Jewish Question' among many other questions of race, ethnicity, religion, science, patriotism, cosmology etc...

"I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is." -- Robert Anton Wilson. Bloomsday 2001. http://www.rawilson.com/thoughts.html

I thank Harold for alerting me to this hole or missing 'pluralistic model' that like Ben Whorf remarked 'can change our apprehension of the cosmos'

I'll let RAW explain with his claritas, steve fly.

Schroedinger's Jew
Bloomsday 2001 e.v.
16 Juno 80 p.s.U.

97 years ago today Leopold Bloom, a fictitious man, wandered the streets of Dublin, a real city; and Joyce scholars still argue about his odd odyssey. I would like to add to the confusion with a note about Bloom's "Jewishness."

"Is" Leopold Bloom a Jew?

Not according to Orthodox Rabbinical law, which defines a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother. Bloom as the child of a Protestant mother "is not" a Jew.

According to Nazi law, however, a Jew "is" a person with a known Jewish ancestor. Bloom as the son of Rudolph Bloom [born Rudolph Virag], "is" a Jew.

See how easily a person can "be" and "not be" a Jew at the same time?

On the third hand, most humanists define a Jew as one who believes in and practices the Judaic religion. By this definition, Bloom who neither believes in nor practices any religion "is not" a Jew. But Marilyn Monroe, who practiced and probably tried to believe in Judaism while married to Arthur Miller, "was" a Jew by that definition-- for those few years, if not before or after.

Extensionally or phenomenologically, a Jew "is" somebody considered Jewish by all or most of the people he meets. By this standard the multi-ordinal Bloom "is" a Jew again.

Once more: in terms of pure existentialism a Jew "is" somebody who chooses to consider themselves Jewish. Bloom obviously doesn't consider himself Jewish but Irish, most of the time. Only when under verbal assault by the anti-semitic Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub does Bloom define himself as Jewish ["And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me."] Here he obviously has in mind the "known Jewish ancestor" rule, because he adds "And so was his father," to which the Citizen replies, as a correct Catholic, "He had no father," and Bloom, unfamiliar with that theology -- logic played with deuces, eights and one-eyed jacks wild -- can only pragmatically reply, "Well, his uncle then."

But recalling the incident later, Bloom says "And he called me a Jew, which as a matter of fact I'm not." Here he returns to his customary "believer in Judaic religion" definition.

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is." --http://www.rawilson.com/thoughts.html

OPEN SOURCE PARTY: UK 2010 election.

Open Source Party.

Open Source Democracy (b)- DOCTOR MARSH... by flyagaric23

My thoughts on Politics and the democratic VOTE cannot be split from my other thoughts about life and community. My philosophy is one of holism, where art and music are as powerful and important as Law and politics, and have an equal representation in my thoughts and writings upon the political paradigm generally.

I do not resonate with any political party from the UK, and will not vote for any political party in the UK for this reason, why should we forfeit our individual intelligence for the groupthink of political packs?

What would I do? Well, first I would dissolve myself, like an indigestion tablet, so that what we know as governmental power is literally dissolved into the community, rather than printed on a small number of so called representative’s, identity cards so that they, distribute the wealth and information that belongs to us all together, as the collective stewards of the places that we live.

The idea of dissolving the Government into the community and making everyman women and child a co-operative shareholder in the great NATURAL store of wealth we create by our labours, reflects the trend in information theory and ‘things’ generally to diversify, and preserves a significant amount of Novelty.

The great Buckminster Fuller proposed a similar and much more detailed version of this ‘decentralization’ of power structures, and his model reflects an all-around-the-world system of decentralized, co-operative ‘desovereignized’ communal tribes, sharing resources and ideas openly within a McLuhaneque ‘Global Village’.

One look at any of the UK political parties illustrates to me how generally they wish us to stop thinking, trust them, vote for them, and turn over our power as an interacting processing super-computer. Why? Why when most of us are connected to each other and the outer world, and do not require the security and control mechanisms imposed on us by the state/government/council?

The global news media and the global spy networks and their governments manufacture consent, or they manufacture ‘reasons why’ we need them to survive; i.e to protect us from the terrorists, the dope pushers and the criminals as defined by their criminal ‘terror and drug’ network of lawyers and cops, those in charge’ who manufacture a labyrinth of irrational, contradictory and somewhat strategic ‘life’ traps.

My vision for a decentralized, dissolved and resolved community of self representative truly ‘global citizens’ as stewards of their own birth rights as human beings and fellow citizens of planet Earth, displays my reasoning for not voting in their game of death, as I view it, based upon my experiences and ongoing study into politics, language, history, psychology and poetry. I am writing this to inspire a new wave of thinking and questioning of authority, do we require the protection and advice of our governments, I ask.

I know nothing of banking in practice, for example, but if I could round up ten of my friends I might find myself capable of banking within a short period of time, combined with the power of global internet and analytics ‘anybody’ with a sufficient ‘network’ of like minded individuals can take up some positions previously monopolized by a certain ‘class structure’

If the existing mechanisms and channels of global trade, telecommunications and teaching were ‘open sourced’ to the community, via new contractual binding agreements specifically tailored for the particular ‘group’ or tribe of people, and attenuated by a globally connected ‘village’ bulletin board, with no particular moderator, but moderated by the network of individuals connected therefore both locally and globally. This may sound pretty overly optimistic stuff to some, total anarchy and revolution to others, yet, from my perspective I am simply stating the impact of an expanding universe and exponentially expanding information paradox.

Information wants to be free, I guess, and no individual human beings will stop the process of meme’s, bits, genes and atoms differentiating themselves, fusing and finding new means to connectivity, to me, the universe is an information and novelty conserving engine.

I deduct that the old religion-dogmatic paradigm of centralized power and control has run its course and lies dead, slumped at the starting line, the gun about to go. Politically we are recycling the kinds of ideas and dogma you can find in the dark ages, from before the renaissance and the age of ‘reason’.

We seem to be operating on mass ‘Ghengis Khan’ economic model, combined with a crusading ‘Knights Templar’ militaristic ‘model’ and a Machiavellian ‘political’ model, all of which appear to me as representative of the old paradigm. Might makes right, violence, bullying, extortion and bluff, these are the pirate ‘rules’ of their game, and you can see and hear these types of models put forward by governments, politicians, CEO’s, corporate media and military strategists, today.

Open Source ‘minarchy’ cuts out the major causes of war and aggression, poverty and ‘death’ by limiting government to a kind of ‘night watchmen’ that only intervene in some cases concerning ‘life & liberty’. Once more I hope to describe a general theory here, ultimately this leads to YOU and your friends and community writing your own constitution, and operating your own local business enterprise and sharing resources and any profits with others.

The most important attribute to this kind of decentralized government model is feedback. Feedback helps us to define standards and lets us compare and revise our collective models and data.

Feedback between small independent communities seems a critical function for their survival, and it is this feedback, used intelligently that I think will provide the ‘security, advice, and guidance’ currently forced upon us by our governments. I do not need to further my argument that governments force their democracy on its people. Freedom from the banks, freedom from the military and freedom from the government are a part a parcel of the meaning to ‘freedom.

But in this new model freedom is old paradigm and shall be replaced with the principle of ‘novelty’. Freedom to be different and to do new things, freedom to evolve and conserve novelty. Freedom must not be confused with any static state. Freedom concerns a process and changing and moving potential that defies definition.

Thanks for reading my thousand words in defence of not voting for any political party in 2010, I hope you at least think for yourself and consider some of the things I have said. If you do choose to vote, vote for the candidate YOU feel is best suited to the job at hand.

Steve Fly.

http://rushkoff.com/books/open-source-democracy/