“All these characters, moving around and against one another, share but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical—…”.   —Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

  Last post I wrote of James Joyce’s threshold crossing in Ulysses, you could say his death to the world of Dublin with all its values and customs, habits and thoughts, and rebirth into world artistry. 

  But the average man, the critic and professional teacher and preacher of the vetted and authorized version of the truth is ill-equipped for the Truth a shaman/poet of Joyce’s calibre has plumbed. They are two distinct tTruths, one literal, common, easily taught and easily grasped; while the other is profound and shines from a mythopoetic mountain top and need be sought with a lifelong commitment.  

  Again:   “All these characters, moving around and against one another, share but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical—…”.

  As Campbell and Robinson recognized, by Finnegans Wake Joyce has attained to a vision of the Oneness of all Life, the Unity beneath and within the guise of an apparent multiplicity that is our lives. 

  We have need of that vision today as the world appears to be fracturing, fragmenting into pieces which threaten to combine into monstrous armed and mutually hostile camps. Vast contending belief systems are in play around which half formed men and women across the world are coalescing, but who is speaking for Unity and Truth? Who can see beyond the divisive surface to the Unified depths? 

  Life is ALL there is folks.

  There IS a Oneness to it all.

  Life is on BOTH sides of a prison wall, BOTH ends of a gun. 

  Aummmm….

  And blessings to ALL.