Holometic Retribalism

Introduction:

After reading an illuminating essay by the fab Joyce scholar, Mary Libertin [01], i've been catapulted back into the marshy fields of Finnegans Wake, considered as the performance by example of Holographic Principles, now popular in physics and astrophysics, and cosmology [02]. These ideas were seeded in me by the works of Robert Anton Wilson [03], who often returned to the Wake like a falcon to his falconer. In her essay and study, Mary uses the principle of Synecdoche [04] and the close family of literary/linguistic terms Metonymy [05], Metaphor to tease out a holographic principle, as i see it, i discovered the term mereology [06] to be almost a synonym for the holographic principle, a study of parts and the wholes they form. As Mary so gently and meticulously suggests, we at the least require more investigation into Joyce and his use of synecdoche. What i propose here is a new pathway to the entrance of a detailed investigation, a focus on Hermeticism [07], or what i’ll call Holometic Retribalism.

The founding and popular hermitic principle of ‘that which is above as to that which is below’ seems to me to act like an equivalence theorem, a two way channel of communication that i think best describes the rather unintuitive idea that the whole is within each part, or that the interconnected nature of all things leads to the seeds of the whole things themselves present in each part. There are some Eastern religious ideas that have a similar flavour. [08] This idea feeds at different levels, the microcosmic level of atoms, cells and molecules, the human level of organs, body parts and cybernetic processes, the social/city level of social structures, family structures and political systems, and the planetary/cosmic level, astrophysics, the digital universe.

"if words were ambiguous and best studied not in terms of their 'content' but in terms of their effects in a given context and if the effects were often subliminal, the same might be true of other human artifacts, the wheel, the printing press, the telegraph and the TV”—Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan shows harmony with Joyce when states explicitly that the effects of language in a given context are somewhat different from the contents of a particular isolated word in itself [09]. A process oriented philosophy of relationships. Each word means different things to different human nervous systems in different timespaces: neuro-linguistic relativity. Thus relativity, in the hands of James Joyce, is translated from the realm of mathematics and operationalist volumes of philosophy into a living laboratory, a living circus or zoo where no single word can define meaning concretely, yet a string of them together can cast a powerful message to the reader, with a little playful sympathy and willing critical ability to listen. The whole of Finnegans Wake is present within every part (omni-directionally correlated) and the evidence for this is explicit. What other book or author can you pick up and know instinctively, within one sentence, when and where you are? This seems a good litmus test for evaluating literature and the effects of language and different media. Epic literature that stays…epic, irrelative of what cultural operating system the reader is running.

There are many studies, relative laws and examples of evidence to support the Holographic Principle throughout both Academia and the arts, both hard and so called soft sciences. I’m writing to say, furthermore, and without so much evidence, that a Holographic outlook, applied to everyday life, can lead to a more fulfilling, meaningful and shared joyous life. I think that to stand between Dogmatism and Academia, where the Zetetic [10] may pitch their tent, is a good place to visit for a break, as often as you can. A well deserved break from the rampant certainty, conviction and lack of critical reasoning exhibited throughout the mainstream channels of communication within global village.

To start to live your life according to the holographic model is easy, the models and methods are already out there in your reach. Holographic traces can be found in Modernism generally, in Joyce and Pound, In Picasso and in Einstein. By engaging with their work with your senses, and with their ideas you can begin to enter similar reality tunnels as those who helped craft them. The jury is still out on many questions surrounding human consciousness such as where mind starts/ends and where so called physical material reality starts/ends [11] I am of the opinion that if you can tune it in, its real. Different languages and different nuero-chemical networks construct different realities. What is real differs from each individual to individual, an observer created universe, strung together by codified signs and symbols.

I have found more pleasure and wisdom and woo woo in Finnegans Wake [12] than within any other book, and have discovered a network of like minded individuals who share many modes of thought to my own. But, the vast silent majority have not looked past page 1. I want to reinforce my feelings that the text can literally transform your life. The message is to read James Joyce, in particular Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and it helps boost your immune system, fire off endorphins and make new connections, new networks, both synaptically speaking and socially. On all levels, micro/human/city/planetary, as above so below. I hope this helps to marry together the tale of the tribe with that fact that the innovators of the tale, the art of story telling, and of the medium by which the tribe may process that story, harmonise with traditional Hermetic principles. The Hermetic lineage seems to be a lineage of holographic thinking, decentralised methodology [13] and rotational principles. What i call for is a new Holometic Retribalism.

The Holometic Tribe

Girodano Bruno: a bonafide Hermetic alchemist and polymath, working with symbolic languages and cosmic principles. Bruno was a role model for James Joyce and you can find him and his ideas cycled into Finnegans Wake: a contemporary Hermetically styled, holographic, illuminated manuscript. [14] Bruno conceived of a decentralised universe with billions of possible suns like our own hundreds of years before this became scientific fact.

Giambattista Vico was another Hermetic philosopher and the founding father in the field of Rhetoric. Here we have a direct link to Joyce and to the art and craft of metaphor or better yet synecdoche which Joyce excelled at, and once more brings us cycling back to a holographic or field approach to the study of meaning in languages, a hologrammic prose. A self consistant set of laws that have a universal application, the effects of words in their sphere of influence, spacetime relative, not so much concrete and static like a noun. The principle of Ricorso [15] in Vico can be traced directly into Finnegans Wake and the four books that make up the Wake are widely associated as inspired by Vico’s turning of the four ages, or four modes of history. Ricorso implied the furtive area where the end turns back to the beginning but at another octave, a higher degree of meaning.

Next in line is Nietzsche, who’s ideas and contributions have a Hermetic flavour, as if compounding previous Hermetic wisdom, and that of Bruno and Vico, into a new synthesis. Perhaps exemplified by his help in sewing the seeds of existentialism [16], and his holographic type notion of the ‘eternal return’ and how both existentialism and the eternal return are mediated and modified/mystified by the structure of the language we use, share, spoil. This led to conflict with religiously biased institutions and schools of thought, like his predecessors and hermetic heretics, Nietzsche battled to exemplify his thought and created a new level of coherence, relative to his timespace in history. Joyce put many of Nietzches ideas into practice, and once more the Wake can be interpreted as a direct performance by example of existentialism and modernism and post-modernism due to the holographic foundations, the loops and intersections points of synecdoche. A global village internet of things, hermetically stylised for everyman and everywomen.

After Nietzsche comes Ernesto Fenollosa [17], an American born scholar of linguistics, Japanese culture, language art and history, who directly inspired Ezra Pound, and the early melting pot of Modernists that birthed the Imagist movement, the Vorticist movement and Modernism in poetry and prose (Yeats, Joyce, Pound) Fenollosa proposed neuro-linguistic relativity by way of describing Oriental ideogrammatic languages and western Aristotelian/Alphabetic languages. And by distinguishing the differences and showing the similarities of meaning. Fenollosa’s work ‘The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry’ [18] proves to be a stepping stone, or new map, for navigating the emerging global village, and while keeping a Hermetic language and symbolic approach to describing such a ‘conflux of cultures’. James Joyce includes many Oriental themes through his work, both explicitly and implicitly. Finnegan’s Wake might be viewed as an endless stream of ideogrammatic prose, imagist and vorticist and modernist all-at-once. To consider Finnegans Wake as an western version of Taoism and of Quantum Mechanics was theory developed by Dr Robert Anton Wilson over a 50 year period. In some sense this writing and the tale of the tribe reflects an attempt to reiterate this point. See The Tao of Joyce 1958. [19]

William Butler Yeats continues the traditions, both neuro-linguistically, with the relativity of his species of Symbolism [20], mostly borrowed from the French and Chinese, together with his Celtic Twilight of inspiration and rootedness. A part of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, here we have a more direct link of a teller of the tale of tribe, who has explicit contact with the practical magickal Hermetic lineage. Aleister Crowley, for example, holds an important place next to Yeats in his analysis of languages, symbols, and holographic prose, or in this case magical writing, spells and spelling. Word and deed and symbol, both as above and so below, synthesised into a system, in this case Thelma [21], a holographic principle, an early model of quantum entanglement, and empowered by a strong historical lineage and wide array of cultural ingredients. Yeats developed his own magical systems and language, perhaps toward a romantic and gentle Taoist direction of symbolism, developed in his work ‘A Vision’ [22] which once again brings us to an area of research into synecdoche, words charged with extra meaning. Joyce and Yeats are kings of the great neuro-linguistic relativity revolution, and Finnegans Wake exhibits many esoteric symbols and spellings, in fact the entire book maybe interpreted as a wiccan witches brew, stewing the worlds hermetic magicians, shamans and medicine women and their spells into a colossal grimoire. See ‘Witches Brew’ by Eric Rosenbloom. [23]

Buckminster Fuller pulls the focus of attention to geometry, a corner stone of traditional Hermetic practice. The innovation of geometric thinking and design science applications, by Bucky, show how ideas once trapped on the inside of human thoughts, can be extruded into reality, and engineered to appear in the shared experience with others. Bucky also synthesised the previous cultural, linguistic and relativistic evolution of the humanity tribe (all-around-the-world-humanity). Bucky wrote a hell of a lot, in fact he has one of the largest libraries of documented works of any American, the Dymaxion Chronofile [24] He also wrote an epic poem called ‘Untitled Epic’ [25] that is a singular work that exemplifies our recurring themes of hologrammic prose and the way that the language you use and share can transform your perception of the cosmos.

Ezra Pound and in particular his epic tale of the tribe ‘The Cantos’ [26] are another direct translation of holographic principles, as exemplified in specially charged language. In Pounds case in synthesised his hermetic predecessors, Vico, Nietzsche, Yeats, and built his own neuro-lingustic language of relativity, with a heavy lean to the east, the Chinese written characters, and an answer to our conundrum: how to create and share an epic poem including history? The ideogrammatic method developed by Ezra Pound exhibits a holographical principle of symbolic relationships, multi-ordinal terms, a vortex of meaning and hyper-linked ideas, a new means of poetically driven communication for the global village. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce are two completely different interpretations of the tale of the tribe, and Robert Anton Wilson might hold them as two of the most important texts to be studied and learn’t from in the last 1000 years. A guiding light and new study tool for these famously unreadable and esoteric texts is the internet search engine. New translation tools between languages can help decode foreign terms, and opening up ideas trapped within these pages for decades. Pound seems to have another unique, hermetically inspired network of meaning, and a bespoke technique of mixing metaphor and synecdoche. How to make it all cohere?

James Joyce, to my mind, acts like the great pivot that all the other ideas concerning Hermetic principles, Holographic principles, and neuro-linguistic relativity, meet. The evidence is right here, all over the web, thousands of articles, each for the most part full of praise for Joyce’s great works of literature, and struggle to define why their interpretation of the texts should be considered. It’s as if whatever your field of interest or day to day activity and experience may be, the books reach out into your mind and hook in. For me, the writing of Joyce more than anybody else, and especially in the Wake, hooks me, it does what great literature and writing should do, leaves you wanting more, to discover what happens next, when, why and how, and what happened before, what caused such and such, what are the origins.

Alfred Kozybski directly fits into the neuro-lingustic relativism proposed by the new science of holographic principles. he developed a rigorous scientific method for linguistically analysis, a toolkit for learning and practising linguistic relativity, literally multi valued logics and importantly to note, non-aristotelian [27] systems of language. Here we find the building blocks for many current ideas about semantics, neuro-linguistics, and how a transformation in language can affect perception of the cosmos. Kozybski crafted many distinctions that are useful for any investigations into synecdoche and the effects that words can have, besides their content. Joyce can be viewed next to Kozybski as creating a similar system or tool kit, but in a totally different language, bursting with fiction, yet striking to the core of every living individual, wherever they may be on planet world.

Claude Shannon, like Kozybski, created a kind of elemental language, or new definition of a unit, which although not directly associated with neuro-linguistics at the inception of the idea (1948) has since led to new languages that have totally and utterly transformed our tribal tales, and how they are presented: global internet telecommunications and digital media. Claude Shannon includes Finnegans Wake within his seminal work ‘The mathematical Theory of Communications.” [28] as an example of redundancy of information in English, or alphabetic language. The holographic principle intersects information theory, as one simplistic explanation for it depends on each small part, or bit, containing the information of the whole. The final manifestation of the data: TV, Radio, Webchat, Facebook. Shannon may also have a resonance with the decentralised theology of Giordano Bruno, in the decentralised nature of his information theory. Lets also perhaps consider the cosmological ‘digital’ universe, or digital simulations models currently hot in physics, the philosophy of reality and ontology, what is real, where did it originate, why and how did it happen, it being the fictional moment to moment interpretation of the infinite flux of being. Finnegan’s Wake fits this description of it, or the undefined moment to moment flux of perception, and life of the mind of human consciousness filtered through our brain body nervous systems and neuro-linguistic, symbolic interpretation.

Marshal McLuhan brings yet another synthesis of the previous hermetically inspired artists, writers, philosophers and scientists together. McLuhan includes the effects of digital communications [29] together with the previous decentralised, neuro-linguistic innovations. McLuhan specialised in the works of Joyce and Pound, and through his lens of media ecology, and different laws of media, provides yet another tool kit to process and describe our point of investigation: synecdoche in James Joyce and the importance of these findings on the global ecology of language and communication. McLuhan’s work titled ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ started out with the title: the road to Finnegans Wake. He also conceived of tribialisation, detribalisation and retribalisation, which takes president in the title of this writing [30] His work is often seen to be esoteric and complicated. Every bit of McLuhan helps to explain Joyce, and Finnegans Wake in particular. From here we can begin to propose a new turing test for artificial intelligence, Finnegans Wake as the unique jewel crafted from one of the greatest literally minds of planet world. To distinguish the difference here, is to in effect distinguish human from the machine, like a Bladerunner investigating a complex of origins. In some of his letters to Howard Innis, McLuhan encapsulates the tale of the tribe explicitly, including Vico, Yeats, Joyce, and Pound in his new synthesis. (Understanding Media) [31]

Orson Welles provides a vital link between Bruno and Shannon, innovating communications with performance by example both on, and behind, the screen. Acting, directing and writing dozens of stage shows and films, Orson continues the hermetic traditions of stage craft, slight of hand, illusion, or using all of the tools at your disposal to get the message across. A total assault on the senses, through the emergent medium of cinema. Cinema Verite [32], a complete 360 degree panorama of the illusive moment to moment flux. The artistic and aesthetic design science knowledge, coupled with an innate understanding of the human psyche and what makes us tick, Welles presents models and metaphors in a medium we can all access and appreciate, and a medium that above any other mentioned in this treatise exponentially expands across the planet: film, or visual media. The combination of methods picked up from McLuhan and Welles alone can bring one to a useful synthesis in 2016. Let’s hope that some of these more esoteric ideas can find the light of day through emerging, open source and shared media platforms [33], and lets pray that some exhibit a touch of Welles like brilliance and intelligence, and brevity to tell a memorable tale, a story relative to all-around-the-world-humanity.

I would like to thank Mary Libertin for inspiring this short study, and i hope you can forgive my mistakes and over exaggerations, i repeat this is a doorway into new investigation, in progress.