The Russian General

You Hurt Him! See, He’s NOT a Machine, 

He’s a MAN — Be MORE Man Than He Is!

“I’m inclined to suspect that Jung was influenced by Joyce, because Jung certainly had the highest regard for “Ulysses”. 

He recommended it as a new Bible for the white race on the grounds that The Bible has warped the development of Western Humanity in certain egotistic directions, and Jung thought the development of the True Self - The Higher Self - required a dose of Oriental thinking and feeling - he said Joyce had brought that into Western literature with “Ulysses”.  

When Finnegan’s Wake started to appear, Jung wrote a comment on it in which he said that ‘This is either Mental Illness, or a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people’, and I think Jung finally decided it was a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people, because a lot of Jung develops right out of FW, just like a lot of Joseph Campbell did.  

The synchronistic element includes many seeming cases of precognition.  I’m going to do a whole book about this eventually, just to annoy The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, but Joyce has much better credentials as a prophet than Nostradamus does.  

So many things in FW seem to refer to events after 1939, when FW was published.  For instance, the middle chapter of the book, The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General.

Buckley was a friend of Joyce’s Father who served in The Crimean War, which for Joyce was a symbol of all wars, because it had the word ‘crime’ in it, and Buckley saw A Russian General in The Field, and was going to shoot him, because The Primary Military Rule is ‘Always shoot the highest ranking officer of The Enemy Army’.  

As Buckley was about to shoot, The General took down his pants and sat down to take a crap in The Field, and Buckley, telling The Sory in Dublin pubs as he was (inaudible) to in old age, said ‘It made him look so Human, I couldn’t shoot.’.  

And then The General finished and pulled his pants up again, and he was An Enemy Officer again, and Buckley shot the poor bastard down in his tracks.  

And somehow, to Joyce, this is the symbol of The Fight or The Predicament or The Comedy of Humanity, that The General is Human with his pants down and his ass sticking out, and he’s Not Human with The Uniform on.  

And in telling The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General, Joyce incorporates all the battles of human history.   

You can find every battle in every history book, The Charge of The Light Brigade, and Bryan Boru fighting The Danes at Clontarf in 1014, the Peloponnesian Wars; there have been long commentaries on all the military histories that Joyce put into that one chapter, together with all the anal jokes of which the English language is capable.  

Joyce seems to have shared Freud’s view that war is anal sadism, and mixed in with this is a running theme about the atoms and if’s, which goes back to the first sentence of the book, “Riverrun past Adam and Eve’s”.  

Eve And Adam are the male and female archetypes that dominate the book, and become all the different male and female combinations.  

And they’re like the Yin and the Yang in the I Ching, they’re also A River and A Mountain as well as a woman and a man, and they seem to be complementary cosmic principles.  

And the ‘atoms and the if’s’ is a pun on the ‘Adam’s and the Eve’s’, the basic Yin and Yang duality, but it also refers to The Uncertainty Principle in atomic physics, atoms and if’s, everything is uncertain on the quantum level, and Joyce has all these quantum puns running through the chapter, not only atom’s and if’s, but ‘blown to atoms’, which takes you back to The Garden of Eden again, and there are “sullied bodies all atom’d”, and then there’s a reference to “nokie-soakie”, followed closely by  a reference to “lipinese long-wage” which is the 'Nipponese language', which is followed by “Sayonara Poke-hole son” which is Nipponese language for  “Farewell Honorable Pookah”, the pookah being a six-foot tall white rabbit who resides in County Kerry and is well-known in Irish folklore.  

But “Sayonara poke-hole son” is also a well known in Norwegian yiddish for “Look at the hunchbacked fool”, and there’s a theme about The Hunchbacked Sailor cheating The Tailor all through that chapter, and The Sailor and The Tailor are like The Two Twins changing places, The Sailor is The Tailor and The Tailor is The Sailor, it’s just an S-T transformation, which is part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the S-T transformations in the Space-Time equations, then there’s The Charge of The Light Barricade, which refers to The Two-Hole Experiment in Quantum Mechanics where Light is both Particles and Waves, and that’s followed by a geranium curtain, which sounds like the flower the geranium but Joyce spells it with a ‘u’ so you’ve got Uranium in there, that’s The Trigger of The Atom Bomb, and it runs all through the chapter, you can find this theme of the atom bombing of Nagasaki, which hadn’t happened yet except in Joyce’s Head.  

And that’s the aspect of FW, as I said, that I’m most interested in these days. 

The Sailor

The song is Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) 

by Looking Glass.

“ I tend to think that what fame has done is to replace The Sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. 

If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to Run Away To Sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to run away and form a pop band. 

The difference is that in the 19th century, before Running Away to Sea, you would have had at least some understanding of the element that you were dealing with and would have perhaps, say, learned to swim ... 

The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame. 

So you'll get some, otherwise likeable young person, who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, suddenly told that they are a genius, who believes it and who runs out laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity, and whose heroin-sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloids. ”

- Alan Moore 

160. EXT. CITY STREET - LATE AFTERNOON/EVENING

Sailor walks down the street pretending hard not to care.

 CUT TO:

161. INT. LULA’S CAR - LATE AFTERNOON/EVENING

Lula climbs in behind the wheel - sobbing. Pace sits sadly, staring out the window.

 CUT TO:

162. EXT. CITY STREET - LATE AFTERNOON/EVENING

Sailor continues walking down the street. A GANG OF INSANE KILLER TEENAGERS on PCP appear and come towards Sailor. They circle around him, coming in closer for the kill.

 SAILOR 
What do you faggots want?

That’s all it takes. The gang is on him. Sailor tries to defend himself, but one big punch to his nose sends him down and out. Blood begins to pour from his swelling nose.

162A. EXT. CITY STREET - LATE AFTERNOON/EVENING

CU OF SAILOR’S FACE - a bright light illuminates it.

In the sky above Sailor, a large glowing bubble holding the beautiful Good Witch of the North [ Laura Palmer ] comes floating down above him.
 
The GOOD WITCH Laura Palmer :
Sailor Ripley...

Sailor’s eyes suddenly see the Good Witch through his closed eyelids. His mouth speaks through closed lips.

 SAILOR 
The Good Witch...

The GOOD WITCH Laura Palmer :
Sailor... 
Lula loves you.

 SAILOR 
But I’m a robber 
and a manslaughterer 
and I haven’t had any parental guidance.
The GOOD WITCH Laura Palmer :
She has forgiven you of all these things ... 
You love her... 
Don’t be afraid, Sailor.

 SAILOR 
But I’m Wild at Heart.
 
The GOOD WITCH Laura Palmer :
If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams... 

Don’t turn away from love, Sailor...
Don’t turn away from love... 
Don’t turn away from love.

The Good Witch disappears.

162. EXT. CITY STREET - LATE AFTERNOON/EVENING

Sailor opens his eyes and drags himself and his giant swollen nose up on his feet. The gang still stands around him.

GANG MEMBER

You had enough, asshole?



SAILOR

Yes, I have...

And I wanna apologize to you gentlemen for referring to you as homosexuals.

I also want to thank you fellas - you've taught me a valuable lesson in Life. 

(lifts his head high) 

LULA!!!!

Sailor turns around and starts running back. The gang watches him go.





There's a port on a western bay
And it serves a hundred ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes

And there's a girl in this harbor town
And she works layin' whiskey down
They say, Brandy, fetch another round
She serves them whiskey and wine

The sailors say: "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"Yeah, your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea"

Brandy wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the North of Spain
A locket that bears the name
Of the man that Brandy loved

He came on a summer's day
Bringin' gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn't stay
No harbor was his home

The sailors say: "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"

Yeah, Brandy used to watch his eyes
When he told his sailor stories
She could feel the ocean fall and rise
She saw its ragin' glory
But he had always told the truth, Lord, he was an honest man
And Brandy does her best to understand
At night when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man who's not around
She still can hear him say
She hears him say "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"
It is, yes it is,
He said, "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"

FULL QUOTE : " I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.

I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult.  Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman.  

The fact that in present times, this magickal power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy.  

At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers.   Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable.  

Their magick box of television, and by their magick words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. 

In all of magick there is an incredibly large linguistic component.  The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician.  A magician might curse you.  That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot.  If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you.  If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family.  It would destroy you in your own eyes.  And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries.  

Then, years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.  

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic.  

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river.  

They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment.  

They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society.  

They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. 

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants.  

If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience.  

They would be the artists.  

It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need. "

- Alan Moore