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    James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru, Glen Kealey
    James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru, Glen Kealey
    James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru, Glen Kealey
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru, Glen Kealey

    By Don A Lashomb

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    About this ebook

    In Canada there lives a most interesting man whose creativity, radical use of language, strange themes and wide range of thought are comparable only to James Joyce in his late period. He is Glen Kealey, an unconventional genius who is part prophet, part philosopher, part conspiracy theorist, and leader of a small band of truth seekers who hold fantastical beliefs that derive from an alleged code hidden in the alphabet. This study compares Kealey and Joyce by examining their common ground as well as their noteworthy differences in psychological approach and creative process. It uncovers the difference and the value of Joyce having been a playful, literary author rather than a serious, deadpan guru. While this study does NOT denigrate or make fun of Kealey and his followers, an afterward does pose an unpleasant but necessary question: Besides university standing, what is the difference between Joycean academics and Kealey's group, which many people would dismiss as a fanatical cult?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDon A Lashomb
    Release dateApr 10, 2012
    ISBN9781476250052
    James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru, Glen Kealey
    Author

    Don A Lashomb

    donalashomb[at]gmail[dot]com

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      Book preview

      James Joyce Reincarnated - Don A Lashomb

      James Joyce Reincarnated:

      The WordGuru, Glen Kealey

      By Don A Lashomb

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012 Don A Lashomb

      License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

      Quoted materials obviously remain copyright of their original authors or current legal holders; quotes are reproduced here under the fair use doctrine for commentary and criticism.

      Cover artwork shows Kealey facing Joyce’s death mask.

      Table of Contents

      Author’s Disclaimers

      Reference Abbreviations

      Introducing the Word SculPTor

      The Premise

      Language Coding

      Flowing Water: Joyce’s Rivers, Kealey’s Flood

      Finn on the Raft

      Neanderthalers Are Like Fairies

      Re-Creation Recycling: REGO and REPO

      In ALP’s Santa-Sack: Quarks Fit for a Sac•red Hadron Bag Lady

      There’s Nothing New, Just a Rein•car•nated Compost Heap

      If I Go All Goes: Forget! or Be Re•membered with Creation

      Conclusions: Name-calling, Laughing at Madness, and Living in Two Worlds

      Addendum: Five Final Coincidences

      Afterward: From Kealey’s True Believers . . . to the Cult of Saint Joyce

      NOTES

      About the Author

      •

      •

      Author’s Disclaimers

      Because of the unconventional nature of this work’s subject matter, it seems prudent to make certain matters clear to the reader as soon as possible. 1) While the author obviously believes that the ideas of Glen Kealey deserve some serious attention, he does not endorse or subscribe to them literally. 2) That said, the author absolutely does not intend his work to ridicule Glen Kealey or make light of the concerns of those who support his philosophy; rather, the author considers all of them good people who are, in their own way, fighting for a better world. 3) Despite having written a thesis on Finnegans Wake and continuing to follow literary debates on the subject, the author does not wish to be known as a Joycean.

      •

      •

      Reference Abbreviations

      Most references will be cited as endnotes. References to some of Joyce’s works and to the Ellmann biography, however, are cited parenthetically, in the main text, using the abbreviations below.

      FW : James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press), 1939. (References are to page and line numbers. Sections are indicated by book and chapter numbers, e.g. i.8.)

      JJ : Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised ed. (New York: Oxford Press), 1982.

      LI : James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections in 1966).

      P : James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. R.B. Kershner (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

      U : James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. H.W. Gabler with W. Steppe & C. Melchior (London: Bodley Head, 1986). (References are to episode and line numbers, e.g. U 12.727-9.)

      •

      •

      •

      •

      Introducing the Word SculPTor

      At 4:12 a.m. on July 1, 2010, the following message was posted on the Draco Debates Yahoo! group by a man named Glen Kealey:

      Creator God is Cashing-In his GE Human Potato Chips-off-the-Old-Block

      SEE BRAZIL'S JESUS, THE REDEEMER AYE-AYE LEMUR

      Bringing in the sheaves: A collection of five feathered human arrows all crunched to-get-her in a quiver, by means of the Fannie Mae mortgage money pulley.

      SESAME SEESAW BAYER

      To be or not to be Yemen's Empty Quarter shebang, shebang.

      Bing, Being, Boeing, Beijing, Bang

      ____________________________

      The SculPTor (1776-1867)

      WWW.WORDSCULPTOR.NET aka WWW.KEALEY.NET[1]

      In a strange way, it is as if James Joyce at his most bizarre has been reborn in altered form. His new incarnation is less professional, less presentable than the last. He is even more of an outsider. He seeks neither money nor fame, desires neither benefactors to support him nor critics to champion him. He only wants to save the world. His weird language reconceives and strings together disparate pieces of history, mythology, popular culture, current events, and autobiography. His words form a radically creative narrative that functions as a quasi-religion for himself and his small circle of followers, who parse his every syllable and locate what seem to be references to his ideas in other fields of knowledge. To almost anyone else, his story sounds ludicrous at best, and at worst totally incomprehensible; most who encounter it soon dismiss it as crazy or nonsensical. In particular, the way in which he uses language is a sore point of contention: people should not—do not—use language the way he uses it. The multiform material that has become the great work of this man’s life in fact resembles nothing so much as it resembles Finnegans Wake. And if we were to take the sometimes wacky, often amorphous concepts of Finnegans Wake quite literally—fearsomely believing in HCE, ALP, the Museyroom, the workings of the cycles, and everything else in the book as if it all constituted factual reality—then the experience closest to our own would be the peculiar language-bound credo of Glen Emmett Patrick Kealey, the self-styled Word SculPTor.

      Though he is not a Christian, the capital PT in his moniker alludes to Saint Peter, first Pope and founder of the Catholic Church. The group of four or five persons who might be termed Kealey’s true believers (for they deny that they are a cult of passive followers) say that those who reject Kealey’s ideas simply lack functioning brains. Their defense evokes the ways in which Joyce’s circle sometimes characterized those who reacted negatively to Work in Progress: [I]f you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, Beckett wrote, it is because you are too decadent to receive it.[2] But really, Joyce claimed, It is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud (JJ 590). Kealey underpins his own enterprise with a similar rationale: "Every word . . . in every language is built with philosophers’ stones. . . . ‘Silly balls’ [i.e. syllables to juggle and play with]. Phonetics is the common denominator of all language. So is pictograph."[3]

      The present study will reveal a deep connection and kinship between Joyce and Kealey. The two share a striking number of similar interests and favorite themes. Both men subscribed to superstitious beliefs and utilized them to produce unusual linguistic material. They both use word games, subversive ideas about reality, and creative logic in attempts to understand the world and their respective places in it (Joyce came to see himself as an archetypal scribe; Kealey sees himself as something of a prophet). But while Joyce used these interests and abilities to form Finnegans Wake—an endlessly rich book that provides readers with innumerable lines of thought, amusement, and inquiry—Kealey eschews aesthetics and demands that his ideas be taken literally, not literarily. Early psychoanalysts noted that their most neurotic patients simply showed them clearer, more pronounced examples of traits present in healthier members of society, and Joyceans would find similar benefits in studying Kealey: he may be a Quixotic crank, but he offers us a very raw, direct view into certain imaginative drives quite like the ones that fueled the composition of Finnegans Wake. In Kealey we glimpse what Joyce might have been like were he not a self-described artist; and we can thus better descry the value, point, and use of Joyce’s having been a literary writer. We often give pause when considering Finnegans Wake as fiction, or as a novel; but with Kealey’s work as a counterpoint the importance of Joyce’s fictionalization process rises in our estimation. Both Joyce and Kealey seem obsessed with similar material, similar types of material, and similar ways of making sense of it all by means of creative language. Through his art Joyce was able to overcome his idées fixes and channel them in worthwhile directions. But whereas Joyce swims in this material, Kealey—somewhat like Lucia Joyce—wallows in a flood (and the thematic water metaphor proves quite appropriate, as we will see below). By understanding Kealey we gain the ability to subtract his nature from all we know of Joyce; and by doing this, the nature of Joyce’s sublime, sublimating artistry stands revealed in greater detail.

      Kealey offers Joyceans an extremely unique point of comparison. Unlike so much of the other material with which Joyce’s work is compared, the case of Kealey stands out because he is a real, living person who is totally, truly immersed in creative linguistics. His example allows us to observe the function (and dysfunction) of linguistic processes similar to Joyce’s own as they actually arise, straight-facedly, in a twenty-first century society. Though we may disagree with him or find him patently absurd, Kealey has actually managed to live in (and somewhat successfully promote) a lifestyle based on certain linguistic conceptualizations quite like those that

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