Marriage of Finngans Wake And Indra's Net of Gems

I, Stephen Alfred Gutknecht, am not the only one to suggest the marriage of Finnegans Wake and Indra's Net of Gems.


My inspiration came from Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, and the idea of Internet "World Wide Web". I found the spider-web metaphor of the Internet surfing to be limiting, as the purpose of a spider web is to entangle, enclose and consume those trapped in the network. That is how commercial social media has become in modern times (since 2012), notably well expressed by  Christopher Wylie who worked for Cambridge Analytica.

“The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.”

Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, 2019

The spider-web metaphor encosses, the Indra's Net meetaphor opens. I find this is much more in tune with the rivers and Orinoco flow of Finnegans Wake.

"He is there to evoke compassion and thus bring a dead wasteland to life. There is a mystical notion there of the spiritual function of suffering in this world. The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion. This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses -- the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way. In Joyce's next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs." - Joseph Campbell, age 81, 1986


Others who have found the Finnegans Wake + Indra Net pairing to be useful!

The Wake of Indra  ─Finnegans Wake and Buddhism─

 ダレン・ダグラス・モートソン 

Darrin Douglas MORTSON
Keywords:Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Buddhism, Nāgārjuna, Theosophy キーワード:フィネガンズ・ウェイク、ジェイムズ・ジョイス、仏教、龍樹、神智学

PDF file:
https://ogigaya.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/the-wake-of-indra.pdf