Participation in the European Southern Observatory

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In his essay on the precession of the equinoxes in Finnegans Wake, Roy Benjamin suggests a new meaning for the circular diagram that appears on FW 293. The Euclidean diagram, featuring two intersecting circles with a Vesica Piscis triangle forming in the center, is generally considered to be the book's centerpiece. It appears in the middle of a math and geometry lesson as Shem and Shaun are doing their homework in the so-called "Nightlessons" chapter. It is a pregnant image, ripe with potential meanings and allusions. Benjamin builds on the observation by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon in their book Understanding Finnegans Wake that this diagram is "a map of heaven," comparing it directly to a map depicting the precession of the equinoxes taken from Hamlet's Mill. This map depicts the so-called Great Year, showing the earth's current polar coordinates superimposed upon the coordinates 13,000 years from now, essentially half of the ‘precession of the equinoxes’ cycle, the pole star shifting every 13,000 years between Polaris and Vega with the pole of the ecliptic in the center. http://finwakeatx.blogspot.ie/2016/01/what-is-finnegans-wake-simulacrum-of.html

What spectacle confronted Bloom ans Stephen when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden? • The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations? • Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

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