Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

PQ on 'Finnegans Wake' and chess

PQ, immersed in Finnegans Wake, discusses a passage that refers to chess and detects a possible reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase." He finds links from chess to Aleister Crowley and to Robert Anton Wilson:

It was The Rza, Abbott of the Wu-Tang Clan who first taught me about the depth of chess, pointing out (among other things) the importance of the number 64, there being 64 squares on a chess board as well as 64 different possible combinations of pieces that make up DNA, 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching and a few other such examples. Robert Anton Wilson discusses all of this in connection with Finnegans Wake in his spectacular book Coincidance (he's also got a short essay on chess in The Illuminati Papers that will make your head explode; and in another piece discusses it all in regards to the Law of Octaves).

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