Process thought talks about “the presence of the past” and scientist Rupert Sheldrake has written a book with that title. In William Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens says: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In light of this, imagine my wonder at a word that, out of the blue, fluttered up from my unconscious late last night and made me smile — jetzterday . . . which blends jetzt, the German word for “now” (pronounced yetst), and “yesterday.” And, thus, in one word, we have the past in the presence or vice versa.
I consulted my copy of A Concordance of Finnegans Wake and found that Joyce came close, very close indeed, to this word. On page 570, line 9, he jests the reader with “jesterday,” in the following context:
“I have heard anyone tell it jesterday (master currier with brassard was’t) how one should come on morrow here but it is never here that one today. Well but remind to think, you where yestoday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow in toth’s tother’s place. Amen.”1
Ich bin Hy Nun . . .
Hy Nun? Nun, pronounced “noon,” is another German word for “now” and the clocks in the film High Noon, with their hands always moving, now until noon, and Grace Kelly, Coop’s new Quaker bride, is rather like a nun as she prepares to leave town when the noon train arrives (Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’) but who, nonetheless . . . is less the nun at the end when she stands by her man and helps him shoot Frank Miller dead.
This is the gist of my jest for just today.
Note
1. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 570.
Parsing the phrase “where yestoday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow,” where ys is Welsh for “is” and Morganas suggests morgen (German for “tomorrow”) and war is German for “was, we have:
. . . where yesterday is, tomorrow was, and always is, tomorrow . . .
HyC