The closure or ‘fulfillment’ of scripture reflects the operational closure of autopoietic meaning space. A mythos or story, to feel complete, must have a beginning, middle and end, where the end resolves the tension which keeps the story in motion.
All was of ancientry. You gave me a boot (signs on it!) and I ate the wind. I quizzed you a quid (with for what?) and you went to the quod. But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses fore the last milch camel, the heartvein throbbing between his eyebrowns, has still to moor before the tomb of his cousin charmian where his date is tethered by the palm that’s hers. But the hour, the smiting, the day of decision is not now. A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap them, cut them up allways; leave them to terracook in the slowth of the muttheringpot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till Ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.
— FW2 (The Restored Finnegans Wake) 16
Mixed with all the references here to writing, printing and paper we find two books lurking: the Qur’án revealed by the Prophet Mohammed, and Finnegans Wake itself, ‘the book of Doublends Jined.’ The circularity of the Wake means that our story never ends: the closure is ongoing: tension must remain unresolved while we live (since equilibrium is death): revelation continues beyond the last prophet: the Mother Book must bear 70 readings, each closing the current gap between World and Mind while projecting the entelechy into the future.
A present without a future, or an eternal present, is precisely the definition of death; the living present is torn between a past which it takes up and a future which it projects. It is thus of the essence of the thing and of the world to present themselves as ‘open,’ to send us beyond their determinate manifestations, to promise us always ‘something else to see.’ This is what is sometimes expressed by saying that the thing and the world are mysterious. They are indeed, when we do not limit ourselves to their objective aspect, but put them back into the setting of subjectivity. They are even an absolute mystery, not amenable to elucidation, and this through no provisional gap in our knowledge, for in that case it would fall back to the status of a mere problem, but because it is not of the order of objective thought in which there are solutions.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 388)
The indefinitely unresolved tension is not so much subjective as semiotic, for as Floyd Merrell writes,
‘living’ Peircean signs ipso facto exercise, and will continue to exercise, some degree of autonomy; if not, they would not be ‘alive.’ But rather than mere islands unto themselves, they are also to a degree perpetually open to their environment …. There is constant give-and-take, disequilibrium, imbalance, tension. The process is ongoing. This tension of tensions there will always be: a tendency toward symmetry, equilibrium, balance (‘death’) versus an opposing tendency toward asymmetry, disequilibrium, imbalance (‘life’). If ‘death’ were to reign supreme, then there would be only crystallized stasis. On the other hand, if there were only ‘life’ and nothing but ‘life,’ then pure chaos would erupt—Nietzsche’s eternal return, nothing new under the sun—within which ‘life’ as we know it, and perhaps as it can only be known, could not continue to sustain itself. There must reign, in the final analysis, disordered order, ordered disorder: being always becoming, and becoming never quite becoming authentic being.
— Merrell (1996, 186)