So I started reading Finnegan’s Wake, as per the recommendations of James at Pataphysical Graffiti. I had made a post a while back, about how I thought dreams consisted basically of super-condensed folded moments. Where, each moment in a dream can be opened up to reveal an entire nother dream or story or memory inside of it. And the reason that dreams don’t make rational sense when you look at just the plot descriptions of them, is that the plot points, characters, details and impressions of the dream are all actually shorthand references to things which go much deeper below the surface.

Anyway, James suggested that’s more or less what Finnegan’s Wake was all about. And that seemed like a fucking hoot to me, so I bought it yesterday. Especially since I’ve become so much more interested in and conversant with my dreams lately. I’m 20 pages into the book so far. It’s certainly daunting, but each time I pick it up, I can tell its sort of opening up to me more, or maybe me to it. In any event, I’m most likely going to be posting about it intermittently here.

James sent me the following link, which is Robert Anton Wilson on James Joyce. I think I had perused this link on my own back at some point, but never got too far into it.

More interesting to me at the moment though is another article I rediscovered over at Fusion Anomaly, called Surfing Finnegan’s Wake. It contains this passage, which is what got me interested in reading this book way before James had made the above connection for me:

…[Joyce] was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic. The entire book is based on La Scienza Nuova by Giambattista Vico who was a Renaissance sociologist and a systems theorist. And Joyce once in a famous interview, said, that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only FW survived, that the goal would be that the entire Universe would be reconstructed out of this. Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea, that somehow a book is the primary reality. You know, the idea in Hassidism is that all of the future is already contained in the Torah, and then when you ask them, well if it’s contained there then isn’t it predestined, and the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled, and only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letters.

I also think this line about it is interesting:”it’s like a dip-stick for your own intelligence. What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.” On that note, I think it might be worthwhile to approach this book with as little outside commentary as possible. Just going into it and finding what I alone will find in it. Almost like when you read the tarot cards, you end up projecting your own self and situations into the figures and combinations you encounter there.

I also want to get into using the book for stichomancy. Which is when you open a book and find a line at random, in an attempt at some kind of divination or revelation into a question. It seems particularly well sorted for that sort of research.

Anyway, more on this as it comes up.