The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly

I have this crazy idea to write a book about 'Finnegans Wake' one day (one day!? Start now or you'll be dead first!) - yeah, I know, like the world needs another - along with 'Ulysses' probably the most written about book / author excepting Shakespeare. This is an idea that I have harboured for many years now, without it really getting from my head to the page.

Why am I writing this here? Why now? Well, partly because everything seems to be screaming at me to do it. Everywhere I go, 'Finnegans Wake' keeps being brought to my attention: this month's 'Idler' magazine (issue number 67, for more info see here) contains an essay, titled 'After The Wake', that touches on the book and, just a few days later, whilst perusing 'The Quietus's' website, I came across an article under their 'Tome on the Range' feature, where one of the authors talks about reading 'Finnegans Wake', the article being found here.

I've always assumed the book I'd write would be an introduction to FW for the lay reader, or at least, a 'how-to-approach-and-read-it-without-losing-your- mind.'  I first read the book over 30 years ago and have been under its spell ever since: a year hasn't passed in which I've either been drawn back to the book or read something about it, which in turn has brought me back to its pages.

Given its justified reputation as a difficult read, why even bother to read it? For starters it's funny: anyone who is a fan of a pun (admittedly at times requiring knowledge of several languages) will find much to raise a smile.  It's also filthy  in places, though exactly what is being described isn't always clear.  It also has beautiful, moving, poetic passages, typically those associated with the main female 'character', Anna Livia Plurabelle.  Famously, read out loud, it sounds wonderful, and hypnotic, though to get the most out reading it aloud you need to be familiar with Dublin Irish pronunciation. Most of all, though, it is an adventure, a voyage into something that is both familiar, yet completely unknown, an adventure that could lead anywhere - to Lewis Carroll, to The Book of Kells, to Giambattista Vico, to Irish history or indeed to the life of James Joyce.  The 'referentiality' of the work, whilst not infinite, is certainly enough to fill a lifetime - even if you first read it as a teenager.

Go on, give it a go, your life may never be the same again! 

Of course, there has to be music, and only one album in the rock music canon comes anywhere close to the complexity of the Wake...

Down, down, down, down, down...

[[[[[Meditation and mindfulness have at their core the idea of being in the moment, being present in the here and now.  I have come to realise that this is part of the problem for me, because I don't like here and now, I don't like the present, I need it to change. Only the possibility of something good and positive that the future could offer is motivating. In order to get to a positive future, something negative and personally cataclysmic must occur. I need here and now to end.]]]]]