More Random Musings

It has long been an ambition of mine to write an autobiography but alas - at least from my own point of view - such would seem never to become reality. Beginning with the very first memory, of being sent upstairs in a little house in Lower Anchor Street, Chelmsford, to collect the "wow wow ends" from the bedroom fireplace, to end in my home now in Kingfisher Lodge - such a story is beyond me. 

So just what, instead? Well, this blog I suppose, where I can waffle to my hearts content, ramble at will, be unconcerned with chronological sequence and other such disciplines of the true writers art. 

And perhaps console myself that as one of the basic ground plans of Finnegans Wake is that everything happens at once, or at least that any word/event can be a microcosm of any other, such a virtually pointless rambling can in fact make some sort of autobiographical sense. 

Above:- three paintings inspired by Finnegans Wake

So. What is it we "become" as we progress through time? 

I see that everything truly valuable is a pure gift, a gift to be realised but never earned, and that the way of such realisation is unique to each. There is no one key, no one door. 

From that perspective, how can we possibly become anything permanent?

Pure Gift

Recently I have become embroiled in the before mentioned Finnegans Wake, and that rather strange work begins as follows:- 

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth castle and Environs.

All rather strange and some give up the ghost at this point, returning to the very latest potboiler that offers far more titillating - not to say stimulating - fare. But the text does yield to at least a second reading. The above beginning is in fact the end of the last, unfinished sentence of the book. Thus the whole text is a never ending circle, indicating that perhaps only our finite experience of time and space stops everything happening all at once! 

Past "Eve and Adam's" shows Joyce concerned with the Fall and its consequences, but more the "fall" of the O Felix Culpa, that "happy fault that merited so great a Redeemer". This said simply because of the great YES of Molly Bloom in Ulysses, the Yes to life, Yes in spite of everything, or possibly because of everything. 

Howth Castle

The "commodius vicus" I am told references the "New Science" of the 17th century thinker Giambattista Vico, who argued in that book that "understanding comes from making", that "one can understand only what one has created". Further:- only God, accordingly, could truly understand the cosmos. Human beings, by contrast, could and should address themselves to the study of the human world - the laws and institutions, customs and practices created by earlier humans. 

By some roundabout way I see this as related to what James Joyce once said when speaking with a friend about the writings of Freud, writings then quite new:- "Mystery of the unconscious? Bah! What about the mystery of consciousness?" Joyce always had interest in life as actually lived, and always championed the lives of the common folk, or at least insisted that all life was worthy and capable of offering up treasures. Whether sitting on the toilet, feeding the cat, or reeling drunk within a brothel. 

Common Folk

Getting back to the quoted opening of the Wake, all leads back to "Howth Castle and environs", once Joyce's home ground, Dublin, the city that had clothed his being, for better or for worse, and which he never sought to throw off.

The point as I see it is that each and every moment of our life has the potential to enlighten, or as Joyce would say, become a moment of epiphany. There is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Possibly some ardent religionists would object and ask that we "study" God, and "God's word". To that I would point to the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, to a vision of Christ through whom all things are made. As our eastern friends see, to know ourselves, truly, fully, is to know God. 

Related Quotes:- 

"Give up what is before, give up what is behind, give up the middle and get beyond becoming" 

(Udana, Buddhist text)

"The Middle Way - not a position between two extremes but a no-position that transcends both"

 (Thomas Merton when musing upon the Madhyamika philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism)

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

 (James Joyce, from "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man")