I am slowly moving on into Finnegans Wake (when not hiding beneath the blankets seeking solace from Brexit) and have now reached page 27. Enjoyable in its own strange way. Maybe, in time, when historians look back, they will make more sense of it than many a newspaper editorial.......certainly of transcripts of the average speech of the average politician.
Well, the blanket joke IS a joke, yet I do suffer from anxiety and what could be called mental health issues, plus, like all of us, we all have real issues to face and to live with.
One character in Finnegans Wake is the Eternal Mother, the wife of Earwicker, one Anna Livia Plurabelle. She continually appears under various guises......as Joyce explains:- "Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord"
Anna is many things, the "untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest", but above all, she is a river, always changing but ever the same, the flux which bears all life on its current. Joseph Campbell, in his "Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake", writes......
Principally, she is the River Liffey, running through Dublin, but she is also all the rivers of the world: the heavenly Ganges, the fruitful Nile, the teeming Irrawaddy, the mysterious Nyanza. She is the circular river of time......bearing in her flood the debris of dead civilizations and the seeds of crops and cultures yet to come.
Anna is many things, the "untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest", but above all, she is a river, always changing but ever the same, the flux which bears all life on its current. Joseph Campbell, in his "Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake", writes......
Principally, she is the River Liffey, running through Dublin, but she is also all the rivers of the world: the heavenly Ganges, the fruitful Nile, the teeming Irrawaddy, the mysterious Nyanza. She is the circular river of time......bearing in her flood the debris of dead civilizations and the seeds of crops and cultures yet to come.
I feel a strange comfort in the words "debris of dead civilizations", especially when I look around me.....however much I try to love all that I see.
As respite from Finnegans Wake I am always dipping into the Hymns of the Pure Land Masters, written by the 13th century Pure Land "master" Shinran.
One begins:-
"The light of wisdom exceeds all measure and every finite living being receives this illumination........."
Wisdom here is chie . Chi = thinking by reflection and judgement, discrimination. E = no-activity through stilling such thought, beyond all grasping (in the sense of self justifying)
Such wisdom is bestowed and shared by grace by Reality-as-is, the ground of all being. We tend to get in the way of it, but there is always hope.
The light of this wisdom is described by Shinran as "the true and real light" and also the "liberating wheel of light." Real because all things will unfailingly reach fruition. Which is a comfort that I need.
It might be guessed that I am here again in Costa's, a place I find therapeutic. One of the ways that Amida "liberates" me in a very minor way, giving me the strength to face the onslaught of a world slowly going mad. I can only hope.
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