Then it actually launches in the last paragraph into a fairly straightforward evocation of at least the mythological Finnegan.
 As you all probably know, there is an Irish drinking ballad of great antiquity called "The Ballad of Tim Finnegan" or "The Ballad of Finnegan's Wake"
 and it tells the story of Tim Finnegan, who was a hod carrier, a bricklayer's assistant, and he was given to hitting the potein rather hard
 and he fell from his ladder. It's the Humpty Dumpty story. He fell from his ladder and he broke his back and his friends waked him in the grand Irish fashion
 and at the height of the wake they became so carried away and intoxicated that they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head and he revived and joined the dance.
 Tim Finnegan lived and walked on the street, a gentle Irishman, mighty, a pretty beautiful brogue, so rich and sweet, to rise in the world he carried a hut.
 You see, the sort of a chipplin' way, with a love for the liquor, poor Tim was born, a helpful man with his work each day, to travel the craith or every morn.
 "I call the dam out, and see a partner, well to blow your trotters shake, wasn't it the truth, I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake."
 One morning Tim got rather full, his head felt heavy which made him shake, fell from a ladder and he broke a skull and they carried him home as corpse to wake.
 Roll him up in a nice lean sheet and laid him out upon the bed, a gallon of whisky at his feet and a bottle of porpore at his head.
 "I call the dam out, and see a partner, well to blow your trotters shake, wasn't it the truth, I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake."
 His friends assembled at the wake and Mrs Finnegan called for lunch, first she brought him tea and cake, then pipes, tobacco and whisky punched.
 The old man began to cry, "Such a nice clean corpse did you ever see, Tim of Ornyon, why did you die?"
 "I had a hole," your gob said, "Petty Mickey."
 "I call the dam out, and see a partner, well to blow your trotters shake, wasn't it the truth, I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake."
 Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job, a bit easy, she, a wrong I'm sure, but he gave her a belt and a gob and left her sprawling on the floor.
 "Let the world it soon engage, woman to woman and man to man, she'll hear the law, was all the rage, and her own eruption soon began."
 "I call the dam out, and see a partner, well to blow your trotters shake, wasn't it the truth, I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake."
 Then Mickey Maloney raised his head when an ogg and a whisky flew at him, it missed and fallen on the bed, the liquor scattered over Tim.
 "Tim revive, see how he rises, Timothy rising from the bed," said, "whirl your whisky around like blazes, Tannamundiel, do you think I'm dead?"
 "I call the dam out, and see a partner, well to blow your trotters shake, wasn't it the truth, I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake."
 This is the resurrection, I mean Tim Finnegan is very clearly for Joyce a Christ figure, and here is then the first evocation of Tim Finnegan.
 "The fall," then the Viconian thunder, "of a once wall-straight old par," which is just an old person, "is retailed early in bed, and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy,
 the great fall of the off-wall entailed at such short notice, the fitchoot of Finnegan," now this word, P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E, "fitchoot" is Norwegian, I'm informed,
 and it refers to the act of falling, and the act of falling from a hill. "Finnegan, earth's solid man, that the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west,
 in quest of his Tumpty Tumtoes, and their upturned pike point and place is at the knockout in the park, where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlin's first loved Livy."
 This is fairly transparent if you're Irish or a citizen of Dublin, because what it's talking about is Dublin is imagined to be situated basically in the belly of an enormous giant person,
 who is Finnegan. Finnegan lies like a giant reclining figure along the Liffey there, husband and wife, river and mountain, and this is actually then, the focus has changed,
 and now we're talking about the geography. He was a solid man, earth's solid man, but then somehow he turned into something where the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west,
 in quest of his Tumpty Tumtoes, and if you have a map of Dublin laid out, you can actually see this enormous man in the landscape, and there are many enormous men and women in the landscape of this planet,
 and Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them. Some of you may know Iztaccívatl, the magical mountain in Mexico. Iztaccívatl means the sleeping woman in Toltec, and many mountains are imagined to be sleeping people.
 So here he introduces this theme, and this is one paragraph. This is the the invocation of Finnegan as hod carrier. "Big Mr. Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman's mower, lived in the broadest way
 marginable in his rush lit too far back for messages before Joshua and judges had given us numbers or Helveticus commuted deuteronomy. One yeasty day he sternly struck his teat in a toe before to wash the future of his fates,
 but erry swiftly took it out again by the might of Moses. The very water was eviperated and all the gunuses had met their exodus, so that ought to show you what a pension junchy choppy was. And during mighty odd years this man of hard cement and edifices, HCE, hard cement and edifices,
 in topper's thorp piled bildung, supra bildung, upon the banks of the livers by the so-and-so, he iade idle fife ane, og'd the little creature, with her har in hones took up your part in her, off while babulous, mirror-head, with goodly trowel in grasp,
 and ivor-rolled over-alls which he habiticularly fancied, like harum childeric egerberth, he would calculate by multiply cables the altitude and multitude, until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor where twint was born, his round-head stable of other days,
 to rise in undress masonry upstanded, joy granite, a wall-worth of a scear scrape of most eyeful howeth and towerly, originating from next to nothing, and selluscating the hymnals and all, higher architect tip of flopical,
 with a burning bush a bob off its bubble-top, and with Lorenzo Tuller's clittering up and Thomas a Bucket's cluttering down.
 Now, what this paragraph says is he was a great builder, and I think if you think back through your impression of hearing it read, you knew that. You know, these words that are associated, words like a wall-worth of a scear scrape of most eyeful howeth and towerly,
 these are skyscraper words, wall-worth, skyscrape, in towerly, howeth, so forth and so on, and he can do this. He can build up a pastiche of surfaces, of impressions.
 Now, you might say, why is there no economy? Well, there is no economy because economy is an aesthetic criterion for shoemakers, not for artists. And, you know, economy is the curse of the Bauhaus babblers from hell, which Joyce was very concerned to refute all of that.
 If you have to place this in a context, it's in the context of the most hallucinatory of the Baroque. You know, this is Arcamboldo land. This is a work that would have been welcome at the Rudolphine court in Prague.
 It's a work of magical complexity and enfolded self-reference. Now, we've just been through these first four paragraphs. Now, I'll read you what Joseph Campbell has to say on it, by no means all of what he has to say on it.
 The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin. They are, in effect, an overture, resonant with all the themes of Finnegan's wake. The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph three, "Baba, Baba, Daru, that one," which the voice of God makes audible through the noise of Finnegan's fall.
 Narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of Hod Carrier Finnegan, pages four to seven. The wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs. We've just heard how he fell from the ladder. Now, we move into a description of the wake, and there's a certain voice that appears at certain times.
 It's where there are a lot of words ending in A-T-I-O-N, continuation of the celebration until the examination of the extermination. Okay, these are the twelve judges. Each character, when they appear, has a certain tempo to their character.
 So when that tempo enters the text, you know the character is present, even though there may be no trace. For example, Annalivia Pluribel's tempo is the tempo of the hen. "Hear a little, there a little, go a little, see a little, do a little." The hen is scratching. This is this nervous, bird-like, that's Annalivia's signature.
 Here's just one paragraph from the wake scene, which builds and has quite a minor amount of humor associated with it.
 "She's, I should she, Macool, Macool, or a hoia diddy a day, Of a trying Thursday morning, Sobs they sided at filigons chrysomorus wake, All the hooligans of the nation prostrated in their consternation,
 And their doodismally ploflusive plethora of ewe-ulation. There was plums and grunes and cheriffs and scitherers and raiders and cinnamon, too, And they all going in with the shout-most chauviality, A-gog and ma-gog and the round of them a-grog, To the continuation of that celebration until Hand and Hungen's extermination.
 Some in kink and chorus, more can-can keenin, Belling him up and filling him down, He's stiff, but he's steady as Priam Olam. 'Twas he was a decent gay laburn youth, Sharpen his pillow-scone, top up his beer,
 'Ere where in this whorl will you hear such a din again? With their deep-brow fundigs and the dusty fidelios, They laid him brawn-drawn alang last bed, With a buckalypsofisky for his feet and a barrel-load of gunasore His head, 'ti the total of the fluid hang the twaddle of the fuddledoe.
 Well, it's a drunken Irish wake, that seems clear. But there are a lot of things going on. 'Ere where in this whorl will you hear such a din again? And he's stiff, but he's steady as Priam Olam. All this Dionysian and sexual imagery is fully explicit.
 In some ways, more realized as a character, or more lovable, if that's the word, is Anna Olivia Plouribel. I mean, Anna Olivia Plouribel is Molly Bloom on acid, basically. I mean, Molly Bloom, we don't lose her outlines.
 We understand Molly, and because Molly doesn't offer us that much of her own mind, she stands for the eternal feminine, but only in the final soliloquy in Ulysses do we really contact her.
 Anna Olivia, it's her book. It may in fact be her dream, and the whole thing is permeated with her tensions and her cares. As it says, "Grandpapus is fallen down," meaning the great father god is at wake. "Grandpapus is fallen down, but Grinny spreads the board," meaning Anna Olivia is always there. She's always there.
 And in the wake, really you could almost say that Molly Bloom's soliloquy has been expanded to 300, 400 pages, and the whole thing is a meditation on the river. The river is the feminine, and the first image in the book and the last image are the image of the river.
 The river dissolves everything and carries it out to sea. Let me read this description of Anna Olivia Pluribel, and then we'll go back to the synopsis.
 How bootiful and how true to wife of her, when strangely forbidden, to steal our historic presence from the past post-propopheticals, so as to will make us all lordy heirs and lady-maidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.
 She is living in our midst of debt and laughing through all plores for us. Her birth is uncontrollable, with a napper on for her mask and her sabos-kicking arias, so ser, so solly.
 If you ask me, and I sack you, how, how, Greeks may rise and Troycers fall, she is mercenary. Through the length of the land lies under liquidation, flute, and there's nar a harbow nor an eye-brush on this glabrous flace of her-shruft.
 What our vultures shall loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat, and shall do all a tarf-woman can to puff the business on, puff, to puff the blaziness on, puff, puff.
 And even if Humphrey shall fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beard's bus-a-loom of all our grand remonstrances, there'll be eggs for the breakers come to mourn him, sunny-side up with care.
 So true it is that there's where's a turnover the tay is wet too, and when you think you catch sight of a hind, make sure you're cocked by a hen.
 Well, Nora felt that Jimmy would have been much better as a singer. She so stated that she had great hopes for his voice, and she was a very practical woman, Nora Barnacle. There wasn't a literary bone in her body, I think.
 I think that's what Joyce loved about her, was that she was the real thing. And all these women, Molly, Anna Olivia, they all are Nora Joyce for sure.
 He died shortly after it was published, although it had been known in manuscript for over ten years to the literati of his circle. It was called "Work in Progress," and people didn't even know if he was serious or not.
 And it was very hard to find a publisher. It was a typographical nightmare. Joyce was going blind, and so trying to keep track of the spelling, and there's hardly a standard spelling in there.
 There's hardly a word that is not somehow fiddled with and changed around. If you pay attention to what you're calling life as it is, you will discover that it's not a simple thing at all. That it's like this.
 I used to say, when you're vacuuming your apartment, Rome falls nine times an hour, and your job is to notice. And you always do notice, but you never tell yourself that you're noticing.
 And so, in the course of a day, I live, and you live, to some degree, the entirety of global civilization. I mean, Rome falls, algebra is discovered, the Turks are beating at the gates of Vienna, and it isn't even 11 a.m. yet, you know?
 So, there is this sense of the co-presence of history. We are imprisoned inside the linear assumption that I'm a person in a place, in a time, I'm alive, most people aren't.
 But, in fact, when you deconstruct all that, that is fiction. And the truth is more this onrushing magma of literary association, and you know, in Ulysses, you get an enormous amount of half-baked science.
 Leopold Blum is always looking at things and explaining to himself how they work, using very crack-potted notions of hydraulics and electricity, and this sort of thing.
 I think, you know, people say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience.
 You know, you lie in the bath, and you close your eyes for 30 seconds, and empires fall, dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope disgraced, so forth, that was for you.
 And then somebody drops something, and you wake up, and 15 seconds have passed. That's the reality of life. But we suppress this chaotic, irrational side.
 The genius of Joyce, and to some degree, although in a more controlled form, Proust, and then there were other practitioners, Faulkner certainly, was what they called stream of consciousness.
 But what it was, was it was an ability to really listen to the associating mind without trimming, pruning, judging, denying.
 One of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce, because you would have thought that they would have been comrades in arms.
 But Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was a very uncreative use of it, and that it should all be fabricated into literature.
 It's very hard to surpass, you know, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people, everybody genuflects to Joyce, but very few people plow in the way he did.
 I mean, Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer, and there isn't twenty pages in Gravity's Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here.
 I can understand the impulse to want to get the universe into a book, because it hints at something that we've talked about in some of these circles, or whatever they are, which is that the character of life is like a work of literature.
 We are told that you're supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.
 I mean, we fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything, we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has this strong and strong aspect to it which physics is not supposed to have, but which literature always has.
 And I think that, I don't know if it's true, but I think what Joyce believed, and what I'm willing to entertain at some depth, is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension.
 That salvation is an actual act of apprehension, of understanding, and that this act of apprehension involves everything.
 This is why the alchemic, before James Joyce and this kind of literature, the only place where you got these kinds of constructs was in alchemy and magic.
 The idea that, you know, through an act of magic the universe could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself.
 Well, then what Joyce is saying is that the novel, which was unknown in the alchemical era, the novel comes later, I mean, arguably, but the real zest for the novel comes in the 19th century.
 That the novel is the alchemical retort into which these theories of how things work can be cast.
 I think the great modern exponent of this, although now dead, and certainly one who owed an enormous debt to Joyce, was Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada.
 Ada is his paean of praise to Finnegan's Wake, basically, and the idea tacked in there is the idea of causality and ordinary causoistry.
 See, what all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language.
 And that somehow, you know, if we are prisoners of language, then the key which will set us loose is somehow also made of language.
 And nothing else could fit the lock.
 So, somehow, an act of poetic leisure dormain is necessary.
 And Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake, I mean, he didn't live to argue the case or to work it out.
 He died shortly after. But this comes about as close as anybody ever came to actually pushing the entire contents of the universe down into about 14 cubic inches.
 Joyce and Proust had one meeting, and supposedly, Joyce said to Proust, "I'm too young for you to teach me anything."
 Are you all familiar with The Remembrance of Things Past?
 Well, it could hardly be a more different work of literature. I mean, it is stately and cinematic, and you always know where you are and the characters you define.
 It's an old-style novel, but there are places in it where he just takes flight and prefigures the kind of writing that Faulkner and Joyce were able to do.
 As far as psychedelic influences, I don't know that there are arguably any.
 Joyce lived in Trieste for a while and taught English.
 He may have been, as a habitué of Paris, he may have been familiar with hashish.
 He probably had some familiarity with absinthe, but I doubt that it was a lifestyle for him.
 I think that the whole of the 20th century is informed by this hyperdimensional understanding.
 And that Jung tapping into it in the 20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists even earlier, the École de Pathéphysique, l'Entraînement, Jarry, all of these people.
 What it's about, the 20th century, is this... well, McLuhan's phrase comes to mind, the Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects created by print.
 You know, the classes, the conceits, the industries, the products, the attitudes, the garments, all of the things created by print.
 And we are living in a terminal civilization.
 I mean, I don't want to say dying, because civilizations aren't animals, but we are living in an age of great self-summation.
 What we look back at is basically since the fall of Rome, there has been an unbroken working out of certain themes.
 Scholasticism, the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses, Christianity, always presented as somehow a rival to science, is in fact, paves the way for science.
 There would have been no science had there not been William of Ockham, who was a 14th century nominalist theologian.
 Really, Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway.
 And I don't certainly presume, at least not this evening, to judge it.
 How do you place a value on an entire civilization?
 But in the same way that when a person dies, their entire life passes before them in review,
 when a civilization dies, it hypnagogically cycles the detritus of centuries and centuries of struggle to understand.
 And someone like Joyce, I think, just brings that to an excruciating climax, because it's all there, you know.
 It's all there, from the smile that tugs at the lips of the woman in the Arnolfini wedding,
 to quantum physics, to what Moliere said to his niece in the 15th letter, and so forth and so on.
 And the task is to hold it in your mind.
 I think it was William James who said, "If we don't read the books with which we carefully line our apartments,
 then we're no better than our dogs and cats."
 And, you know, too often this is lost sight of.
 And the point of it, it's not simply that we are aesthetes, literatures,
 and that here in the twilight of the gods we should sit around reading James Joyce.
 That isn't the point.
 The point is that this is the distillation of our experience of what it is to be human,
 and it's out of these kinds of distilling processes that we can launch some kind of new dispensation for the human enterprise,
 because we have played it out.
 It's now a set piece, all of it.
 I mean, when I listen to rock and roll now, it's interesting to me, but it has the completedness of polyphony.
 You know, it's a done deal somehow, and we're looking backward and we're anticipating.
 And the purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future.
 And this book, by being at first so opaque and so challenging to aesthetic canons and social values,
 eventually emerges as a very prescient insight into our circumstance.
 The Ballad of Finnegan's Wake has hundreds of verses, and in an Irish pub it can keep people going all night long.
 It's a celebration of complexity and of the human journey, and Joyce doesn't judge.
 I mean, you know, it says somewhere in Finnegan's Wake, "Here in Moy Cane," which is the red-light district of Dublin,
 "Here in Moy Cane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'yent, prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.
 So if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked." That's that passage about death.
 "Here in Moy Cane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'yent, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings."
 It was a very optimistic, transformative sort of vision.
 Somehow complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf.
 That's the river.
 Yes, that's the river, and that's the psychedelic side of it.
 I mean, imagine that you can get 63,000 different words in here, tell a story,
 and have all the common articles and modifiers operating normally anyway.
 And then it's very optimistic.
 I mean, Molly Bloom's speech is probably the single most optimistic outpouring in all of 20th century literature.
 Not that there was much competition, but...
 Yes, yes, the final affirmation, yes.
 Sam Beckett, Nobel Prize winner, genius in his own right, but secretary to James Joyce for many, many years,
 and passionately in love with Joyce's tragically schizophrenic daughter.
 You want an unhappy story, the story of Sam...
 You'll find out why Sam Beckett is not exactly laughing all the time in his story.
 A very, very complex relationship to Joyce's schizophrenic child.
 Joyce's family life was not very happy.
 I think he had a wonderfully sensuous life with Nora.
 But I don't know what it would be like to be the guy who wrote this book
 and live with a woman who thought you would be better off as a saloon singer.
 Not exactly a saloon singer, I mean, he did...
 But still, shall I try and find a passage?
 Let us now, whether health, dangers, public orders, and other circumstances permitting,
 of perfectly convenient, if you police, after you, police, police, pardoning mine,
 ich bin so fleischbe, drop this jitter-pokery and talk straight turkey, mate to mate.
 For while the ear, be we milk-galls or nicholists, may sometimes be inclined to believe others,
 the eye, whether browned or nolanced, finds it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself.
 Habeus ares et nun vidibis, habeus oculos ad hoc manus pallipo batis,
 tip, drawing nearer to take our slant at it, since after all it has met with misfortunes while all underground.
 Let us see all there may remain to be seen.
 But I am a worker, a tombstone-mason, anxious to police every avery-buries,
 and july-glad when Christmas comes his once a year.
 You are a poor Jewist, unctuous to police nopey-boppies,
 and tonny-belly solely when 'tis thine took or home-gin.
 We cannot say "aye" to "aye," we cannot smile nose from nose.
 Still, one cannot help noticing that rather more than half of the lines run north-south in the Nimsis
 and Bukharahas directions, while the others go west-east in search from Malazis via Bolgharad.
 For tiny-taught, though it looks when shvump-humphsling,
 alongside other incunabula, it has its cardinal points for all of that.
 Tip.
 Now, this word "tip," which keeps occurring throughout the text,
 no one is clear what it means, but Joe Camel's guess is it's a tree branch
 which is tapping against the window, and whoever is dreaming this huge hallucinatory gizmo of a dream,
 every once in a while the tap of the branch breaks through.
 [silence]


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