Putting the Fear of the Wake in 'ya

To pump the fire of the lewd into the soulths of bauchees havsouedovers, tillfellthey deadwar knootvindict

(P:370 L:31)

This line, in the third book seems to me to be a sour bitter sermon; to pump, let us assume is really a description of mass market religiosity, in that I mean that people are being 'pumped' with religion everyday until they die in a war, a dead war at that.  Everyday we are fed this message of 'cleanliness is next to godliness' that is just not true sometimes. And the word 'soulths' adds to this image of a 'sermon by fire' sort of like a trail by fire (war?), although, why not a sermon by thunder?

Double face-ness and rhythm?

I think of this line as a sort of reflective imagery rhythm a moment of doubling reality:

Shutmup. And bud did down well right. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly speech lit face to face allaround. ( P: 355 L: 8-9)

   You should be able to find this rhythm in the first few lines ‘And bud did down well right.’ And the above mentioned reflective imagery (double I might add!) is ‘And if he sung dumb (word rhythm) in his glass darkly’ I think of singing blindly and wildly without much clue as to what you are singing; one where you have a moment when you just go for it and don’t give a damn (much like Joyce, who was not all blind).

   ‘Speech lit face to face’ reminds me a bit of the Allen Ginsberg ‘A Supermarket in California’ line ‘the trees add shade to shade’; and William Faulkner’s As I lay dying when Darl is on the train to Jefferson and sees two men who he remarks as looking like a double French penny (right?) and this brings me to a surrealist image of a deep, moving complexity of the human soul. And on and on or should I say on to on…

What I am doing here and why

I am an avid reader of James Joyce (And more often than not I read more books then I can remember) I also happen to enjoyce him (get it?) there is something with Joyce that is... well easy for me to get into Finnegans Wake is as much my Bible as anything else.  

   What I will try to do is give you a glimpse into reading and understanding the Wake through stream or conciseness study words (i.e., I will give you a line I literally looked up at random and tell you what that particular line means to me). As for a profile picture for this blog; I don’t like pictures of myself in the flesh … I would really like that Page 30 (Here Comes Everybody) Illustration on Stephen Crowe’s Wake in Progress website (which gave me the idea to do this in the first place, Minus the illustrations I will link that site once I am not so busy fixing my own).

So, I hope you will see the blog; go “what the hell is “Television kills telephony in brothers' broil”. (Part:1 Episode:3 Page:52 ) and then I can only hope that this will make sense to you once you see where I’m coming from.

My key for the quotations that I use:

For Page: P

For the line it appears in : L

Quiet simple right?