River Swells.

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s...

So “begins” Finnegans Wake, or at least the first five words that one encounters when opening the book.

Finnegans Wake, or simply, the Wake as it is most often referred to amongst Joyceans (namely those of us hopelessly afflicted by being aficionados of the Irish Bard...) is arguably the most important book in my life. Or, at least one of them, but its presence in my life is ominous, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Likewise, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha shares the literary pole position in my heart for favorite books. Both could not be more different, yet more the same, so it goes. The former is considered the most difficult, confounded, self-absorbed, narcissistic exercise in futility of language, while the latter is often scoffed at being too simplistic, naïve, and claiming to be a quest for losing the self, becoming the anti-narcissistic book. So, what then do they have in common? All, and no-thing, but most importantly, they are both about a river.

Joyce’s postmodern linguistic Frankenstein is topically about the River Liffey that runs through Dublin, though simultaneously about every river on the planet, condensed into no less than 800 different rivers in the well-known chapter on ALP, the universal Mother. Siddhartha, on the other hand is a “tale from old India” with a focus on an unnamed river, which teaches Siddhartha the magical power of the sacred syllable “OM.”

When I was young-er (I still feel young, despite being 42), and dumb-er (still dumb, but just aware of it now), then I gave a talk in Zürich, Switzerland at a Joyce Symposium, my first of many to follow over the years, about the relationship between the Wake and Siddhartha, arguing that they were more or less the same book, just different.

Having given, what I thought was a dazzling presentation for a young whippersnapper, complete with one of my in/famous Fulton diagrams (if you know me, this needs no further explanation, though I will post a picture of the original when I can find it again for a visual aid), I put down my felt-tipped marker and waited for shouts of “bravissimo, bravissimo, encore, encore.”

Rather, silence. Crickets more like. Only, unlike Beethoven , I wasn’t deaf, it truly was silent.

Now, silence is good and bad, and with a presentation, there is a fine line between death and victory, a hair’s breadth.

The silence was broken by Fritz Senn, the über-Swiss Joycean, who is in/famous for making or breaking young Joyceans on the spot, the former usually being sprite, young good-looking female Joyceans, the latter often look more like me.

In his typical faux-Socratic self-deprecating irony , Mr. Senn threw out this chestnut, more or less, as such, saying, in his Swiss manner, “Now, it is my humble opinion, and I don’t claim to know anything about anything, but there is one thing that I have noticed about the Wake and that is that there is a uncanny ability for people to talk a great deal about the Wake, but actually not understand it at all.” That was the first and last comment of the presentation, and I sat down.

Well, some twenty years later, having worked much more extensively on Joyce and having read Siddhartha several more times (I taught myself German to read it in the original, so it must be important to me), I would give the exact same presentation, the echoes of Mr. Senn’s deprecation notwithstanding.

Which was: the two books are the same, and they are about a river, and in that river, everything happens all the Time at all Times and covers all Space and it is contained in the sacred syllable OM, though protracted to the tesseract of A-U-M-Silence (hence I tell myself the silence at the end of my presentation was actually fortuitous...always look on the bright side of life, “whistle, whistle/whistle, whistle”) as described in the Advaita Vedanta classic, the Mandukya Upansihad...

Sunday was a beautiful day in Antwerp. Though 99% of the denizens might disagree evinced by the dearth of human beings out that morning, I found it to be phenomenal, to use my daughter’s favorite adjective.

It was very cold, grey and foggy as Dickens’ London. I was tooling around my bike in the Waste Land of avenues and streets and ended up on the banks of the Schelde, the river that made Antwerp a viable metropolis for hundreds of years. Down towards the South, where it becomes more river and less commercial property, I sat by the river, and wept silently, though not out of sadness.

Sitting there for some indefinite amount of Time, watching the muddy swells roll plashing against the nearby hull of the good ship Helenic, listening to the plaintive, feline calls of the gulls, and feeling the cold, damp caress of fog on my cheek, I sat, and tears did in fact come to my eyes, though I did not even notice when, how, or why, yet, I wasn’t sad, not at all, but rather I just was, and I was indeed a lone a long the...