Is a kerygma possible after Finnegans Wake? Perhaps only by assuming the posture of a clown can one succeed in obliquely communicating a serious message.
— Joseph S. O’Leary, “The Spiritual Upshot of Ulysses” in An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, edited by James P. Mackey
I read Finnegans Wake my senior year of college. It blew my mind, flipped me out, and opened up for me just how possible it is to sculpt and create new worlds using the written word. I knew I wanted to be a writer before reading James Joyce, but his mastery of language helped me to see the unlimited possibilities of fun and mystery that lay at the author’s disposal.
On page 249 of that densely puzzling book, the following few sentences grabbed my imagination — and have never let go:
Luck!
In the house of breathings lies that word, all fairness. The walls are rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone. The roof herof is of massicious jasper and a canopy of Tyrian awning rises and still descends to it. A grape cluster of lights hangs therebeneath and all the house is filled with the breathings of her fairness, the fairness of fondance and the fairness of milk and rhubarb and fairness of roasted meats and uniomargrits and the fairness of promise with consonantia and avowels. There lies her word, you reader! The height herup exalts it and the lowness her down abaseth it. It vibroverberates upon the tegmen and prosplodes from pomoeria.
Wow.
First, a confession: I love this passage because I see me in it. I see the writer, the contemplative, the mystic lover of the sacred feminine. “Her fairness” may be about Anna Livia Plurabelle, but for me it could just as easily be about Sophia, or Gaia, or Brigit. “The fairness of promise with consonantia and avowels” calls me to my own avowed life of unpacking the treasures to be found hidden in the word (and, perhaps, the Word). And what is “pomoeria” other than the region where postmodernism hangs out?!? (Pretty cool of Joyce to come up with that one, way back in the 1930s). The more I reflected on this passage, the more I wanted to live in the house of breathings, hopefully forever.
As a brash and idealistic young man, I thought that one day I would start a publishing company — and I intended to call it the House of Breathings, satisfied with my own little Joycean pun. But the path of my life veered me away from the idea of owning my own business, and so that dream faded away. But when I found a different venue of publishing — the world wide web — I revisted the house of breathings, and for years called my website by this name. For much of that time, “the Website of Unknowing” was a page within the house, in which I talked about my particular love of mysticism.
As the twists and turns of life would have it, the time eventually came when I felt that my entire website was, indeed, a “website of unknowing.” So I changed its name accordingly, and retired the old house of breathings. But its hold on the more playful regions of my unconscious was simply too strong. It wouldn’t go away. And so I finally decided that this was the right name for the archival section of my website — where older writing of mine, as well as interviews (both of and by me) and other off-site links — could be housed forever, thereby having new life breathed into them.
Pardon the pun.
