Luckily for a Yeasayer

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Luckily there is another cant to this questy.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 108-109.

I'd intended to finish Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake before I dove into the Wake itself, but I couldn't hold myself back. I've been preparing myself to read the Wake for at least ten years, and now that I'm so close, I can't help but jump before the gunshot.

You have to understand what Joyce means to me. In the presence of Joyce, I become giddy, awestruck, reverential: Joyful. And finally I am allowing myself his masterpiece. The power of his imagination is unspeakable. His associative abilities are indescribabble. In his presence, I am jawstruck. Here comes an imagination set loose.

I remember my grad-school room-mate Danielle asked me about Ulysses, which I had recently finished, and I said when I read the final sentence, I felt like I had received first communion. She asked if I was saying that myself. It sounded like a quote to me too, but I was sure it wasn't. It was just the description that came to me, though the canned vibe to the words was uncanny. Because I meant them; for me reading Joyce is a religious experience-- a religion of joyous affirmation and the wildest untamed Yes available to our almost waking imaginations.

I know I'm carried away and about to swim back into it, but I just have to say that I am doing it, right here. Right now.