This Beating Heart

At first, his dreams were chaotic;  a little later, they became dialectical.

--

He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres--much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind.  He understood that initial failure was inevitable.  He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track, and he sought another way to approach his task.  Before he began, he devoted a month to recovering the strength his delirium had squandered.  He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming, and almost instantly managed to sleep for a fair portion of the day.  The few times he did dream during this period, he did not focus on his dreams; he would wait to take up his task again until the disk of the moon was whole.  Then, that evening, he purified himself in the waters of the river, bowed down to the planetary gods, uttered those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to pronounce, and laid himself down to sleep.  Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart.

--Jorge Luis Borges. "The Circular Ruins," from Collected Fictions, 97-98.

* * *

You'll notice I haven't posted in several months.  Finnegans Wake was a secret dilemma.  Slowly, as I descended into it--my reading spanned my entire absence . . . music, voices, Shakespeare echoes . . . and to my state grew stranger, being transported and rapt in secret studies . . . --it captivated and enslaved me.  I stopped dreaming.  My imagination dissipated.  I stopped meditating.  All magic dried up.  I was under the sway of a superior talent.

I'm not exaggerating: not only did I lose my skill of lucid dreaming, I even began to forget my dreams: my dream journal was rarely opened during my reading of the Wake.  Though I continued work on my novel, I lacked inspiration.  My writing was work, and thus inferior.  I received no flashes of lines, characters or scenes.  I saw no visions.  I heard no voices.  All powers were consumed within the Wake.  And yet I always trusted that Joyce is nothing if not benevolent.  After awhile, I had no choice.

I've never had a reading experience like the Wake.  I wonder if my experience is common, if it is what Joyce intended.  As I went deeper, it scattered my thoughts, my attention, the power I'd gathered through years of practice--it took me beyond the coherent limits of association.  His imagination is so strong that it depletes the imagination of the reader.  As the Wake progresses, it goes deeper into sleep, down into the darker waters, where little can be perceived and almost nothing comprehended.  It is an inconceivable darkness, one no other novelist I've read has even guessed at.  It is the womb, where we can only dream, though we have nothing with which to dream.  It is form without shape.  It is eventually annihilation.

I was inspired by Angels when I decided to prepare myself for the Wake with The Divine Comedy.  For if the Wake has any sort of narrative arc, it is the arc of the Comedy.  The descent precedes the ascent.  Toward the end of the Wake, light begins to break through.  It never becomes comprehensible, but one senses a dawning clarity.  Where Joyce differs from Dante is that he never shows the final overwhelming inbreaking of light.  We never reach the day inside the Wake.  Instead, Joyce ends the novel just where the dreamer is about to awaken.  The darkness is only banished when the reader puts down the book.  And there is something very unique here.  I can't think of another book whose intended effect is only felt in the aftermath of its reading.  Prior to that, you feel the exact opposite.

It is as if Joyce grabs you by the ankles and carries you to the bottom of the ocean.  For 500 pages, you sink.  At some point, impossible to locate, for one is already senseless, he releases you, and so you may slowly rise to the surface.  The last hundred pages, give or take--who is able to judge in such conditions?--consist of this ascent.  But you only break through the surface after the final word.  And the purpose of all this drowning was to teach you how to breathe.

I'd been preparing for the Wake for several years, and my initial reaction upon putting down the book was disoriented.  Now what?  I'd conquered my Everest.  My horizon was under my feet.  But that was only shock and disorientation.

A few days later, I began dreaming.  Heavy.  I received messages.  Power, guidance, inspiration enveloped and invigorated me.  Magic and imagination fed into each other, welling up, ready for use.  Exploding for use.  I set myself down to meditate, and was successful.  I've never felt this strong before.

My return is founded once again upon dreaming.  Not by choice: by inspiration.  I've been given a project.  I'd picked up Borges only to prepare myself for a novel about Prague called The Other City--I'd forgotten about how heavy Borges was into dreams, magic, power.  Names.  The strange relevance.  He is feeding me.  I see a new program of study opening before me.

And I believe this intense resurgence is entirely due to the Wake.  This is the intended result.  The reading is the ordeal by which one earns initiation.  I don't want to imagine what would've become of me had I given up--it would've been poison without cure.  I would've been lost in darkness, madness, and for how long?  And though I am now lifted, arisen, I can't say I'll ever read the Wake again.  How many times can you submit to a drug whose effect lasts six months?  I cannednut forseed hit anny(living, fleurthebelles)time swoon.  Celtickly saltunleave sirtrainleaf knot for severrally yeeaars.