Gusto

Kate and I try to avoid having too many "What bills can we pay this week?", and "Well, that payment bounced, we'll try it again next month" conversations. Yes, we keep only loose track of our money, but it's not like I go out gambling and drinking, and we don't like antagonizing ourselves or each other with the obvious. We're not poor, but we're not rich.

If you look at life economically, in terms of a person's earning potential, then I'm still not really worried. My line of work is transferable internationally, with the right licenses and a bit of language brushup. So if the economy ever unfreezes enough for a galoot with a few years' experience to slip his way through a door again, then I have reason to feel good about the years to come.

Of course, like an ancient Irish poem says about spring: it's pretty, but there's no food. Hope isn't dinner.

About fifteen years ago, while I was drunkenly schlepping my way through my 20's, a beggar in Boston asked me for money. I walked past, and thought, I have quite a bit of credit card debt right now that I can't pay off. Total all my assets and liabilities up--books versus debts--and I'm in the negative. I'm worth less than that beggar! It left me thinking that I should go back and demand money from him.

That's nonsense, of course, because I have an education and had the prospects of receiving money from a reasonably well-off family. In other words, I had support and the potential to earn that the beggar most likely didn't. (Although some beggars might have suprising personal histories. One slovenly drunk I knew was a black-sheep castoff of a Boston Brahmin clan.)

Anyhow, my main point here is that there is no mystery in the presence or absence of money in a person's life. Unless one wants to live off the grid (the little bengal's floated it once or twice), money is an essential tool. So Kate and I try to avoid wrangling too often over it, when our general situation is pretty obvious to both of us.

In the meantime, while Kate works, I've mentioned studying math and geodetics (the science of locating things geometrically on planet Earth), but I'm also taking the opportunity, like last year in the hospital and afterward, to dig into some literature I've been neglecting for some time. Like last year, it started with Thoreau.

(Well, last year it started with Shakespeare and Chaucer, but once I got to Thoreau, I realized I'd found a writer I could understand instinctively. So in that sense it started with Thoreau.)

Thoreau, during his discourses, mentions many old writers. Walden is a modern Confessions, a sincere psychological self-profile by a mature adult male. In the Confessions Augustine describes his conversion to Christianity, and in Walden Thoreau describes his two-year experiment to simplify his life so as to eliminate all unnecessary things, or in his own words, "all that was not life." Both discuss the writers which influenced them--Augustine famously writing that he fell in love with Vergil's heroine Dido, and Thoreau spreading his affections a bit more widely.

Time in Walden is somewhat kaleidoscopic, with many different moments of time merged within one picture. The book moves generally through the four seasons, but with two years' experience compressed into the apparent passage of one single year, and even then, sometimes Thoreau will range across several months, or even years, to find another memory which illustrates a point. And during the course of this not-quite-passage of time, he describes several books, or even classes of literature, which have especially formed his thinking.

Oddly enough Thoreau never mentions Kant, whose philosophy was the basis of the label given later to Thoreau and his friends: the Transcendentalists. Perhaps Kant was as intimidating and as feared a writer then as he is among undergraduates now, and Thoreau didn't want to scare off his readers. In any event, Thoreau never mentions him.

He does, however, discuss Homer at length, and Hindu philosophy in general, at even greater length. In "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" time passes even more vaguely--where a few weeks seem to encompass the passage of spring to fall, as well as several extended forays into memories from years past--and the discourses on literature are longer, and nearly as fascinating. (I'm ashamed to admit that in one of his essays, Thoreau lavishes praise on the Scottish poet Ossian, supposed author of several Gaelic epics. Unfortunately, by Thoreau's time Ossian had long been revealed to be the fraudulent creation of the Scottish poet James McPherson, who had taken actual ancient Gaelic fragments and incorporated them into several English works of his own invention. The incomparable Samuel Johnson, who almost immediately detected the counterfeit, wrote that the books of the nonexistent Ossian were as "gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." And nearly a century later, my intellectual hero fell for it. Ah well.)

In Walden, Thoreau celebrates the heroism less of the characters than of the poet, whose work is a joyful affirmation of piratic and warlike life in bronze age Greece. And all Homer's heroism is overwhelmed by a tiny moment's experience in his own life: "I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment in earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and the Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting fertility and vigor of the world."

Literature speaks very much to writers of literature. However, life speaks to everyone, and literature might at best describe outlines or echoes of what we live every day. But these outlines and echoes can be valuable clues by themselves for living. To the literary woman or man, however, not only the content but the aesthetic is the lesson. What matters to me is not only the experience and thought compressed into Thoreau's words, but the arrangement of words themselves. When he blends time together imperceptibly, turning his Walden calendar into a delicate fiction, I am charmed and intrigued. When two weeks become nearly one full year on the river, spanning from spring to the onset of winter, I'm inspired to find the more rapid seasons within my own life.

So I wanted to take Thoreau's advice: go back to the source. Every source has its source, of course, and when the person we call Homer was composing poetry, the stories he (or she? I subscribe to the idea that a woman composed the Odyssey) was telling in verse might well have been ancient beyond memory. (This is Thomas Mann's time coulisse, the endless dive into human memory. "Very deep is the well of time. Shall we not call it bottomless?" he wrote.) Unfortunately, Homer is our earliest coherent source for these Greek stories, and fortunately they are told so magnificently that they along with the Bible have formed the unmovable foundation for European and American literature.

The Iliad is all about war, and shines with soldiers' joy in their work. Death is more than a necessary evil--it is a tool for gaining fame. Mankind's spirituality was still in its childhood, with godly male and female characters displaying our species' psychology on a cosmic stage. Whether acting unseen by the mortals within the poem, or planting suggestions within the humans' brains, the gods and goddesses perform psychologically valid acts. They are part of the framework for displaying the humans in the poem.

The role of gods and goddesses--mainly Poseidon and Athena--in the Odyssey is the same as in the Iliad. The main character is Odysseus, a man; Poseidon, also male, is the principle divine antagonist, and Zeus, another male, remains the high arbiter of the gods. However, Odysseus and his son Telemachus live in a world of settled homesteads, where the heroic culture is counterproductive at best (think Ivanhoe). The Odyssey occurs largely in a world dominated by women, where Penelope is the focus of over a hundred brawling and blasphemous suitors. Athena, the crafty goddess of wisdom and battle, quietly guides both Odysseus and his son through a series of desperate adventures, none greater than ridding the palace of the mob of suitors.

Helen, adulterous cause of the Trojan War, is beyond reproach and beyond analysis in this story. She so thoroughly dominates her (apparently rather stupid) husband King Menelaus of Sparta, that he can adoringly tell the story of how, when he, Odysseus and others were crouched within the Trojan Horse, Helen walked round it, with her (second! After Paris had been killed) Trojan husband, calling the names of the principal Greeks--imitating their wives' voices. Menelaus' tale comes just a few lines after Helen had condemned herself as a prostitute, and said that her mind had changed at Troy, and she wanted only to return to Menelaus and the Greeks.

The point that defies analysis: if Helen told the truth about wanting to forsake Troy, why try to flush the Greeks out of the horse? (And the sequence of time is clear: Helen mentioned wanting to leave Troy behind before the horse was ever brought in.) But if her self-accusation was a lie, why bother to tell it when it's so unbelievable? In no small part because Menelaus was gullible enough to believe her. And this is just the beginning of the mystery that is Helen, and the theme she so grandly introduces, of duplicity. Whether calculated, or subconscious, or simply to cover up a monstrous crime, the poem is a nearly unbroken series of deceptions.

Helen's physical beauty is undeniable. Her magic, on display more than once, is almost terrifying. Her motives in using it, inscrutable. She is both greater and less than Penelope--faithless follower of her own advantage, and capable of steering the minds of anyone she is with. Penelope, unspeakably faithful, is clever but not magical and is held almost prisoner by her illegitimate suitors.

Odysseus, the lone adult male profiled at any length in the poem, exists almost in isolation. Even his son Telemachus, introduced earlier, is constantly described as just exiting adolescence and entering adulthood--so he is hardly comparable to his father. It is the several female characters--Penelope, Helen, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, even Athena--who can be compared to each other, and who at various times (except for Helen) hold Odysseus' fate in their hands. Rejection by any one of these would mean death (or, in Penelope's case, worse) to the poem's namesake.

This is not to become a dissertation on my favorite book. I just wanted to explore a few themes which I've been considering since re-reading it. Like the Iliad, and I'll agree with Thoreau here, joy suffuses the poem, in the acuity of description, the detail which validates the story as a whole, and in the overall affirmation of the lives of its characters.

So I want to keep taking Thoreau's advice in Walden, "Read the best books first, or you may never have the chance to read them at all." So I'm moving from translated Homer, as my warmup, to possibly the most intimidating book in Western literature: Finnegans Wake.

Joyce took the title from a 19th-century Irish folk song about the wake of Tim Finnegan, a mason (well, a hod carrier: the guy who brought bricks and mortar up to the bricklayers) who fell off a ladder and died. At his wake there was a fight, and someone accidentally splashed whiskey on his face as he lay in the open casket. Finnegan awoke and joined in the party.

There's a bit of etymology behind the name "Finnegan": the name comes from "Finn-again", as in, a reincarnated version of the hero from Irish myth, Finn MacCool. That's precisely the kind of trick that Joyce adores, so who am I to deny it? (Joyce is the one who wrote, "God is dog spelled backwards.") So with the death and reincarnation of Finnegan, Joyce is dealing with the process of sin, guilt and redemption. And that's just the itsy-bitsiest kernel of things.

I can't really even describe what that book's about, except to say that it's about everybody, and everything. Since all humans share the same basic psychology, we all play out similar psychological dramas in our lives. Based on this, Joyce's book is full of male and female characters which are all ultimately lesser parts of, and distorted expressions of, the two main characters: HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody), and his wife ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle).

Their two sons Shem and Shaun are utterly opposite in nature, and constantly fight. They are the source of all wars in history (with a generous assist from their sister the temptress). The daughter Isabel is the object of all the males' attentions (not least her brothers and father). Within these five characters is the grounds for Joyce to display and explore all human history. Finnegans Wake is the fantastically complicated journey of exploration. (And that point I made earlier, about meaning plus aesthetic...well, let's just say, I really don't want to get too far into that topic right now.)

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs."

That's how the book begins.

"Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousends thee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

That's how the book ends. Note how you can go right back to the beginning from the end. And that's one of the main points of the book: the story never ends, and it's the same thing over and over. (And it's worth mentioning that the title, "Finnegans Wake", has no apostrophe indicating the possessive. It's really a statement that all we Finnegans must wake up from our guilt-imposed psychological self-abuse: our own death, in a manner of speaking. And in another sense, Finnegan wakes in the form of children who grow up and take their parents' place in the world.)

The book is too complex, and I have too much to learn about it, to waste anyone's time blathering about it now. But I intend to learn. And I'm getting ready to write my own, but you might say I'm taking a good stiff draft of excellent literature to prepare my own spirit for the act of writing.

* * *

A version of the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" I picked up from the internet:

Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin' Street,
A gentleman Irish mighty odd;
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin' way,
With a love of the whiskey he was born,
And to help him on with his work each day,
He'd a drop of the craythur every morn.

Chorus:
Whack fol the dah O, dance to your partner,
Welt the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn't it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!

One mornin' Tim was feelin' full,
His head was heavy which made him shake;
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed,
A gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.

Chorus

His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake,
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O'Brien began to bawl,
"Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
"O Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?"
"Arragh, hold your gob," said Paddy McGhee!

Chorus

Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job,
"O Biddy," says she, "You're wrong, I'm sure",
Biddy she gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawlin' on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage,
'Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.

Chorus

Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered over Tim!
The corpse revives! See how he raises!
Timothy rising from the bed,Says,
"Whirl your whiskey around like blazes,
Thanum an Dhoul! Do you think I'm dead?"

Chorus