Two of my favorite sentences in Finnegans Wake are among the shortest.

At the end of the book, during ALP’s magnificent final monologue, in which she (as the River Liffey) prepares to rush out to the ocean, she anticipates her daughter dropping like rain to become the next ALP. The cycle is going to begin again. She recalls when she herself fell from her mother, as she addresses the resurrecting HCE, the next iteration of her husband:

For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall.

It is incredible that after 600-some-odd (very odd) pages of literary acrobatics, it’s six simple, standard English words that hit so hard.

The sentences summon all the meanings of the word “fall,” from our individual transgressions to “falling” in love to the cosmic process of entering manifestation, dreaming a dance of separateness by constructing the idea of a “self.”

I was thinking about this process of “falling” into manifestation the other day in connection with a passage from the first chapter:

The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.

Those 12 items — an important number in the Wake, since 12 is the number of hours on a clock, zodiac signs, months, apostles, citizens in HCE’s pub, and jury members who judge him — here are the 12 Buddhist nidanas, a Sanskrit word meaning “cause, motivation, or occasion.” They are the twelve links of “dependent origination,” the mechanics of the cycle of birth, suffering, and death (samsara). That is, they are the ways in which we feel (sweeten sensation) and fall into the world of birth and death. Or, to put it in less supernatural terms, they are (according to the Wiki page I linked to above) “describing the arising of mental processes and the resultant notion of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ that leads to grasping and suffering.”

In Buddhism, the nidanas are ignorance, formations, consciousness, name and form, six senses bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, old age and death.

There’s a lot that can be done by matching the Buddhist understanding of those terms to the alliterative phrases Joyce comes up with for them. But that might be for another post. For now, it’s enough to note that Buddhism sees ignorance at the root of suffering — ignorance of the impermanent nature of all things. Unable to see this impermanence and emptiness, we take “things” to be real, permanent objects. To put it in terms that I’ve been using in previous posts, we mistake categories for Platonic Forms and essences, or at least stable “things.” Doing so, we grasp onto them, clinging onto what pleases and avoiding what displeases. This is where desire comes from. And thus comes the cycle of birth and death: one does not need to believe in reincarnation to take this cycle to be the endless turning of generations captured in Finnegans Wake. The Buddha describes this cycle as “dukkha,” which means “suffering”…though a better translation might be “unsatisfying”; we seek to cling to certain things, but nothing ultimately satisfies because we are lost in the ignorance, the belief that there are things that *would* satisfy us if only we could cling to them in the right way, or if only they could last forever (which of course they can’t). It is only by seeing things in their impermanence that we can let go and relinquish this tendency to grasp for permanence (which is a better term for what the Buddhists mean by “desire”).

Another way to put this is that the same cycle that is unsatisfying when seen from one perspective can be infinitely satisfying if we accept that everything in it is impermanent; if we accept that there are no eternal things, or stable “things” at all; if we stop insisting that things in it “have to” be a certain way for us to be happy ; if we stop insisting that certain things “shouldn’t be” (since every part of reality depends on the rest of it); if we start embracing the nature of things as change, without grasping onto part of it and trying to insist that it never change or go.

Another way to put this is that this same world of cycling and recycling generations that is “suffering” from one perspective becomes joyful if we can figure out how to regard it differetly (to “read” it from another perspective). Finnegans Wake — which trains us to read in ways we have never read a text before — can also train us to “read” life and history in new ways, drawing connections that can induce a direct perception of the interdwelling of all “things,” the ultimate emptiness of all “things,” which are impermanent and in flux. The only stable thing is the flux, the riverrun. You cannot step into the same river twice.

Many people seem to think that the Buddhist idea of “giving up desire” means renouncing all worldly things and living alone on a mountaintop. But a better interpretation of this idea, in my estimation, is relinquishing the notion that any one thing will make us happy or that any one thing should be (or is) permanent. Joy does not consist in the attainment of any particular “thing” — all of which are just mental categories anyway; it consists in an embrace of the flux of riverrun.

But we can’t remain permanently in a state of Nirvanic bliss, either: inevitably, we will feel and want to grasp, and we will fall right back into the old patterns of thinking, though perhaps with time we can become better and better at seeing more quickly through the tricks with which the mind traps us into an unsatisfying experience of the world.

Thus, we can participate joyfully in the sorrow of the world. Life may be sorrow/unsatisfying, but we can begin to live in joy by seeing and accepting its fleeting nature.

And that’s what ALP does at the end. She lets go.

Let go and let rain.