In chapter I.8, the washerwomen describe ALP arriving

with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door!

These can be interpreted as the gifts of the universe to each of us, for we are all her children. Her gifts to us are like gifts we dreamed we gave her, in this dream we call life, because we are ALP also: I think here of Carl Sagan’s idea that humans are the cosmos’ way of knowing itself; in the same way, we are the cosmos’ way of giving itself gifts. Our experience is a long series of gifts.

“Gabe” is German for “gift,” but it also reminds me of the “gift of gab.” Another major part of ALP’s gifts is language, the everyday discourse in which our consciousness is saturated.

ALP lays the spoils at our door, the spoils of the past, the pieces of the Fall that she gathers up and passes on to the next generation.

In I.1, it says that “all spoiled goods go into her nabsack.”

The spoils of the past are also “spoiled.” They’ve gone bad with age. And when we refuse to let go of the past, we let them calcify. We have to renew the past by letting it go and passing it on by giving it new life: that is, we renew the past by finding its essence again in new experiences (as Finnegans Wake suggests that the same archetypes live again and again in each generation through the work of ALP). In a similar way, language is endlessly reframable, ever ready to be made new. For instance, I can quote Finnegans Wake somewhere in some moment and suddenly the moment has a new meaning and so does the book. I can return to a passage I’ve read a dozen times, like this one that I’m discussing here, and it’s fresher than ever because I have more to bring to it, more to apply it to. I can share words, and now suddenly I have more joy than I started with. Engaging with art can be a way of escaping the zero-sum game that we’ve created for ourselves.

One of my other favorite passages about ALP is found in I.1:

How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when strengly forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.

All of us are lords and ladies, heirs to the Fall (“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit,” begins Milton, punning on the fruit of the tree and the consequences of that offense)

Fruit is responsible for the Fall, but fruit is also nourishing and delicious. So is fish. Here, “kettle of fruit” recalls the phrase “kettle of fish,” and fish = Christ, the Christlike HCE, the feast after the Fall, the feast at the wake of Finnegan. As ever, one need not take these symbols in a religious sense. To me, Christ in this context signifies something purely secular: the overcoming of egotism to embrace the Other, the notion of Here Comes Everybody (human, erring, condonable).

The Fall and the Redemption are identified in Finnegans Wake, and/or they are presented as two ways of looking at the same event. The Fall is a feast. Experience is a feast. A gift. A delicious gift.

Every moment. Even a dangerous moment, even our last moment.

There’s a story told in the Zen tradition of a monk who is being chased by a pack of wild tigers. While running, he falls over a cliff but manages to catch hold of a vine, and now he’s dangling over an area where more tigers are gathering. The vine is starting to break, and he is about to die.

In his last moment, he plucks a strawberry off the vine, tastes it, and declares, “Delicious!”

The parable suggests that even in moments that are “bad,” there is something wonderful to be found if one knows how to look mindfully at experience. It’s always Now, and the present moment is always fresh, if you know how to perceive it — that is, if you can cease to lament the past and cease to worry about the future (since both of them exist only as mental phenomena, and both of those ideas are key parts of the zero-sum game we construct for ourselves). That ability to find what is delicious in the Now, to enjoy the ordinary, is a gift we’re being given all the time, a gift that really does keep on giving.