In October of 2021, my copy of Finnegans Wake began to fall apart. I had owned the book for nearly fifteen years at that point, and I had spent the previous year and a half reading and re-reading and annotating it over and over again. So it wasn’t a surprise. Most of this post was written then.

Back in 2021, I found I had to tape the spine of my Finnegans Wake because the book broke in half. Right down the middle. That’s how it exists to this day. I’ve still got it on my shelf. Fragmented into two sections, it really is the “book of Doublends Jined.”

My mind keeps going back to a bit from II.3 when HCE defends the Russian General and begins talking about a certain “(suppressed) book” that he had been reading on the toilet (while he’s in the “lamatory” or lavatory…lama being Latin for “bog” or “latrine”). [I also think of “Lamia,” a snakewoman monster who might correspond to the girls in the Park…a passage in I.3 says that we give ourselves lease to imagine the “intimacies” in “all ladies’ lavastories”/lavatories]

The book is Finnegans Wake or Ulysses and/or all of literature.

HCE makes this enigmatic comment about the book: “Who straps it scraps it that might, if ashed, have healped.”

I puzzled over that one for a while. The way I read it now is that whoever straps the book to himself — like, attaches himself to it, as if the book in and of itself is the important thing — is ultimately scrapping the book, making it worthless. But whoever burns it up (ashing it) — like the phoenix — is actually internalizing it and will be healed/helped.

To regard the book as special in and of itself is to miss the point. It’s the finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself.

I’m reminded of a Zen koan: “If you see the Buddha coming down the road…kill him.” That is, if you turn the Buddha himself into an object of worship, you’ve missed the point. There’s a similar version of this: the teachings of Buddhism are likened to a raft to reach the other shore of Nirvana. But how absurd would it be for someone to sail to another shore and then pick up the raft and carry it around and hold it over his head and venerate it as if it were special?

The teachings are a means to an end, not the end in themselves. The final act of the Buddhist is to give up Buddhism. The final act of reading is to burn up the book in discovering the thing to which it points [and one thing Finnegans Wake ultimately points to is summed up by that glorious passage in I.7: the process wherein “the slow fires of consciousness” “transaccidented” “life unlivable […] into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal”]

My copy of Finnegans Wake? The one that’s falling apart? The damn thing is an artifact. It has underlines and marginal notes that make reconstructing my thoughts on the text a snap. It’s a treasure. It’s meant so much to me. It was heartbreaking to see it start to come apart. How would I feel if it were ripped to pieces in front of me?

The thing is, though, that reaction of mine is silly. It’ll one day be pulp. It’ll return to earth, no matter how much I try to protect it. The same is true of all things.

I can’t protect everything. I have to figure out how to let go and live and accept life’s sad but beautiful disintegration.

“Who straps it scraps it that might, if ashed, have healped.”  

HCE reads the book on the toilet. I’m imagining someone tearing out the pages and using them as toilet paper. The physical book is meaningless. It’s a sign. It’s meant to disintegrate eventually, just like this little life we live.

I’m not there yet. I can’t fully accept the impermanence of all things, but I advance toward that understanding little by little, a little more every day, with the help of fingers pointing to the moon.

Some additional thoughts:

“Strap” is listed as a slang term for having sex in the OED. [Amusingly, Issy, in her form as Iseult making love to Tristan in II.4, is called a “strapping modern old ancient Irish prisscess” (“priscus” means “ancient” in Latin)]

The word “scrap” can also mean to fight (the brawl at Finnegan’s wake), or it could refer to table scraps — from the feast of Finnegans’ wake.

Perhaps “Who straps it scraps it” can be taken not just to mean something negative — foolishly revering a text — but something positive (using Finnegans Wake or literature itself as a means to engage with life, a figurative sex toy by which we plunge into life in all of its fights/scraps, in order to get some of the scraps of the feast of life).

It’s both the Fall and the Rise at once.

The sentence immediately preceding it can also be read both ways: “Packen paper paineth whomto is sacred scriptured sign.” The word “Packen” is German for “grab.” To grab at the book — “grasp” in Buddhist terms — and revere it as a sacred exoteric object, instead of internalizing it — produces pain. Yet “pain” can mean bread, part of the feast of life. So holding up the book as a holy object of worship leads to pain, but regarding it correctly — as a means of engaging/strapping life itself — is a way of partaking of the feast. Regarding it correctly entails de-emphasizing the object itself as important, accepting its impermanence, and living its lessons rather than venerating the object.

The word “ash” is also a verb that means to flog with an ash stick (Stephen carries an ashplant stick in Ulysses). Perhaps we can interpret the passage as suggesting the book is a tool of punishment (and/or erotic pain). [The ashplant stick can also symbolically be a divining rod, a magic wand, a pen, a phallic symbol….]

“Ash” also can be used as a verb, to denote tapping ashes out of a cigarette. I’m visualizing “ashing” the book not only as burning it up but specifically as burning it as rolling papers.

It makes me think of references to smoking in the Wake, including this description of ALP:

she’ll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff.

The word “blaziness” is appropriate in this context, as “blaze” is slang for smoking. In the next generation, the question Issy answers in I.6 too contains a smoking reference:

What bitter’s love but yurning, what’ sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?

And the word “ash” makes me think of the opening of the novel:

The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. 

Tellme tellme tellme elm.

“Ash” becomes “ask.” Ask and tell. It’s out of ashes that the phoenix rises. It’s out of questions that our tellings arise like ash trees.

To conclude these wandering thoughts, I’ll put my tongue-in-cheek summary of these ideas that I wrote years ago:

Altogether, Finnegans Wake is a sex toy, a roll of toilet paper, a collection of kindling and/or rolling papers, and an instrument of erotic punishment. It’s also a cookbook, a self-help book, a guide to dream interpretation, a collection of songs, a spell book (along the lines of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, guiding the soul through the afterlife), and a time machine.

It belongs in every section of the bookstore!