Category Archives: Mystical Blathering

“We Live Inside a Dream”: David Lynch and James Joyce

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The quote in my title plays a pivotal role in David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk with Me and in Season 3 of his show Twin Peaks. I was reminded of it recently when I came across a passage from Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. In discussing the way that HCE and his accusers often blend with each other in the Wake, they cite Schopenhauer’s description of the world as a kind of dream: “It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.”

This post reflects on the idea of dreams in the work of David Lynch and Finnegans Wake.

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Shut Your Eyes and See

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In rereading Ulysses, I recently reviewed the passage where Mr. Bloom helps a “blind stripling” cross the street, and Bloom’s reflections remind me how central sense perception is to Joyce’s work.

In this post, I look at a few places where sense perception is important to Ulysses before turning to Joyce’s treatment of the senses in Finnegans Wake.

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Clipper Clipper

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Finnegans Wake has a way of burrowing into the mind, and after readers have internalized enough of it, they can more easily connect it to their everyday experience. In this post, I briefly examine how the word “clipper” in everyday life can become a jumping off point for reflecting on Joyce’s literature and, ultimately, the human condition. It is as Buck Mulligan says in Ulysses: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” Mulligan is, of course, being his usual, mocking self, but — as Joyce often reveals — a lot of Truth can be said in jest.

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