Tag Archives: selflessness

The Prism of a Language Manycolored

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I went on a ride on a speedboat over the holiday weekend, and I chose to remove my glasses, lest they fly off my face and into the water (I have lost more than one hat in such a way over the course of my life). As severely nearsighted as I am, I find that removing my glasses and going off somewhere without them makes me feel keenly vulnerable.

I reflected, of course, on James Joyce’s terrible eyesight, and this post will look at Joyce’s speculation in Portrait that his weak eyes gave him more pleasure at prose that reflects the “inner world” than prose that describes the external world. I will consider how Joyce uses that idea in Finnegans Wake.

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Someday We’ll Find It

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about the song “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie (1979). My daughter heard it for the first time the other day, and she immediately hated it (ha). But as I listened to it to appreciate her distaste for it, I was struck by the idea that rainbows symbolize a connection between our reality and our dreams and hopes.

The rainbow is a significant symbol in Finnegans Wake, and this post considers it alongside some of the ideas about “storytelling” I’ve been developing on this blog.

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“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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