While making
dinner earlier this week, I decided to check out Thinky Pain, Marc Maron’s comedy special. While cooking, I usually watch some comedy videos via Netflix streaming and
it was more than time I checked out Maron’s neurosis parade. One of my favorite bits had to do with
Captain Beefheart. Maron claims
Beefheart’s music has always loomed over him, this intimidating thing he knows
he is never going to understand, never going to posses the largeness of mind (paraphrase) to really comprehend, but he feels now, in his late 40s, that it's time to dive into the
mad world of Beefheart.
This is how I
feel about Finnegans Wake. To borrow Maron’s phrase, I will never,
ever have the largeness of mind to fully get what Joyce is up to in the Wake. And that’s fine—I knew that going in. But when Maron said that, well, I felt
a kinship. There are things in
this world we will never fully get,
but that’s no reason to steer clear of them. Frankly, I feel sad for anyone who avoids the inexplicable.
I’m about done
with book I. It’s that goddamn
chapter 6, the quiz
chapter, that really threw me. In order
to assail that fucking wall, I returned to the toolkit: the critical texts, the internet,
all the efforts all these years devoted to decoding the Wake. I’ve done well just reading the book
without resorting to a lot of guides, but that chapter was too much. And the guides proved helpful, but I’m
determined to continue without them.
I think reading the book first then reading critical texts will prove
more enjoyable. I’ll likely miss
out on a lot this way, but I have the rest of my life to dig back into the Wake. I just want to get through it once before I set about the
lifelong task of trying to make a modicum of sense out of this clusterfuck.
PS: I tried listening to Beefheart while Reading the Wake. Big mistake. That's flying too close to the sun.
