Awake all Finnegans!

Finnegans of the world have been called to unite to bring to life one of Ireland's most well known yet hardest to read books.

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Finns, Fionas, Finnbars, Fintons and Finnualas are also invited to get involved in what has been heralded as the first full length public performance of James Joyce's epic novel Finnegans Wake.
- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/festival-invite-for-every-finnegan-30411651.html#sthash.JDAho8Hp.dpuf

'Finnegans of the world have been called to unite to bring to life one of Ireland's most well known yet hardest to read books. Finns, Fionas, Finnbars, Fintons and Finnualas are also invited to get involved in what has been heralded as the first full length public performance of James Joyce's epic novel Finnegans Wake. The live reading of the complex and famously impenetrable work will take place over a week and a half in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, next month. Titled 'Awake All Finnegans', the marathon venture will see each participant read, whisper, shout or sing four pages of the book.' 

That's a story I read in the Irish Independent this July. 'What a wonderful stunt!', I thought. But would the accident of being called Finnegan be enough to make you to travel to Enniskillen to perform Ireland's 'hardest to read book'?

My wife Lisa loves Ulysses, but thinks Finnegans Wake is nuts. But she's also a theatre reviewer, for Total Theatre, and she loved the sound of the Beckett festival. Performances take place on islands on Lough Erne, in caves and in disused churches. The whole town gets involved: the barbers offer Beckett haircuts, and one sandwich shop sells Krapp sandwiches. We agreed that it would make a great alternative to Edinburgh this year. 

The festival was launched on 1 August, with another splendid news stunt from Sean Doran, the artistic director.  Here's how the Belfast Telegraph covered the story:

 
Happy Days Festival: Beckett, Joyce...and a dog called Finnegan

'A dog named Finnegan was one of the more unlikely respondents to a worldwide call for participants for an epic performance of an Irish literary classic. Part of the Happy Days Festival is dedicated to Beckett's mentors, and this year it is Joyce's turn.

Sean Doran, director of the festival, revealed the diverse response to the call for Finnegans to assemble. "We have had a very good response, ranging from somebody who wants to bring their dog called Finnegan to three actors," he said. "It's a varied response, beyond your imagination. And it's going to be very much an informal and sort of rough and ready reading, that's going to be handled like a relay."

Mr Doran admitted he did not know what to expect from the canine Finnegan. "We'll put the book in front of him and see how he gets on," he joked. With around 160 readers needed, the director said he had made preparations if not enough Finnegans turned up. "When we run out of Finnegans we are inviting artists and audiences and the local community to become a Finnegan for the day," he said.'

Finnegans of the world have been called to unite to bring to life one of Ireland's most well known yet hardest to read books.

• Share
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  • 
    
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Finns, Fionas, Finnbars, Fintons and Finnualas are also invited to get involved in what has been heralded as the first full length public performance of James Joyce's epic novel Finnegans Wake.
The live reading of the complex and famously impenetrable work will take place over a week and a half in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, next month.
Titled 'Awake All Finnegans', the marathon venture will see each participant read, whisper, shout or sing four pages of the book.
- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/festival-invite-for-every-finnegan-30411651.html#sthash.2p8BRKNz.dpuf

So they'd already relaxed the rule, announced in the brochure, that only Finnegans could take part.

Here's the page in the brochure, with the crest of the Finnegans on the left and an impressive parody of the Wake at the bottom.



We flew into Belfast on Wednesday, picked up a hire car and Lisa drove us south and west to Enniskillen, along roads reeking of cow poo, through towns flying union flags and the Red Hand of Ulster.  Then it was up the main street to Blake of the Hollow, a beautiful Victorian pub.

This is a good place for a Wake reading, for the young Joyce identified with the poet William Blake, and Stephen Dedalus quotes him several times in Ulysses. In his 1912 lecture on Blake, Joyce is clearly talking about himself when he says, 'Blake, like many other men of great genius, was not attracted by cultivated and refined women....In his unlimited egotism, he wanted the soul of his loved one to be entirely a slow and painstaking creation of his own.' That's how Joyce thought about his Nora.

I had a delicious pint of Guinness, beautifully embellished with a shamrock, and costing just £2.70 (the price rises to £3.30 after 7pm). We met a friendly local, who'd had a go at the Wake readings, and proudly told us about the pub. It has one of the great Victorian pub interiors. You can read all about Blake's pub here.

Lisa at the bar.

On the tables there were flyers inviting anybody to be an honorary Finnegan.

Ronan Doyle (from the festival facebook page)

The reading took place in the upstairs bar, which has a gothic interior, and, like a proper Irish wake, a table with a coffin resting on it. Here we met the Sligo actor, Ronan Doyle, who's been in charge of the readings.  He's had the task of cajoling the locals downstairs into coming up and having a go.

Ronan said that, on the first day, only three genuine Finnegans showed up. 'If only he'd called it Murphy's Wake,' he said, 'we'd have had no trouble!'

I asked Ronan, was there really a dog called Finnegan? 'There is now!', he said.

Sean Doran, director of the festival, revealed the diverse response to the call for Finnegans to assemble.
"We have had a very good response ranging from somebody who wants to bring their dog called Finnegan to three actors," he said.
- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/dog-among-cast-at-joyce-reading-30474719.html#sthash.x5GmqfSB.dpuf

Sean Doran, director of the festival, revealed the diverse response to the call for Finnegans to assemble.
"We have had a very good response ranging from somebody who wants to bring their dog called Finnegan to three actors," he said.
- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/dog-among-cast-at-joyce-reading-30474719.html#sthash.x5GmqfSB.dpuf

Sean Doran, director of the festival, revealed the diverse response to the call for Finnegans to assemble.
"We have had a very good response ranging from somebody who wants to bring their dog called Finnegan to three actors," he said.
- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/dog-among-cast-at-joyce-reading-30474719.html#sthash.x5GmqfSB.dpuf

We arrived to find the reading in the middle of the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter - the one Joyce made a record of. Anna Livia is a woman who is also the River Liffey.

The first reader we heard was Beate Hein, who's German but now lives in the USA. She's the dramaturg with the Yiddish prodution of Waiting for Godot, being staged in Beckett's old school, Portora.  Here she is reading about Anna Livia's first sexual experiences, including the meeting with a local hermit, Michael Arklow, who plunges his hands into her hair/waters.

'he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown.'

Beate was followed by her partner, Moshe Yassur. He's Romanian, and the director of the Yiddish Godot.

He read Anna Livia's toilette:

'First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butter-scatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary.'

I read the next bit 'Well, arundgirond in a waveney lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses, the diliskydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetchvine agin us, curara here, careero there...'
  
Lisa was up next, and she should have got the final pages of the chapter, which ought be enough to show anyone that Finnegans Wake isn't 'nuts'.  Defending the book to his patroness, Joyce wrote,  'Either the end of (Anna Livia) is something or I am an imbecile in my judgement of language.' 

Unfortunately, the pages had gone missing, so Lisa had to read the beginning of the next chapter, 'The Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies', which is written as a theatre programme: 

   

 'Every evening at lighting up o’clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.) Entrancings: gads, a scrab; the quality, one large shilling. Newly billed for each wickeday perfumance. Somndoze massinees. By arraignment, childream’s hours, expercatered. Jampots, rinsed porters, taken in token....'

There were three more readers that afternoon, including Shane Baker, an American actor, who plays Vladimir in the Yiddish Godot, and who also translated the play. He describes himself as 'the foremost Episcopalian on the Yiddish stage.'

Shane had to read the list of theatre props in the production, which includes 'Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen' . That reminded him of Pozzo in Godot saying 'I've lost my Kapp and Peterson!'  Kapp and Peterson were famous Dublin pipemakers.

After the reading, we had a drink in the bar downstairs with Moshe and Beate, and talked about the resonances of Godot in Yiddish. Aged 29, Moshe worked with Roger Blin on a production of Beckett's Play in 1963. He saw Beckett, but he was too shy to approach him. Read an interview with Moshe here.

Then we were joined by Adrian Dunbar, who had brought the Yiddish play to the festival, having seen it in New York. He entertained us with a beautifuly told joke about Moses promising to part the Red Sea. It had a Biblical build-up and the punch-line being a press agent popping up and saying, 'If you can do that, Moses, I'll get you two pages in the Old Testament!'

This was the beginning of three wonderful days in Enniskillen. 

We went back the following day for another reading, and I had to read this fearsome line from p.254, 'Ricqueracqbrimbillyjicqueyjocqjolicass? How sowesthow, dullcisamica? A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch of tears.'

The final reader I heard, on Friday evening, was an Irish lady (left) who had the misfortune to have to read one of Joyce's hundred-letter thunderwords:

'Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup'


This is on p314, exactly half-way through the book. So they had just two days left to get through the second half of Finnegans Wake!


What came across to me from the festival was the fun of reading and listening to Finnegans Wake in a pub. Even the most incomprehensible pages had lines which got laughs from the listeners. I was reminded of the words of Robert Anton Wilson, which I've quoted before on this blog:
 
The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is in a group.  It has to be stalked like a wild animal, and you need a hunting party.  I’d been reading Finnegans Wake alone for many years before I discovered this....It was Tindall, I think, who was the first to say Finnegans Wake has to be read aloud. The second thing is - it’s best in groups.  And the third law, which I discovered, is it’s best in groups with several six packs of Guinness on the table.  The more Guinness you drink the clearer Finnegans Wake gets.   

Back home in Brighton, I got this email:

'Come all to celebrate the close of Happy Days 2014 with award winning actress Olwen Fouere. 

Olwen flies into from Edinburgh where she's performing her sell out show 'riverrun' based on Finnegans Wake, to read the last ten pages concluding Awake All Finnegans, the festival's durational reading of Finnegans Wake at Blakes of the Hollow.

Free. With Music. 21:00 hours. Duration 40 minutes.'

What a coup! What a perfect way to end the festival!

Read Lisa's review of Happy Days here in Total Theatre.

High Weirdness at the Horse Hospital

I had a wonderfully mind-bending evening at the London Horse Hospital recently, thanks to the London Fortean Society. The event was a celebration of the 'guerrilla ontologist', Discordian Saint (and Finnegans Wake nut), Robert Anton Wilson. 

Wilson is best known for The Illuminatus! Trilogy, co-written with Robert Shea when both were editors of Playboy Forum. The clearest description of the trilogy is Wilson's: 

The Forum...received a lot of paranoid rantings from people imagining totally baroque conspiracies. One day, either Shea or I­... asked whimsically, "Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists." Thus, the Illuminatus saga was born. The idea was simple - a novel, perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between "proving" the case for multiple con­spiracies and undermining the "proof."

The evening began with an inspiring and funny talk from John Higgs (above right), author of the magnificently titled I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary. John talked about Wilson's philosophy of 'multiple model agnosticism' - not just agnosticism about God, but about everything. Wilson describes his agnosticism in his introduction to Cosmic Trigger:

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

John talked about how Wilson's books demonstrate just how arbitrary and untrustworthy our beliefs really are. To Wilson, what we perceive as 'reality' is only a partial model - a 'reality tunnel'.

You can see all of John's great talk on youtube. 

The second talk was from Daisy Eris Campbell, whose father, the brilliant Ken Campbell,

adapted Illuminatus! for the stage in 1976. A lot of her talk was about synchronicity - meaningful coincidence. Illuminatus! is full of synchronicities, often involving the number 23. You can read an article Wilson wrote about The 23 Phenomenon in the Fortean Times. Daisy began by describing the effect Illuminatus! had on her, when she read it (aged 23!)

I began to see synchronicities everywhere, and life became too meaningful...I flipped out and I found myself in a very plush loony bin somewhere in Kent.

She went on to describe some wise advice her father (who shared Wilson's agnosticism) gave her:


Now listen Daisy, don't believe anything! Nothing that has come out of a human mind is a fitting subject for your belief. But you can suppose anything and everything. In fact you should....Suppose God, if you must, suppose flying saucers, suppose fairies. I suppose you could suppose that one of the big religions had got it right right down to the last nut and bolt. But don't believe it Daisy!

I took this photo of Ken at the 2003 Fortean Unconvention, when he was enthusing about the Nag Hammadi Gospels as a great source for weird supposings. 'Fortean', by the way, comes from Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932), someone else who refused to believe:

I conceive of nothing in religion, science, or philosophy that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while. Wild Talents

I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. Lo! 
 
I love that phrase, 'I am given to bizarre hospitalities', which could also describe Robert Anton Wilson.

Daisy told us that she's planning her own stage production of Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, the autobiographical work he wrote after Illuminatus! She then introduced the actor Oliver Senton (right), playing Robert Anton Wilson, who read the introduction to Cosmic Trigger:

Cosmic Trigger deals with the process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-76.....Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that 'reality' is always plural and mutable.

Wilson's experiments involved hallucinogenic drugs, Crowleyan magick, and bizarre suppositions (e.g. that he was receiving transmissions from Sirius) - various ways of finding new 'reality tunnels'.

Daisy then showed us a scene from the play, set in the Playboy Office, in which William Burroughs, played by Mitch Davies, explains the 23 Phenomenon to Wilson and Alan and Jano Watts (Nick Marcq and Kate Alderton).

Mitch Davies (left), veteran of the Science Fiction Theatre

Daisy also took us through the story of Ken's 1976 production of Illuminatus!, a story bursting with strange synchronicities. It began when the Liverpool poet, Peter O'Halligan, read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections. On page 223, Jung described a life-changing dream he had about Liverpool (a city he had never visited). Jung wrote, 'I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool' After a detailed description of the location, he concluded 'I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that's why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the 'pool of life.''

Jung's bust and plaque, in 2004

O'Halligan believed that he knew the location of Jung's dream, on the corner of Matthew Street, near the Cavern Club where the Beatles once performed. He rented an abandoned warehouse here, which he called 'The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun' (shades of the Wake!). O'Halligan put a plaque on the wall with a bust of Jung and a quotation from his dream, which you can still see today.

O'Halligan offered the building to Ken Campbell, then planning to set up a Science Fiction Theatre. Looking for a book to adapt, Campbell went to Camden's Compendium Bookshop, where he noticed a book with a connection to Matthew Street - a Yellow Submarine on the cover! Turning to page 223, Campbell found that Jung was in the book!  

Daisy read out the quotation, and I felt my own jolt of synchronicity when I realised it also involved another father and daughter - James and Lucia Joyce!:

Do you know what Jung, that old Chinese sage disguised as a psychiatrist,

said? 'You are diving, but she is sinking.' 

Jung said this about the Joyces' respective explorations of the unconscious. Diving, Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake; sinking, Lucia became schizophrenic. This made me think of Ken and Daisy's own experiences of Illuminatus! Ken, diving into the trilogy, turned it into theatre; Daisy, sinking in the same text, found herself in that 'loony bin'.

Robert Anton Wilson came to London to see the Illuminatus! show when it transferred to the National Theatre. He writes about the production on page 223 (of course!) of Cosmic Trigger, which is dedicated to Ken. Wilson even had a walk-on role, as a naked participant in a black mass, chanting 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.'

In 2007, Ken gave his own version of these events in a talk for a Robert Anton Wilson memorial night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. His talk is on youtube and so is Daisy's.

I've already sent my donation of £23 to help 'fire the cosmic trigger'. You can do the same (with whatever currency you use) on Daisy's website, where she writes: 

I'm adapting Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger for the stage, because Synchronicity has told me to. It's all rather apt since my father adapted and staged Illuminatus! and I was conceived backstage...The plan is to crowd-fund it, stick on a UK run, and from that raise enough money to do a tour of US Discordian Cabals. And to immanentise the eschaton (the good one).

Help these people stage Cosmic Trigger!

I've never managed to get far with Illuminatus!, which strikes me as harder to read than Finnegans Wake. But I was inspired by both talks to read Cosmic Trigger, and I love it. I've almost finished Volume Two, which has a lot about James Joyce in it. Wilson was obsessed with Finnegans Wake, which he called 'the Good Book'. He used it for bibliomancy, like the I Ching, opening it at random to see what it had to tell him. There's a recording of him doing just this at a talk he gave to the Reality Hackers Forum in 1988.

Wilson even took the Wake's opening line, quoted at the top of this blog, as an instruction, and in 1984 moved to Howth Castle and Environs:

After over 30 years study of the Good Book, I had finally...found myself living in its first sentence. Cosmic Trigger Volume 2

Wilson first arrived in Dublin on 16 June 1982, when the city was celebrating Bloomsday and Joyce's centenary. He describes the day in Cosmic Trigger Vol 2:

Bust of Joyce unveiled on Bloomsday 1982

I was astonished when I read this, because I was also in Dublin that day, and our paths must have crossed. Like Wilson, I was running around Dublin with a radio pressed to my ears, and watching the performance of Wandering Rocks. I also went to see Siobhan McKenna's Molly Bloom at the Abbey. I'd seen Eamon Morrissey's Joycemen the previous evening.

By coincidence, when we went to the Dublin Theatre Festival last month, the first thing we saw was a new one-man show, at the Peacock, by Eamon Morrissey!

Wilson once gave a long interview about Finnegans Wake, which you can hear on the Only Maybe blog, with a transcription by Scott McKinney. Here's how he describes what Finnegans Wake meant to him:

Finnegans Wake is what I call “The Good Book”, and I’m only half joking.  To me it’s not only the greatest novel ever written, it’s the greatest poem ever written, the greatest detective story ever written, and the most entertaining work in all literature, and as William York Tindall of Columbia says, it’s the funniest and dirtiest book in the world.  

Wilson has some extraordinary ideas about the book. He's the only reader I've come across to take seriously Joyce's claim to be able to predict the future. For example, he finds prophecies of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 'which hadn’t happened yet except in Joyce’s head'.

But there is also a lot of level-headed advice. I love his answer to the question about the best way to approach Joyce's book.

The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is in a group.  It has to be stalked like a wild animal, and you need a hunting party.  I’d been reading Finnegans Wake alone for many years before I discovered this....It was Tindall, I think, who was the first to say Finnegans Wake has to be read aloud. The second thing is - it’s best in groups.  And the third law, which I discovered, is it’s best in groups with several six packs of Guinness on the table.  The more Guinness you drink the clearer Finnegans Wake gets. 

Who could argue with that?

Drink Guinness and read the Wake!