My pal Henry called the other day: “Hey, this is right up your alley. My friend’s been reading Finnegans Wake aloud since yesterday afternoon at the corner of Grove and Larkin. I was there until 2 am. Meet me there for lunch, eh?” First, let me make clear that one needn’t have conquered James Joyce’s seminal stream of consciousness story in order for the remainder of this blog to make sense. This is important to note, as roughly 4 out of 5 English Literature professors admit that “get through” is a more accurate verb than “read’ in describing full-frontal immersion in Joyce’s last bit of masterwork. Second, it might be worth noting that, to MapQuesters, the corner at which this event took place represents the southeast edge of San Francisco’s City Hall plaza; but, to residents of the City by the Bay, it’s a place infamous as the stumbling ground for lot of peeps who are heavily into a different kind of experimental dream state. Third, I got a huge adrenaline rush from this news. Is that normal? Let’s leave that last question for another blog and just get on with this one….

As it happens, I was booked for a meeting at lunchtime so I couldn’t join Henry. But, being all atwitter (see third point above), I decided to head over solo and check things out. I found Henry’s friend looking scorched and sweaty. Heavy tome in one hand and cell phone in another, he was attempting to text. “I’m trying to get someone to bring sunscreen,” he explained. I ran back to my car and returned with a bottle of SPF 45. “T’anks,” he lubed up and resumed reading:

Houseanna! Tea is the Highest! For auld lang Ayternitay! Thus thicker will be grow now, grew new. And better and better on butter and butter. At the sign of Mesthress Vanhungrig.However! Mind you, knuckling down to nourritures, were they menuly some ham and jaffas, and I don’t mean to make the ingestion for the moment that he was guilbey or gulpable gluttony as regards chewable bolaballs, but biestings be biestings, and upon the whole, when not off his oats, given prelove appetite and postlove pricing good coup, goodcheap, were it thermidor goost or floreal may…..

I’d never met Lars before, and didn’t want to interrupt his flow with too many question, but I did learn that he and a group of buddies had been meeting regularly to read Finnegans Wake together. He’d joked to them at one point that if he ever lost his job, he’d perform it straight through on a street corner somewhere. Lars got laid off last week and thus here he now stood, pressing on through Joyce. In the time that I stood listening, an occasional group of tourists stopped over, a few lobbyists offered brief glances, and the same very high man kept leaning in on a continual loop requesting cigarettes over and over.

I started watching the nicotine guy’s circuits as Lars’ voice washed over me. I began thinking about the novel’s structure. It’s a sort of loose psychedelic rondeau. Narrative threads weave in and out but there’s no time-bound plot; the opening sentence is itself a continuation of the closing sentence. Yet, as with a poetic or musical rondeau, the cadence of the words themselves began to transport me to unexpected places. I’ve “read” the novel before, but this is the first time I’ve really heard it. It’s absolutely beautiful and brilliant in the listening.

As Lars, spent and parched, soldiered onward, I start to internalize the 17 years that it took Joyce to birth his exhaustive, exhausting final novel, and I start to distinguish some quality in Lars that I feel confident no amount of whiskey or even years of friendship might reveal quite so starkly. There’s joy and sadness in all of this on a personal and societal level. The performance of great literary works is a lost art. Play and musicals, of course, are designed for live audiences, but we don’t really think of poetry and prose that way anymore. I myself hadn’t thought much about this until a couple of weeks ago, when a conversation with the poet Dana Gioia inspired me to begin learning poems by heart for the first time.

In the past, I always liked the idea of rediscovering a poem – even an old favorite – upon each fresh reading. But now that I’ve begun committing them to memory, it’s a completely different experience. They are mine now. They live inside me. I’m beginning to appreciate the ambiguities, the pauses, and each word choice on a whole new level. But beyond that, as never before, I put something of my fullest self into poems each time I speak them aloud to another person, simply because there’s no other way to learn the verses or pull them up from within without doing so. And when I can look into someone else’s eyes – even a stranger’s – and speak the words, I can’t do it with anything less than pure love. Can a listener fail to experience this too? It makes me want to accost random people on the streets of San Francisco, letting Yeats, Auden, Elliot, Dickinson, Cummings, Ashbery, and me spill out of me. Wouldn’t they have to give a little of themselves over in return just to make room? Wouldn’t it be incredible to inhabit the inner space of someone else, even for a moment?

WAKE: a ceremony of death; a track left behind; the very act of becoming alert again.

THE LITANY
by Dana Gioia

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
or to forget–of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,
falling on mountain, field, and ocean–
indifferent, anonymous, complete–
of water infinitesimally slow,
sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,
gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,
only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna
and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,
a benediction on the death of a young god,
brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”
Savor its taste–the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time’s
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere–like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,
my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist
steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,
the shattered river rising as it falls–
splintering the light, swirling it skyward,
neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,
even as it vanishes–were not our life.

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Dana Gioia’s note on “The Litany” from www.danagioia.net

I could say a great many things about “The Litany,” but most of them would matter far more to the author than to anyone else. The poem will, I suppose, seem difficult to readers eager for the paraphrasable content of workaday prose. I hope the poem is not opaque, but neither did I want the language to be transparent. A reader will either understand “The Litany” intuitively or not at all. It will help, though, to read the poem aloud. Its organization is musical. Though not all art aspires to the conditions of music, this poem wants to be heard and not seen. What better way than music to describe the invisible?

From Interrogations at Noon
© 2001 Dana Gioia

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Photographs by Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE. See more photos here.