...And Another Thing...

Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn

Last week Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected leader of the Labour Party. Few in the media rate his chances of winning a general election, which is the sole objective of politics in a system of elective representation. It is also the antithesis of anything approaching actual democracy.

Now, before we go any further, I should declare my allegiances. I am a member of the Green Party. I don't necessarily believe in everything that the Green Party stands for, but I do believe that in a system of elective representation, where the only choice is to which pre-approved candidate you hand over your decision making proxy, the only power that a citizen can reasonably exert is to vote out the current government. And then vote out the government that replaces them. And the one that replaces them. And keep voting them out until we get an administration that we actually like. I vote Green because they are the party at the furthest remove from the mainstream parties (without actually becoming deranged) and so furthest removed from the homogenous Lib-Lab-Con hive-mind. Power corrupts, but Westminster corrupts absolutely. When the Greens get in, I'll probably vote them out too.

I despise the Tories as much as the next person (I grew up with a soul in the 1980s), but I think I despise the Labour Party just that little bit more. Hating a Tory is like hating a shark for doing what is in its nature to do. Under Tony Blair, the Labour Party expended great energy telling the British public how dangerous sharks were, how they needed to be protected from sharks, and then gave the contract for constructing shark defences to a consortium of Great Whites. Hospitals and other Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects signed off under New Labour will end up costing the public purse ten times what would have been spent using only public money. Then, Tony Blair was always a Tory in sheep's clothing. He was so good at being a Tory that one of his dead skin cells became the next Conservative Prime Minster.

What politicians don't seem to have worked out is how angry people are. The governments of the world bailed out the banks involved in the subprime mortgage scandal, failed to bail out any of their victims, and then used the doctrine of Disaster Capitalism (see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine) to asset strip public resources and public finances of anything that is of benefit to the public. People are understandably angry at how even richer the 1% became in making everyone else poorer. When their only form of redress is to occasionally get to vote on something that is ultimately meaningless to them, they are liable to make irrational choices. We saw this in the EU elections of 2009 and 2014, most council elections since the 2008 financial crash, the 2016 EU Referendum and, of course, the election (and re-election) of Jeremy Corbyn to leader of the Labour Party. It's the same reason why Donald Trump is so unaccountably popular, because people are looking for any alternative to the political elites that drove us into this ditch. I suspect that many God-fearing Americans would vote for Lucifer dressed as Rocky Horror's Dr. Frank N. Furter, so long as he wasn't part of the D.C. elite (or a woman, for that matter).

Which brings us back to Jeremy Corbyn. No, he probably can't win a general election, but then Jesus Christ could be leader of the Labour Party at the moment for all the difference it would make. So long as the SNP continue to dominate in Scotland, Labour can't possibly win, because (and here's the thing), England is a Conservative country. Labour may have pockets in London, some strongholds in the north of the country, but the principle colour of England is blue. British media commentators, however, are overwhelmingly on the left, which is what happens when you are successful and well off, and every minute of every day isn't a constant battle to survive. It's easy to be liberal when you don't view every other human being else as a potential rival.

The media also tends to be a self-reflecting surface that can only view the world with reference to its own reflection. Jeremy Corbyn is not a slick media operator like Blair or Cameron and that makes him a bad politician in the eyes of the Westminster media bubble (most of whom have long since succumb to full blown Stockholm Syndrome). I don't really care what Corbyn or any politician has to say. I tend to mute any politician that appears on TV, something I advise everyone to do. It's irrelevant what a politician says, as it's usually empty rhetoric, or a distortion or oversimplification of the truth. By hitting mute, only their body language remains, stripped of any context. Then you get an idea of what the one speaking wants you to think, like being able to filter out a magician's misdirections. A politician should be judged on what they do, not what they say. By this measure, Jeremy Corbyn is doing better than most.

I take my definition of socialism from Bertrand Russell, as modified by George Orwell, as modified by me. Socialism is the belief in three things: freedom of choice, equality of choice, and social justice. If you believe in those three things then you are, I'm sorry to say, a Socialist. At least Jeremy Corbyn is honest about his socialism. I'm still unlikely to vote for him, but less unlikely than any Labour leader in living memory. Which is progress of a kind. I'd have immersed my scrotum in sulphuric acid before I'd have voted for Blair: But then I had Blair pegged as a dangerous narcissist from the moment I became aware of him (and I never get tired of saying, I told you so.)

It is possible to change the world without being in government. If Corbyn's "kinder politics" forces the Tories to adopt more left of centre policies to even give the illusion of possessing some modicum of humanity, then it's a step in the left direction. Where there is little prospect of power, honesty can flow a little more freely. Though the way things have been going of late, the country might yet make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister out of mere spite. Now that would be a change.

8/6/02

As often happens, when I think about writing something about the state of the modern world I find that I already wrote it a decade ago.

8/6/02

To take a step forward, I must first retreat. Retreat into the shadows, oblivious to all except my own thoughts, my own mind. To confront this pressure cooker frustration full in the face, see it for what it is, examine and understand and from there to toleration and acceptance.

This has been allowed to fester far too long. Who the hell have I become? This stalking consciousness. This foster child of hope. An apologist for disappointment. Secure with every inch of my fibre of who I am and what I was meant to be and yet impotent in the light of possibility. So I lock away knowledge inside myself. Engorged upon future I am too lazy to bring to inception. And the tension grows.

Yet who knows? Who sees? If you find me crying, that doesn’t mean I’m unhappy, nor does laughter denote joy. The turmoil deep inside is a constant ache. Uninterrupted nights are rare. The thought process, once a point of pride, has long ceased to hold pleasure. It becomes more and more a torture day by day. Yes, I appreciate your help and concern, but only one person can confront this hell, ‘fore only one us is living through it. Be grateful for that. Where it comes from, I fail to understand, yet it has been in here as long as I can remember. Maybe I was born this way or I was dropped on my head or perhaps I just had humanity sussed from a very early age.

Yes, you see you are all part of the problem too. Your cruelties, your petty hatreds of those you don’t understand or worse still, have never met. What’s wrong with you all? Chill the fuck out. Yes, in this oh so conscious stream, I see you for what you are. Afraid. Afraid of death, afraid to die forgotten. And in your impotence, you accept mediocrity and fall further into the dustbin of history than if you’d just let it all go and say in a proud, clear voice, ‘I’m terrified of my own mortality.’ Stop aligning yourselves to people of the same race or nationality or sex and sexuality and the other assorted accidents of birth. There is nothing to be proud of here. Be you own person, be with people who understand you, accept you and not simply tolerate you because you look like them. And examine yourselves. Look in the mirror and ask, ‘Who am I,’ and maybe, just maybe you might begin to approximate the person you where meant to be and not the monster social engineering has forced upon you. Again, mutilation is nothing to be proud of. Neither is clinging to flags and anthems and primary colours, as if you’re hanging off the edge of cliff, grabbing at handfuls of turf, trying to save yourself from the void. Let it go. Let it all go.

But don’t worry. I’m not angry with you. You’re unlucky enough to have been born in the flatulent west. Hypocrites and murders in residence. I mean the Bushes and Blairs of the world. The ones who promote democracy and freedom with empty statements and curtail and destroy them with the next. Words and actions. Emotive, motivational speeches. Abstract nouns. Abyssal chasms of morality. You see, they are really no different to Hussains and Bin Ladens of the world. The ideology may be different, yet the methodology is identical. If there really is a war on terrorism, why isn’t NATO bombing Washington? How many times will the good ole’ U S of A see their trained nutters come back to haunt them before they realise that those abstract nouns could be so much better if they had some basis in reality? Why did either of my grandfathers bother fighting in the second world war, when the fascists have obviously won through in the end. While our faces were turned towards the Channel, the real coup was taking place behind our backs.

So you see my problem here! I have so much to give you all. Passion, joy, knowledge, hope and understanding. Yet you fit into your tight little ethnic groups and start kicking out at each other. And THEM, the rulers, the dictators of this solar, island plantation, that’s exactly what they want. They want you impotent and afraid. They want you to look out of your rose tinted, double glazed windows and focus all your hatred upon the first face that doesn’t resemble your own. Yet as long as you remain fragmented and isolated, this little blue, green planet will sink further into the mire. You will work for their companies and spend their wages on their products. Meanwhile, your taxes will be spent on subsidising them, while they contribute nothing to your well being. Yet they will still control what you see, read and watch. Paranoid? People, it has already gone on for decades.

In 1984, Orwell invented a language called Newspeak. The purpose of this new language was to slowly reduce the vocabulary of the public, until there were so few words left, the human race could no longer communicate emotion successfully. Humanity would be reduced to the level of savages. Orwell was too limited in his appraisal and probably too decent a person to fully appreciate the full malevolence of the world. Political correctness, which to begin with was a perfectly valid idea, has now reached the point where we can no longer have an intelligent debate on social ills and inequality, without being accused of ‘political incorrectness’, further exacerbating racial tension among communities. Hey! Racism is not something that simply disappears because you don’t discuss it. See Burnley and weep. If you ignore cancer, it doesn’t go into remission. It festers and eventually it claims you as its own.

Further, popular culture seems to have no other mandate than to lower people’s expectations, until anything of a vaguely higher standard is hailed as artist genius. Pop music has now become so anodyne and homogenised that often even the teenagers, who almost exclusively listen to this trash, can not differentiate been one boy band or another. TV is slowly rotting into the same swamp as across the pond. On the small screen we are sold fantasy in the guise of reality. Meanwhile Hollywood sells us historical rape as incontrovertible fact. Popular culture hasn’t lost the plot, it just feeds us the same one over and over again.

So, how long ‘fore you’ve had enough? When the population of Africa no longer exists and the continent has become one enormous free trade zone, where the poor of the world have been shipped to, to serve double breasted slave masters? This, in my most cynical moments, is the future I envisage. ‘Slavery’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming.’ Europe, the ultimate theme park (already happened ). The irony of all this of course, is that humanity spread like a virus out of Africa and now we sit back and do nothing as it slowly implodes. If an entire continent is on the endangered species list and we choose not to act, is that not genocide?

All of which bring us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation (to quote Joyce), to me and my unfulfilled life. I need to look at this in more depth. Why am I unhappy? Lack of confidence? Definitely. Laziness? Guilty as charged. Environment, unemployment, disappointment, insufficient outlets of emotional and intellectual feelings. All true. What the hell am I waiting for? Why so many questions (humour, good)? No one else is going to do this but me. I have all the potential in the world. I could achieve relative immortality (an oxymoron, but never mind). I have intelligence and passion and ability and strength and originality (a rare commodity in these dark times). I also have a moral and ethical code which I have been guilty of disrespecting too often recently. I have been petty and I need too focus all that anger (an indispensable form of passion) into more productive areas. My evolutionary path these last five years has been so steep, that I have become so swamped in information, it has clouded my judgement. Weighted me down, basically because I have had no outlet to channel it all through (hence this digresstionary tale). I am out of practice and out of touch with my form, my art.

So maybe this is what I should be doing! Sitting down, day after day at this machine and writing ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, until I reach such a point as the fog has lifted and I can communicate properly with the world once more. An artist cannot survive in a totalitarian state ( to paraphrase Orwell) and I cannot survive in any state recognisable to myself, so long as I continue to live hostage to my own confused mind, heart and soul. This has gone too far. Enough is enough. When the tangents subside and sustained, literary creation begin to flow, then I’ll be myself once more. No, I have never truly exhibited my true form, my true persona, not even to myself. This will be its embryonic awakening. And once it arrives, it will be here to stay.

So, let’s get the fuck on with it, eh! This shall be my daily testament to my inception into a creature of light, of radiance, of apple-white purity. Whether you cheer or groan when you lay eyes upon me is not my concern. As long as you see me, that is all I ask. I will hide in the shadows no longer. Nor will I let any of you off the hook as easily as I have done. Already I feel freer, less tense. This is my medium and I reclaim it as my own. Through words I exist. Through words I share my insanity, my wisdom, my passion, and all anger, hatred and prejudice dissolves on contact with this keyboard. You can not infect me. I will achieve peace and not allow the time between now and my demise to become a void, nor filled with resentment and bitterness. Your world is full of shadowy figures and duplicity. Mine is filled with glorious creatures and truth. The only truly impervious beings are the honest. So that is who I shall be. Cool! So, come and have a go if you think you’re smart enough. The Truth! You can’t handle the truth. And things generally of that ilk.

Why not just do your best. ‘Cause the way things stand, it all pointless anyway. We all die, we all rot away. I am as convinced as I can be that there is no God. I’ve yet to hear an argument in His favour that wasn’t clever wordplay or mere intellectualising, leading to profound confusion. Descartes believed that since he was imperfect, he must have been created by a perfect being. Or alternatively, Rene, perhaps you were created by a process less imperfect than yourself. Christians argue that evolution could not have created something as perfect as the eye. What they fail to either mention or comprehend is that the human eye is far from perfect. It is riddled with flaws. If God did such a good job, why did humans need to invent glasses? Which throws up another question. Why would a perfect being, create an imperfect one? What’s up with that?

Neither do I by into this argument that procreation is a form of immortality. Most of us have little knowledge of own lineage beyond four or five generations previous (not an especially successful attempt). However, a larger percentage of the population know that Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Hmm, can’t name our own great-great-grandfather, yet we remember the name of a gay Irishman. I’m not gay, but I think I prefer Oscar’s method. Maybe I’ll never get anywhere or my portfolio be lost to civilisation, but since I’ll be forgotten within eighty years after my death anyway, I may as well have a shot at it. Beats watching Big Brother (being flayed alive and anally fucked by an elephant beats watching Big Brother however).

Get it done.

 

Making Mistakes

Shorter post today. Enjoy.

Making Mistakes

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

          James Joyce, Ulysses

George Orwell states in Nineteen Eighty-Four that “the best way to keep a secret is to hide it from oneself.” Which is bollocks, right? The best way to hide a secret, as we all know, is to write that secret down, leave it on the mantelpiece or coffee table, go for a piss and then come back and try and find it.

It can’t be done, because the mind is as mischievous as it is treacherous and so replaces the memory of the thing searched for with some unpleasant image, like a large tax bill or a picture of Boris Johnson in just his pants and socks, and so we skip over the form of the desired object time and time again, even when it is starting us in the face.

This works well for drug dealers or spies. Keep a list of your contacts in a little black book in plain view on the sideboard. Saves you having to remember anything incriminating. Then when the police or intelligence services break the door down demanding names, all you have to is get them to help you look for the book. Bingo! They are quickly co-opted into a shared sense of blindness for the thing searched for and desired.

I’m being factious of course (it’s a skill), but it’s a source a continual fascination to me the way the mind works or doesn’t work. We all make mistakes, it is after all the way that evolution works, through errors in the duplication process copying strands of genetic material. Some errors are beneficial to progress, others disastrous. One of the greatest errors in the public’s perception of science is in misunderstanding the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’. It doesn’t mean the fittest in the sense of the most well-toned, or even the sexiest (there’s that factiousness again), but in the sense of the most well suited to survive in an ever changing environment. Today you may be top of the food chain, the savviest with current technology, the richest economy, but who knows what next week will bring. Adaption is as much about serendipity and making mistakes as it is about forward planning. Without mistakes, we’d all still be a pool of slime under a rock somewhere.

One of my greatest weaknesses is my ability to proofread my own work. I still find typos in posts on this blog that I wrote five years ago or more. It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t survive long in banking (aside from the danger to my mortal soul). Banks externalise all mistakes to their own staff, the public, the public purse, anyone but themselves. The kind of errors that in the public sector or less carcinogenic elements of the private sector would simply be regarded as part of human nature, in banking are instead treated like the worst crimes imaginable. It’s the principle of judging others by your own standards. Put the date in the wrong format, miss out the county on an address, call someone Ms instead of Miss and you’ll be treated like you were the one who mis-sold the PPI policy in the first place. By laying the blame for mistakes squarely at the feet of their own staff, banks leave much to chance and it’s no surprise they are still screwing people over and engaging in toxic practices, even to this day.

I jumped before I was pushed, but I’m glad I jumped when I did. As a writer, it was a useful experience and I gained some valuable insights, but only in the same way as I would if I’d spent a year with the Taliban. Yet I factiously comfort myself with the knowledge that my ability to make simple mistakes does at least single me out as a powerhouse of evolution. Get things spot on 100% of the time and you may have a glittering career in banking ahead of you, but it’s also probably best if you don’t breed at any point. You’d only be diluting the gene pool.

People will sometimes offer up a prayer to St Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, when looking for something they’ve misplaced. As an atheist it is all too easy to deride this type of behaviour, because no matter what we atheists might like to think, atheism is a cult, filled with its own unique set of prejudices just like any other religion. Scientifically speaking, the appeal to an external power definitely does work, not because St Anthony or God necessarily exist, but simply because the process removes ownership of the problem from the domain of the mischievous mind to some unseen third person. Like with banking, externalise the problem and it ceases to be your concern and you’ll soon find you find your watch/wallet/car keys/phone.

It’s the same as when people say, “Look for something else, you’ll soon find it.” Drug dealers and spies, be aware that you should under no circumstances offer your unwelcome guests tea or coffee, or ask them for any assistance in the kitchen. One quick fumble through kitchen cupboards looking for the sugar is enough to dissolve the cloak of invisibility surrounding that little black book on the sideboard quicker than you can say one lump or two.

I don’t really have an ending for this piece, so instead I will close by saying that the writer has made eight deliberate mistakes. Can you spot them all?

Get it done.

We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

“Supper, sir, and tonight's movie. I'm sorry, sir, it is another Doug McClure.” By which I mean to say, more today on Finnegans Wake. Only in the middle eight though. Little bit at the end. Read it, you’ll enjoy it and you’ll learn something. Read on, MacDuff

We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

We are such stuff as dreams are made on: our little life is rounded with a sleep
                                                                                              The Tempest act 4, scene 1

I love sleep. One of the many reasons why I never really took drugs (certainly not ‘uppers’) is because I can’t imagine anything I’d less like to be doing than taking drugs and stay out all night clubbing. Yawn! All things considered, I’d rather be reading. That and getting an early night.

I say an early night, but my sleep patterns are so notoriously off when not engaged is regular servitude (I mean employment, sorry, sorry, my bad – attitude) that I can be getting up at anything from 4am to midday to midnight. I can easily sleep for anything up to fourteen hours at a time, often staying awake for a day or more just to try and reset my body clock. It usually works, at least for a couple of weeks.

To sleep, perchance to dream¹. As I sleep, I dream. I have friends who claim to never dream or to not remember their dreams. I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like. I have four, five dreams a night and usually remember all of them. They have regular plots, themes and moods, like episodes of TV series.

There are the post-apocalyptic zombie dreams, the escaping from government agents or criminal mastermind dreams (same difference, am I right?), the dreams where real life locations miles apart are connected by shortcuts through the woods or under the M61. Whenever I leave a job, a house, a town or a relationship, I have dreams of being back there for months afterwards. My father died of cancer eighteen years ago and yet every other month I still dream that he turns up alive and no one but me seems suspicious at him not being dead, even though we had him cremated.

I have dreams where I’m running, but move more like a marionette, feet never quite connecting with the ground because the mind can’t accurately reproduce the sensation of running (or, more likely, because I rarely felt the need to run and so have no stored experience of what that’s like). I have dreams I am on bike, struggling to get up one of the monstrous hills that surround this village. I dream of being on boats all the time, steam boats on Russian lakes and speed boats on canals and some version of my fictional sailing ship, the Anna Livia Plurabelle, zipping around the oceans of the world. And if I’m not actually on water, then I’m walking along the bridal way of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Except, it’s a dream, so it both is and isn’t the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

I have dreams that I am in the United States and, most bizarrely of all, I have infrequent dreams about being in Vienna or Saltsburg, though I haven’t been to Austria or have any great desire to travel there.

Whenever I have spent all day reading or writing then the story continues as I sleep and my dreams are filled with nothing but a typed page that I read, except the narrative proceeds in the kind of fucked up way for which dreams are notorious. If that sounds strange, a friend of mine once had a dream that consisted entirely of a can of baked beans on a table. Static image, no panning or tracking shot or anything. Just a can of beans on a table. In the land of dreams it is the ordinary that is fucked up.

I also have a lot of anxiety dreams. I have dreams where I have run away from work or friends and am hiding, but regularly emerging from my hiding place to taunt them and run away and hide again. I used to have frequent dreams where I’m in an elevator that starts to get smaller as it ascends. Or works like an elevator in Star Trek, moving sideways and between buildings like a monorail system. I also have dreams that I’m in Star Trek, Deep Space 9, Red Dwarf, Community or The Office, depending which show I’ve recently been watching in marathon sessions.

In fact, the one dream that I can’t seem to remember is the one that I’d most like to able to recall. It is a recurring dream and a recurring nightmare from when I was very young. I can only remember it in snatches. It’s a disjointed dream. There are some grave diggers, which I know for certain come from seeing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid. Something involving the army moving into position or something, but as so often with dreams, it’s the sense of unease and terror that the dream used to instil in me. It was the sense of time slowing down to a crawl. Where the sound of speech is in slow-mo and lowered pitch. I would get these sensations in waking moments too, of the world running at half speed. It used to freak me out, but now I’d kill to be able to recapture that sensation. I’m 41. I could do with some extra hours in the day. I had the dream once in a flu fever when I was fourteen, but other than that, I’ve not had in since I was five.

Oh! là! là! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvés!² Given such a broad range of dreams, it is perhaps not unsurprising that I would become obsessed with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel which takes place during the course of a dream. When Joyce was writing, it was the theories of Sigmund Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that held sway. Both men died long before the discovery of Rapid Eye Movement (REM), first described in 1953, and it was at the time assumed that dreams progressed in something like real time during the course of sleep. Today we know that dreams happen in bursts of activity during the night, identified by REM. What can appear in the dream world to last for hours actually happens in fast forward and often only takes minutes of real time. Perhaps this accounts for my feelings of temporal dislocation as a child.

Freud’s theories seem to us naive, even idiotic at times, but no theory is ever entirely wide of the mark and some of what he has to say is still valid. His theory that some dreams are nothing but wish fulfilment holds true. A child sees a toy in the shops that they wish to own and that night they dream that they are playing with the toy in question. I’d be willing to bet that in these days of consumerism, self-entitlement, arrested development and the cult of celebrity that more people have wish fulfilment dreams than ever before.

For Freud, all phallic or quasi phallic objects represented the penis and all womb or quasi uterine objects represent the vagina. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all that Freud ever thinks about. Joyce employs some of the same imagery in the Wake. It seems to me that in studying Finnegans Wake, which contains allusions to a great many works of fiction, non-fiction and mythology, some fall into the trap of assuming that just because Joyce references something, it must mean he thinks of it as being worthy.

The Wake makes great use and reference to Giambattista Vico’s The New Science, which contains Vico’s theory of history moving through repeating cycles. Yet anyone who’s ever read The New Science should know that while it might have some interesting theories about history and the etymology of certain words, it is for the most part a poorly conceived piece of fundamentalist, misogynist tripe, which tries to prove the literal truth of the Biblical stories, especially the bit where Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth travel out after the Great Flood to the three known continents and singlehandedly repopulate each continent by impregnating the race of giant women who survived the rising waters.

Perhaps I give James Joyce too much credit, but most of what I have read that was written by him or by the people who knew him leads me to believe that he ultimately came to see Vico’s theories as being as misogynistic as I do, especially once he’d read James George Frazer’s counter theories in The Golden Bough. The phrase, ‘a commodious vicus of recirculation’ contained in the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake seems to me to be Joyce calling out Vico’s theory as a vicious recycling of the same old misogynistic shit. Similar denunciations occur throughout the Wake.

The same is true with Freud and with psychoanalysis in general. Joyce’s own daughter, Lucia, muse to Finnegans Wake, suffered from what today would be probably diagnosed as manic depression and simply treated, but then, in the dark ages for feminism and psychiatry, was ministered to extremes and left languishing in mental institutions for forty years after her father’s death. Only Joyce kept faith in Lucia that she was not disturbed, but took her to see the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. The consultation was not successful, especially after Jung tried to get Joyce himself to undergo psychoanalysis. The conversation and Joyce’s witty retort is replayed in the Wake:

I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want (the fog follow you all!) without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer.

At one point in the Wake he refers to ‘Jungfraud’ to describe just what he thought of psychiatry. He believed that Vico had anticipated the work of Jung, Freud and others, but often the language of all three men in the Wake seems to be used as a weapon to strike back at them. The fall of man at the Garden of Eden and all the subsequent falls and returns, deaths and rebirths that play out through the Wake use Freud’s phallic dream symbology to symbolise sexual excitement and release. Death in the Wake is really la petit mort, the little death which is said to occur after ejaculation. Once the giant HCE has shot his load into his wife, ALP, he will sleep and she will be left unmolested until he is priapically reborn to rule over her once again.

Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?³ Today there are two competing theories on the purpose of dreams. One is vastly more woolly headed than the other, but neither quite catches the essence of the landscape of dreams. The prevailing cognitive scientific view is that dreams don’t really mean anything. Dreams are simply what happens when the governing conscious mind is suspended through sleep and neurons in the brain fire to trigger random memories that have no higher-self to give them direction. Freud said that every image in a dream is based on something that the senses have recorded in the real world, whether we consciously remember it or not.

The other theory on dreams come from the New Age community (New Age is such a fine example of Orwellian language: nothing even slightly new about any of it). Here, the theory holds that every symbol and image in dreams has some very definite meaning, as if all dreams are a Renaissance painting or a Modernist novel. Here’s a few of random examples from a fairly typical online resource:

To dream that someone is hacking into your computer or files symbolizes your vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The dream may be a way of telling you that you need to work on building up your self esteem.

To dream that you are eating macaroni symbolizes comfort and ease. The dream may be trying to bring you back to a time where things were much simpler.

To dream that you have rotting or decaying teeth implies that you may have said something that you shouldn't have. You may have uttered some false or foul words and those words are coming back to haunt you.

Sometimes satire writes itself. I’m sure that there must have been some evolutionary advantage to dreams, probably developed when our ancestors still lived in the trees. I don’t imagine our ancestors dreamt about their computers being hacked very often. The middle quote is so inane as to require no further comment. I often dream about my teeth falling out but that’s because I have rotten teeth. As Freud never actually said, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. New age dream analysis, from the school of thought that brought you astrology.

That said, I can’t quite bring myself to fully endorse the scientific view either, because it fails to take account of the human dimension. Whether or not dream imagery is just random neurons firing in the brains neglects how we as humans interpret the world. It’s like looking at the slide show on someone’s computer screen saver. To the objective observer, the images may seem random, but every single image will be of significance to the person that put the slide show together. The same is true of dreams. We as human beings find meaning in random patterns, as you see from every tortilla chip or toasted cheese sandwich that is said to bear the image of Jesus Christ (funny that he always looks like a white European, never Middle Eastern or Jewish).

The scientific view of dreams has as much wrong with it as the New Age view, because both fail to take account of a personal interpretation. Look at night terrors, where people wake up during sleep, but are still also dreaming. Sleep paralysis, which stop us acting out our dreams during sleep is still in effect, rendering people helpless and they start to hallucinate figures in the room. What form those shapes take is entirely predicated on their personal belief system. Some people see alien abductors, other see the devil. An ex-girlfriend used to say that vampires were sucking her energy, because she reads Anne Rice novels and watches too much True Blood. My mum see angels, because she’s a New Age type and her house is covered in angel trinkets. We see in dreams what is personal to us.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?⁴ Dreams take any significance we chose to place on them. They can be mere entertainments or the revealers of great personal truths. Some nights I go to bed with as much excited anticipation as sitting down to watch a new episode of Community. Other nights I don’t want to sleep at all. Clearly dreams are more than just memories randomly doing as they please while the conscious mind sleeps. The conscious mind never completely relinquishes its control, as evidenced by wish fulfilment and anxiety dreams.

I have yet to experience lucid or directed dreaming, the Holy Grail of the dream world, where you are conscious as you dream and able to affect your surroundings. However, I have had semi-conscious dreams, semi-night terrors, where I dream that I am alone in a room but aware of some other presence being there. I take the view that what I am aware of is my own conscious mind removed to a distance from self and I believe that this is where our idea of a higher power comes from. God is really just ourselves. It’s like when any politician or schizophrenic (same difference, am I right?) tells them that God speaks to them, I think, no, that’s just your inner voice, we all have that, because it was evolutionary beneficial to have some part of you to shout, “Hey! Lion!” than go through the process of conscious recognition and evasive action taking. It just takes a different form when we sleep. Same with night terrors. They’re probably just unconscious substitutes taking up occupancy in the bit of the brain usually inhabited by the conscious mind.

As with dreams, so with Finnegans Wake. I have a personal interpretation of the Wake, probably as shaped by my own views on the nature of the world as anything else. Yet what Joyce intended to say in writing the Wake is to a certain extent irrelevant. Given that it describes an event that is to a greater or lesser degree subconscious, it is reasonable to assume that a good deal of the Wake was written by Joyce’s unconscious mind. Any writer will tell you that there are times when they are compelled to write something in a particular way and only later, when reviewing their work, does the significance of what they have written become apparent.

As Joyce was writing the Wake his eyesight was failing. He wrote in gigantic letters to be able to see what he was doing and had a series of secretaries (including a young Samuel Becket) to help him transcribe the streams of word in his head. Much of the Wake he never saw written down, only spoken, and so even he may have missed much of the significance of his own masterpiece. Yet by virtue of that fact that it hovers somewhere between the Freudian/New Age and the scientific version of dreams, the Wake succeeds in sketching out an accurate version of the dreaming world. It may not get it right all time, but hey, see impressionism, pointillism, cubism or futurism and tell me they are less valid artistically for their inaccurate interpretations of the world. Go on, I dare you (<my dreaming self seeping through).

I would close by wishing for all of your dreams to come true, but I wouldn’t want my zombie dreams to come true, nor that recurring dream where I’m wondering around town in my pants, wrapped in a quilt, trying to masturbate in public without anyone noticing, so I will merely end by wishing that you dream interesting dreams. Dreams rock. I’d take my own dreams over 95% of the shit that’s on TV any day. Listen to what they are trying to tell you, but don’t take them too seriously either. There’s no hard and fast method for working out what dreams mean. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. Sometimes a dream is just a dream.

[wakes: Whoa! Hey Babe, I dreamt I wrote this amazing article on dreams. Ah shit, how did it start again?]

Footnotes

¹Hamlet, act 3, scene 1

²Ma Boheme (fantaisie) - Arthur Rimbaud (‘Oh, of what splendid loves have I dreamt’)

³A Dream Within A Dream – Edgar Allen Poe

⁴The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Volume 1

Get it done.