clouds over water

Around this time of year I always find myself back (from swerve of shore to bend of bay) returning to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s “nonsense” book, to take another stab at seeing what I can make out of its language of “puns and reedles,” its Rorschach blot style of prose, and every year there’s been a bit more to discover. Stream, steam, air, cloud, rain, water— the Earth’s humanly existence is a neverending rearrangement of hundreds of small tributaries of which you and I are only two. There’s the message of the book. Our bodies are a sort of clay: our mother is the rivers, streams, oceans; our father is the mountains, the hills, the dirt. The words and small dreams of language filling all six hundred and something pages is still by far the most moss-grown, rain-splashed prose I’ve encountered—like I could wring out my copy and cold swamp water would splash out.

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“Then nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!”

This passage from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce reminds us that the secrets connecting the Earth and Sky can be found in the watery parts of the world.

For context, the above passage from the novel is found in a section called The Mookse and The Gripes, a play on the fable of the Fox and the Grapes, in which a small, wispy third character floats far above the scene hoping to be noticed by either of them fighting down below along a riverbank. This cloud’s name is nuvoletta (a play on nuvoleccia, an italian word meaning little cloud) and she looks down at the Mookse and the Gripes below as they duke it out until they’re both carried away, unconscious, by creatures from the wood, and nuvoleccia is left alone and waiting, presumably forever, when a sudden epiphany strikes her like a beam of sunlight and she drifts away. And just as sunlight might tear apart a cloud like a tuft of cotton being pulled out into loose strings, she vanishes into thin air, disappears like a cloud across an endless blue into the abyss of nothingness, “A lightdress fluttered.” Joyce writes.

But even a “nothingness” has its connections to the universe, existing in relation to the “somethingness” that might surround it. We don’t simply disappear when we die. Our water, our earth, our clay, is broken apart only to be rearranged by the systems described in modern Science or older Religions only to return eventually under a different name, a different face, but the same soul and/or molecules.

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“Then nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one.”

While reading the above, I find myself thinking about the sun, that hotplate lurking amid nuvoletta’s indecision, and what it might mean for our lonely, little cloud nuvoletta to have such a heat growing behind her. Should she rain? Should she simply gather together? The indecision is ressolved. She lets the sun take her; and the sun certainly obliges, takes her upwards further and further into the sky where the specks of water which make her up can become crystal and cold in that way a small cumulus cloud, close to the ground, can only imagine until it becomes a feathery and distant cirrus, made up of crystalized ice.

But before she made up her mind, Nuvoletta, our cloudy character here, had been floating over a small riverbank all afternoon, gazing down at herself in that river and it was there that she reflected for the last time. She had cancelled her “engauzements” (an interesting word, engagements with the word gauze in its center—is it medical gauze for her hurt feelings? Or is it gaze, in the French sense which means “regards” and that she’s cancelling her regards, saying a proverbial bon voyage? or is the gauze at its center the english sense of the word gaze meaning the past tense of looked as, after all, she “reflected for the last time” in that river) and rather than linger,

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“She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.”

Nuvoletta climbs over both a bannister but also the stars themselves; this can be seen in the word embedded at the end of the word “bannistars”—by combining the words “bannister” and “stars” into one, the created word is certainly no static object but rather it’s a noun with a sense of motion, pulling the reader through the meaning in first half of the word and into the meaning of latter half, into the stars. And it’s there that our little cloud Nuvoletta gives her cry of despair: “Nuée, Nuée.”

Nuée is French for rain cloud though it also resonates with the sound of the English word no which, well, means no. A third meaning here is an onomatopoeia of a thundercloud murmuring in the distance—the despair of a thundercloud about to let down its drops—as, after all, nuée does sound somewhat like a soft roll of thunder when said slowly underneath the breath. I can think of no word in any language that might better to a sound well known to us in our hearts, that of a distant and invisible thunderclap nestled inside the clouds. Perhaps that soft, distant thunderclap which seems to come from behind the cloud cover and far away is the despairing call of a cloud lost in the realm of mystery beyond what we can make out in a grey and blanketed sky. Thunder may be chemical reaction but it evokes an emotional reaction, too, drifting in to create a cascading yet enthralling emptiness in the soul.

And then, with small teardrops, the rain begins.

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“And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear.”

Turning our frame down from the Sky now, down instead to the stream along which the Mookse and the Gripes fought their recent battles. We’re told the stream has grown into a fully fledged river through eons and eons of raindrops (or tears), and it’s a well known river, in fact: The Mississippi. Wait, no, it’s two rivers. Here again, Joyce creates a noun of transition by combining Mississippi with the Liffey, the river flowing down the center of Joyce’s hometown Dublin. Every river around the world is the same river; they’re made up of the same water mourning its loss of the Earth and crying itself down, down, to fill the rivers, streams, oceans, those muddied containers, with the joy of the land itself reclaimed by the water.

The Word “Leaptear” is also an interesting turn of phrase. My guess is it’s in reference to her character as it’s referenced throughout the rest of the book—she has many names, including Izzy and The Prankqueen, of which Nuvoletta is just one—and she’s referred to at one point as that girl born on a leap year but for now, for our purposes, we can imagine that this raindrop was a special raindrop in that it hopped once or twice on the water like a skipped stone. But why would the river care? The water simply continues to flow, tripping over the skipped stone. And based on the description we get of the river, it appears to be an especially clumsy one; its water sloshes around to create the words which will finish out the passage “Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!”, evoking almost directly the sound which water makes splashing against rocks. If one listens closely to what the waves are saying, every splash is a mournful goodbye, a lost coherence.

Where does that leave us? What’s the vibe that’s descended upon us two sitting here reading, thinking, dreaming? I can smell petrichor in the air. The world around me feels more damp now, looking up from the page, and though it is fall outside my opened windows, it feels almost like the spring.

The dimensions of the passage remind me of the verticality shared between the space of the clouds and the space of myth, that verticality of which both the stars and thunder seem to belong to (in a spiritual sense if not a scientific sense), and then the verticality between the sky and the pools, rivers, and oceans at its feet, at our water level, those basins which collect the clouds as if out of the sky by way of water falling. Moving water gives us the horizontal space of the passage beyond the simple, dumb horizontal of our eyes moving across the words. Flowing water is the great re-arranger of life, yet we must ask flowing water what does it mean to carry such a hefty task as rearranging the living, breathing Earth. If we are to imagine its feeling, much like the sadness of the cloud, flowing water must also feel some sort of longing since the blue, sad tinge of gathered water is the reflection of open sky, wherein each and every water molecule on Earth has been and will be again. That’s all to say, there’s something sad in listening to water flow. It can be therapeutic, certainly, but only therapeutic in the sense of an empty expanse of desert, or any other comfortable vast emptinesses, might help us feel fully conscious and human in our most reflective moments.

-gbe