Re-membering Finnegan

Here is the link to Dr. Sexson's essay Re-membering Finnegan. I'm not going to try and explicate the essay, you really have to experience it for yourself. Dr. Sexson makes so many connections that the essay itself becomes hypertextual, an anchor to hang onto as we are led into the electrified abyss of knowledge and remembrance; and the overall effect of the essay left me feeling good about floating around in the depthless vastness of an electronic world. I would, however, like to swirl my foot around in the waters of the second paragraph on page 6. Here is the first stanza of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll for your delight. Tangentially (which, after reading the essay, you will have learned that tangents are a good thing. The internet and Finnegans Wake are full of them!) I watch Jeopardy most nights with my neighbors. Two nights ago the final Jeopardy answer in the category "Invented words" was, "Its the made up word for Four o'clock in the afternoon: the time when you begin broiling things for dinner." I, of course, knew from what Dr. Sexson has taught me that the question (or answer) is Brillig. A day of despondency and disappointment punctuated by a brief moment of triumph!

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Carroll used portmanteaus to create multi-dimensional words. One word that means two things. Joyce, in Finnegans Wake also used portmanteaus, but his one word might mean three, or four, or fivesixandseven different things--which of course makes the novel unnavigitable, but also different each time we read it. The internet is, according to Dr. Sexson (and I hope I'm not be too presumptuous) one big portmanteau, like Wake, but the internet is Wake electrified. Electricity is the lightning bolt that pilots all things! The lightning bolt incited visceral responses in pre-oral, mute cultures, and it is the thing that brings Frankenstein's creature to life. Now, I always figured that memory is the lightning bolt that pilots all things, but now I learn that it is actually a lightning bolt. I was hoping for more of a metaphor. Wordsworth, in his poem Daffodils, says the image of the daffodil flashes on his inward eye, so maybe I'm still not far off. Especially when we consider that the "re-membering" part of the essay is actually suggestive of remembering as corporeal activity whereby one pieces together different parts of a body. The book, in a Joycean sense, is a body that can, like Frankenstein's creature, rise to life from a bricolage of appendages.

Referring to some of my other blogs and Dr. Sexson's introductory quote, Marshall McLuhan believed technologies and mediums to be extensions of ourselves. Clothing is an extension of skin, housing extends the body's heat-regulating mechanisms, and the bicycle and car are extensions of the foot. Media extends communication and also our senses. Thus, it is not difficult to imagine remembering a book with a bricolage of simulacra, the stuff of the everyday, and appendages extending through, around, and over the caves of memory and communication.