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"If Ulysses is the Algebra of literature then Finnegans Wake is the partial differential equation." - Terrence McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake", a talk given a

• bshepard 9y ago
  "People say that the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, that dreams are hard to remember but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience. You lie in the baths and you close your eyes for thirty seconds and empires fall, dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope is disgraced and then somebody drops something and you wake up and fifteen seconds have passed. That’s the reality of life but we suppress this chaotic irrational side. The genius of Joyce and to some degree although in a more controlled form, Proust - and there were other practitioners, Faulkner certainly – what they called stream of consciousness but what it was, was an ability to really listen to the associating mind without trimming, pruning, judging or denying. One of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce because you would have thought they would have been comrades in arms but Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was very uncreative use of it and it should all be fabricated into literature. " McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake" above.
  • zoul 9y ago
    Woolf also does this in a beautiful way. To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway.