This audio composition features a reading by Lee Borocz-Johnson of John Cage's mesostic composition “Writing Through Finnegans Wake for the Fourth Time,” accompanied by original music and found sounds recorded and remixed by musician and recording artist Elvis Andruzkiewicz.
A mesostic is like an acrostic, except that the letters running midline rather than along the left margin. Cage’s “Writing for the Fourth Time Through Finnegans Wake” is the fourth and shortest distillation produced by performing specific operations on the text of Finnegans Wake, centering each line on the letters JAMES JOYCE. Here is a short example from the text:
(ll. 396-97)(1)
The present work was originally motivated by my desire to explore the dementia experienced by my father, Timothy O'Rourke, who had entered the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Reading Finnegans Wake provided a bridge to that realm.
The title, “RoaraTORio: A Senescent Circus on Finnegans Wake,” follows John Cage’s template:
[title word], [indefinite article] [adjective] Circus on [work]
TOR (the initials used by Timothy O’Rourke) call forth the Nordic god Thor (where Finn=Thor=TOR=HCE=Everyman).
According to Cage, Joyce intended Finnegans Wake to be read out loud. This project contributes to a poetic-sonic experience of the text, using Cage’s carefully derived mesostic to explore the realm beyond meaning and coherence, moving closer to the immediacy of experience and subverting the compulsive need for meaning and coherence that a reader commonly brings to a literary text.
The resulting composition is difficult to explain, since it depends on leaving behind past and future meanings. The present work attempts to explore the domain beyond the cognitive - that is, the unknown. James Joyce reportedly told Arthur Power: