I think I will return to the question of rivers and their signifigance that the last blog sort of left dangling(though I have to say that this entry may not do much more than 'dangle' itself).

Rivers are powerful and are a part of original creation, at least in the Bible, where there are four rivers that have a role in the geography of the garden of Eden, and we travel down them for journeys of various lengths and dangers(my own family floats on rivers in the summertime, which sometimes takes up to a whole day, or days depending on the trip). It may be for fun, or it may be of dire necessity, or it may simply be to go the way that one needs to go. Think of the importance of river journeys in, say The African Queen or Huckleberry Finn. Heck, even the Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song "Moon River" fits into this: "Moon river, wider than a mile/I'm crossin' you in style, someday."

And, since the river is the source of life, we can never know for certain were it can lead. For some reason I think of the line in Coleridge's Kublai Khan : "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree/Where Alph the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea." Is the sunless sea the end, Death? Or are we being taken back to where we were before, into Creation which was also dark before the light comes forth? Maybe this is what the first sentance in Finnegans Wake is getting at then: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Invirions."

Maybe I've just been going in circles around this issue, which is so incredibly fruitful and revealing. But I do think we can see that something is here. Even I can see that.