S: FW 23. 17. “O foenix culpa!” Theology. Without Adam’s sin fall, no sinless Son of man could rise. (The second time as farce.) Now what have we hear? The dinn of bottles and trotters trompin’ and prayer “delivered us to boll weevils amain.” FW 24. 6. We’re at Finn’s wake agen! A splash of the aqua vita, the whiskey breath and the spirits move him. Timothy risin’ from the sleep of raisin’. Good mournin’!
It was long the custom in Celtic countries for mourners to keep watch or vigil over their dead until they were buried — this was called a “wake,” possibly as somebody needed to be “awake” with the body at all times. (Compare the Jewish tradition of “sitting Shivah.”)
The Irish-Gaelic word for this ritual is tórramh.
M: It’s been a rough wake:
Ornette Coleman died today (6/11), so let the free jazz keening commence. Friend of the site Floyd Hughes described watching Coleman play, his band, standing like a phalanx, him with his sax, two guitarists, two bass, two drum kits. All start playing, and ‘its just noise.’ Everyone’s waiting for the beat, now and then catching a couple of notes, then it’s gone. All players then proceed to stop at exactly the same time and the audience is, as they say, “like, whoa.”
It’s a fine comparison to make with Joyce and the Wake, where now and then he tempts the reader with five words of straight English, only to turn it inside out again. Reading page 54 the other day I discovered Italian and Spanish and jumped for joy with recognition.
Wakes, like weddings, played a significant part in the social organization of Irish country life. They were officially deplored by the Roman Catholic authorities, but usually tolerated, as long as the funeral Mass took place in church.
Immediately following a death, neighbor women gathered at the Wake House, usually the home of the diseased. They washed the body and dressed it — if possible, wrapped it in white linen – and placed it in a coffin, if one was handy, but any horizontal surface would do. This procedure was known as ‘the laying out’. A rosary was then wrapped around the hands. Candles were placed at the head and foot of the coffin and were to remain lit until the dear departed had literally departed. All clocks in the house would be stopped and set to the time of death and all mirrors covered or turned to face the wall.
Hermann Zapf, typographic legend, died today (6/8). While he is known for the design of countless typefaces, it is perhaps appropriate in this post(script) to mention Optima, quite possibly the most touched and traced face of all time, used at is in the black granite wall of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC. Achieving the rotational symmetry of 96 years of age — assuming the proper typeface, of course — Zapf was living history, having crafted type in metal, film and pixel.
At an Irish wake, custom dictated that crying could not begin until after the body was prepared, for fear that evil spirits would be attracted by the sounds of mourning and attempt to snatch the soul of the deceased. Only when the laying out was accomplished did the keening begin. Professional female keeners might be hired, and the Caointhe, the lead keener, was first to lament the deceased, wailing and weeping and chanting poetry. According to Volume 4 of the “Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy,” mourners at a funeral would then divide in two, with one group at the head of the deceased and the other at the feet. They would alternate verses of the laments and join in song at the chorus. After spending some time recalling the virtues and vices of the deceased, the two semi-choruses would then take turns “interrogating” the corpse – “Why did you die? Was your wife faithful? Were your sons dutiful? Were your daughters chaste?”
“Their wakes also over dead corpses, where they have a table spread and served with the best that can be had at such a time, and after a while attending (in expectation the departed soul will partake) they fall to eating and drinking, after to reveling as if one of the feasts of Backus.” – MacLysaght: Kildare, 1683.
Food, tobacco, snuff and alcohol were plentiful at Irish country wakes, with poteen and whiskey the most common liquors, but “Perhaps the strangest feature of old-time wakes was the playing of wake games.” (Kevin Danaher, In Ireland Long Ago. Mercier, Dublin 1962 p 175.)
In 1853 James A. Prim, a member of the Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland, described a game in which one mourner acts the role of a priest, who officiously confronts the master of the wake, a personage known as the Borekeen; the “priest” is first of all thoroughly discomfited and then finally expelled from the room. In a game called Drawing the Ship out of the Mud, “the men actually presented themselves before the rest of the assembly, females as well as males, in a state of nudity” (Estyn Evans Irish Folkways. 1957, p. 291). In another, the women performers dressed up as men and “proceeded to conduct themselves in a very strange manner” (Evans, p. 291).
Sir Christopher Lee, master thespian revered by many for his definitive Dracula, died today (6/7) at the age of 93. Nighty knight.
The Mock Court or The Police Game was one collected by Sean O’Suilleabhain in Irish Wake Amusements. (Mercier, Dublin, 1976) Eight or so of the players remained in the kitchen, while everybody else went outside the door. Those who were inside then divided themselves up according to their duties in the game; one would act as judge, two as lawyers; one as court-clerk, and three or four as policemen. The police would then go outside and drag in somebody as prisoner, while the others pressed in also to hear the case being tried. The judge took his seat, and the clerk read out the name and address of the prisoner, as well as the offense with which he was being charged. The main source of the fun, apart from the charge itself, was to be found in the sly references made by both prosecuting and defense counsel to the private affairs of some of those present, who were dragged into the case. Having heard the evidence, the judge announced his verdict. The police had then the task of seeing that the verdict was carried out; if guilty, the defendant might be handled roughly as punishment, or even doused nine or ten times in a tub of water.
Over time, as rituals will do, the Wake evolved into theater, and thence, with any luck, into an all-out carnival.
By the bay, if we supply a comma and an exclamation point to the unpunctuated title, “Finnegans, wake!” becomes a call to action, to which the response may be Young Irelander Thomas Davis’s 1880 wishful-thinking anthem: “But hark, a voice like thunder spake: The West’s awake! The West’s awake!”
sum mer de le wake 