White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. (FW65, No. 27 - II.4, 389-III.1, 403)

It feels surreal to be finished with book II, especially the really difficult II.3, and to be on to III. The dynamic of reading feels different now. Knowing the end is coming, it feels like it is going downhill and picking up speed (the prose is simply easier to read), or, to be more accurate, downstream, which is what III.1 is concerned with: Shaun beginning his backwards journey down the Liffey. The "backwards" element refers to Shaun's perspective on what has already happened in the dream, which he encounters in reverse order (as JJ himself said about book III). I think he is also backwards in his posture in the river: he is in a barrel (which can also be a pulpit, as well as a crucifix) and is facing upstream as the current takes him. At least that is what I have gathered from the different guides about the book ever since I started reading FW. I can perhaps see in a few isolated places in this chapter so far. We will see how this idea bears out in reading.

To risk being repetitious, I once again see a rainbow, at the beginning of this book, and am thinking about how it fits into the whole. It is in a significant place: after HCE was unable to see a rainbow when looking out of his ark/pub, but only saw the floodwaters maintaining their height (as I wrote about earlier), a rainbow now appears and is described by the narrator of the beginning of III.1 (more on which shortly). 

But it is not a rainbow itself that is being seen, rather a fog bow: "White fogbow spans. The arch embattled" (403.6). Unlike a rainbow, a fog bow is fainter, more white, and according to Wikipedia, shows only a weak red and blue on its edges. The finer droplets of the fog fail to render the white light in its full array: embattled. Perhaps the foggy vista and the muffled light signals the approach of dawn and a new beginning.

There is a faint rainbow buried in the words. A hint of each color, in Roy G. Biv order, can be found in the passage, but not each color is equally visible. One, I think, is only hinted at in the phrase "She has prayings in lowdelph": yellow is hidden in the "yi" and the "low." It is like the barely-visible rainbow at the beginning of the book, on p. 3.

I've been in the habit during this readthrough of marking where I see rainbows with my colored pencils. This is another piece of evidence admissible in the case where I am judged to be a bit off my rocker in the way I hold this book in my life. If I fill the book with annotations, as many people do, why not turn it into an artwork? It has already begun to color itself, but in a pitiful way of yellowing after 20+ years on my shelf. The paper is becoming hard and brittle. With its cover and first pages completely detached, and pages here and there too, I feel the need to compensate, to add ballast against its inevitable sinking into the oblivion of waste paper. Coloring my copy also reflects my desire to channel this book's overflowing bounty of creativity and beauty (and, if we are being honest, darkness) into my own creative powers. I color it as it colors me, in the exchange of reading and thinking which becomes hoping and creating. If I could I would make it as ornate as the Book of Kells...as long as I could keep reading it.

Colors of the rainbow, but rainbow-less (FW 403)

Returning to our passage. The text speaks with an "I," and I have to assume that it is the dreamer saying these things. The colors of the rainbow are faintly seen in two apparitions of HCE and ALP under a fog bow. When observing the former, the dreamer remarks "He am..." (403.8), a telling confusion of grammatical gender, the identify of the dreamer and the dreamed figure slipping through. HCE is made out through the fog in outline, but his "fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts" (this is probably a reference to Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch). The dreamer is like a painter in rendering visible forms from his own memories and unconscious, but here there is a struggle to do so. I often wake up at night and see forms in the room where I am sleeping and try to put them together, but they seem to be wavering like dark leaves swaying in the watery currents of the thick night. ALP, and other forms emerge as well, but soon a harsh voice calls out: "Come not nere! Black! Switch out!" (403.17). These commands are disturbing and seem to be spoken not by the dreamer but from the dream itself. We return to darkness.

Another rainbow in Finnegans Wake, "heptarched span of peace"

[FW 403]