The River Liffey: A message of warning to all women–especially young ones

One of the many metaphors of the great book Finnegan’s Wake is the role of Anna Livia Plurabelle within it who is often compared quite dramatically as the epitome of the river Liffey as it flows through Dublin, Ireland. I have in mind one specific young girl in this article, but this should be helpful to all young girls and old girls alike so that they might know their place in the universe not as a law constructed by politicians, ideological college radicals, and bra burning feminists—but rather the rules of life itself governed by a rapidly expanding universe and the forces from without which drag that momentum. Women are what they are just as men are—and for our bearings we must refer to our arts to measure the honesty of our analysis.

 This is for every girl who shows up at 16 years of age to a family event in tight jeans, knee-high boots, a few body piercings to be sexy and sheik by contemporary standards and makes sure that her shirt is just short enough so that when she raises her arms, her belly button shows—these days pierced and occasionally tattooed—and believes that she is the first of her kind to arrive as a seductress of mankind and has the power of all existence between her legs. Such girls are often reckless and smoke cigarettes thinking that their fine skin will not wither away into dried leather any time soon, and abuse themselves with drugs and alcohol thinking that it aligns their minds to the impulses of animal instincts without any recourse. There is only one way that such stories end—and for women—all women, it is a box canyon of options that defies escape once they’ve moved into it. It is the hardest thing in the world to watch young girls you care about enter this void to know what will become of them on the other side. So to chart the course we must turn our gaze at Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Anna was the wife of HCE in Finnegan’s Wake and was forced to come to his defense when her husband fell from grace. Like all women who have the gift of giving life through their sexual exploits, Anna is seen in the novel as the river Liffy itself which runs in from the countryside to the west to enter the suburbs just outside of Phoenix Park. It then widens and moves into the harder—seedier elements of Dublin where the prostitutes discard often of their waste as well as the various pubs and the ruckuses which proceed after many ales of Guinness have passed through the mouths of many humans, through their digestive centers and out onto the streets of Dublin at the small hours of the morning to be washed with rainwater down the city streets and dumped into the river Liffey day in day out for all eternity.

 The river then widens more and carries all of the garbage of the city into Dublin Bay to wash out into the sea only to be evaporated by the sun and predisposed back across Ireland in the form of rain to begin again at the foot of the River Liffey far to the west where the great body of water starts as a thin little attractive stream of purity and sanctified newness. The water that runs down this river is considered beautiful and fresh when it is in the upper part of the river and is thin enough and shallow to walk across with ease. But toward the middle and end of its lifespan, prior to mixing with the sea, it becomes a vision of filth which carries away the contents of mankind’s waste—its indiscretions.

 The best way to see the River Liffey is not to visit Ireland and sit upon its shores to watch the water roll by, but to visit a typical funeral. There are a lot of River Liffey’s which cry after their deceased friends and families–the girth of their asses barely fitting their pew seats. They cry not just because they will miss their deceased icons, but because they know that they too are carrying with them all the garbage of mankind’s existence with them into the sea to be integrated and evaporated into rainwater only to be sprinkled once again across the land. Another way to see the River Liffy is to visit the Pepper Pod in Newport, Kentucky at 4 AM. That is where the strippers from the Brass Ass and the Playpen come after their shift is completed to catch a bite to eat. They cover up their c-section scars and put on street cloths looking like young ladies trying to pay the rent. Under their cloths they are in need of a shower, but the food is the first order of business as they stave off the last of the night’s drunks still hoping for a hook-up. Some of the older ones—in their late 20s and early 30s are starting to wrinkle up from a decade of smoking and abusive living. They have been pissed on and covered in enough reproductive juices over the years to pave a highway from Cincinnati to Florida—but at 4 in the morning, they just want an Iced Tea. They are the river Liffey before it passes by Phoenix Park in Dublin—still nice to look at, but starting to fill with trash. To see the river further downstream you have to go to a Waffle House during the same hour and the waitresses there have their lives filled with all the garbage of mismanaged lives, all their bad marriages, the abusive drinking, the ungrateful children, the failing health, the general degradation of any city anywhere in the world washing away its waste into the rivers which flow through them. Women are the rivers who carry away the waste of their families whose lives are filled with embarrassments as they near the bay.

 But rivers never start that way, there is always hope that a river will maintain its beauty and grace well into it long journey into the sea. But it never works that way. Men craving the scenic structure of a young river that is still thin enough to cross from one side to another—that hasn’t had the world’s trash dumped into it yet—seek the vibrant waters of a shallow stream. They like young girls because nobody has yet tainted them with their glutton behavior. So upon seeing such a creation of beauty seek to be the first to dirty the waters with their waste so to declare to the burgeoning city downstream which will ultimately dump its cargo into the much wider river that they were there. For the perverted man of middle years it is like graffiti indicating that their lives were once important and that they existed as they too are facing death’s door with hesitation and drunkenness. But unlike the women, they are not flowing anywhere. They do not bring forth life, they only deposit themselves into the rivers they encounter and so are free to walk from river to river dirtying up all that they can along the way. The woman has no choice. She is the summation of what gets dumped into her as she flows through life. Fair or not, that is her fate because women—unlike men are the givers of life and the primary target of life’s garbage—which has to go somewhere.

 Feminists have tried to rectify this situation by making men clean up the table at the end of a family meal, but to a large degree this will never take. Men might be willing to clean up a dinner table so that their women will give them sex later—otherwise they will just desire to return to the living room to watch football while the women carry away the waste of the meal. But they are not inclined to do it unless there is something to be gained for them in doing so. Unlike women, they do not feel inclined to carry away the family’s waste. They do not feel the responsibility to do so. They only feel inclined to make a mess. They are like the drunks who dirty up the streets of Dublin which the river Liffey carries away daily. The cycle never ends even though the characters might change.

 Most young girls at 16 think that their lives will always be as they are at that point in their lives, thin, shallow, and a little bumpy from rocks that are visible in their clear waters. They don’t think of the consequences of a little dirt here and there because their waters are rapidly running and pure with sparkling radiance. But anybody with a brain knows what’s downstream and once there, that young 16-year-old will begin to fill up with trash. They’ll widen proportionally, their depths will deepen and they will no longer be able to see the bottom. They will quickly become dirty and contaminated—and much slower moving. The cries of the rivers at funerals are not so much that their end is near, but that they are no longer sure who they are as they are so filled with everyone else’s junk, that they have lost that slim body of water from the start which they understood so clearly. At the end of their lives they are like the river Liffy before it hits the harbor, wide, dirty, and so deep that the bottom can hide the bodies of the past without detection. The 300 pound Waffle House waitress missing most of her teeth and wearing the face of a cigarette ash try is just such a river before it hits the bay. The same could be said of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, or the St Lawrence before hitting the Atlantic, or the Nile before hitting the Mediterranean Sea. There is no escape for such women. It is the fate of their nature, and the destination for every young river still shallow and clear.

 So, while you can it is good to keep away those who seek to muddy you up. When they come near, push them away. And slow yourself down as much as possible because what is downstream will contaminate your waters and the faster you get there, the quicker you become the river Liffey prior to its dispersal into the bay. There is no cuteness, no tattoo, no skin-tight jeans that will steer your life away from such a fate. Instead, they accelerate your decent into such a deep and muddy river. The more lucrative the sight of your countryside beauty, the more inclined the men will be to imprint you with their marks of defacing graffiti.

If this is a little obscure, then so be it. The warning has been cast. Fate will do the rest. The only escape from that fate is to slow down the water’s flow of a river and avoid the contamination of a city if possible. And seek not the lure of the impure to carry their filth to your fresh waters to be the first to mark purity with waste. The path of such a river is clear; they will within a few short years of their rebellious rapids from the “west” become those whores of the Pepper Pod so sick and tired of love juice that they just want a freshly made cup of tea and coffee. As I said, this message is intended toward a specific person who is on the last gasp of a young river about to flow into the red light district of Dublin. But it is useful to any young women trying to find their direction in life.

Rich Hoffman

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