Life is but a dream, and it ends with a wake. You can see it, the ship of dreams passing through the sea of existence, trailing ripples behind it; when the person is gone, they leave – as Arundhati Roy would put it – a person-shaped hole in the universe, but unless we are in a world of ice, the hole becomes waves that spread, expanding like your lips as you say the /w/ in “wake”; the passing of the person makes ripples that are wider and fainter until, through recirculation, they are at last subsumed into the general Brownian motion of all things… just like the vivid dreams that evanesce from your mind when you wake: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”—
One wakes, and one has one wake, but there are two wakes. One wake is a verb that is a convergence of two similar ancient verbs having to do with coming out of slumber and being aware; it has also begotten a noun that refers to staying up rather than sleeping, in particular the night before – or, in some cultures, after – a person’s interment or cremation, when the family and friends swim in the last ripples of the person’s existence, reflecting on the fading dream of life rather than, this night, dreaming the fading reflections of life. (I remember going to many of these in my childhood, in small houses heated by old iron stoves, with many small cups of strong tea, and a man named Lazarus leading the hymns.) The other wake is a noun that has to do with the movement of water, related also to an Old Norse word for a hole in the ice: a displacement, but never permanent. A wake may even be the chaotic currents in the air left by a butterfly that will later wonder if it is a man that dreamed it was a butterfly or a butterfly that is dreaming it’s a man. Which side of the wave is awake?
Wake is a word of disruption, of awareness, of a turning of a switch, a change of the narrative, like the ablaut from awake to awoken. You wake to cold, hard reality, to facts, to the existence of other humans, people you cannot and should not ignore or treat as dream phantasms. You are, probably, still in the warm, soft comfort of your bed when you wake, but that will change. You will arise, leaving a you-shaped hole in the sheets, an impression that might stay as it is or might be tidied up, but the thing that leaves no impression at all on the physical is the dream, the entire oneiric world, its faint wake now rippling away in your mind.
And we all must wake, again and again. And we all must wake others. And we all must leave wakes, in the water and for other people. We cannot dream our way through life, even if life will end with a wake. The waves that ripple above our heads are motions of the surface that we, too, must ultimately pierce – or, as T.S. Eliot elegizes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
We leave a wake or we leave, awake. But we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. And at the end of the day, we submerge and turn to the fin again, like James Joyce beginning Finnegans Wake, a long the “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back…”
Sesquiotica 