Complete Works of James Joyce (163 page)

Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far de-ciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily indepen — dence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine author — ship and holusbolus authoritativeness. And let us bringtheecease to beakerings on that clink, olmond bottler! On the face of it, to volt back to our desultory horses, and for your roughshod mind, bafflelost bull, the affair is a thing once for all done and there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time, be it a day or a year or even supposing, it should eventually turn out to be a serial number of goodness gracious alone knows how many days or years. Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory, Coccolanius or Gallotaurus, wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O, undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this down-right there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?

Because, Soferim Bebel, if it goes to that, (and dormerwindow gossip will cry it from the housetops no surelier than the writing on the wall will hue it to the mod of men that mote in the main street) every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollabora-tors, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual why-acinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff’s flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philo-phosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.

For, with that farmfrow’s foul flair for that flayfell foxfetor, (the calamite’s columitas calling for calamitous calamitance) who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign
, finally called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contra-watchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller
, fontly called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort: (though for that matter, since we have heard from Cathay cyrcles how the hen is not mirely a tick or two after the first fifth fourth of the second eighth twelfth — siangchang hongkong sansheneul — but yirely the other and thirtieth of the ninth from the twentieth, our own vulgar 432 and 1132 irre-spectively, why not take the former for a village inn, the latter for an upsidown bridge, a multiplication marking for crossroads ahead, which you like pothook for the family gibbet, their old fourwheedler for the bucker’s field, a tea anyway for a tryst someday, and his onesidemissing for an allblind alley leading to an Irish plot in the Champ de Mors, not?) the steady monologuy of the interiors; the pardonable confusion for which some blame the cudgel and more blame the soot but unthanks to which the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken for kews with their tails in their or are quite as often as not taken for pews with their tails in their mouths, thence your pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians; the curt witty wotty dashes never quite just right at the trim trite truth letter; the sudden spluttered petulance of some capItalIsed Middle; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons: that ab-surdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummp — show than does the mute commoner with us how hard a thing it is to mpe mporn a gentlerman: and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepep-percast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted ma-jesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those super — ciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genu-flected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kako — graphy affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end: the head-strength (at least eleven men of thirtytwo palfrycraft) revealed by a constant labour to make a ghimel pass through the eye of an iota: this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past; those throne open doubleyous (of an early muddy terranean origin whether man chooses to damn them agglutinatively loo — too — blue — face — ache or illvoodawpeehole or, kants koorts, topplefouls) seated with such floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff, the hornful digamma of your bornabarbar, rarely heard now save when falling from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetarosexual (used always in two boldfaced print types — one of them as wrongheaded as his Claudian brother, is it worth while interrupting to say? — throughout the papyrus as the revise mark) stalks all over the page broods
sensationseeking an idea, amid the verbiage, gaunt, stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin, with its basque of bayleaves all aflutter about its forksfrogs, paces with a frown, jerking to and fro, flinging phrases here, there, or returns inhibited, with some half-halted suggestion, F, dragging its shoestring; the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of Aran man the hat through the whispering his ho (here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again); those haughtypitched disdotted aiches easily of the rariest inasdroll as most of the jaywalking eyes we do plough into halve, unconnected, principial, medial or final, always jims in the jam, sahib, as pipless as threadworms: the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings: that strange exotic serpen-tine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freak — wing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer’s hand; the ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder ah ha as blackartful as a podatus and dumbfounder oh ho oaproariose as ten canons in skelterfugue: the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint; the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first: the gipsy mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an in terpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bb — Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup M D C X C: the scholiast has hungrily misheard a deadman’s toller as a muffinbell): the four shortened ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of the quick-scribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accu — sative hole in which it ends itself; the aphasia of that heroic agony of recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one’s own: next those ars, rrrr! those ars all bellical, the highpriest’s hieroglyph of kettletom and oddsbones, wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubric prayer for truce with booty, O’Remus pro Romulo, and rudely from the fane’s pinnacle tossed down by porter to within an aim’s ace of their quatrain of rubyjets among Those Who arse without the Temple nor since Roe’s Distillery burn’d have quaff’d Night’s firefill’d Cup But jig jog jug as Day the Dicebox Throws, whang, loyal six I lead, out wi’yer heart’s bluid, blast ye, and there she’s for you, sir, whang her, the fine ooman, rouge to her lobster locks, the rossy, whang, God and O’Mara has it with his ruddy old Villain Rufus, wait, whang, God and you’re another he hasn’t for there’s my spoil five of spuds’s trumps, whang, whack on his pigsking’s Kisser for him, K.M. O’Mara where are you?; then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tene-brous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for the crucian rose awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for such hanging committees, where two was enough for anyone, starting with old Matthew himself, as he with great distinction said then just as since then people speaking have fallen into the custom, when speaking to a person, of saying two is company when the third person is the person darkly spoken of, and then that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if who-ever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or per — haps her) cheek as the case may have been then) and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imper-fectible moral blindness; the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness of all those fourlegged ems: and why spell dear god with a big thick dhee (why, O why, O why?): the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the pene-lopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso — who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex up-andinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?