Chapter
5
Pages:
104, 105, 106,
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125
[Which
begins with a tribute to ALP, and her letter. The text of the letter is discussed:
what it is about, the possible circumstances of its writing, who was the author.
The chapter concludes that it is a copy of a much older historical tale, and
by a process of elimination concludes that Shem performed the forgery.]
In the name of Anna Livia Plurabelle,
who brings forth the multitudinous population, a river of humanity, who is also
known as Eve, it is her will that is done in heaven, and there are no
boundaries to where she might lead us.
Her untitled Letter about HCE has gone
under different names at different times.
[Here follows a list of names which allude to HCE, the other characters
or events in FW, including: HCE as a resurrected Seabeast or Noah, Tristan and
Isolde, Huckleberry Finn, a brewer, the rainbow, Letters, Dublin…
…
Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, how Buckley shot the Russian General, the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Nile, the 29 Flower girls [for example]…
…
the Maggies, the final leaves, Guinness, Humpty Dumpty, Tree and Stone [etc]…
…washer
women, and finally a true Account of Earwicker – and the snake – by a woman of
the world, that tells the story of Earwicker’s privates [3 bits of male
genitalia?] and a pair of girls [ALP’s labia], and some accusations about the
use of a condom (raincoat).]
The protean text is a mixture of all
scripture. There was a time when some naïve person may have written it all down
– probably a writer who was a recidivist criminal, ambidextrous and snub nosed,
who smoked a pipe [i.e. profound rainbowl?]. If it had been written down,
someone reading it would have seen a mosaic of sexual stories about lust and
weddings, in which HCE seeks his sugar and salt, that is, his young women
[Vanessas], like a moth on the hunt from flower to flower. This sounds like a
pure science but it is also about the richness of the literature of yore.
We are so far from him [the writer] in
this night of darkness, reared as we are by a 1000 and one rolls of paper and
also thunder. We grope on until our zero hour of death, poor old infidels that
we are, trying to preserve the moments of our days. Closer inspection of the
writing would also reveal a multiplicity of personalities in the document and a
prediction of a crime that could be made by anyone unwary who happened to come
along at the wrong moment. In fact, in the minds of the Four Historians, our
inspectors, the features of the sexmosaic coaelesce, their contrary elements
eliminated, to reveal one stable somebody or similarity, via a process of
dialectic conflict, who experiences a series of prearranged disappointments
[i.e. Falls] along a long line of generations.
Say, Mister Lightgiver, who in hell
wrote the damned thing…
…
anyhow? Who is it, seated below the wall with the picture, using a quill or
stylus, whether with a turgid or lucid mind, maybe chewing, interrupted by
visits of fellow writers, between two girls or tossed by the three soldiers, a
right down regular man of the soil or a bespectacled sharp witted fellow laden
with the loot of learning?
Now patience is a great thing, and
we must never become impatient. A good plan used by worried business people,
who may not have had the time to master Confucius’s ‘doctrine of the mean’, or
the codes of propriety written by his son, is just to think of all the patience
you need for a sinking fund, or how Robert Bruce learned to be patient by
watching a spider, and think of the patience of HCE. If – after years of
archaeological delving – someone has come up with the theory that our great
ancestor had no surname, i.e. was three syllables less than his own surname,
and that the ‘ear’ in the name of Finn ‘Earwicker’ was the trademark of a
broadcaster, with ‘wicker’ being local jargon for some invention [possibly a
primitive radio/penis – Mary ‘conceived’ via ear] then regarding this radio
epistle to which we must ceaselessly return – where in hell is that bright
person now to slip us the ‘good oil’?
There are sceptics. To conclude that
the absence of political fallout and requests for money signifies that the
written description of the earlier epistle [i.e. Document No.2 is in part about
No.1] cannot have been penned by someone of those times or parts is to leap to
conclusions. It would be like inferring that the absence of inverted commas
[such as in Ulysses] means that the author was incapable of appropriation of
the spoken words of others.
Luckily there is another angle to this
quest. Has anyone ever looked at an ordinary stamped and addressed envelope?
Admittedly it is an outer husk – its face, in its extreme plainness, is its
fortune: it disguises whatever passion-pallid nudity or purple nakedness which
may be under its flap. Yet to concentrate on the document within without considering
what’s on the envelope wouldn’t make sense, or be good manners. It would just
be like a fellow having been introduced to lady imagining her naked, without
considering at all the clothes she was wearing, with all their local colour
and perfume; without considering how they fill out some parts of her body
and flatten others, and are able to be parted for better survey by the deft
hand of the expert. No-one doubts the existence of the clothing, and that
they are a part of the feminine fiction, especially the view of the rear.
Who doubts that one could be separated from other, i.e. clothes from body,
or that each can be considered simultaneously or, alternatively, separately?
Let’s consider a few artefacts
concerning the original letter. The river [ALP] wanted salt, so she went to the
sea. This is how she met HCE [Brian O’Lynn]. Then the country wanted HCE
[Mahon] for his sin and then dinner and got it [rain?]. We of Ireland, that
clover-covered place, have often watched the sky overreach the land: it was
once said by Mahaffy that Ireland [Chapelisod-Lucan] was the one place in this
vale of tears (whose greenness only yellows when Phaeton parks his car – the
sun – too close, and the tea-coloured Liffey is the dream of would-be
Ophelia’s) where ‘the possible was the improbable and the improbable the
inevitable’. If Mahaffy had hit the nail on the head, then we are in for
sequence of Aristotlean ‘improbable possibilities’, although no-one will
applaud him, for, utterly impossible as they are, they are probably as likely
as others that took place, or as likely as those which never took place.
Let us look at that original hen. It
was midwinter and almost April when, amidst the birds singing life’s sad old
song, a shivering, cold fowl was noticed behaving strangely on Kate’s midden –
which became known as the ‘orangery’ [Protestant] when on one holiday it
displayed orange peel, the remains of a meal by an unknown fugitive in the
past. Who should have found this treasure other than Kevin, which was as much a
cause for future sanctity as, say, when the Ardagh chalice was found by a
beachcomber who was trying to steal Tipperary...
…
potatoes from the dead in site of the bloody patch of the massacre of most of
the Jacobites.
The shivering fowl was Belinda of the
Dorans [ALP], who was more than 50 years old, and what she was scratching at as
the clock struck 12, looked for all the world looked like a goodsized sheet of
a letter originating from Boston (Massachussets) from the last [dead HCE] to
the first [new ALP], with words on it like ‘Dear Maggy, well & all at
home’s health well, only the heat turned the milk on the van Houtens cocoa, and
the general elections – with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a
beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear, thank you Christy, and with a
grand funeral of poor Father Michael, don’t forget unto life’s end, and Maggy,
how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close, with
fondest [love] to the twins with four cross kisses for holy Paul, holy, wholly
Irish. P.S. (the locusts might eat all except this) affectionately – then a
large tea stain.’ The tea stain (the over cautiousness of the author signing
the page away) marked it as a genuine relic of ancient Irish pleasant poetry of
that Lydia languishing class known as ‘hurry-me-over-the-hazy’ [written as a
letter to one’s self].
Why then, how does that tea stain do
that?
Well, almost any photographer worth
his chemicals will tell you that if a negative of a horse happens to melt which
drying, what you get is a distorted mass of horseness made up of bits and
pieces of horse. This is what must happened to the letter (wipe it off with a
sod of turf) when it was taken from Kate’s midden by the cold fowl, the hen.
The heat in the middle of the orange-flavoured mound had obliterated parts of
it and had caused some features nearer to you to appear larger, indeed grossly
swollen, while…
…the
farther back we are looking at this letter in the midden, the more we need the
loan of lens to see as much as the hen saw.
You feel as though you are
completely lost with all the various parts of the missive? Looking at it you
say: it’s a pure and simple jungle of wood and words? You shout out: I haven’t
the paltriest notion of what it all means. Cheer up, Charlie! The Four
Historians may own the translation, but any gypsy scholar may pick a peck of
kindness or kindling from the sack of the hen [i.e. ALP’s basket/the midden].
Lead kindly fowl! They always did:
what bird has done yesterday, man will do next year: be it moult, be it hatch
or be it agreement in the nest. For bird sense is as sound as a bell – by
instinct she feels she was born to lay and love eggs – trust her to propagate
the species and guide her chicks through danger). She is also ladylike in
everything she does, in fact, she’s quite a gentleman. Let’s think it through
and foretell the future! I predict that before everything comes to an end, the
Golden Age must return with its vengeance, and women with their eggs, their
children, will become like lionesses, with their de-horned rams, their husbands
lying peacefully by their side. The doomsayers are not justified who claim that
letters [literature] have never been as good as ancient times, the time when
Biddy Doran the hen found the letter.
And, she may be small, our mistress of
Arthur. But, it is not relevant to the amorous, anonymous letter, signed by a
woman with a tea or tear stain. Her presence in the letter is forthright, like
a fist in your face in fact. We note that the paper itself has her watermark
[teastain]: Our Lady of the Department Store. And [like the Sacred Heart?] she
has a heart of Erin, iron and gold! And what a river of language as she speaks
to her friends, with her thankyou’s and morning greetings. As a straw [before
her mouth] will show, she is a windbag, and struts about showing the red of her
vigorous hair and the fantastic set of curls she has. But how many of her readers, the readers of the letter…
…realise
that she is not out to dazzle with a great accoutrement of post modern
glossaries solely from Latin and Greek. Not on her life! There’s old Armenian
for archeologists [and other ancient languages], Zoastrian and Merovingian; she feels that one fact is plain, that
a man out alone has no right to have a peep at anyone other person – especially
if they have titties at the front and the rear is similarly shaped as the
front. [A 100 letter thunder word – for
that sin - occurs that seems to say – in a pasture is a crooked chimera, and
around the Magazine Wall it kinks and clanks and stares at you]. Mesdames,
mademoiselles, monsieurs, s’il vous plait! All she wants, she writes, is to
tell the cock’s truth about him. ‘He had to see life [i.e. peep] fully, as he
was old and the sick’, she writes. ‘His only foible was dancing with two girls
of dubious character [harlots/moll]. Especially as they were such peaches – honeys
with cream-coloured underwear and whore-like makeup. Yours very truthfully,
Anna Livia.’ Yet it is an old story, the story of Tristan and Isolde, of a man
held down by tent pegs while his crazy friend was loose on the run; the story
of what Adam would do but Badman wouldn’t; the battle of Genoa and Venice; and
why Kate takes charge of the tip.
Let us now, weather
permitting, drop this polite jiggery pokery and talk straight – mate to mate –
for while the ear may sometimes be inclined to believe in something, the eye
finds it hard to believe what it sees. So let us draw near to the tip to get a
better view – for after all it has suffered for being underground – and let us
see all that remains to be seen.
I am a worker, a tombstone ‘mason’,
anxious to please everyone and jolly glad when Christmas comes once a year
[Shaun]. You are a poor carpenter, not anxious to please anybody and terribly…
…sorry
when it is time to go home again [Shem]. We cannot see eye to eye, we cannot
smile at each other, we’re nose to nose in confrontation [when interpreting the
letter]. Yet, half the lines [of the letter text] run North-South, or up and
down, while the others go West-East, or across the page, for though it is a
tiny fragment compared to other ancient books, it has it cardinal geographic
points just the same. Note the straight lines along which the traced words,
run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, and retrieve themselves,
and the latter seem to have been drawn using an ink made of lampblack and a
stylus that is alike to a blackthorn cudgel. The crosses at the end are
pre-Christian of course, yet the use of a primitive pen [shillelagh] shows a
distinct social advance from savagery to barbarism. It is believed that the
intention may have been to do with structural symmetry or with simple
orderliness: but by writing from one side to the other and turning back again
to return, with letters going up and then coming down, with the tendency to
rise offset by the tendency to fall, the whole making literature about HCE.
Another point, concerning the paper
(anyone can imagine the scene, in a small, cold room, with a spluttering candle
and a solitary chair, with a supper of eggs and a bottle of spirits, an orange
and some bread on the table, like in the detective stories mother used to tell
us as children) it has acquired many stains from the earth having spent so much
time in the tip. The tea stain at the end is small and brown, and whether it in
fact a thumb print, a watermark, or a very poor portrait, its importance in
establishing the identity of the writer is clear, as the letter was not signed.
The
spelling is not too good, but it is readable. The end of the letter may have
even have occurred with the throwing of missiles [with the death of the
author], and thus the arabesque or scribble on the page. The writer had a cup
of tea, a candle, a cigarette as he worded the letter – why sign anything when
every word, pen stroke and paper space, is a perfect signature of its own? Just
as a friend is known by his personal touch, his habits, his dress, his
movements and appeals for charity, than by his footwear. And speaking of
Tiberius [HCE] and the incestuous salacity of those lovers of old men [Issy] –
a word of warning about the affair hinted at in the letter. Some reader might
imagine that it was just a case of a young girl [or budding prostitute] in pink
deliberately falling off her bicycle, right before the curate, who picks her up
as gingerly as any palm bearer - at which gentleness the virgin was most hurt -
and asks: ‘Where have you been Grace O’Malley and were you chased my
child?’ ‘By who, Father?’ she asks, and
so on. But we grisly old psychiatrists who have done our unsmiling bit on
Alices when they were young and easily frightened, in the darkness of the
procuring room, and what aural confession we extracted from them, know that
‘father’ is not always ‘undemonstrative’ or is just there settling the food
bill, and that innocent looks of the sort she gets from Father Michael are
really akin to a ‘pudendascope’ [i.e. he imagines her naked]. And finally, she
is a chronic nymphomaniac with a trauma in her past, with an urge towards the
male erection and sexual union with her kin and feels quite slippery when she
says she likes a particular man’s face. And yet what need is there to say it;
it is as human a story as any paper could carry…
…
whether as sweet as the song Solomon sang or as brusque as Ezra Pound, or the
poetry of T.S. Eliot. And, getting back to the subject, we know from reading
the pages about ‘I was a Russian General’ and ‘The Shooting by Buckley’ [later
in FW] that Father Michael referred to in the letter was an allegory of the old
regime, and Margaret (the Maggies) is the social revolution, and that the
‘cakes’ are party funds, and the ‘dear thank you’ signifies national gratitude.
In short, the letter is an ancient message from a cell of slave rebels. We are
not conquered yet, dear land! We can recall the volunteers and revolutionary
songs about how far sweeter it will be in Dublin afore one year is over. We
toured our coasts singing these songs, from ‘When we down swords’ to ‘My Old
Howth Gun’, to ‘And Answer Made Brave Old Dwyer’. But, let’s steer a middle
course [in the interpretation of these things]. Let us instead define a
prostitute as one who stands before a door and winks, or is to be found in a
brothel [pub] near the Magazine Wall, and the curate [Father Michael] as
instead one who brings strong waters [i.e. barman]. Also remember that there
were many nights between in the first Finn and the arrival of the later HCE
[from the Middle East – see Bk I.1], and that even the notion of marrying girls
[wedding Kates] is enough to make Mike punch the hell out of his twin Nick. And
consider that ‘Maggy’s tea’ could be ‘your majesty’, if it was transcribed from
oral words, and may refer to the ‘born gentleman’ of the letter. The letter
must be ambiguous, for if the words and meanings of the letter, however
basically English, were to be preached by the vicars in the churches, and
priests in the hedgerows and the lawyers – if its vowels, words etc, were
broadcast - where would their specialist practices be, or the human race itself
- if the secret Pythagorean mathematics had been grunted over country stiles,
behind dwelling houses, down blind lanes, or when all else fails, under some
sacking on a cart?
So has it been. That’s what love is.
We
steal love where we can. Here is Isolde the fair, and Tristan brave. The cycle
of love begins with their lightning glances, to the cries of their love-making,
to the solemnity of their graves, where the waters flow on for evermore. A mixture of fire and air, earth and water;
the sons of god gaze on the daughters of men. The cycles of civilisation are
like a birth, it begins with thunder like a smack on the backside, before we go
on to a state of marriage, then finally death – they do say hell is a fine
place. Such is our lot to lose and win again, like when he grew those green
whiskers – she plucked them out but they grew again. So what are you going to
do about it? O dear!
If youth but knew! And if age but
could! It’s the same old story: from Quinet to Michelet and from Giambattiste
Vico. It is told in our utterances, in our universal signs, in our guttural
noises, in deaf mute languages, in artificial languages, in remote languages
such as Shelta, in all languages. Since the first ‘no-no’ Nannette walked
amongst the palms with ‘High-ho’ Harry, a fire has warmed her kindling, and the
bellows have blown on her peat, and the ‘teapot’ is kept wet for him. They have
then talked together forever. This business has been the same for millions of
millenniums; the mixture of races has been continuous, regardless of what might
be regarded as recent sexually liberating factors such the invention of wine,
and the colonial outposts of New York, or South America, where the brothels and
rum spelt many a man’s end. And so, in the letter, the whole world story of
their births, marriages and deaths and natural selections [of mates] has been
handed down to us, as fresh as your old cup of tea. While I was hot in me
sou’wester [?], and you were cold in your dirty hovel, Anna told the tale of
her town. Haha!
Now, it may be akin to divination using
tea leaves and smoke, and we in Ireland have our doubts about the sense of the
whole lot, but regardless of the interpretation of any phrase…
…
or the meaning of any word, so far as it has been deciphered, the authenticity
and authority of the document must [not?] be called into question. And let’s
bring the case to a close and focus [bicker] on that point. On the face of it,
the writing the letter [the affair] was finished in a certain timeframe,
although no-one knows in how many days or years it took. And, whether it was
before the flood or after it, someone wrote it, all the way to the final full
stop. And one who thinks deeply will bear this in mind, that all this downright
‘there you are’ and ‘there it is’ attitude towards the letter, is really only a
gleam in the eye. Why?
Because, suffering heart, if it comes
to that every person, place and thing in the chaos connected with producing the
letter was moving and changing all the time: the travelling writers, the type
of inks, the manufacture of pen and paper, the misunderstandings of the
document collaborators, and the change over time of pronunciation, scripts,
meanings and alphabets. So help me god, it is not a riot of blots and blurs and
wriggles of writing: it only looks as though it is. And we ought really be
thankful that at this hour of the opening of the dung heap [and the birth of
consciousness?] we have a scrap of paper with something written on it, after
all that we lost and plundered of our history, even to the most hidden corners
of the…
…
earth, considering all that the relic letter has gone through. By all means we
should cling to it, as though with drowning hands, hoping that by the light of
philosophy (and may she never forsake us!) that the sense of it will clear up
one way or another in the next quarrel of the hour, and ten to one the quarrels
will too as, between ourselves, there is a limit to all things and this
[arguing] will never do.
For the hen [the finder of the
letter], with her flair for smelling a fox [i.e. HCE], marvels at the argument
about the letter’s meaning - the indignant whipping and lashing of the hunt
dogs, the bolted or jammed guns, the lost trail of the argument – as much as
she marvels at the beauty of its writing embellished with the initial of
Earwicker [i.e. HCE] and the baffling sigla of three uprights and a lintel [M].
The latter described as Hec [HCE] which, when moved counterclockwise,
represents his sigla as the smaller E, the middle leg exhibiting an erection
whenever beside ALP, his consort. The latter is represented by the delta [a
triangle]. (Consider the hen as represented by the year 1132 and the other
[HCE] as 432, and view HCE’s sigla as symbol of a village pub and ALP’s delta
triangle as an upside down bridge, then an X for the Four Historians as though
at a cross roads [between Shem and Shaun swapping sides?], then a pothook ‘[’
symbol for Shem, the most likely of them to be hung upon the gibbet, then a
square like a horse’s field [for town or book or container]; a T for the
Tristan love-match with Isolde, and finally, a fallen T [?] symbol for Issy –
alike to an alley way or sexual passage to war and death). She, the hen, also
marvels at its steady interior monologue, and the confusion some blame on the
pen and others the ink because like the Irish celtic the Ps may be confused
with the Qs…
…and
result in words like Pristopher Polombus and Katrick Kresbyterians. There are
words cunningly hidden in its maze of literary drapery like a field-mouse in a
nest of coloured ribbons and, with it’s ‘B’s sometimes showing up as the Greek
‘mp’, how will the common reader ever understand it? Look at this so-called
‘funferall’, impossibly engraved and retouched, as though a whale’s egg stuffed
with pemmican, doomed to be read forever, or while we still have sufficient
intelligence, by the ideal reader with perfect insomnia, and look at all those
red editorial marks over the text pointing out errors and omissions. See those
…[the text launches into a list of witty descriptions of the characters and
themes of the hen’s letter i.e. FW and Book of Kells and physical presence of
HCE]… those ‘W’s seated so determinedly that they remind us of a squatting
defecator, while that frightful ‘F’ of the barbarian, which was also once used
as an ‘S’ but now only in the lisp of a [?] homosexual…
… the ‘F’ used as an insertion in the
manuscript [of FW]. Also note ‘S’ as being the symbol used as a warning to
indicate the words of our ‘proto-parents’ which archaeologists of Dublin call a
‘leak in the thatch’ [condom?] or the man from Arran whispering through a hole
in his hat, meaning that the words that follow maybe taken in any order
desired… the serpentine ‘S’, long since banished from our religion, and to see
one is as rare as seeing a fair lady riding on a cock horse, when the ‘S’ in
its insolence seems to grow longer and swell under the pressure of our writer’s
hand. It is a gypsy mating of a grand
grave-digging story [House by the Churchyard] with [Shakespearean] adultery….
…Next
those ‘R’s, those religious wars and the blessed skeletons of dead friends,
wrested red-handedly [i.e. Protestants] and bloodily from us in exchange for a
truce and booty, pray for Romulus murdered by his brother! and tossed rudely
from the pinnacle of life down amongst those who are without god [or a head]
and who haven’t, not since Roe’s Distillery burned, quaffed a glass of whiskey
– but dance with the chance the life throws us, the game of cards, even if,
blast ye!, I lose, and there’s a fine woman for you with red locks…And the
three cross-like postscript marks that inspired the Tunc page of the Book of
Kells (with the three figures in the marginal panels), and the slope of the
scrawl which is a sure sign of moral blindness [wanking?]…
…
and why spell god with the capital G?… And lastly with Penelopean patience, the
‘Z’, the final inscription consisting of 732 strokes tailed with a lasso, a
signature vaulting with interbranching feminine libido, but controlled by the
uniform matter-of-factness of the writer’s male fist.
Someone called Duff-Muggli (whose
invention of television may soon be viewed for a small payment) first called
this partnership of characters ‘Ulyssean’, ‘tetrarchic’, ‘quadratic’ or ‘ducks
and drakes’ [i.e. FW themes], after the observation that it was a little-known
bestseller - a Punic admiralty report called ‘From MacPerson’s Ossian Round by
the Tides of Jason’s Cruise’ - that had been republished as a travel guide of
the ‘every-tale-a-treat-in-itself’ variety with something for everyone.
The identity of the person behind the
fraud came to light in a devious way. The original document was written is what
was called ‘Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbreakable code, and showed no punctuation of
any sort. Yet on holding the paper against a light, this new book of Morse Code
showed…
…
that it was pierced by numerous stabs and foliated gashes by a pronged
instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were first understood to mean
‘Stop’, ‘Please stop’, ‘Do please stop’ and ‘O do please stop’ respectively
[i.e. made on the point of death]. Following this main clue, from within walls
topped with broken glass and split china, the ‘Yard’ investigators pointed out
that the holes had been made by the fork of a Professor at his breakfast table,
to introduce a notion of time on a plane surface by punching holes in space.
Being so deeply religious by nature [the Vicar?] it was rightly suspected that
such ire could not have been caused by Professor Prenderguest, even
unwittingly, upon the values of a women [ALP] he venerated and being, too, her
first boy’s [HCE] best friend. Then someone noticed that the fork jab was more
recurrent where the script was clear and that these were the same spots that
the hen, Dame Partlet, had pecked upon the midden when she found the letter.
Thinkers in all Ireland - and a playful fowl and musical me but not you! - put
two and two together, and the women all sighed from their rouged mouths with
shame that it wasn’t the Professor. [This rules out everyone else except Shem?]
So this was the outcome of letter-making exploits of Finn MacCool when he was
in the old woman’s country [Ireland] with his soldiers! In acknowledgement of
our fervour in seeking him out, he remains ‘yours most faithfully’. For the
postscript, see his spoils [the basket, and Letter’s tea stain]. And all this
was before the Norwegian Captain [a later story] had sipped his sup or HCE
owned his pub. When the animals all lived in the peace of paradise around the
home of Father Adam.
There was no need after that for the
Four Historians, for quizzing weekenders…
…who
had come to the R.Q. [restful quiet?] about how HCE shot off with a snake-like
hiss, how he’s muddled up now with Christmas and how everything the
noon-drunkard built is in the hands of his son. Or how the Ossianic Society
continues to tell how he had not a son of sons by him in his old age and
ignorance. And how his son Diarmaid was the main person after that day, the
name of the chap who did the writing for the Church, and who was the taker of
his [HCE’s] dear mate after he passed away [?]. After that the women all went
to look for the son: good-looking, fair women too. They wanted him for military
service for that older person ALP, mother of Tommy Atkins - and many British
soldiers. He might be growing a moustache [they said] with an adorable look of
amusement, and he frequents low-class billiard halls. The forger of the letter
wasn’t Hans the Curier [HAM], though if he laughed a little more and wasn’t so
worried by a persecution complex it might have been him they wanted; and not
Joseph the gossip [JAPHET]: to everyone’s relief that jabbering ape’s sole
half-hypothesis amidst the shower of chestnuts from Bruno was dropped. No HCE’s
place was taken by that odious and insufficiently hated forger (‘How are you
today my black sir?) [the Cad] - Shem the Penman [SHEM]. [i.e. Christ takes the
place of Yahweh.]