by James Joyce
If juness she saved! Ah ho! And if yulone he pouved! The olold stoliolum! From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a jambebatiste to a brulo-brulo! It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. Since nozzy Nanette tripped palmyways with High-ho Harry there’s a spurtfire turf a’kind o’kindling whenoft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve: and whathough (revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when win power wine has bucked the kick on poor won man) billiousness has been billiousness during milliums of millenions and our mixed racings have been giving two hoots on three jeers for the grape, vine and brew and Pieter’s in Nieuw Amsteldam and Paoli’s where the poules go and rum smelt his end for him and he dined off sooth american (it would give one the frier even were one a normal kettlelicker) this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has combled tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like an auld cup on tay. As I was hottin me souser. Haha! And as you was caldin your dutchy hovel. Hoho! She tole the tail of her toon. Huhu!
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 deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship 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, baffelost 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 downright 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 anticollaborators, 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 whyacinthinous 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 now dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it (and we are luffed to ourselves as the soulfisher said when he led the cat out of the boat), after all that was lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff’s flung over our homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy (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, strictly 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 in scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes: those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds: the touching reminiscence of an incomplete trail or dropped final: the gossipy threadreels, a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambi-embellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffing chrismon trilithon sign , finally called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller Δ, 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 irrespectively, why not take the former for a village inn, the latter for an upsi-down 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 puite as often as not taken for pews with their tails in their mouths, thence your Pristopher Polumbos, 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 absurdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummpshow 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 puddenpadded, 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 cayennepeppercast over the text calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking 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 genuflected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kakography affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end: the headstrength (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 throneopen 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 flopright-down determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff (the hornful digamma of your bornabar-bar, rarely heard now save when falling from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetarosexual but 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 by our copyist 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, , d
ragging 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 aitches 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 serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture (about as freakwind a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse), which, ever longer and of more morosity, seems to uncoil so spirally in its invincible insolence 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 the writer 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 interpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS, Bb = Cod iv, Pap ii, Brek xi, Lun iii, Dinn xvii, Sup xxx, Fullup MDCXC: 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 quickscribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative 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 rubijets 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 hearts’ 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 tenebrous τunc 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 whoever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his—or perhaps her—cheek as the case may have been then): and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness: the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness of all them 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 penelopean 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 upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?
Duff-Muggli, who now may be quoted by very kind arrangement (his electroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon as tone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos Limited at a millicentime the microamp), first called this kind of paddygoeasy partnership the ulykkean or tetrachiric-quadrumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex (v. Some Forestallings over that Studium of Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis, vol. xxiv pp. 2–555) after the wellinformed observation, made miles apart from the Master by Tung-Toyd (cf. Later Frustrations amengst the Neomugglian Teachings abaft the Semiunconscience, passim), that in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner (trianforan deffwedoff our plumsucked pattern shape-keeper) a Punic admiralty report, From MacPerson’s Oshean Round By the Tides of Jason’s Cruise, had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle me gander as game as your goose.
The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast duplex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively and, following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a single-minded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina—Yard inquiries pointed out → that th d bîn “provòked” by fork, f grave Brofèor; th é’s Brèak-fast-table;; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdçe nòtn f [pòn n plāñe (?) s’’ rfaiç’e’] by pn! ingh les (sic) in iSpåce?! Deeply religious by nature and position, and warmly attached to Thee, smearbread and better and Him and newlaidills, it was rightly suspected that such ire could not have been visited by him, Brotfressor Prenderguest, even underwittingly, upon the ancestral pneuma of one whom, with rheuma, he venerated shamelessly at least once a week at Cockspur Common as his apple in his eye and her first boy’s best friend and, though plain English for a married lady misled heaps by the way, yet when some peerer or peeress detected that the fourleaved shamrock or quadrifoil jab was more recurrent wherever the script was clear and the term terse and that these two were the selfsame spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on her dungheap thinkers all put grown in waterunspillfull Pratiland only and a playful fowl and musical me by not you in any case, two and two together, and, with a swarm of bisses honeyhunting after, a sigh for shyme (O, the pettybonny rouge!) separated modest mouths. So be it. And it was. The lettermaking of the explots of Fjorgn Camhelsson when he was in the Kvinnes country with Soldru’s men. With acknowledgment of our fervour of the first instant he remains years most fainfully. For postscrapt see spoils. Though not yet had the sailor sipped that sup nor the humphar foamed to the fill. And fox and geese still kept the peace around L’Auberge du Père Adam.
Small need after that, old Jeromesolem, old Huffsnuff, old Andycox, old Olecasandrum, for quizzing your weekenders come to the R.Q. with: he shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass and his whole’s a dismantled noondrunkard’s son.
Howbeit we heard not a son of sons to leave by him to oceanic society in his old man without a thing in his ignorance, Tulko MacHooley
. And it was thus he was at every time, that son, and the other time, the day was in it and after the morrow. Diremood is the name is on the writing chap of the psalter, the juxtajunctor of a dearmate and he passing out of one desire into its fellow. The daughters are after going and looking for him, Torba’s nicelookers of the fair necks. Wanted for millinary servance to olderly’s person by the Totty Askinses. Formelly confounded with amother. May be growing a moustache, did you say, with an adorable look of amuzement? And uses noclass billiardhalls with an upandown ladder? Not Hans the Curier though had he had have only had some little laughings and some less of cheeks and were he not so warried by his bulb of persecussion he could have, ay, and would have, as true as Essex bridge. And not Gophephgo-gossip, I declare to man! Noe! To all’s much relief one’s half hypothesis of that jabberjaw ape amok the showering jestnuts of Bruisanose was hotly dropped and his room taken up by that odious and still today insuffciently malestimated notesnatcher, Shem (kak, pfooi, bosh and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen? Sez you!) the Penman.
So?
Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?
The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!
(Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. He misunderstruck an aim for am otto of number three of them and left his free natural ripostes to four of them in their own fine artful disorder.)