I had to take a week off because I was sick. Sleepless nights because of coughing and fever made it hard to continue. For the first few days, I thought repeatedly about the last few pages of I.3 (which I'm mostly skipping over now) and about the layeredness of FW in general. I was stuck inside mental loops and was trying to find a sympathetic connection to the way FW was written. I think I might have had some ideas in that regard but they are lost now, driven out of my by what felt like a sickness that was never going to end and a brain shaken into submission and stupor by relentless coughing. I'm picking myself up off the ground and dusting myself off, and bravely continuing.
* * *
What subtler timeplace of the weald than such wolfsbelly castrament to will hide a leabhar from Thursmen's brandihands or a loveletter, lostfully hers, that would be lust on Ma, than then when ructions ended, than here where race began: and by four hands of forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume. Give over it! And no more of it! So pass the pick for child sake! O men! (80.12-19)
The context is Kate's ability to convey a picture of what happened in Phoenix Park by piecing together the shards of the past she finds in her scavenging around the "Serpentine" (the magazine wall?) at the park. The narrator remarks that here, in particular the spot where Kate dumps her dirt and collected matter, would be a good place for hiding a precious book. This would be reminiscent of a legend about the Book of Kells in the Annals of Ulster, which was said to have been found under a layer of turf after it was stolen. In 2006, a copy of the Psalms, in fact, was found in a bog in Co. Tipperary (now called the "Faddan More Psalter"). In this passage, the idea seems to be hiding things of precious value from invaders in bogs and other places. A book is mentioned, as is a letter; two written objects which can stand for FW, the latter being ALP's letter defending HCE. I thought for a moment that the exclamations at the end of the passage (see more below) suggest that such a book/letter was found, and that what comes next quotes from it, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, we have foreshadowing, as well as the reflection of the learned narrator as he conveys the facts about the case of HCE as he hears them.
I find the skeletal grammar of the sentence and its tense odd, especially the verb "to will hide," which seems like backforming English to match some other language (Irish?). "Will" could also be read as "well."
As a coherent thought, there's some tension. What starts out as a speculation or reflection on the suitability of this bog for hiding a book (called a leabhar after Irish) from looting invaders ("What subtler timeplace...began") becomes a present, vivid account of the stashing away of the book, now called a "babe" (the book is hidden in the bog like Horus in the marshes of the Delta by Isis), and with the promise of "reconcilement" that the discovery of this book/babe holds, the speech turns urgently into imperatives: dig! Yet the voice is the same. The men hiding the book and being addressed at the end ("four hands of forethought") could prefigure the four annalists that make up Mamalujo. We might even see the four exclamations at the end of the passage (each ending with "!") corresponding to one of the four annalists, shushing each other, fighting over the pickaxe (for excavation), eager to find the treasure and to rediscover the past. Of course, the wording of the exclamation "So pass the pick for child sake!" casts the excavation as the meal after HCE's wake (cf. in I.1 "pass the kish for crawsake"), and this motif (which crops up in FW a lot) seems to indicate Mamlujo praying an impatient grace before eating (glutton). It is exciting to see the voices of Mamalujo emerge in a way connected with the emergence of the object of FW itself and the letter.
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