I am a bit off of schedule. Not with reading the book: still on pace to finish on April 15th. But I skipped most of a week because I was sick, and have been reading a bit more every day to make up. The past few chapters have also been much easier reading, to the point that, though I'm writing now about I.7, I have actually finished I.8, having read it all yesterday in one go. The book is going to get much more difficult, so I am going to slow down and stick to 10 pages a day, and not try to surpass that.
It is hard coming up with something to write about every day. I've let myself slip a bit by keeping up with the reading but not posting here every day, but I am going to try earnestly to go back to the original design and write something about FW every day. Even if it is just a little commentary on something I find interesting.
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He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm. (193.29-30)
...
He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
--- Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! (195.5-6)
I.7 is mostly (except for a few pages at the end) the figure of Shaun talking about Shem and painting him in a very harsh light. Shem responds near the end.
These two statements are spoken by a narrator (no identity can really be discerned) describing what Shaun and then Shem does with their magic wands. They are then each followed by a response.
In the first, the narrator describes the effect of Shaun's wand: those he enchants fall asleep, and the presence of sleep is invoked in a chant which parodies the common Catholic Latin refrain. This kind of solemn, churchy pronunciation seems to be characteristic of Shaun. The narrator himself seems to be overtaken by the sleep, since his "Amen" is said while yawning. Also evoked in "Awmawm" is the sacred syllable "Om" and maybe "mom," anticipating ALP's coming.
Sleep being equated with death is nothing new. When I think about it in terms of FW itself, the connection is striking, since this is a book about sleep. It is also about resurrection, for which death is a prerequisite. I don't think that Shaun is actually putting anyone to sleep. It might simply be the result of listening to him lecture for an entire book (and beyond, if we go back to I.6, which is mostly him as well, including him assuming lecture mode before the Mookse and Gripes fable).
Shaun's action is the opposite of a miracle, which is ironic given his harsh criticism of Shem's apostasy. This is why I think we see a narrator (again, who?) straightforwardly assessing the meaning of Shaun's action.
But could it be Shem doing this? Just before this statement, Shaun is apoplectically calling out Shaun and demanding he answer. Is Shem silencing him? Shaun's final statement seems to show Shem standing before him in anger: "Sh! You are mad!" Before that, he swore that he would go silent if he was speaking wrongly of Shem: "That a cross may crush me if I refuse to believe in it. That I may rock anchor through the ages if I hope it's not true. That the host may choke me if I beneighbor you without my charity!"
Shem would then wave his wand (his pen...Shaun does not seem to be associated with a wand-like object) and silence Shaun.
Does he fall asleep? Or just silent? Somnia somniorum not only mimics saecula saeculorum in sound but in sense as well. This is a superlative construction (which is ultimately something in Hebrew that is carried over into Greek then Latin translations of the Bible), like the book of the "Song of Songs" (shir hashirim) which means "the most exquisite song." So Shem can make Shaun sleep the deepest of all sleeps. But it is not just in somnia (in + accusative of motion towards: the enchanted enter sleep), but insomnia: sleeplessness. The sentence also says: "sleeplessness is the most exquisite of sleeps," or "sleeplessness is the dream of sleeps," that is, wishing that one could sleep. The earnestness of this prayer requires an "Amen"...and the prayer seems already to be working, since it is said through a yawn.
If Shem is pointing the deathbone, then he might be saying Insomnia..., and if so, it would mock Shaun's pious religious disposition (Shaun can also speak in extenso in Latin, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter).
A further result of reading this way: when Shem (surely it is he doing the action at the chapter's end) "lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak," the dumb could refer back to Shaun, and it would then be Shaun (and others?) saying "Quoiquoiquoi..."
What is saying "Quoiquoi etc.", if not Shaun, or in addition to Shaun...or who has Shaun joined...or who is Shaun speaking as, or like what? It sounds like ducks to me, on the river that is ALP that has flowed onto the scene; note especially how it ends "quoiq" (like quack) and not "quoi." It also sounds like the gurgling of a stream. "Quoi" means "what" in French. I see substance itself coming alive, the lifewand a pen that gives voice to what was previously silent and allow its quidditas ("whatness") to emerge. In its own voice. Waving the lifewand is an act of poetic creation. This is so different from Shaun's description of Shem's debased kind of creativity throughout the chapter (to the point that he describes him creating ink from his own feces and writing illegible texts all over his body).
It is as if Shaun's damaging act of vituperation is countered by Shem's silencing. Shem is then only able to give voice to the voiceless (the recently fallen dumb) because he is standing at the river his mother. It may even be that the mother is the one given the voice as well, just as Shem is the scribe for ALP's letter in I.4.
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