Joycean Wordplay (with a sideplate of Beckett)

A bawling comes across the blue. A tincture of Luvox and Lobe to quell the jimmying in the scourge of my thoughts, reconnect, disconnect repeat ad nausea. Do you remember that morning 25 years ago when you awoke in a dither and chugalugged a pint of sour milk, a wail of blue sky, connected, disconnect, repeat? Remember to forget; forget to remember, it’s all the same, a Moyle’s shears, Darwin’s prepuce, an excise tax to quell that jimmying in the fob of your trousers. Morning has spoken: I have yet to awaken, knees pulled tight into the heave of my chest. Now everybody—dance!

A blue-quail morning, grey perhaps, oilseed, peroxide, mercurochrome scabbed over knees, brindle, puck black. I slept the sleep of the devilish, a bromide without a watershed, a crumpet without the butter-lard and pot-marmalade. Now I will pull a rarebit from the trumpet of my ass, a blaring, sonorous Dantean annunciation issuing from the scullery of my rectos. Gods’ morning to you all, rat’s asses and halyards cinched taut around Leopold and Blum. Molly’s skivvies hung out to dry, commode paper, Sears and Roan-buck, a kidney surd skillet-fried with onions and compote of barley. Daylight craving time, so much to get done, assonance, bad grammar and syntactical patricide.

Corn syrup solids, hydrogenated soybean oil, sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, sugar, artificial colour, mono and diglycerides, carrageenan, soy lecithin, artificial flavours, rats’ asses, zithers, monorail grease, machinist’s oil, e, gummy white crap, salver, parturition sweat, an old sweater with tattered cuffs, pre-seminal fluid, a snippet of cocks’ wattle, (yES) a cockscomb, brushed flat, (nO) protein, penicillin, uppers, downers or PCP.

I have a dream, he said, an ineffable, marvellous dream. Molly sidles up close to me, her breath sour with whey and Paddy’s, bloomers cinched round her neck, a cock’s wattle. She leans in close, the cinnamon sweet treacle of her hair cussing the bevel of my cheeks, and whispers, Yes I will, yes, Yes…I said Yes. I collapse, implode in on myself, a rasher of kidney and allspice, a page of Sears and Roebuck’s clutched between fore and thumb, her whisper like diamonds in my hand.

A pullet blue sky: commode chain given a fair to middling jerk, a colostomy of neither this nor that, that nor this. I am the commode pot, the a posterior, posterior. Adman Bloom, mollycoddler of Sears and Roebuck, skillet-fried with Paddy’s and Parnell, a most delectable treat, not for the faint of stomach or kidney, a colossus of import and Liffey. Gad morning, I have awoken.Bloom in commode eating kidney soiled, fetter of surd. Denham dead rotting in bog peat, no such luck with trackman’s stub or adman’s commission, or coitus in porkpie hat, a wee Stephen begging foreskins for alms and mother, dog’sbody, jellyfish and undertow, and the Liffey runs round and back, over hillock, copse and morgue.

Bootblack blackstrap molasses black coffee, a sewage best imbibed ad-dulia, tongue lolling, feet shuffling, a spicy oleic treat. Goes down like rue of castor, a cure-all for heel sores, Gomorrah and colic whooping.Good morning, please commode your mucking-boots at the door, remove all partial and full dental-plates, prosthetic stemmers, hairpieces, and wipe that silly smile off your face. While a guest at the theta-not-theta syllogism hotel, you will be required to suspend all belief in commonsense, logic, formal and informal, deductive reasoning, inference, axioms and dialectics, material and immaterial. Here we regale in the Socratic monologue, the soliloquy, the deferral of rational discourse, the blather of blather, yes, philosophical cuckoldry.

He represents the representation of citation, the citation of representation. In this manner all representation is citation, citing the citation of the representation, which is the conational representation of the citation, the representational citation of the conation. I, on the other hand, represent the representation of conation as the citation of citation, the citing of the citation, the representation of the citation of citation.

My mind is a blunderbuss, short-armed and full of pebbles, an excerpt, a mention, a reference extracted from a citation, a conational citation of representation, a blunderbuss without a shove-stick or powder-sac.I awoke scribbling in the stockyard of my thoughts, a binary of tropisms and gabble.

I await the final metempsychosis, the transcendent lollygag that will send me careening into the next millennium, perhaps further: Quantum mechanics, a good sturdy slide-rule, or a loose wheel on a child’s bicycle. Tinkering with a splashguard or chewing Black Cat gum until your jaw hurts.

I prefer, he said, a sideplate of toast smeared with oleo of lard, perhaps, he said, a curd of allspice with a Burgee’s nM4*, or a pumpernickel, black as the ace of spondees: Or, for that mutter, a skim of tappet simmered with oil of egress and oxblood soupcon [he said] the kind that sullies the palate and vectors the wee Tilley. I ambulate, he said, with polio boot and ashplant striking the pavewalk like a firewood match, sulfur yellow and quidbrown like Blazes gobspit, Mully’s thingwort slathered with allornothing. No: he said: a marmalade compote, or a measure of jamjelly scone(d) on the farplate next to the cinderbox powdery with oldperson’smints and the odd biscuit, chewed from the insod out. Mansebevel hidden in the rector’s closet, where a knockabout of wee Tully’s eat macadam bread patted with aster of Goethe, Writher’s head shorn clear off his shoulderigging: Or, [he said] a barilla of tin biscuits, the sort that me great aunt Alma made with recto cloth cinched round the coop of her reddress, the (verily) one she wore on Somedays and those that fell between heathen and haycock. Barging that, he sod, a wedge of the bluecheese, the allsorts that grandmamma pressed in briecloth, the wee buggers playing the loop-de-loop in the barrows of her skirts. [He said] nary muck of impute [he said, saying], I prefer a Burgee’s nM4*, or a cold August night boiled in a samepot with boxthorn and pumperknuckle, a sideplate of skimming and quillworst.

I ate, no goblet(ed) a bologna sandwich this evening on primpknuckle and lye, a soft whereabouts in the labium of me mouther. She, she did, tied a lariat round the wattle of my neck(tyke), cinching it tight with a Scout’s knot, fleche(ing) the knead to butter me wrongsideup, like a sideplate of melbas, cracked wheat and wry. Fucking cough medicine’s going to be the end(son) of me. Beckett’s crockpipe finger between thumb and fore, no endgame for Ham or Plink or some ruffian in a tackman’s hat; now tell me please, if you might, whereabouts the clubmaster with the frottage cheese and cowslip lip, the one with the baby tuk tuk and Dedalus smile, and wee Aquinas first principle, be that Muslix or Cripper, or a vicar’s surplice fleeced with hopscotch, applejack, or a Eucharist Jell-O in a firkin’s jampot wrongsideup.

Pencil prehensile, Damsel washerwoman, scullerywhore, impetigo, Tobago, that fucking Winnebago you bought for a song, dirge(y) bastard, scant knowledge of vectors and algebra, logarithms are the devil’s work, Samuel Johnson ate mutton jerky, sicker than Hemmingway’s cow(lick), my proctor, doctor greatcoat soiled with Cooper’s oil and jampot jemmies, silly fuck with a tonsure cut round river runs past and on, patchy cunt with a satang bunnyclip(ity) clop goes the rector’s closet full to brimming with wafers and jamjuice made from plums and civet seeds cowl(ed) from the boot of me daddy’s Buick with the fiveanddime beebonnet on the fader’s mirror image of Mr. T. Mann’s postseminal chappings, sad mixed up Buddenbrooks with the blackest pair a lungs you(will) ever see.

Begin: Epsom salts: allocate: electrocute: turn off the damn radio: Slim Jims: taste like Fantail: orange: but without the bitterness: I am a jammy: jam: scone: no butter pats: nor: brine Ricky: a cool soda treat: but hard on the oesophagus: it is: goes down like a scullery whore: Timmy feet: and half an ear: shorn off: for malediction: and: bad faith: illocution: naysayer: in a gabardine-pullover: mute as a sprig of celery: you will pay: for: this: this: is: nonsense: but without: the: bitterness: and colicky aftertaste: StopRobin’s egg-blue, nature, nurture, pollute, corrupt, soil, profane, infinitude, destitute, refute, confute, salute, rebuke, collate, reprobate, allocate, falsify, dolomite, hard Etruscan bone, white, whiter, whitest, pale-white, junk-worry white, whitest white, whiter. And tongue balanced lolling in the chance of her mouth, sullying saltlick-cowing cud and grassland muddy with Dublin dirt and tenor’s railhead siring poor mad-footed Lucia dancing madly, mad. Patchy-eyed ginstone, hiking trousers to knee and ankle and foot and arch, mollycoddling commode wiping ass with Sears and Roebucks and Atlantis Monthly. Joyless’ eyesore, river runs round pound, errata, drowsing never to awaken to quillwort, barnacle and tackman’s stub: End.

I was just now thinking about philology and Nietzsche’s inkpot, and those head seizures he was prone to, and Saint John’s Wart, a panacea for whooping, and Goethe’s Writher, the whole side of his head blown clear off, Margarita’s garden a mess of burl ends and steak tartar. I should be sleeping, counting the slaughter, the pickaxe sloughing neck and breastplate. But I am not, I am stuck thinking thoughts about philology and Nietzsche’s inkpot and seizures and Writher’s head blown clear off and the mess it made of poor, dear Margarita’s garden, fucking thoughtless bugger. Then I thought, thought now, why it is that such men of great genius and mien loose they’re eyesight, patchy-eyes and Lucia dancing mad-footed in the Liffey, which has neither a beginning nor an end, but runs in a circle round Martello tower and Bunion’s hip.

There is enough wind today to blow a super kite to Uranus and back; blusters of windy wind; bluffs of wind, a gale-force wind that blusters and bluffs. The wind is separating the leaves from the marrow, the twigs from the branches, the stemming from the stipule. This is a Uranus wind, so strong and efficient that it will surely blow us all to Uranus and back, like super kites bluffing and blustering in the bluestone blue sky. If Beckett were still drawing breath he would approve of this windy wind day, flying is own super kite, tugging gently on the string, pulling the bobbin close into his chest, heaving with delight and faro. I recall flying a box-kite, a Chinese cube with a fiery red tail, reeling the string into the bobbin of my chest, my friends jumping for joy, faces red with madness and wind.

I find myself in a state of estrangement when I realize that Beckett’s Murphy, Malone, et al, live in my neighbourhood, on the very street that I trudge, feet shod in holey shoes, greatcoat flapping like sailcloth, breathing the same air, seeing the same sun, experiencing the same frustrations as I. They are everywhere and nowhere, a ubiquitous ubiquity. Beckett’s characters are a part of all of us, whether we like it or not. They exist in the excess of our thoughts, in the deepest recess of our ‘not wanting to think at all’. His characters represent the ‘unnameable’, our disaffection with cause and effect, with this and that, that and this, the ‘unnameable’. Beckett taught us to be wary of thinking, to be cautious of the things we think we know but will never know; the impossibility of knowing the insensate, the Platonic, the form within the form, the essence of what we think we think, but never think at all, the impossibility of escape, the closure that opens up into the possibility of thinking thoughts about thinking, the ubiquitous ubiquity, the ‘unnameable’ that is named then quickly forgotten, our estrangement from ourselves, our characterlessness