"your new Irish stew"

(188.8-190.9)  In yesterday's passage, Justius/Shaun called upon Shem to make his confession.  In keeping with the tone of the chapter, however, in today's passage Justius begins a new dissertation on Shem's history instead of allowing Shem to deliver his confession.  The reading begins with Justius's twisting of the priest's familiar invocation ("Let us pray") when he says, "Let us pry."  He then recalls how Shem was brought up the right way but has become an self-centered outcast, a "condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch."  Much like Lucifer, whose fall was rooted in pride, Shem "will neither serve not let serve, pray nor let pray," and has founded a "disunited kingdom on the vacuum of [his] own most intensely doubtful soul."

Justius goes on to tell Shem that Shem was given a set of working genitals ("a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders") in order to "repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hungered head and the angered thousand."  Instead of carrying out this mission, however, Shem "thwarted the wious pish of [his] cogodparents."  Justius then discusses the multitude of eligible women in Ireland that Shem spurned.

Justius begins the next paragraph with more choice epithets for Shem:  "Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word."  Shem is now described as a type of prophet who "cutely foretold . . . death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst."  But, Justius tells Shem, Shem never considered that the more prophecies and atrocities he dreamed up -- "the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel" -- the more gas or hot air he let out into the world:  "the merrier fumes your new Irish stew."