"What has gone? How it ends?"

(613.8-615.10)  The reading for today is another particularly challenging one, but it's equally rewarding to try to unpack.  Tindall writes that this is a kind of transition passage, clearing the way from St. Patrick's victory in yesterday's reading to a final look at ALP's letter in the coming pages.

Day ("dayleash") is upon us now.  With this new beginning, it is time for transformations to occur.  "And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos," the narrator says.  The couples we've seen -- husbands and wives, warring brothers -- will take on a greater significance after they've eaten their breakfast, or "brarkfarsts."

Today "there is bound to be a loveleg day for mirrages in the open."  As the Wake prepares to repeat itself, we will see new marriages, just as we will see new mirages, in the open world of a new dream-within-a-dream.  New clothes are a necessity for this rearrival in a new world:  "You got to make good that breachsuit, seamer.  You going to haulm port houlm, toilermaster."  Meanwhile, old clothes -- just like old stories and gossip -- will return from the washers at the Liffey:  "Delivered as.  Caffirs and culls and onceagain overalls, the fittest surviva lives that blued, iorn and storridge can make them.  Whichus all claims.  Clean.  Whenastcleeps.  Close."

In this transition state, we're left to wonder where we are.  "What has gone?" the narrator asks.  "How it ends?"  We maintain our focus on the present, but in doing so also feel simultaneously drawn toward and repelled from the past and the future:  "It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word.  Today's truth, tomorrow's trend."  To cope with this jarring moment, the narrator instructs us:  "Forget, remember!"

The final paragraph of the reading is a great one.  It strikes me in one sense as being Joyce's commentary on the construction and purpose of the Wake.  The book is a "wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon."  It is known to every "Matty Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk" and follows "a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process."  To "the farmer, his son and their homely codes" (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), this process is "known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch can" (Vico's four ages represented in the breakfast ritual).  Like a digestive system, Joyce takes "separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination."  In doing so, he details the "sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One" (HCE and his various forms) and prepares it so that it's ready for our breakfast nourishment, "piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs."  Pretty great, huh?