Friday, October 9, 2015

"A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded."

(593.1-595.29)  Book IV begins with a bang (or, maybe more appropriately, an invocation:  "Sandhyas!  Sandhyas!  Sandhyas!").  It makes sense that, as the closing chapter of the Wake, this one will mirror the opening chapter and provide a sort of general postscript to go with the general introduction of the book's opening.  That means that we may be in for some densely packed pages.  And densely-packed could be a way to describe these first few pages.

A new day is dawning, and HCE is alerting everyone with the news:  "Calling all downs to dayne.  Array!  Surrection!  Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world.  O rally, O rally, O rally!"  The light comes to all from "the reneweller of the sky" to illuminate the continuation of the human cycle of birth and death.  As the narrator explains, "Kilt by kelt shell kithagain with kinagain."  References to soap and washing emphasize that the dirty and old is being remade into the fresh and new.

We soon go on a quick tour of the landscape to see those places that will be renewed by the light.  "We may plesently heal Geoglyphy's twentynine ways to say goodbett an wassing seoosoon liv," the narrator says.  We get a long list of things that we'll find throughout the new day, many of which McHugh notes double as Irish counties (for example, "for limericks, for waterfowls, for wagsfools, for louts, for cold airs, for late trams").  And at the conclusion of today's reading, we get a reminder that while HCE and ALP rest, "a successive generation has been in the deep deep deeps of Deepereras," ready to unseat them.

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