^|aLet m us now draw nearer to it since it has after all met with misfortune & see all there is to be seen.^a| One cannot help noticing that ^|asome about half^a| of the lines run from E to W, others from N to S. ^|aThese ruled lines along which the traced words can run, march, walk, stumble in comparative safety seem to have been first of all drawn in a pretty checker w by using lampblack & a blackthorn.^a| Such crossing is antechristian though the explanation may be ^|ageographical geodetic^a| quite as easily as domestic economic. Then, in addition to the original sand, pounce ^|apowder^a| or soft rag, it has acquired accretions of terricious matter while loitering in the past. The teastain is a study in itself and its importance in establishing the identity of the writer complex (for if the hand was one the minds were more than so) will be appreciated by remembering that after ^|ain the time^a| before & after the battle of the Boyne it was the custom not to sign letters always. For why sign when every word, letter, penstroke, space, is a perfect signature in its own way. A person is known more by his personality, habits of dress, movements, response to appeals for charity rather than by his or her boots.
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^|xWhile we may ^|adoubt have our irremovable doubts^a| as to the whole sense of the text, the meaning of any phrase in it, the meaning of every word deciphered and interpreted we c must not have any doubts as to its authorship and authoritativeness.^x|
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^|xThough apparently & to a rough mind this document is a thing once for all done & there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time be it a day or a year or even supposing it should turn out to be a long stretch of goodness only knows how many days or years. But anyhow somebody ^|asome where some time^a| wrote it, wrote it ^|adown all^a|, wrote it all down and there it is, full stop. Ah yes but one who deeply thinks will always bear in his mind that this downright there you are & there it is is only all in his eye. ^|aAll Every single person place & thing^a| was moving, changing ^|aevery part of the time^a|: the travelling inkpot, the hare & turtle pen & paper, the continually more & less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning words themselves vocable scriptsigns. ^|aNo it is not a riot of blots & blurs & bars & balls & hoops & wriggles, it only looks as like it as damn it^a| We ought to be deeply thankful that we have even a ^|awritten on with now dried ink^a| piece of paper after it all & cling to it as with drowning hands.^x|
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Who that in scrutinising marvels at the indignant whiplashloops, the ^|aso prudently^a| bolted ^|aand or^a| blocked rounds, the touching reminiscence of an incomplete trail or dropped final, the gossipy threadreels, the whirligig glorioles which ambiembellish the majuscule
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of Earwicker, ^|athe monology of ^|bits the^b| interiors,^a| the pardonable confusion ^|aowing to^a| which at times ^|athe swollen^a| pees ^|awith their caps awry^a| are ^|aquite^a| often ^|aas not^a| kews ^|awith their tails in their mouths, the sudden petulance of a capitalised middle, the curt witty darts never quite at the truth letter^a|. ^|aThen a sudden sinistrogyric return to some sore point in the past ^|ba word here so cunningly hidden a nest of ^|cmaze^c| like a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons^b|, the innocent exhibitionism of those capricious underlinings,^{a| |a}those exotic serpentines ^|bsince^b| properly banished from our scriptures ^|bwhich ever longer and more headstrong seems to grow ^|c& swell before one's eyes^c| under the writer's hand^b|, ^|bthe toomuchness and toomanyness of its fourlegged ems,^{b|a| |a}the penelopean patience of the paraphe tailed by a leaping lasso^a| — who thus ^|aat this^a| marvelling will not ^|ago press^a| on to see the ^|afeminine^a| vaulting ^|aambition ^|bsex libido^b|a| of those interbranching ^|aupsweeps continually sex up & in sweeps sternly^a| controlled and ^|aled easily repersuaded^a| by the uniform ^|aundeviating course matter of factness^a| of a ^|acold meandering^a| male fist.

Duff-Moeggli called this ^|akind of^a| partnership the Odyssean or heterochiric complex ^|afrom after^a| the wellinformed observation that in the case of the ^|alittleknown^a| periplic poem popularly associated with that name a Punic admiralty report had been ^|acleverly^a| capsized & refloated by ^|athen saucily^a| reissued as ^|aa^a| dodecanesian baedeker of an every-place-tale-a-treat-itself variety which ^|ashould amply could hope to^a| satisfy the gander as well as the goose. The identity of the persons in the complex came to light in a curious way. The original document was what is known as unbreakable ^|ascript tracery^a|, that is to say, it had no signs of punctuation of any kind. On holding it to the light it was seen to be pierced or punctuated (in the university sense of the word) by
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numerous ^|adots cuts^a| and gashes inflicted made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually understand to mean stop, please stop, do please stop and O do please stop respectively and investigation showed that they were provoked by the fork of a professor at the breakfast table ^|aprofessionally ^|btrying piqued^b| to introduce tempo into ^|ba plane^b| surface by making holes in space^a|. Deeply religious by nature it was correctly suspected that such anger could not openly have been directed against the ancestral spirit of ^|aher who one^a| openly respected by him ^|aonce a week^a| as our ^|afirst^a| boys' best friend and when it was at last ^|anoticed detected^a| that the fourth or heaviest gash was ^|amost more^a| frequent ^|awhere wherever^a| the script was clear and the term terse and that these were the exact places carefully selected for her perforations by Dame ^|aPartland Partlet^a| on the dunghill reluctantly the theory of the jabbering ape was ^|aabandoned hotly dropped^a| and its place usurped by that odious & even ^|anow today^a| insufficiently despised ^|aperson notetaker^a|, Jim the Penman.