There are then eight mounted title pages:

It seems every word in the Wake is a suitcase stuffed with meanings, ragbag and riches. In March Demon the placement on the page is the case. Both are methods of counterpointing story and language, artifice and observation. For language can become a false redesigner of consciousness, retelling us what we might have known better without the explanation. It marches ahead like an army shod in dictionaries, trampling on the inarticulate. It can't help becoming a class structure, necessarily conformist and conservative. Like Sterne and Carroll, Joyce and Cox found new ways to subvert and democratise the authoritarian use of language. There are cracks in the structures of human society built by language. Joyce was one with an eye for the crack. Cox more briefly places it all on the page to show how hilariously ridiculous it can be.

Cox was brought up in the non-conformist church. The teaching of religion – and citizenship – was done at Sunday School. There are no Sunday School Classes in Alice in Wonderland – they were for poor children to allow their parents time for each other on a Sunday afternoon. March Demon presents the Sunday School version of the world, its incontrovertible truths and exhortations. He turns the chop logic upside down by mocking the nuts and bolts method, a meccano of words, whereas Joyce throws the whole bagwash in the river and lets it float apart.

Right from the start I've linked the two books in my mind. They liberate the imagination in the same way. They subvert rhetoric by (affectionate) ridicule. They let words float free then catch them again, see them as physical associations. They're both practical and realistic to the way the mind actually functions (as opposed to the way it 'works'). ' Hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits.' Dreams of heaven, purgatorial earth, the whole thugogmagog (see The River Romps to Nursery, Wake p222)… the many streams of consciousness.

Mollie Bloom's soliloquy, passing water into the widening river. Whose dream is it, the Wake? It is life that is dreaming, specifically Irish life, the Liffey. Again like Tristram Shandy, you can pick it up at any page anywhere; even on page one there is always what came before. Jump in or dive head first (the academic method) it goes swimmingly. Beckett quotes Stephen Daedalus's description of Epictetus as 'an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucket of water'. An image of the imagination, Bucket and soul. Don't look down, keep going. 'Never stop. Continuarration! You're not there yet, Garonne, garonne!' (Anna Livia Plurabelle)

I've yet to read the Wake from beginning to end. I've just lived with it a while. That's as much as you can say about your own life. Events, facts, opinions, lies, jokes, people you've met, married, given birth to, maligned, murdered, or now intend to slaughter in retrospect, whatever, the lowdown, all the obvious material. A proper study. Shore a lifetime book I'll be taking on the desert island – if that eventuality should arise with due notice and pretty soon. I doubt it's the ideal book for a nursing home. That passage of time ahead I've already marked down for repeated re-readings of Malone Dies. Anyway didn't the Wake appear erratically in sections, sold a stretch at a time like a trout stream? Do you need all of it at once?

A stack of pages all numbered one. Certainly Beckett saw it comes to the same thing, eternal reoccurrence. Back to his classifications:

Philology. n. (no longer in scholarly use) says the HarperCollins discretionary. There goes the love of words, washed away downstream.

Philosophy.n. an academic discipline investigating intelligibility by means of rational argument concerning presuppositions, implications, interrelationships and suppositories in particular questioning the nature of reality. Statements in words on what cannot be expressed in words. Definitions of truth numbered and propped up by propositions. Twinned with the above by Samuel Beckett. A timber yard dying for a flood.

Idiom is the drawback with perfected art, the Wake so oarish, san ferry Anne. And Cox's colloquy: Wyndham Lewis has a phrase for it (in The Demon of Progress in the Arts) 'The moon sawed up into square blocks.'

The Wild Irish Harp is having a turn. Proper upright uptight efficient clipped English is out: pompous, self-righteous and protestant. Not enough childering, too much chiding. Cox's favourite composer was Domenico Scarlatti. Skittering brilliance of interdependent notes across the keyboard, the most hands-on music ever written. If there was music he disliked next to pop it was Bach. He found it humourless, a menace (like the military band origins & orchestrations of Haydn & Mozart & Beethoven & Schubert & Wagner & Bruckner & Mahler). No, he liked Scarlatti, intricate patterns. He achieved his effects with great care, as evidenced by some proof sheets of earlier poems collaged before March Demon was started. Like most of us he worked hard to appear effortless.

In the end he martialled his material in order to create a book. Both the Wake and March Demon are probably best read as extended prose poems. They both have interludes and dramatic moments. For example, the page sequence (pp 93-94) from March Demon leads brutally from one of the many sections on education into a completely unexpected litany. The shock on turning over the page into the new chapter anticipates the kind of effect found many years later in the Gogmagog Press books, structurally magnificent. It's as good as a Bach fugue, Morris.

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This concludes the present Exagmination of these progressive works with another brief quotation from Beckett: 'A last word about the Purgatories. Dante's is conical, Mr Joyce's is spherical,…'   Beckett's bilingual, Cox is terrestial? Is their no ascent?