by the waters of babalong

“by the waters of babalong” is a recurring expression whose changing contexts bind the book’s river imagery to its songs, rumors, and unstable records. It evokes a familiar phrase of exile and remembrance, but the text redirects it into local landscape and communal speech; recurrence, rather than a single definitive explanation, gives it force.

River, Stones, and Memory

The expression appears in a passage of attachment to a woman figured through landscape: the speakers have taken their sheet upon her stones, hung their hearts in her trees, and listen as she draws them “by the waters of babalong.” The riverbank joins intimacy to place, while the plural, transformed “babalong” makes the remembered phrase sound newly local and fluid. The scene does not explain the allusion; it lets the phrase work through its setting and rhythm.

That local setting also resonates with the book’s recurrent mingling of water, memory, and return. In a passage about a waste dump near the Serpentine in Phoenix Park, the landscape bears traces of earlier violence and a lost love letter, while the imagery turns toward reconciliation and a child’s cradle. The river phrase is not repeated there, but its association of waters with remembrance and renewed belonging finds a striking parallel in this scene.

Song and Public Performance

The phrase’s circulation belongs to a world of performed language. Hosty’s ballad is presented as a communal event: names and possible identities proliferate before the refrain gathers the crowd into a chorus. The performance breaks into the sound of crashing glass, and the song that follows recasts HCE as Humpty Dumpty, fallen beside Magazine Wall and threatened with Mountjoy Prison. In this setting, a phrase that can carry private recollection belongs equally to public song, where a story acquires force through repetition and collective voice.

Other passages widen this performance culture beyond the ballad. A long catalogue of children’s games includes “Writing a Letter to Punch,” “Postman’s Knock,” dream-telling, and the Battle of Waterloo; elsewhere, changing dances and tunes travel through Chapelldiseut, Ballybough, and Grangegorman. Such lists place song and saying among practices passed between people and generations. The expression’s reappearances belong to this same world of inherited forms, altered as they move.

Rumor, Record, and Unsettled Meaning

The book repeatedly stages the difficulty of deciding what can be known about HCE. One account describes him meeting a man with a pipe in the park, answering a question about the time, and defending himself against an accusation; other passages gather conflicting testimony, public opinion, legal language, and rumor. The expression’s recurrence participates in this unstable circulation: it is not a neutral label attached to one scene, but a phrase whose associations shift with each new telling.

The problem extends to writing itself. The text calls a proteiform graph a polyhedron of scripture, then imagines multiple personalities impressed upon a document and traits merging into a more stable somebody. It asks who wrote the thing, under what circumstances, and with what state of mind. Against that uncertainty, “by the waters of babalong” acts less like a fixed gloss than a verbal trace: recognizable enough to recur, transformed enough to keep its meanings open.