Having my way with Ulysses

Thou, abortion, thou.

Shee therefore is not to bee accounted impious or hereticall as if shee acted contrary to Nature, but it is to be imputed to her imagination. For her imagination is alwaies the cause of it. And the imagination of a breeding woman is so powerful, that in conceiving the seed into her body, shee may change her infant divers wayes: because her inward starres are so strongly bent upon the infant that they beget an impression and influence upon it. Wherefore the infant in the Mothers wombe in its forming is put into the hand and will of its Mother.10:12 pm

If you do indeed find yourself put in a pod, and wish to remove the djinn from the bottle, focus your spagyric efforts within the first three months, keeping your work to the proper day of the week and planetary hour.  Solve et coagula, for a successful outcome so to speak. that is to say one must dissolve the fix and fix the volatile.  Begin with enough marjoram, gathered when just coming into flower.  Only 2% of the plant is volatile oil, so gather as much of it as you are able, in your condition.  Grind it up as finely as you can and steep it in warm brandy for two weeks, to bring out the essential oils.  Filter it. Keep the brandy and the macerated marjoram. Next, separate the essential and the subtle from the inessential and the gross.  Dry the remaining plant matter and burn it to ashes.  Mix the ashes in a pot with 20 times their volume of rain water.  Boil for 20 minutes then filter it.  Evaporate the remaining liquid until it calcinates in the pan.  Keep it in your pan at 500 degrees for several hours.  Cool it and dissolve it in filtered rainwater.  Repeat the calcination at least twice more until you are left with a chalky white substance in crystalline form, the Marjoram’s volatile salt.  You have now in your possession the bridge between plant and mineral, the essential component of your upcoming purge.  Wait for the waxing moon and spread it on plates.  leave the plates outside overnight, raised off the ground.  Go to bed and allow in your house rest to reign, as the time’s occasion is most sacred and most worthy to be most sacred.   At sunrise collect the liquid and whatever has not yet dissolved, avoiding contact of it with skin or metal.  This is the marjoram’s angel water.  Distill it until the salts are dry, and save in a dark glass jar.  Now you are ready to separate the false from the true.  Gather your angel water, the salts of marjoram, fresh marjoram, and the brandy infused with marjoram’s essential oils (good God you didn’t throw that away!).  Boil water and make an infusion with the fresh marjoram, allowing it to steep for at least 10 minutes.  While waiting, pour the brandy into a glass and mix into it the salts of marjoram.  Pour the angel water into a third glass.  Now in silence, hist! All three cups you must straightways now attack.  Staboo.  Stabella.  Feel her approach.  Lilith, those broad wings.  Listen, she is all eyes.  Swallow.  Drink.  Focus all your soul, every pit of every little apart of your self that ever wanted anything before wants now to want.  Your truth centers both your speech and your belief.  You are a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.  Come on baby girl, chug a lug.  There you go.  Take a breath.  That which never dies and that which dies are only the reflected light of that idea which love with love begets.  Keep sipping now.  Just nice sips.  And put all your everything you’ve got into your womb.  There now Staboo, Stabella’s here.  The closer of openings, yes, she makes possible the best of all possibilities.  Hello Lilith.  You feel it go now and look. Look under her feathers, see that? Right there. That. See it? The living light that pours out so from its bright source.  Notice that it does not dis-one itself from love or from the love that enthreed itself with them.  Ok baby, you ok?  Go clean up now, there you go.

His nostrils arched themselves for prey

Sulfur is mature quicksilver, and quicksilver is immature sulfur; and on account of this affinity they unite like male and female, and they act on each other, and through that action they are mutually transmuted into each other and procreate a more noble offspring to accomplish the miracles of this one thing. Frillies for Raoul.  Raoul!  Raoul’s hands feeling the opulent curves inside her deshabille.  Yes.  Feeling her fishgluey slime, the phlegm wherein our sulphur is decocted, turned to gold.  The sulphur of the living male soul, yes, uniting body and spirit.  This is a good one.  Fire and air burning in the sweets of sin.  Yes, end.  Hot, dry, active, king red lion, crowned burning consuming corrupting the heaving what? embonpoint, the fishgluey green queenly lioness matter uniting, mingling, heaving with leonine sulphuric form.  Young, living prima materia.  No longer young, an elderly woman alive and joyful rushed from courtroom W-331 where the honorable and sober Judge Schapira had just called recess in the case of Deluna vs. Dickhoff et al, 10-2-14157-0SEA and hurried smiling toward courtroom E-713 where she may witness the equally honorable and even more sober Judge Lum express detached irritation caused by an inner yet unpressing need to defecate in the case of Oberg vs Knight 10-2-31223-4SEA.  Burning in dung the prima materia, sulphur fixing and coagulating, volatile spirit, mercury, dissolving his fixed matter.  The cheery matter of Denis J. Maginni, dancing instructor etc. mingled incongruously with his dour spirit.  Tumescence, detumescence.  Then birth, a child born every minute somewhere.  Enough.  End. The sweets of sin, for Raoul!  Yes.

The tangle of wined breaths

Ah, he's very thoughtful and sympatrico that way is Brother Intelligentius, when he's not absintheminded, with his Paris addresse! He is, really.11:13 am

Pimander is coming and how sweetly delicious he will be.  I see you, you man shepherd, I have my eye on you.  We will be yokefellows in arms.  We shall go to Paris and from the bed of your lover’s wife we will make a meal of it, our mouths yellowed with the pus and the taste of acetic acid so sweet and I shall thrust my fang between your lips.  Oh Pimander, I see a Vision limitless, all things turned into Light, sweet, joyous Light.  Transport me, appear in visions with me, I see you.  And you will show me the darkness coiling in my sinuous folds and the darkness will change into moist nature ineffable.  Drink and belch smoke and wail with the voice of fire.  Hang with me in the air, rise up and hang on the fire and mingle together.  Drink me.  I will wash you lacivious Pimander and bathe you in my most private green liquids.  I will rub your malefemale nakedness in the bath and like horseleeches oh to suck to suck the very blood to suck.

How goes the time?

penteplenty of pity with lubilashings of lust for Olona Lena Magdalena 10:16 am

Quarter after.  What is quarter of?  I’ve never understood that one.  Quarter of, is it before or after?  Whatever.  Why quibble over a preposition, there is no before or after.  Time enough yet.  Always time.  Where is this?  Ah yes, the last time.  That’s where.  Wait.  Have to go for Molly’s lotion.  When did I get it last?  No prescription.  Alchemist can look it up.

[The shop door rings as Bloom enters.  A toothache he had been experiencing is suddenly cured]

Mary Magdalene: Can I help you?

Bloom:  Yes, a shrunken skull, the philosopher’s stone, a lemony soap, and a refill of a prescription lotion for Molly Bloom.

Mary Magdalene:  Is she in our system?

Bloom:  [with a drugged mental excitement] Yes.

Mary Magdalene:  And you could use a cure for that dandruff.

Bloom:  Not for me.  Do you mean me?

Mary Magdalene: [Mixing ingredients in an alabaster jar]  No of course not.  Let’s see, need to rinse scalp with a little laurel and green tea steeped in distilled water.  Any allergies?

Bloom: Bee stings, so please not an electuary.  Can’t be too careful.

[Mary Magdalene hands Bloom the jar then whacks him across the face]

Bloom:  [With obvious pleasure] Why?

Mary Magdalene:  In case of reaction.  Want to be careful.  Anything else?  Having trouble sleeping?  Maybe some chloroform?  Laudanum?  How about a nice love philtre?

Bloom:  Does it constipate?

Mary Magdalene:  Clogs the pores.  Or the phlegm rather.

Bloom:  Can you mix it into Molly’s lotion?

Mary Magdalene:  Ah yes.  A remedy where you least expect it.  That’s the acid test.

Bloom: [Coyly] I’ll come for it later.  You know, you ought to physic yourself a bit.

Mary Magdalene: [flirtatiously]  And gradually change my character?  You have a bit of pluck!  Now as for Molly’s lotion, tell her she wants to be careful.  Too much and she will experience a lifetime in a night.

Bloom: [Exiting, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs]  Yes.  I said yes.  I will.  Yes.

Thus Spake Zaraϑuštra

Also Spuke Zerothruster.9:39 am

Who am I?  So many have told of me and have spoken with my mouth.  They say I invented magic and then poof! I made astrology appear.  With that I gained the foreknowledge of truth that diligent stargazing affords the patient.  But those who lived my life didn’t stop there, oh no, not when it was relentlessly clear that I had invented truth itself.  Believe me.  That’s when my magic, they tell me, turned to the black variety and I became fearsome.  Those closest loved me, especially for the words they said with my voice.  He that stealeth from the poor lendeth to the lord.  I became for some a prophet of God!  Imagine that.  Nietzsche even said that the priests, those poets of the Veda, were unfit to unfasten my sandals.  Of course I too was a Vedic Priest.  As I understand, in that capacity I wrote millions and millions of lines of verse.  To give myself enough time for such a task, I invented the week.  You’re welcome.  And born from necessity, I invented hieroglyphics; I used them to hide my invention of Alchemy.  Well to speak the truth that element of my curriculum vitae never quite stuck; Those who move Hermes Trismegistus’ mouth had that particular market cornered.  Better PR.  In my later career I denied to oblivion many deities so I could invent a singular monotheistic morality.  Then Nietzsche used my voice to deny morality in favor of truth, my prior invention.  Ay me.  Well, what could I do?  My life is an accomplishment of others.  Rather grand and famous others too, I might add.  I was the teacher of Pythagoras, they say.  Plato liked the words in my mouth so much that he passed them off as his own.  Excuse me, Socrates’ own.  I was even Yeats’ pen pal!  There’s a laugh to rival the one I had on the day I was born.  My head came out pulsating and there I was, infant tiny thing giggling away.  To my mother’s horror my head could repel the touch of a hand.  You can’t touch this.  Oh a unique birth to be sure.  And rather an unnatural death as well.  I’m rather proud of this one.  By the time of my doom people were calling me a living star.  Can you imagine?  Me, a star!  So how does a star die?  I was murdered by another star.  Was it really a meteor?  Maybe lightning?  You’re asking me?  You show me what’s real.  I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there.

A Chemistry of Stars

The perfect square lacks corners.

9:27 am

There are fifty-five stars contained herein. There are other fifty-fives too, signposts to here or there.  And yes, there is yes, fifty-five times.  You’ll see.  We won’t get there until next winter, but what is time for us really?  It is winter now, it will be winter then.  But to focus.  Star one: alchemy.  Not the transmutation of lead into gold, no.  That’s a red herring.  We are talking about transcendence, not transmutation.  And not the achievement of endless duration, life extending for years and years.  No, another red herring.  What we want is the movement from linear experience, one word in front of another,  to eternality, the great all-at-onceness of it all.  It is a secret but the word is out.  And we won’t get there through rationality, no no.  Throw that out the window right now.  A circle is a circle because it is not a square and a square is a square because it is not a circle, yes this is so.  Nice and rational.  But square that circle and we have something else altogether.  There is this and there is that, and then there is the third thing that they combine to make, two things contrarily defined coexisting as aspects of the same reality.  I get ahead of myself.  Star one.  Alchemy: the catalyst for finding the eternal within the sequential.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It devours itself and spits itself out, kills itself and generates itself again.9:00 am

Buck likes to dress in front of a poster of Oscar Wilde like it is a mirror.  Today he told off everything he put on for being stiff, rebellious, etc.  Wants puce gloves and green boots.  Not quite over Wilde and paradoxes no matter what he says.  And he thinks my hat is artsy.  Called himself Mercurial Malachi, that Mercurius that is made up of all conceivable opposites, a contradiction and I suppose it is one but not how he sees it.  He is vulgar mercury, hardly the anima mundi.  He is both creative and destructive, though, I give him that.  And he is solvent, despite what he pretends.