Having my way with Ulysses

Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress.

• Circe

It seems that you can see, if I hear rightly, beforehand that which time brings with it, but in the present you have another view. "We see, like those who have bad vision, those things," he said, "which are far remote; the Highest Lord shines on us just so much. When they draw near, or are, all our intellect is in vain; if no one brings it to us, we would know nothing of your human state."12:46 am

Let me see your hand. Come on then, hand it over. You worried I’ll see something you don’t want me to know? Oh sweetheart, we all wear our interiors on our surfaces. Honey it’s the same damn thing. Just look at what you show with your eyes.  I see your fate there. You’ll meet with a, well, I’d better not say.  Would do more harm than good perhaps.  But I see it in your eye; I see it in the corner of your eye.  Go look in the mirror honey, you’ll see it too. Don’t you want to? Go look.  Look at your eyes like you are seeing somebody else.  Stare hard.  Look until all you see is eyes and the rest slips away. You’ll see what you are.  You’ll see what I see, baby, you worried? You should be. Now go.

We are observed.

• Circe

The face was like the face of a just man, so benign was the appearance of the skin; and all the trunk was the body of a serpent; it had two paws hairy up to the armpits; the back and the breasts and both sides had been painted with knots and wheels. 12:37 am

Do you feel my basilisk stare? I’ve been trying to have a sniff for a while, so off with your shoe why not indulge just a little. Go on. How about just your heal, let it dangle on you row a little. Gimme something. Just a little bit of a real sweat smell. Good god I can’t decide if I want to dominate you or be dominated by you. What do you think? On which side do you tie your knot? Like I’m expecting an asnswer. I can’t cipher you. So many and so many and so many much and so silent. Jesus Christ say something, could you? You’re willing, you want me to force you?

Though they stink yet they sting.

• Circe

Look and see if anything is as great as this.12:34 am

Everything’s a temporary dream. Look at the great pyramid, my creation of longest duration.  A fat triangle in the desert, eh? You think they call me thrice great for nothing? I’m still dripping with the music of mathematics from since I played at dividing flowers and sweeties. I mean listen to it and work it out like a good young idiot. You people couldn’t do the half. Are you divided from your own organs? Listen to the harmonies of proportion and ratio; what composer tell me ever moved number so well. All is lost. You think I left it looking like that fat heap it is now, squat and spreading. But do you do anything about it, no. Nothing. Renovate it. Go ahead, it needs it. You have my permission, if not my help. Put some people on the job. Choose your most, your beautiful, your delicious, and your delightfuls, force them to say coactus volui and give them my pyramid so it might sing again. Paint upon it a diabolic rictus of black luminosity. Give it phosphorescent scorpion tongues. Paint its shafts like coal black throats and shine lights through them so out of itself it would make itself a lamp. Let the shafts open their windpipes to the outside all bloodred and sing. Add a few octaves. Here and or there. I’d hum along to that. Cover it. Take the original and jazz it up. What did I do when it was mine? I divided myself with the potentiality of it. Then I made a choice and left the rest unchosen. I covered it with white limestone and polished it to a mirror. And the sides: they were two in one and one in two. You think you see a triangle there? Look again. There are eight sides and though they sink yet they sing when the sun hits dead on. On the solstice the mirrors’ split face would absorb refract no reflect a divided sun like what do you call it gossamer. Is it a dream to think there’s nothing new under the sun?

He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath.

• Circe

Married! And you a professed anarchist, too! What is this confounded nonsense? But I suppose it’s merely a manner of speaking. Anarchists don’t marry. It’s well known. They can’t. It would be apostasy.11:55 pm

Ooh. Pardon. That buttermilk didn’t agree with me. Bad idea anyway. I traveled all the way from Exile, you know the place? City called We Put God There. Anyway, came pretty far to help out here as I see Bloom’s traveling south at about thirty two feet per second per second. So listen. Listen. Oh come on now, listen up. How’s my wife? Keep her off the booze, could you? And yeah don’t mind Bloom, he’s with me. Or was with me; he was at my funeral. He’s not some unibomber type, he’s all right. You know why? I could give you eighteen thousand reasons why. He’s married, for a start. But look it, I have to keep moving or the rats, you understand. Missing a few features of my face already. Just, you know, pray for my soul or whatever if you’re into that. You can do it with more or less care than is good. Anyway, I’ll see you, an soon from what I hear. When you get to We Put God There look me up.  I’m in field 14 + 24, row 101.

Thou, abortion, thou.

• Oxen of the Sun

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.

Slumberous but awake

• Nausicaa

Father, it would be far less painful for us if you ate of us; for you clothed us in this sad flesh -- it is for you to strip it off. 8:58 pm

Memory.  Remember.  I am almosting it.  I dreamed I was wearing red slippers and scarlet pajamas slashed with gold.  I remember rising from a red carpet and walking amongst my sisters in the street of harlots.  I remember the sea wind, and sickness around me but I was not afraid of death, only of becoming lost.  In my dream, i remember now, my menarche shocking my mother into her old age.  She sees me with pity and jealousy.  I am what she was, another herself.  She’ll murder me, the fear of God in her face.  Laughing, she will, she’ll gobble all her family.  I remember.  I was.  I gave a melon to a king disguised as a carpet merchant.  And then a shift.  It was as if in that instant, that moment when melon became gift or closer in, the moment when melon was simultaneously mine to give and his received, both and.  That moment something confused.  That instant of transformation I became not the dreamer but the dreamed.  I saw myself stuck to a rock on a beach like a diseased mussel.  Dull, waking from sleep, but waking to a different place and in that different place I remembered my life.  I was almosting it.  I felt myself in a bath languid, and I spoke to a woman and I stood by a grave.  I saw keys, crossed and held up my fingers, two keys crossed.  And then and then goddesses, three moving slightly, breathing.  Do they have?  And I heard music, a song.   I listened so beautiful see me.  You see me.  And and and and what and what I spoke against God and flew.  I flew.  I could feel myself flying, a bird flying with three fangs in my mouth and I understand them.  Forgive them.  Yes.  Fate that is and I fell.  I fell.  In a house of death I died and I don’t know what else.  Because you don’t know.  You never can know.

Who am I and what is this and when?

• And Who?

Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.14:14 pm

Nostra. Our. We. I think about that word sometimes.  Dante doing Borges and I.  Borges doing Dante and I.  Joyce does Shem the Penman and I in Finnegans Wake (but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white) and whatever other colors you got.  Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes. Changed it to Veronica Tonkin.  Most people call me Vern.  But Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes was what it was until we moved to the States and people don’t have so many names here.  I didn’t have this name at the start, understand, they didn’t have my name picked out right away.  And as an aside which might be somehow related to the acquisition of my name, my parents referred to the day I was born as the night my dad killed the general.  I’ve asked.  More than once.  I got side stories and whatever else  I could get when they’d switch over to Castellano.  With a little symmetry under the cemetery wall I was born at 14:14 pm, so whatever else went down happened later that night.  There was some catastrophe going on in that I was supposed to be a boy so they never imagined a girl name.  Didn’t think one up.  But worse than having no name, they had no earrings.  There I am a girl and no earrings.  So you can imagine.  It must have been chaos.  There was never any doubt they were getting a boy; the opposite possibility never crossed their minds.  This was before finding out early, you understand.  I was supposed to be a boy because that is how it was supposed to be.  But, besides the complication of no penis so no earrings and no name.  There was, remember, the matter of the possible slaying of some sort of general at the hands of my father.  My uncle was a general.  But he survived my birth.  And I don’t know if he was a general yet.  He commanded the Peruvian army at some point.  War with Ecuador.  Cars with armed escorts.  This was all long before he went to America with his cancer dying in what was that hospital?  East coast somewhere.  My mother didn’t go.  But the night after the afternoon on the day I was born, my father killed the general.  And I didn’t have a name. I don’t know for how long, it was a blank period.  Not a lot of time passed, I’m guessing, but try telling that to a newborn.  Even two hours is everything.  All there is and was and has been and none of those things matter.  What is there of time at the start?  At that moment of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, what is it like?  I forget.  So I didn’t have a name for I’m now guessing a long time.  They wanted names that were spelled the same in Castellano and in English.  My sister already had one. Virginia Maria. Virgin Mary if you really want to translate; try living up to that one, girls.  She did what she could.  Me?  Why Veronica?  My uncle the general who survived the day of my birth had a thing for Veronica Lake.  You know the one, silver screen blonde hair covering one eye.  Sexy.  Ended up an alcoholic prostitute, and lost it a bit upstairs toward the end.  Imagine a spectrum starting with the Virgin Mary to no end point.  I did what we could.  Me.  Vern and I.  That’s me in the picture writing us.

The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps.

• Cyclops

His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard; his belly bulges, and his hands are claws; his talons tear and flay and rend the shades.5:06 pm

Arrgh I saw it all and played my part in it too. I’ll tell you but you won’t look my way except to complain about my noises and let’s look at the truth now, my smell. But I’ll tell it anyway just so I have my say. I was lying on the floor next to my person as always, passing the time with him and waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of food. Well in walked a couple of em both I’d like to take a good bite of but I waited for the signal you understand. One of them came out with money for beer talking about he got it on a tip from some prudent member I heard him say. Give me a minute. Scratch. Aye. Damn I could sleep. What do you want? You don’t smell like you have much on you. Where was I? One of them saw the guy in the market looking at the fish. And believe me, I smelled him coming a mile away. Look I’ll say more but you’re not listening to me, I smell you. I smell biscuits too. They yours? You don’t care. All eyes on the citizen. Well, I’d keep an eye on me if I were you; I’m getting hungry.

A liquid womb of woman eyeball.

• Sirens

The world, when still in peril, thought that, wheeling, in the third epicycle, Cyprian the fair sent down her rays of frenzied love, so that, in ancient error, ancient peoples not only honored her with sacrifices and votive cries, but honored, too, Dione and Cupid, one as mother, one as son of Cyprian, and told how Cupid sat in Dido's lap; and gave the name of her with whom I have begun this canto, to the planet that is courted by the sun, at times behind her and at times in front. 4:47 pm

Accarezzévole

Well I can’t leave now, look at her.  Her eyes, my eyes.  She sees I’ve been watching, it’s in that blank face.  Must be a virgin.  Or fingered only.  She sees me, her hand, look, moving on the beer pull.  Thumb, index and midfinger softly feeling its shape.  Practiced unconscious, expert.  For me.  Me.  No wait.  Lidwell there, not for me.  Yet she knows, my eyes, her eyes.  His eyes.  Liquid eyeball, can see her beauty in her eye when no words.  Her hand moving her fingers making a hole.  Your hand was thin.  Your hand was stiff.  Three holes, women.  Those goddesses three.  Holes?  Didn’t see.  Interrup.  Young goddess.  Milly too, with a young student.  Like him, probably.

 

Women like money and rough treatment.  That’s why.  That must be why.  Take them into the bushes and there lay until the morning.  My dreams were white but life is so dark.