Having my way with Ulysses

The exploits of King Willow

Your temple is reared on the sands, and the first tempest will wash away its foundation.1:52 am

Auspicious King Willow would cry in his pillow
And cry in his pillow would he
He called for his love, and he called for his soul
And he called for the sands in the sea.

Oh good King Willow, don’t cry to your pillow,
Why not dream your blue dreams with me?
I’ll show you a heart, and I’ll steal you a soul,
And I’ll shape all the sand into she.

But look close King Willow, you’ve made a mess of that pillow,
And your tender Achilles is she.
Get up, grow a pair, search your soul, don’t you care?
There’s more lovers than sands in the sea.

Dreams go by contraries.

For a Spectre has no Emanation but what he imbibes from deceiving A Victim! Then he becomes her Priest & she his Tabernacle. And his Oak Grove, till the Victim rend the woven Veil. 12:50 am

Follow me. Come on, follow. Follow follow follow. You know me, yes? Remember? Almost it.  There you go, you saw me in your dream.  I held up a watermelon for you to smell.  Now follow, come away from that badger hole, nothing buried dead buried in there. Now. Is it guilt or shame today? What do you regret, action or inaction? I know that answer. They both have a face and you will see who. Look. I say, look. Lapwing you are. As am I. So a lapwing be. Let us bury your agenbite of inwit in a nice deep grave and lead each other away.  I’ll teach you. I’ll show you how my sweet buzzard scavenger darling, you’ll fly and your foes will be beneath you as they every shall be. Word without end. Listen now. Don’t be Polonius standing behind a curtain, everybody can see your feet sticking out the bottom. You do remember what happened to him, don’t you? You think that bit of rag hanging over your conscience will protect you? Don’t you know anything about hiding? Listen. You’ve done things. We all know it. We see your clay feet. Your actions we all witnessed birthed reactions and those reactions reproduced.  You bury the grandmother deeds all you like, and lead us all away. Hop hop away, little bird, follow me this way. Pay no attention to that world behind the curtain. But the things you didn’t do. Came to a whole lot of nothing, no? Well mark my words babylove, that nothing will be the something that buries you.

The sins of the past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.

The thing pleased him andt, and andt, He larved ond he larved on he merd such a nauses The Gracehoper feared he would mixplace his fauces. I forgive you, gorndt Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping, For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping. 12:39 am

Thousands. They are raindrops rolling across a window, and you can see allpast right through them. Lets get up close. Magnification of where, distortion of how, inversion of what time, and with how many fluxes in octaves between convex and concave. Polytemporality wouldn’t know anything about that, strictly speaking, from here it’s ants all the way down. I dreamed something different perhaps maybe once if rememory serves. I disguised myself and walked, a dark visaged man, trailing hair, creamfruit smell.  I was dreaming and the dream was me. Like you. But you appear to be drowning just a bit. Partially drowning, like you misplaced your what’s that? Well, that’s your opinion, I’m just saying what I see from nowhen. Men like to ondts.

Sixtyseven is a bitch.

MORERIS: The camels looked familiar? CIRCE: I will tell you. Of the men who lay hidden under her, purity means little. But it was all to their liking to appreciate the polluted. Let those who are wise remember the childlike, the kind nasty, infected, and dirty men prefer to receive, or to offer. And now they are preferring as a camel to go drink the whole at once, enjoying, excepting when the water is troubled by the trampling of their own feet. 11:38 pm

Oooh. Come here little fascinatrix. What? Don’t murmur, speak up. You’re quivering. Here, borrow my bat shawl. There now, what’s wrong? Did your mother take a strap to you at your bed post? Sweet little hussy like you, I’ll bet you loved her for doing that to you. Come in. Careful! Don’t trip now, it’s bad luck. Impolite too. There now, let’s see the secrets of your bottom drawers. Oh a little blood there.  I’ll bet you show that to all the men, show them all your worldly goods. There now wise child, I can sell you for a virgin, fresh thing like you. Never touched. I’ll start with $50; maybe $45. Oh honey, don’t be a stick in the mud. We’re all undervalued. Mustn’t have cold feet about that, no no, not the least little bit. We’ll go for quantity. Maidenhead for sale, enough for all takers. Remember be a child with them. Invite the next one who wants to slap your haunch to play a little leap frog. Here have a mango. There you go. That’s better. Let’s get some clothes on you. Turkish costume? Yes, you’ll look a dream. Your stomach looks different; I notice some change. Try not to show. Be for them a light rising and try to smell like something clean, makes more of a contrast for them, yeah? The dirty married men like that in a virgin.

Sometimes they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

September 2, 1666: And as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire.

The journal of AE, Master Mystic, 10:20 pm but time makes no difference I am God.  I can do whatever the hell I want.  I’ve translated. Basta! Enough. Besides, who ever anywhere will read these written words?

Fire will come take us on to Edenville but it’s freezing hell getting there. Oh fire will come aslowly burning, I can see it from here, slow creeping burning up oh and down too poor body. This is the eighty seventh hour and I had a sweetheart of a dream.  The faces in the dark showed me kırmızı terlik ve altın kanatand. So there it is, clear as the rain: change is in the air and fire will come.

Wander years of dreams return

Down through the generations men built the night. In the beginning it was blindness and sleep and thorns that tear the naked foot and fear of wolves. We shall never know who forged the word for the interval of shadow which divides the two twilights; we shall never know in what century it stood as a cipher for the space between the stars. Other men engendered the myth. They made it mother of the tranquil Fates who weave destiny, and sacrificed black sheep to it and the cock which presages its end. The Chaldeans gave it twelve houses; infinite worlds, the Gateway. Latin hexameters gave it form and the terror of Pascal. Luis de León saw it in the fatherland of his shuddering soul. Now we feel it to be inexhaustible like an ancient wine and no one can contemplate it without vertigo and time has charged it with eternity. And to think it would not exist but for those tenuous instruments, the eyes.8:59 pm

I am a dream and I am your dreamer and also, look close, I am a page torn from an old copybook you cannot read so leave it, leave me. Trust me I am a bread cast on the waters. What’s this in your hand? I am a stick see? Too dark. Throw me, goodbye dear, thanks. I’ll stick here. I am a stick with lines and scars and letters inked into my flesh.  Carved upon the winedark sea. Wait.  No.  That’s my kidney.  I am a kidney, burn me instead.  I am a holocaust provided by an angel in stead.  I am a recording angel.  Read me if you can see but only the bats can see in the dark. Sleep, but first bend to see my face there. I am a dark mirror breathe on me. I stir. I am a reflection, nothing grows on me. I am a reflection of you done half by design. We’ll never meet again, O sweety. I fly here. There. Here. No harm in me, I am a transparency, but you can’t see me now.  I am a dark mirror. Don’t look too close naughty Grace darling, lean back swoony lovey and sleep. That’s better. Shhh. There you go. Shhh. There you go. I am a sleep.

Slumberous but awake

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.

That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably.

Finally, the curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naïvely, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it -- the present, that is to say, must have become the past -- before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. 2:57 pm

Afterwit.  I remember my dream.  I dreamed somebody dreaming me and in that dream I flew.  It was a wonder.  I was a wonder.  I flew through the augur’s templum passing from behind and curved to the right.  An evil sign for business warned Michael Scotus, but for the bird?  What of his business?  I was an augur once.  I looked to the temple of air and saw past the image of my mother’s face to read the inhuman clamour of the birds.  Thirteen swallows.  If Judus go forth tonight, he will find reason to betray.  He will go forth and meet himself.  Why?  I looked for reason to leave and found symbols both of departure and of loneliness.  It was both.  Nother dying come home Father.   Now what? No birds.  I was the bird.  Bearing the name of a hawklike man I flew through space to come to time.  Remember.  I am almosting it.  A man, an offer of melon, a creamfruit smell, and a future.  Who?  You will see who.  The present must become the past so we may see the future.

You will see who

Thereupon the eagle changed into a piebald wolf and these two battled in the palace for a long time, when the cat, seeing himself overcome, changed into a worm and crept into a huge red pomegranate which lay beside the jetting fountain in the midst of the palace hall. Whereupon the pomegranate swelled to the size of a watermelon in air and, falling upon the marble pavement of the palace, broke to pieces, and all the grains fell out and were scattered about till they covered the whole floor. 11:36 am

My dream of the night before puzzles me.  Remember.  I am almosting it.  I was walking amongst my subjects in the street of harlots, disguised as a carpet merchant.  I found there amongst the tanyard smells a young man, quite lost, dressed in rancid rags illdyed black.  He looked near starvation so I offered him a melon, but he would not eat.  Instead, he delighted in its smell.  I led him to an open hallway and showed him the greatest treasure amongst my wares, a piece of tapestry that transports any who sit upon it in an instant to any person imaginable, without being stopped by any obstacle.  He asked who?  And I said you shall see.  But when we sat together on the red carpet it was as if in that instant of transformation I became not the dreamer but the dreamed.  I felt not myself.  I was not myself.  I had become my dark companion and what was left of me existed only as the name Haroun al Raschid within the memory of his dream, now my dream.  I sat on a beach watching an inrushing tide.  There were other people, but I could see only dimly, an Egyptian man and woman with hennaed faces, the woman’s hair trailing. There was a dog, dead with a creamfruit smell, and a live one too, lightly kicked by the Egyptian for a transgression I didn’t see.  I watched as well as I could, the dog sniffing a rock, then lifting a hind leg and pissing against it.  Then the dog repeated himself against an unsmelt rock.  I cannot be sure as something was terribly wrong with my vision, but I believe I saw the unhappy beast collapse into painful yelping and as his hind paws scattered the sand his forepaws stretched, altering itself into the paw of a leopard.  With a shake, screaming, the entire leopard sprung forth from the sand.  It was the offspring of a lion and a panther within whose womb, impatient with the delays of time, he had felt burdened by gestation.  He had torn and ripped until he was discharged forth into the world, his birth damaged and scarred his mother’s womb forevermore.  Horrible now, upon this beach, he roots and scrapes.  Scratching.  Stopping to listen.  Scratching.  His merciless bright eyes hungry, scraping the earth.  Salivating now, listening.  Scratching, then triumphant as a carrion vulture, revealing the carcass of his dead mother.

Listen to that warm running sunlight

8:42 am

Haines apologized for screaming in his sleep again.  Buck told him what I said about web fiction which earned the distinction “clever” then suggested I ask Haines for money.  Twice a month Buck has plans for my paycheck; wants to drink it later.  Thinks it will be $700.  He sang this all morning:

 

 

I brought his shaving bowl in from the balcony.  This is the song my mind sang all morning, pushed around a bit by Buck’s bellowing: