Having my way with Ulysses

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.

Weda seca whokilla farst.

 It shall be so: madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.12:48 am

Prepare the funeral pyre, he’s nearing death.  Well, not death exactly. But he is wasting invisible. It will be a small fire. Just a match. You see it? Of course you don’t.  What you do not see is a man slowly shrinking into irrelevancy.  No? Too, something? How about gradually gaining in irrelevancy. Better? Good. I don’t mean to, you know. I’m merely holding the mirror, can I help that it is pointing toward nature? But while we’re here, let us gaze and see just how lapses are condoned, and what might not have flown as an ugly duckling is now spreading swan wings and beating the air. This is how one goes from respectability to a bloody awful farce. You want to change it, do you? Then get in on the joke.

A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.

O, there be players that I have seen play -- and heard others praise, and that highly -- not to speak it profanely, that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made man, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. 2:40 pm

[Scene:  Empty theatre.  The stage manager is sitting in the house seats next to the director, who is eating seeds from a broad silver and gilt bowl.]

God:  List.  You hear that?  Must be seventy people out there.  Jesus!  Jesus Christ!  Where the hell is he?  [on the god mic] Jesus!

Jesus: [Materializes suddenly behind God, startling the director who flies up into the grid, landing on a downstage line set.] God damn it, it’s a mess out there.  Actors are showing up before their check in times, and without their sides.  We ran out of extras and I’m

God:  Can’t you just make more?

Jesus:  I’m not a miracle worker!

God:  Well, how did you do that water into wine thing?

Jesus:  Never mind that.  What’s going on in here?  Whose bright idea was it to hire a bird to be the director?

God: Oh please let’s not get into that.  The whole Arian thing and the meetings in Nicaea and Constantinople, the Nestorian business.  It’s in our contract.  We’re stuck with him, and he likes to be a dove so what can we do?  Anyway, I’m not entirely sure, but I think he’s ready to see the Bella Cohens.  Anybody promising?

Jesus:  Let’s see.  A  bunch of girls who had decent to middling parts in The Tempest, Pericles, Winter’s Tale.

God:  Too young.

Jesus:  Well, Cleopatra is out there.

God: Who?

Jesus:  Fleshpot of Egypt.  Also Cressida and Venus.

God:  Venus might work, but she’s a big star.  Can we afford her?  And is she willing to do drag?

Jesus:  Probably not.  Will do nudity though, she’s naked now.  And she’s not really a star.  She’s flaming out.  Also, we have a crowd of people out there claiming to be Shakespeare’s relations. Brothers, mother.

God:  Mother?  Mary Arden?  Can she act?  Would she be a good Bella?

[Bird droppings fall from above.]

God:  Fine, we’ll tell Mary we’re going another way.  Jesus, send in Venus.  And warn her she might want to put some clothes on, the director is in a temper.

What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.2:36 pm

A father is a necessary evil.  Listen to me, I know.  Who’s your daddy?  Do you really know?  You have a woman’s word for it.  Ok yes, she is your mother and amor matris from whichever direction you approach it may be the only true thing in life.  So why then, come on tell me, do the Roman Catholics and their spin offs base everything upon fatherhood’s rock hardness, when we are all born from the eye of the whirlpool?  Why?  Listen to me, I see you.  Straying in your thoughts.  Get back here.  Come back to my theolologicophilological (I ought to be stopped) theory. Now. Where were we. Father religion. This god is all their daddies. Yes. I’m fine. The church like the world (both micro and macro cosmos) is founded upon the void, the uncertainty of which (even the unlikelihood of which) fatherhood represents.  Or perhaps it happens the other way around.  Yes. Pay attention. The fear of daddy we feel as children while simultaneously feeling secure in his protection from danger we ascribe by apostolic succession to God the father.  Yes.  Feel it.  Furthermore, heretofore, once again, hereafter (are you condemned to do this?) old Nobodaddy will tell you himself that his role was a brief spurt of inspiration (expiration more like) and off he goes.  And agenbite of inwit?  What’s that?  Oh shake it off Nobodaddy.  Mingo minxi micxtum mingler. World without end amen. Oh I will be condemned. (Am I a father?  If I were?)  Look, this enthroned one, this everybody’s daddy, says Sabellius, was son of his own son.  The man felt himself with child foetus that was himself.  How’s that?  Come again?  One coming is sufficient;  Here.  Have an example.  An example.  Well, look at Shakespeare.  Or whatever his name was. Breathe. Breathing. Rutlandbaconsouthhamptonshakespearemarlowe wrote Hamlet.  He was not the father of his own son,  he was the father of all his race.  He was everybody’s daddy.  Am I battling against hopelessness?  Fight with me.  Our worst enemies are in our own house and family.  Stand!  Fight!  Kid, your growth is my decline.  Your youth is my envy.  Your friend is my enemy!  You brought me pain.  Her too and you ruined her body.  You divided her from me.  Get down from there!  Be careful!  You increase my cares.  I worry sick about you.  Slow down!  Look both ways!  Don’t talk to that perve with the candy.  Don’t impregnate before you can pay.  Dont do anything stupid.  Good Christ, listen to me!

Leftherhis Secondbest Leftherhis Bestabed Secabest Leftabed. Woa!

To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.2:30 pm

Ok.  I need to rewrite this thing.  I make, let’s see, yes, and income from lands, hmm.  Maybe about $450,000 a year.  Debts.  Well, what are debts?  I’ll be dead.  Come and get me.  So. 

I William Shakespeare being of sound mind.  Why do they always start this way.  If I were not of sound mind I’d be unable to write this.  Most likely.  Or I would think myself immortal so what use is a Will?  Well in the name of god amen I have to include everybody, especially her, so they tell me.  Posterity to consider.  Mustn’t seem ungenerous or mean.  Fine.  So in perfect health and memory god be praised yada yada.  I commend my soul into the hands of etcetera.  Stick my body in the ground and cover it well.  Feed me to the worms and the rats.  Eat up boys, here’s a fat one.  Get them drunk on the spirits in my belly, my spirit will be drinking in life everlasting. 

Right. 

Daughter Judith, money.  Susanna, oldest.  Property, money.  Neice Elizabeth money, not as much as Judith.  Nice amount.  Carve it up girls.  Sisters.  Toss some money at them and let them squabble over it themselves.  Divide it fairly, but take into account grudges, grievances, arguments long past, childhood woundings.  Balance that ledger ladies; nice to give them something to do.  More reasons to hate.  Give one of them my clothing.  A bit for the nephews.  Small but not too small amount of money for the poor of Stratford.  Lawyer said I should do that.  Friends now. 

Friends. 

My sword to Mr. Thomas Combe so he may have something with which to stab himself.  Hamlet Sadler, William Reynolds, William Walker, Anthony Nashe, John Nashe, John Hemings, Richard Burbage, Henry Cundell: money to buy rings. 

What’s left. 

All of my household goods to Judith.  Jewels, she can have them.  Susanna gets the property, let Judith have the jewels. 

And my wife.  She can have what she already has.  Have them insert that near the end.  Enough.  I give her no more of me.  And how do I.  Oh yes, can’t forget, I do revoke all former wills and publish this to be my last will and testament in witness whereof I have hereunto put my hand the day and year first above written by me William Shakespeare.  Good.  Centuries of people will hover over that second best bed and wonder why.  That should piss her off for all eternity.

One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What's to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure. 2:10 pm

I married a ghost.  And I died before I was born.  Liliata rutilantium.  Well, I died sixty-seven years after I was born, but what is it to you how we lived or died?  Forget me.  He did.  He left me and he gained a world of pretty theatre boys in the cast off armor of court ladies.  The world believes William made a mistake marrying me.  And got out of it as best he could and quickly too.  Stephen thinks a man of genius makes no mistakes, that his errors are volitional, to be used as portals of discovery.  Well William’s genius discovered my portal sure enough.  Made use of me.  And don’t think that because I was twenty-six and he a full eight years younger than me that I drew him in, trapped him into bed and then ruthlessly wed.  Listen to greenroom gossip if you like, but consider:  what would I want with a boy pauper for a husband?  Call me a whore before and a shrew after, what do I care, but the truth is he came after me.  The mistake was mine and he knew it.  He made it Ophelia’s mistake too.  But instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I told my family and they fixed it.  Took care of business.  Five months after our wedding I gave birth to our daughter, my sweet light-of-love.  But did he care?  No.  Gone he was to London and no agenbite of inwit to it.  And for me what was he, a ghost by his absence to haunt me.  And my status?  Not widow.  Hardly a wife.  A stationary target for his debt collectors.  As he rose I became conspicuous.  Like a bad smell in the room, worse than that stench hovering around Æ.  The smell of him!  I may not have a nose left to my face but wow!  That reek will raise the dead.  But the point odoriferous Æ makes is valid.  What use is it to pry into my husband’s life, the bastard.  Good for nothing.  Lousy father.  It was no use to me, that I can assure you, I wept alone.  Leaving us to starve on our own in Stratford.  His drinking, his debts.  Stephen owes AE almost $100, did you know that?  But did he catch AE’s hint?  Bringing up my worthless husband’s financial incontinence.  He caught it.  Then he rationalized his way out of it.  Stephen five months ago was a different set of molecules went his logic.  It wasn’t me.  It was those molecules of Stephen that borrowed the money, the Stephen now is composed of entirely new stuff and cannot be blamed for what any prior Stephen has done.  Free and clear.  No agenbite of inwit, eh Stephen?  Nice try kid.  Good use of physics.  That handy second law of thermodynamics, those molecules from five months ago will decay as plainly as did the nose on my face.  But don’t you forget that first law.  There are still constants to deal with and your memory persists.  It changes things, does a little rearranging here and there, always a bit of phenomenal fluxing within grey matter, but memory persists.  And don’t forget your form of forms.  That soul rattling around within those nice new molecules of yours persists too.  Just look at me if you need a bit of proof.  Or get a whiff of AE  if you prefer your proof to be more on the measurable side of things.  You owe what you owe.  Pay your own damn way.

Space: what you damn well have to see.

Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time And drew it out to Seven thousand years with much care & affliction And many tears & in Every year made windows into Eden. She also took an atom of space & opend its center Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. 2:06 pm

Forming.  Forming.  And I thought the afterlife was for fulfilling.  Try resurrection some time!  I died.  I came back.  Who does that?  I must be, yes, I am a God.  Yes. Yes.  Feel it.  I was the formless spiritual and now I am the Allfather, Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man.  Jesus Christ I’m a magician now, the magician of the beautiful!  Oh yes, I am back.  I was never an ordinary person.  I lived the life esoteric, and look at me now!  Get a glimpse of my elemental!  Not so blurry today.  This is the virgin birth, right here.  In this space.  At this time.  Soul reinserted into body.  I am God!

Krishna:  Stop!

Wait, what just happened.  Who are you?  Why did everything just freeze in place?  Why are you blue?

Krishna:  I have stopped time.  Listen to me, I will tell you the secret of life.

I already know the secret of life.  I am the secret of life!  Look at me.  I’m back, baby.  I’m here.  I’m in a library talking Hamlet with a kid and an old new critic.  And I am the only one here who knows the truth of the afterlife that the kid dances around.

Krishna:  Those who are without faith in my teaching cannot attain me; they endlessly return to this world shuttling from death to death.

Ah, but that’s where you are wrong blue man, I haven’t been reincarnated.  This is not your ordinary metempsychosis.  You are looking at resurrection!  This is altogether a different kettle of fish.

The Ondt:  [Clipping the end of a cigar.  Havana.  A fine Romeo y Julieta]  You smell like a kettle of fish, Æ, your Auric egg’s gone bad.

Krishna:  That rotten egg smell is your sulfuric breath, Ondt.  What are you doing here?  How did you get into this moment?  I stopped time, this is our now.  Out, Ondt!

The Ondt:  [making faces at himself in the window] Honey, this is my space.  I can crawl into your now through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood and back out through Blake’s buttocks into eternity if I like.  You hold to the now all you like, but it is the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Krishna:  Fine.  Æ, we shall proceed regardless.  You have not become deathless; you have merely become manifest without a rebirth.  You are most certainly not God or even a god.  I am God!  I am known by everyone as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face.  I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.

The Ondt: [Taking the form of the Lord of Loaves]  Got a light?  And hey, don’t burn up all that butter.

You both need to cool it.  Look, I used to think that the world’s revolutions were born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside, from the people for whom the earth is a living mother.  But I don’t think so anymore.  The world’s revolutions are born from those of us who say this verily is that.  I took my own fate by the balls.  The point is I am the point.  I have free will!  I used to think that God is a stage manager in the theatre of the eternal, but I am beyond that now.  I am God if I say I am God.  What of it?  You can be God too if you like.  And look there, you see that person breathing all over us?  That one who clicks instead of talks?  And stares and stares, eyeballs moving here and now here and then over to here.  There is God.  God is a click in the street.

The Ondt:  [Blowing smoke rings] The peatsmoke is going to his head.

Krishna: [Crossing his arms defensively.  He is caught between the devil and the ocean of Theosophy]  I know all beings who have passed, and all who live now, Æ, and all who are yet to be.  In the face of the one who can see all temporalities, how can you be so distressingly shortsighted?  How can you believe your will is free?

You guys can blow smoke up my ass all day if you like, I don’t care.  I know what I know.  Talk until you are blue in the face.  I’m making plans.

A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

And it so happened that it fell to the soul of Odysseus to choose last of all. The memory of his former sufferings had cured him of all ambition and he looked round for a long time to find the uneventful life of an ordinary man; at last he found it lying neglected by the others, and when he saw it he chose it with joy and said that had his lot fallen first he would have made the same choice.2:00 pm

Quick.  My heart quops softly and my breath, breath! the flutter of my breath is coming forth in short sighs.  Just act real.  Stay in the shadows.  Keep back from the lamp.  Pretend to be writing something.  My heart!  Be still my beating eyes!  I smell as if I’ve made a trumpet of my ass.  Stay back.  Try not to waft close.  Maybe they won’t notice.  Get my bearings.  Listen to the kid.  Listen.  Seven is dear indeed to the mystic mind.  Threw that one out for me to catch.  Ho ho!  Good.  That sounded like a real laugh.  I can make sound!  Indulge the kid; wait to speak.  Let my particles and molecules complete their formation around me.  Wait.  Oh no.  Look at me.  Look at me!  Look at my typing hands!  I don’t know how to say this but I think I’m soft.  I’m soft.  I’m out of focus.  I don’t know why.  Is there anything I can do?  I can’t adjust for this.  I need to sharpen up.  Well, I expect the world will adjust to the distortion I’ve become.  Now focus on the kid.  Hamlet.  Ok, talking Hamlet.  Lyster speaks the obvious, Hamlet unfit for the job.  Eglinton:  today’s youth not up to creating another Hamlet.  My turn.  O I have much to say!  The mysteries I can reveal.  But how, how?  Must be careful.

Whether Hamlet is Shakespeare, or James I, or Essex, or the historical Jesus or any other mortal shade softens in focus when we think of the true purpose of art, which is to reveal to us spiritual realities, formless spiritual essences which are the truth of eternal existence.  Art is art when it comes from a soul who Knows eternal wisdom, who has visited eternality and has returned filled with truth, who has eaten from ideal forms of tables, and has communed with Plato’s world of ideas.  Mortal, I mean to say, academic speculation is the pastime of schoolboys.

There, that should hold them.  Pretty good I’d say for my first appearance after reincarnating.  Plant a seed.  Now, if I could just sharpen up.

Every Friday eats a Thursday

I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias. I ate him.1:06 pm

Fed gulls today, like that time out with Milly.  Food tastes like what it eats.  Feed pigs lots of stout and they come out tasting of it.  Robinson Crusoe ate swan meat, what do swans eat?  What would I taste like?  Well, no accounting for it.  And no need to know what’s in it, just eat it.  Every morsel.   I tried to fool the gulls with the throwaway given me.  Look out below, Elijah is coming!  What goes up must come down, at 32 feet per second per second bombs away!  That’s the law.  Did he get lifted up in a tornado?  He left his clothes behind so he’ll be coming back down naked.  If I threw myself down?  Likely to swallow lots of water like Reuben J.’s son.  Elijah will be hungry after his splashdown but plenty are well prepared to feed him.  Birds wouldn’t touch the paper I threw away for them.  Not a bit of it.  They know what’s good for them.  Spread foot and mouth disease though.  Mouth and foot, foot and mouth.  Mouth south.  That’s how writers write.  The flow of language.  The stream of it.  Write it and send it into the stream of life, doomed like Hamlet’s father to walk the earth.

His blood wooed by grace of language and gesture

For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew; Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell There God is dwelling too. 12:40 pm

[Scene: A courtroom in Denmark ornately furnished and decorated with four stone effigies in frozen music, the human forms of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. Mercy has a heart carved on her sleeve, Pity a human face, Love the human form divine, and Peace is wearing a strapless black velvet Atelier Versace gown worthy of the red carpet with Neil Lane jewels and a Jaime Mascaro clutch. We approve of the two diamond clips arranged on a draped section but Peace looks like the dress of unfortunate fabric choice is wearing her, and that leg jutting out unnaturally gives the effect of one trying too hard.]

Judge Seymour Bushe: Will council for the prosecution please approach the bench.

Moses: Your Honor?

Judge Seymour Bushe:  I’ve had enough of you dropping the ball.  I must repeat, that we do not wish to hear about anything soultransfigured or soultransfiguring or any other bloody thing that might become of the soul.  Stick with the law, the lex talionis if you must, but be aware that the defense is using the law of evidence.  And he has balls of stone.  Call the damn witness and let’s get on with it.

Moses: Your honor, I believe the ball dropped five minutes ago.  I call King Hamlet of Denmark.

Demosthenes: Objection.  King Hamlet of Denmark is dead.

Moses: He is a ghost, your honor, and though he comes in a questionable shape, he has full use of his voice and it is imperative to the proof of King Claudius’ guilt that we lend a serious hearing to what he shall unfold.

Judge Seymour Bushe: Proceed.

Moses: Your Majesty, you deserve to live, deserve to live.  Please tell the court how King Claudius achieved your murder.

Demosthenes: Objection, your Honor, the question assumes facts not in evidence.

Judge Seymour Bushe:  Sustained.  Moses, you must prove King Claudius’ guilt, not assume it.

Moses:  Your Majesty, please explain to the court your experience of the night you died.

The Ghost of King Hamlet of Denmark:  List, list, O List! Murder! Murder most foul, strange and unnatural. That incestuous, that adulterate beast, with Witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts that have the power so to seduce! — won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.

Demosthenes:  Objection, your Honor.   There is no evidence before this court that the witness knew of any adultery on the part of King Claudius or the Queen during his lifetime.  As there is no evidence that the witness had no personal knowledge of what he testifies to know, I move to have his words stricken.

Judge Seymour Bushe:  Sustained.  Mr. Ghost, please keep to the facts as you experienced them.

The Ghost of King Hamlet of Denmark:  Brief let me be.  Sleeping within my orchard, my custom always of the afternoon, upon my secure hour Claudius stole with juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, and in the porches of mine ear did pour the leprous distilment.

Demosthenes:  Objection, your Honor, that’s hearsay, which I move be stricken from the record.  If the witness was asleep, he could have no personal knowledge of anything occurring in his orchard.

Moses:  Your Honor, as a ghost His Highness is in a unique position to act as witness to his own murder.  He exists in eternity now and thus partakes of all eternity.  He has access to the holy book into which all things are inscribed!  I pray thee, do not blot his words out of thy book now being written.

Demosthenes:  [after a pause, a false lull, quite ordinary really]  If I may, your Honor, it is painful for children to be orphaned of a father.  Yes, but it is a beautiful thing to be the heir of a father’s fame.  And of this pain we shall find the deity to be the cause, to whom mortal creatures must yield.  As such I move the court to dismiss the complaint in this action for the reason that the complaint fails to allege sufficient facts which, if true, establish probable cause to believe that King Claudius committed any offense alleged by the prosecution.

Judge Seymour Bushe:  [takes out his matchbook thoughtfully and lights a cigar]  As I must determine the whole aftercourse of the defendant’s life, the court will recess to consider the motion.  Good Christ who do I have to fuck to get a better gig?  I could have left this job long ago, only for . . . but no matter.  Ah well, do not worry about tomorrow, tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.