Having my way with Ulysses

Glorious Pious and Immortal Memory

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. 10:36 am

Look.  I’m not going to bullshit around.  Everything depends on our understanding of Time.  That’s the bottom line.  Deasy’s memory of history is not my memory of history, and it is not yours either.  Deasy exists in a world of final causation.  He divides past present and future with mirrored boundaries all reflecting one great goal.  An example.  You want an example?  Here’s an example.  Today in his idolatry of Ronald Reagan he remembered the glory of a miraculous and masterfully designed arms reduction accord with the Soviet Union.  But under Reagan’s presidency the cold war’s arms race escalated to extremes and the reduction made only a small dent in the pile of history destroying weaponry.  History destroying.  If only we could.  How do we destroy the nonexistent?  Deasy remembers a great immortal statesman.  His version of temporality cannot remember the Alzheimers, the shaking, the fumbling of words, the confusion, the memory gaps, the days filled with photo-ops starting at noon and ending at five, the disappearances to his rooms, the handlers, minders, babysitters, doctors, the wife feeding him his lines.  There are people who hold this history.  Who?  Whose memory is this?  Whose history?  Is it created through symbolic causation?  Deterministic causation?  Probabilistic causation?  Does it matter?  It does.  I know it does.  Look.  If you divide past present and future and picture it on a line with the past receding back there somewhere and the future in front of us, then history moves away from relevancy.  That’s one way to understand time.  But is time a line?  Oh our memory returns things to us we thought had long drifted away.  Nothing drifts anywhere.  Think of a memory now.  Go ahead, root around in there and find a big one.  See that scar over there?  That one with the nasty scab?  Ew that looks bad.  Pus.  Infection, it has spread into memories around it.  What was that horrible thing that happened to you?  Jeez.  Ok, pick the scab.  Go ahead, you can do it.  I’m right here.  It’s ok.  Pick it right off and let it bleed a little.  That’s it.  There you go.  That memory sure feels like it is happening again now, doesn’t it?  Still hurts.  Or rather, it hurts again.  It’s not back; it’s always been there.  It’s real.  Is time a line?  You tell me.

Phantasmal mirth: her secrets.

Not could. Will. I want to. So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won't know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. Yes he thought between grief and nothing I will take grief. 8:36 am

Memory is more than ideas and sensations.  Yes, Buck is right.  Ok.  I give him that.  But it is also an experience, my experience and my memory of it is a feature of me with a logic internal only to me.  What am I but memory?  That’s it.  Memory of the past that was and the past that never was (but might have been was).   A growing, solid, massive, increasing expanding thing, and just over there, look there, the paltry and shapeless future.  Small.  I hope (not much) I fear (too much).  I had hoped more but that is part of the past now too, lurching away.  I remember my mother and here she is now, enormous.  She fills my now.  She’s right here, do you feel her filling the room?  Of course you don’t.  I do.  Her things, her smells, her tap water before mass, her baked apple filled with brown sugar.  You can’t smell it but I can.