Having my way with Ulysses

קדיש

This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory so that the son of Bloom may be glorified through it.

9:12 am

Have been looking at The Bath of the Nymph print we got from a magazine last Easter, can’t remember which one.  DDI?  I paid about $190 to frame it in oak.  Looks like Molly.  Slimmer.  Easter, now that’s a concept.  Resurrection is nothing like metempsychosis where you don’t know where your soul will end up, no.  A tree, a cat.  No.  Get resurrected and the body you died in comes back too.  And not like Lazarus either, all fucked up and reeking of grave rot.  Come out Lazarus, but woof, you stink! Go back in Lazarus.  No.  I want him back, but the way he’d be if not.  If he hadn’t.  You know.  Rudy eleven years ago today.  My boy my boy.

Some say they remember their past lives

And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquiades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

9:09 am

After thousands of years of people reincarnating, with all the coming and going and waiting in chairs and general foot traffic, heaven’s lobby had become a crumbling old ruin. Indra asked Vishvakarma, who was an archetect along the lines of Dedalus and Frank Gehry, to fix up the place a bit and so he did. It was splendid. Dripping with jewels. Gardens. Towers. There were walls that could sing and there were stairs that rotated to the past. In some rooms you could smell the light just by virtue of the placement of the windows in ratios corresponding to the sacred formula (√5+1)/2. In one room he had squared the circle and in another he had trisected an angle and doubled a cube. I don’t even have to tell you what he did with time. Anyway, it was a ton of work and when he was done he was done and wanted to leave. Get paid and leave. Problem was, Indra wanted more. Wasn’t satisfied with good enough. More building if you please and even if you don’t please. So Vishvakarma had no choice, really. He went over his head to the supreme being. Well, this god in charge, this divine fixer, told Vishvakarma not to worry, be cool, just go back and I’ll take care of everything. The next day a kid all in white with a tattoo on his forehead (what parent is going to let that happen? must have been fake) showed up and marched right up to Indra as if Indra wasn’t The Man. And this kid said look, when are you going to be done with all this construction? No other Indra before you has ever built, well paid to be built for him at any rate, anything half as big or a third as great. And Indra, amused that this kid had what appeared to be the balls of a water buffalo to talk smack to his face just like that, said what the hell do you know about other Indras? And the kid said look dude, I’ve seen it all. I was there when they built the pyramids and that was like yesterday. I’ve seen the bang at the start of the universe and the one before that too. I’ve seen all the universes and all possible moments and the containers of moments and the things those are packed into besides and each one has an Indra, so don’t give me your shit. And while the kid was talking and Indra was turning purple with rage a line of ants marched in like they owned the place, which in fact they did. The kid cracked up to see this and laughed until Indra was nearly apoplectic with fury. Finally the kid took pity and revealed his true form. He was the fixer, the man in charge of the man in charge of the man in charge fifty five times over the whole time. Indra fell all over himself apologizing and in his curiosity which he could not contain even in front of the Supreme One, he asked what was it about the ants that was so funny? And the supreme being said those ants? Every one of them are former Indras.

Ruby pride of the

Is she in love with the first fellow all the time? Molly working that one out.

9:03 am

Flipped through the book Molly wants me to return.  Ruby: the Pride of the Ring.  Illustration promising cruelty enough. The caption: “the monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath”  but Molly was disappointed.  Nothing smutty in it.  Wants me to get one by Paul de Kock next, likes his name.

Met him what?

It must have fell down.9:00 am

Molly looks at me with the same young eyes as that first night when.  She saw a word in a book, “metempsychosis” and wanted to know what it means.  I told her it was an idea from Orphism, that it is the transmigration of souls.  Schopenhauer talks about it in The World as Will and Idea  but he sees it more as a dichotomy of will which persists (male, from the father) and intellect (from the mother) which does notThe Orphic idea has more poetry to it.  The soul is eternal and desires freedom, the body is finite and holds the soul captive.  It is a contract broken by death.  Death.  But the soul ends up reimprisoned in another body and so it goes.  Nice, no?  Beautiful, yes?  Well.  Anyway, I remember Schopenhauer said something like there is a contradiction in every individual existence because all that rises is worthy of being destroyed.  She mocked me with her eyes (young, a contradiction) and her response was O, balls! Tell me in plain words.

I want to and I wouldn’t like to

Who was the text from?8:57 am

Stale incense smell in the bedroom.  Doesn’t seem to bother Molly though.  Boylan coming to work on her show, she’ll be singing something from Don Giovanni with J.C. Doyle and some other sweet old song.  Gathered up laundry to do.  Her panties.  Voglio e non vorrei  socks, garters.  Voglio is that right?  Her clothes end up all tangled up together in the bed.  Altogether smells like foul flowerwater.  Warm, mingles with the fragrance of the tea.

The simulacrum is true

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth -- it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. 8:51 am

Silly Milly gave me a genuine reproduction crown derby moustache cup for my birthday when she was five.  Four.  I gave her the real imitation aberoid necklace she broke.  Then we played pretend with the mail, me putting pieces of folded brown paper into the mailbox for her.  Look Milly, you got a bona fide letter and I’d present her with the fake, and look here’s a forgery, and see Milly a fabrication, and this one’s for you a fiction, and here’s yours an invention, and what have we here the make believe, and for you an affectation, and look here’s your pretence, and Milly somebody sent you a fraud and a mock and a pseudo and here’s a counterfeit sham and an unreal inauthentic and oh how nice this one’s the implausible and here’s a subterfuge and a phony and a simulation and the simulacral just for you my darling.  Oh she is my lookingglass from night to morning.  We laughed when she found Mr Goodwin’s mirror in his hat, that polite old perve, bowing Molly off the stage.  Look what I found!  Pert little piece she was, sex breaking out even then.

All cats are kosher

Whats pork to you means meat to me.8:45 am

Molly particular about her tea.  Scald the teapot she says so I do.  Pour in the boiling water, swirl, dump, four spoons of tea, water in, let it draw.  I do it first then make my breakfast.  Pork kidney it was today fried in butter with lots of pepper.  Cat wanted it, but give her too much meat and she won’t mouse.  Plus she’s kosher.  They never sell pork cat food for that reason, cat’s won’t eat it.  Gave her the paper to lick instead.

Backward eye

I see nothing8:42 am

Email from Milly and she sent a text to Molly.  I took her her phone just now when a text came through and there was another on the screen.  She stuck the phone under her pillow when I handed it to her, but I still saw through halfclosed eyes.