Having my way with Ulysses

The clock on the mantlepiece in the priest’s house cooed.

• Nausicaa

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.9:00 pm

Unportal my loves, let’s tell them the sin of my when.

cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo

There now. I’m very proud of you my sweets.  Please, no inner remorse of conscience. Not that again. Is it such a sin to yelp a perfect number? Sing the numbers of me, birdies, spring from my own mouth and boast the pride of my heart. Sin my foulness to God and the world and sing of nothing but me. Give my offering sweet canary birds, this ennead of night. Stand on the fourth twig of pride’s branch and let’s eat the fifth leaf. Yum Yum, tell my hour so I might open my mouth and swallow this now, the sin of when.

Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.

• The Wandering Rocks

Flatterers and slanderers are of the same school. These are the two sirens that we find in books of kinds of beasts. For it is an apparition of the sea that we call sirens. They have bodies of women and tails of fish. And claws of eagles. And sing sweet songs that make sailors sleep, and afterward they devour them. That's the flatterer. It is a fair, beautiful, elegant song that makes the people sleep. And in fair sin. We.  The two roaring worlds without and within: beingless beings.  And I.  Shatter them and myself in one blow.  Am I bitterer against others or against myself?  Me, we.  They, two women no longer young carry home from the sea a midwife’s bag with trailing navel cord containing eleven cockles.  Dilly, wants to speak French and visit the Paris I created.  Is it any good?  The shadows of my mind.  I see her mirror me.  Who do others see when they see me?  Do they see me timedulled and dusty?  Dreaming worlds words.  Dilly, lying in bed with her imitation gold bracelet seeing herself as Dan Kelly sees her.  Se el yilo she can say, nebrakada masculinum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen.  Nebrakada.  A mashup of words.  What does it mean?  Neb: because, brak: lack, braka: crashing, ne: not, rakad: shave, rak: linear, kada: when.  Da.  I see it now.  Yes.  Woo me with Stephano Dedalo, alumno optimo, palmam ferenti: words of my longing.  Father Conmee longing for the hours, murmurs vespers five hours early.   Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Portuguese, Polish, French, Croatian, Russian.  An American word.  What are you doing here?   Who has passed here before me?  You?  Are you we?  Tell me the secret of all secrets.  Amor me solo!  Your world behind the glass, and my world within the glass, and between them we swirl.  Smash your way into me, my misery.  We will be we.  Together we will drown our agenbite of inwit.  We will be the darkness shining in brightness.  We will coil our inwit in our seaweed hair and sing it to sleep.  Fair beautiful sleep.  Then we will bite!  We will chew!  We will drown it in a salt green death.  We shall be misery standing from everlasting to everlasting.

A star by night. A pillar of the cloud by day. What more’s to speak?

• Scylla and Charybdis

2:43 pm

My cousin.  I attended his funeral.  He drowned, you know.  Did you know?  His father, Nuncle Dedalus murdered him as sure as he did me.  But it wasn’t Icarus who flew too close to the sun for Nuncle D’s comfort.  No.  It was I who burned too brightly, who flew too well.  My growth revealed his decline.  My talent became his enemy.  He didn’t want a rival, plain and simple.  He drew me, hawklike man, predator.  Drew me away from the ground to the top of the Acropolis (and I am the one called lapwing!) my shell still crowning my stephanos. Jealous. He pushed me, his sister’s child, and called it an accident.  Then the artificer wept false tears.  And I thirty-two feet per second per second fell into Athena’s grace.  She enfeathered me.  Now I disguise his agenbite of inwit.  His secret.  Hold me in abomination if you will.  I’ll come to your funeral.  I went to my cousin’s grave after they fished him out, drowned man, seabedabbled.  Weltering in the whirlpools of his father’s agenbite of inwit with no help or care.  Well, I’ll take care of him now.  I’ll lead the hawk away from his grave.  I’ll lead you too.  Yes, you.  Follow my compass.  I’ll be your star by night and your pillar of cloud by day.  We shall stay low to the ground.  I have lost my faith.  Now this is how I disguise my secret.  You disapprove?  You think me too false?  Well, I’ll hide mine, what do you care how,  you hide yours any way you like.