Having my way with Ulysses

For the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.

These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope, they do not point on me. 2:07 am

Now, the best answer to any problem, not to be too woo woo about it, is to let the universe decide, or rather, leave it up to the universe to tell you the best path.  The choice is yours, you have free will as far as I can see. You do. You have lots of it. But it can help, or at least it can’t possible hurt to gain a little advice from a power greater than ourselves.  So come on, do you have cold feet about the cosmos or are you with me?  Now. Hold the hand mirror in the proper position and imagine any problem you might be having.  A matter of the heart maybe, or a financial problem.  Perhaps another person is sleeping with your beloved. Or maybe you can’t decide how much cream to put into your cocoa.  It can be anything, just hold your question in your mind with clear intent and allow me to practice sortes Shakespearianae on your behalf.  I am using a leatherbound Shakespeare complete, 1926, kept carefully upright and once owned by Guare Swofr Jr. from what I can make out of his or her appallingly illegible signature.  Ready? We ask the blessed universal oneness to grant us clarity and insight and guide our hand to the correct place for enlightenment. The answer to your problem is:

Shame and confusion! all is on the rout; Fear frames disorder, and disorder wounds where it should guard.

That’s from the second part of King Henry VI, act 5, scene 2, spoken by Young Clifford.  Tell you anything?  Tells me you should maybe avoid the cocoa and stick with water.  And somebody is definitely sleeping with your beloved. Oh dear. You look terrible.  Do over! Let’s do it again.  This time we’ll try sortes Biblicae. I have a nicely dogeared copy of the bible inscribed To Mike. From: Robbie Nelson.  The copyright page has been torn out. Ready? We ask the universe with full hearts and clear heads for the answer to our questions and your solution is:

Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits.

Pretty! Book of Daniel 3:1, so I’d say pour the cream! Not sure what this says about your other problems though.  Perhaps you should find a nice golden idol to worship?  Or craft one of your own?  Maybe we should try again. The universe is never wrong, you understand, it does sometimes want clarification. How about sortes Cortazarae? In times of confusion I often turn to, yes, where is it now? Where? Green book, paperback, yellow piece of paper with chapter numbers and checkmarks marking chapter 110. Here! Ready? Now, we ask the universe and so on and so forth:

137
MORELLIANA
If the volume or the tone of the work can lead one to believe that the author is attempting a sum, hasten to point out to him that he is face to face with the opposite attempt, that of an implacable subtraction.

So you see! So use mathematics and start subtracting: lay off cocoa and dump your lover. Can’t get a clearer answer than that.

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.

The voice of Esau.

At that very instant: Oh, what I would not give for the joy of being at your side in Iceland inside the great unmoving daytime and of sharing this now the way one shares music or the taste of fruit. At that very instant the man was at her side in Iceland.2:46 pm

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella, and in my case the reality of my existence has become reason for footnotes here or there.  And that’s it. A theory published in a lesser journal then even more delicious, a theory refuted in a much more promising journal.  Where am I going with this?  I forget.  Oh, I hate it when.  Completely gone from my head.  Wait.  Let me walk back to where I was when.  Positional memory, you understand, it will come back.  Can’t walk away though, busy borrowing a pair of typing hands.  I’ll wander with my mind.  Are those your shoes?  You walk around in those things?  Deplorable.  At least clean them up or something.  Rub the dirt off.  Here give them to me.  I’m a shoemaker;  I’ll fix them up for you.  Oh I forgot.  I’m here, you’re there.  Well, do it yourself then.  Oh yes!  That’s right.  I existed.  I exist.  I’ll keep existing if you’ll invoke me, but unfortunately I was the first of five surviving brothers and stories work so much better with three, so a couple of us had to go.  Banishment from heart and home.  And memory.  Most people even deny I was a relative!  As if there could just happen to be two unrelated John Shakespeares in Stratford.  So, exiled I went to the land of lost umbrellas.  People prefer to think of brothers in threes, you see that don’t you.  We crave things in threes.  Three is the magic number, yes it is, it’s the magic number.  No more, no less.  In comedy, three beats to a laugh.  In fairy tales, two bad examples then one good.  One two three, two two three, three two three five.  I was the first of five brothers, named for our father.  Then, forgetting our sisters if you’ll allow it, came my famous brother you know the one.  The others, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, were a haberdasher, a dimwit, and an actor, respectively.  Edmund, following Will’s footsteps, treaded the boards in my shoes.  But it was Will’s boots that changed the shape of Edmund’s feet.  Until he died too early, that is, carried out of the theatre feet first and put into the ground with a forenoon knell of the great bell.  We all felt the loss, though Will paid the bill.  Maybe he felt that inner gnawing bite of conscience.  William, the false, usurping, adulterous brother.  I was the eldest.  And I sold my birthright for so little.  But I did have what I had.  And I still have, thanks to eternity.  Whatever anywhere wherever was, is and is and is three and five times over and then some.  What else is there to want?  We all want what we already have.

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.

No later undoing will undo the first undoing.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be the master -- that's all." 2:23 pm

I returned to Stratford.  Yes, done.  I had written speeches backwards turning (did I write them?) and filled them with wisdom, with laws revealed, and I spoke at length of the word known to all men.  All but me.  I returned weary, untaught by my own (was it mine?) wisdom.  List.  In the porches of your ears I’ll pour.  Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in the middle of the path of life.  I wished for a tumble in a cornfield, excuse me, ryefield (they are both correct) with a shrew armed to the teeth with women’s weapons.  And her boar tusk wounded me where love lies ableeding.  I gained her but she took me.  My belief in myself was untimely killed.  I loved, but never without a wounding.  Goaded by the dark shadow of my youthful passion I sent my love in my place to woo a dark lady, he could play more victoriously the game of laugh and lie down, but that attempted dongiovannism by proxy did not save me.  She disguised herself as a man to escape her mistress the queen and undid us all.  She was ruined and exiled.  He was ruined and exiled.  I returned to Stratford a shadow.  A ghost.  My soul had been stricken mortally once before, here again poison seeped into my sleeping ear and murdered, I buried myself in my second best bed.  Those killed in sleep know the manner of their death.  Of course they know it.  Once dead, the creator endows the murdered soul with that knowledge to carry forward into the life to come.  I am alone.  I am the substance of my shadow.  I am the son consubstantial with the father of my own (my own?) making.  And the prize of my life’s efforts?  An auk’s egg for my head.  Watch me hatch.  Oh leave me be.

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.

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.