Having my way with Ulysses

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.

Those literary ethereal people.

Lizzie Twigg is fundementially theosophagusted over the whorse proceedings.1:33 pm

[Scene:  Around the ideal form of a table sit Æ., Lizzie Twigg, the Reverend Dr. Salmon, Cassandra, and a Wizard.  The stage is darkly lit and the theatre is neither over heated nor chilly but at a comfortable temperature as typically a séance releases an unusual amount of magnetism, thus the room generally becomes warmer than ordinary.  The shades of the living like good ventilation too, so keep that in mind.  On a side table a buffet brunch waits congealing for any hungry living soul which may come. Today’s menu includes nut steak, weggebobbles cooked in soda, fruit, two headed octopus, eyes of cow, and poached eyes on ghost.]

Æ: Those cow eyes are following me everywhere I go. Right.  Let’s get started, shall we.  Five of us today, not an ideal number.  I would have prefered seven or something occult like 13, more symbolic.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  Take yourself in hand, Æ, you can’t have everything.  Am I right Miss Twigg?

Lizzie Twigg:  Not saying a word.  Just taking it all in.

Cassandra:  It is easier with one medium but we appear to have two.  Well, as long as he remembers who is running the show, we can’t have the energies dividing.  Now, the purpose of today’s séance is to attract a living spirit Æ might possess long enough for his astral body to re-enter the physical world.

Wizard:  Metempsychosis?

Æ: No, resurrection.  I’ll be needing my body which I understand will regenerate around me.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  Hold on a minute.  That body was tinned long ago, you’ll smell like a bad egg, you can’t put an egg back into the shell, the genie is not going to fit back into the bottle, once you get it out it’s hard to get it back in.

Cassandra: Please, too many images scrambled.  Let’s keep clear, yes?

Æ: My vegetative body will be attracted by my active astral body and through the vibration of molecules the phenomena of density and apparent weight will collect particles together along with an unseen mass of electrical and magnetic matter, and from that my physical body will form within the living world.  Easy.  Scientific.

Lizzie Twigg:  I answered the wrong ad.  I could have picked the other gentleman who wanted aid in literary work.  Or even the riding companion one.  That sounds pretty good now.  I could use a good belt of booze.

Æ:  Shall we venture now into the untrodden woods to carve the future ways?

Wizard:  Æ, Æ beware of the day!  For dark and despairing, my sight I may seal, but man cannot cover what God would reveal:  ‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, and coming events cast their shadow before.

Lizzie Twigg:  [Agitated, her stockings loose over her ankles.  I detest that.  Tasteless.] Yes!  Remember, time put by a myriad fates that her day might dawn in glory; death made wide a million gates so to close her tragic story.  I took it all in.  Didn’t you pay attention to your own words?  Why go back?  Here, there, eternity, temporality.  What difference does it make to us?  We have left the day to day.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  I say, it is feeling quite close in here.

Æ:  We are doing this.  I want to do this.  I’ll get a different séance circle, but I am going back.

Lizzie Twigg:  This isn’t what you thought it would be, is it Æ?  There is nothing dreamy here, or cloudy, or symbolistic.  You wanted the light of lights.  You still do.  You miss wanting what you didn’t get.  So you retreat back into wanting.  You want to be the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come.

Cassandra:  Please, you are disturbing the vibrations.  Let us join hands and begin.

Lizzie Twigg:  Fine.  But why anybody would want to entrap themselves into the present moment amongst the unenlightened.  This will never work.

Cassandra:  Believe me, we will channel the living and Æ will go back.

Wizard:  Down, soothless insulter!  I trust not the tale.

Cassandra:   Please.  You don’t believe me?  Tell me something I haven’t heard before.  Ok.  Moving on.  We call on the living spirit of the one who has been hovering near.  I feel you.  I know you are here.  Make a sign to us.  One click for yes and two clicks for no.

Æ:  Anything?

Cassandra:  I heard something but it was more a mouse than a click.

Wizard:  The war drum is muffled.

Cassandra:  I call upon you, you know who you are, to draw near.  Lean in honey, we can hear you breathing.

Lizzie Twigg:  Look at Æ!

Wizard:  Oh!  mercy dispel yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell!  Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs, and his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims.

Cassandra:  Oh holy Zeus I didn’t believe myself this time but look!  Æ?  Can you hear us Æ?

Æ:  Click.

Lizzie Twigg:  Where did he go?  Oh Jesus Fucking Christ, I swear to stage manager, nothing good can come from this.

God: [from the booth on the god mic]  Ok hold.  Jesus, what in my name is going on down there?  Where is Æ?

Jesus: I’m not sure.  He’s gone.  I think they resurrected him.

God:  He can’t be resurrected.  This is supposed to be a dress rehearsal, and people please stay on script and stick to the blocking.  The light cues were a mess toward the end of that.  Jesus, get Æ back and let’s go again from the top.

Jesus:  I can’t get him back, he’s been resurrected.  Like Lazarus, remember?

God:  [On the god mic]  How can I forget that debacle?  Can still smell his stench.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  How was I?  I felt a little off.

Cassandra:  You were very convincing, believe me.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  I didn’t get to say my speech.  The dreamy cloudy gull, waves o’er the waters dull.

Jesus:  Um, God?  Now that Æ is loose in the world, well, that’s going to throw a wrench into Scylla and Charybdis.

God:  [on the god mic]  Not our problem.  Jesus Christ where’s the holy spirit?  Why we are going with a director we can’t keep track of, only I know.  Well, we don’t have time for this.  Let’s recast Æ and move on.  Is Arius busy?  Did he get over his, well, issue?  Maybe call his agent.  Let it be done.  Don’t forget we have casting for Circe coming up and tech for that will be a nightmare.

What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me?

Supposing we grant that all things known as substances are homogeneous as possessing something denied to the other genera, what precisely is this something, this individuality, this subject which is never a predicate, this thing not present in any thing as in a subject, this thing which does not owe its essential character to any other thing, as a quality takes character from a body and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to motion and motion to the moved? 12:43 pm

But it wasn’t planes of consciousness I was asking about.  I could give two shits about planes of consciousness.  No.  And there is AE, thinking me a timid boy, declaring absolute knowledge involves understanding the totality of life.  To explain something means to show its connection to everything else.  But tell me something, AE, show me the everything else.  Where exactly will we stand?  How do we sufficiently remove our temporal selves so we can enter into this eternal totality?  Where will we in our opalescent hush experience this absolute?  Shall we lay on our backs in the grass and looking up into the blue try to think ourselves into the absolute?  But our backs, and the grass and the blue, won’t these temporal things get in our way?  It is an utter blotting out of self you quote Plotinus (who like you covets out of body experiences, but he is a hydrophobic leper so no wonder), a rapture of peace which will present to us, the more lucid souls amongst the rabblement, the experience of the absolute, the totality of life.  Please.  Tell me.  How do we sufficiently remove ourselves from the totality in order to experience it?  We are in it.  Where else is there?  When else?   And we see features of this totality through our individual conceptual and relative frameworks.  Emphasis on relative.  Absolute, in your mystic envelope my dear AE, it is the merging of the soul with the all the absolute.  But for you this must be done independent of relative content.  Put yourself in and simultaneously take yourself out.  Give me the relative.  Well, you don’t have to give it me.  I’m filled with it.  Infected by it.  And so are you.  The perception of the observer creates the reality of the observed.  I see you.  Not you, you.  There is no higher absolute, more Godly than the relative, clear to the sensitives.  Look at relativity.  Do you see it?  According to relativity, we can perceive events in time, but not time itself,  All time perception is relative to position and velocity, thus there is no absolute time, no absolute.  Tell that to AE messiah to the mastermystics.  He never packed relativity into his case of tricks.