Having my way with Ulysses

What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

I saw that each, amazingly, appeared contorted between the chin and where the chest begins; they had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them.Right. 2:30 am, Universal Time 2:55, Sidereal time 20:09:45. Conception location: 6w15, 52n20. Is this date right? You are how old? Wow. You look great. Really amazingly great. Did you get much work done? Botox? Doesn’t matter. Gemini sun, Gemini rising, Leo moon. Anyway, the shooting star witnessed at the precise moment your mother centripetally united with your centrifugally oriented father originated from Vega you say? The falling vulture. That would generally suggest a rapid decline of some sort: 32 feet per second per second. And headed right toward Leo’s ass with great apparent velocity. Here, take a look. See? Direct hit. So. Today, Leo’s ass is in direct opposition with Uranus, which at the time of your conception was in the 28th degree of Sagittarius, eighth house, house of death. Let’s look at the progression, Vega, vulture, and holy christ would you look at that. Uh, hum. Just thinking aloud here. I’m not. I want. I want to be very careful I don’t get it wrong here but I see. Huh. It’s just so clear. I’ve never seen. And Uranus in the twelfth house trine moon, which was in Leo at the time of your birth too. Well, for just this moment now at least, we can. Or. Huh. Why don’t we look at Moon trine Saturn first, then we can address the, ah, other thing. Moon trine Saturn says you might want to be alone for a while. Stay away from, um, people. And Saturn trine Neptune, yes. Go on a retreat alone maybe, take a long hike into the woods and stay there by yourself for a while. Meditate maybe. Do you want some tea? Here let me light some incense, your aura is looking, well, let’s clear the air a little. How are you feeling? I’ll be honest, from what your chart is telling me you really ought to be in bed. I can’t in good conscience keep you here. My agenbite of inwit: I’ll need to check my own chart about this. I feel all turned around, so yeah. I need to get my head on straight and you need. Well. Go now, go home and get in bed. If you ah, when you wake up call me and we’ll go over the rest of your chart. But you’d really better, ah, here’s your coat. Oh, and let’s settle the bill now.

Releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.

Then it seemed to me it rotated a little, then terrible as lightning she descended and snatched me upward into the fire. Therein it seemed that she and I were burning; and this imagined burning so scorched me that my sleep was broken. 2:03 am

Give me four minutes, and you’ll have your fire.  There is an art in lighting a fire, and attention to how you make ready the place of sacrifice should be the true object of any creator: that is one of the secrets. The beauty of any holocaust, no matter how slight your agenbite of inwit, must always be within the purification of your own intent. That’s where we will find beauty. I said we. There’s creation. There’s union. So what is it we are burning today? What did you bring?

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.

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

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.

Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish.

The Twofold form Hermaphroditic: and the Double-sexed; The Female-male & the Male-female, self-dividing stood Before him in their beauty, & in cruelties of holiness! Shining in darkness, glorious upon the deeps of Entuthon. 8:47 pm

Scene [Tranquilla convent, in the back garden.  The sisters are preparing to receive a novice for initiation into the order.  St. Agatha and Sister Mary Peter wait with ten fingers locked for her to arrive. ]

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, have you seen my breasts?

Sister Mary Peter:  You left them in the rectory Reverend Mother, shall I retrieve them for you?

St. Agatha:  No, no.  No.  Nuisance they are anyway, really, although I do feel like I lose a charm every time I take them off.  Still, we have a new novice coming and it would be a waste of this whitewashed face and cool coif not to long to appear, well, complete.

Sister Mary Peter: It is a natural craving, Reverend Mother, but you’re looking splendid.  Dressed up to the nines.

St. Agatha.  Never mind, no time.  I can see her coming with my dexter optic!  O look who it is for the love of God! I thought they were dumping Martha on us and instead it’s Lizzie Twigg!  How are you at all?  What have you been doing with yourself? [kiss] and delighted to [kiss] see you!

Lizzie Twigg:  Hello Agatha.  I would have been here sooner but there was all that barbed wire.

St. Agatha:  We do like to cloister ourselves here!  But never mind never mind.  No hurry, my dear sister soul.  I’m just so happy you’re not Martha!  So vindictive for what she can’t get.  Oh my child!  So, here you are, giving up your desire to aid gentlemen in literary work.

Lizzie Twigg:  Yes, I’m done with men.  I loved an Aeon and that ended badly.  Felt like I was drowning half the time.  Now I want to dedicate myself to somebody more, I don’t know, along the straight and narrow.  Linear minded.  Gets us from then to when.

St. Agatha:  Well as a fellow bride of Christ you will have that, even the calendar starts with him, to some end point.  So, let’s have a look at you.  Nice well-filled hose, though they are a bit down around the ankle.

Sister Mary Peter:  Voice like a pick axe, no good for the choir.  Are you lame?

Lizzie Twigg:  No.  My boots are a bit tight though.

St. Agatha:  You might have a high arched instep.

Lizzie Twigg: Um.  I have a question.  I’ve heard things about the sisters here.  That some of you get a bit, well, odd.  I’ve heard about some sisters licking pennies all the time, and wanting to smell rock oil, and all kinds of.  Is this, is this true?

St. Agatha: It’s only the virgins who go mad in the end.  I take it you’re?

Lizzie Twigg: Not. No.

St. Agatha.  I thought not.  You have that I’m all clean come dirty me look.  Now, when was the start of your last menstrual period?  Must have been within the past couple of days.

Lizzie Twigg:  Today.  And it’s awful.  Feels a ton weight.  How did you know?

St Agatha:  The plants are withering.  And the fiddle strings have all snapped.

Sister Mary Peter:  The milk is turning too.

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, go get St. Patricia, she can coagulate Miss Twigg’s blood.  Now Miss Twigg, we’ll stop your menstruation for now, but you’ll have to get into step with the rest of us.  We all bleed together according to the moon.

Lizzie Twigg:  I’m sorry.  I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or question is it all a fake or anything but, none of you look like, well, like the menstruating type.  No offense.  How many women?

St. Agatha:  Listen sister, we feel it ourselves too, ok, all of us together.  We can be a pack of devils when it’s coming on, I can tell you, especially Sister Mary Peter!

Lizzie Twigg:  She’s a hot little devil all the same.  We were girlfriends at school you know.

St. Agatha:  Oh were you?  And how do you find her now?

Lizzie Twigg:  Well back then she was yours for the asking!  And not to pick holes in her appearance or anything, but she does have fewer teeth than before.

St. Agatha:  Never you mind that now.  We all have bodies, we all have curves inside our deshabillé, but if you are to undertake a novitiate with us you’ll find within our walls sanctity and corporeality intermingle.  Bring your agenbite of inwit, but don’t forget your frillies for Raoul, honey, He likes them both.  Now come with me child, that’s a lovely shirt shining beneath your what? But we must get on with dressing each other for the sacrifice.

Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.