Having my way with Ulysses

I don’t think you knew him or perhaps you did, though.

• The Wandering Rocks

And toward a stairway, he and I, together, turned; and just as soon as I was at the first step, I sensed something much like the motion of a wing, and wind that beat against my face, and words: "Beati pacifici, those free of evil anger!"

I’ve tried so many people I can’t tell if I’m coming or going.  School for the children, money, insurance question.  Insurance later with Bloom, much kindness in him.  Poor Dignam, decent little soul, a bit low sized.  We’ll help his children up, and his widow, give them peace.  Down to me to arrange it.  Burned by gold heads appear above the crossblind of their usual window.  She won’t have to ascend and descend other’s staircases.  Descending the staircase, Nannetti, hailed his fellow council members ascending the staircase.  Dual mirrors in a shop window supervise Blazes Boylan, virile, energies rising, intercepting Bob Doran, emasculated, on the downward arc of his annual bender.  Jimmy Henry and Long John Fanning: they’ll give on the spot, no hesitation, no questions.  They’ll do it purely for goodness’ sake.

That which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be.

• Scylla and Charybdis

Within my memory is fixed -- and now moves me -- your dear, you kind paternal image when, in the world above, from time to time you taught me how man makes himself eternal; and while I live, my gratitude for that must always be apparent in my words. 2:16 pm

Scene: [Around the ideal form of a table sit Cassandra, Caesar, Thoth, Lizzie Twigg, Brunetto Latini, Mother Dana, and Little John.  The theatre is darkened and an appropriate number of candles are burning with an inward light alongside several vestals’ lamps.  Peatsmoke rises from the trapdoor along with wafts of incense made from opoponax and violets.  Rest suddenly possesses the discrete vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.]

Lizzie Twigg:  Right.  Thank you all for coming.

Little John:  [Drunk, a little dumb] When are we getting paid?

Cassandra:  Why is he here?  His breath is harming the vibrations.  And are those birthday candles?

Lizzie Twigg:  Yes, they seemed appropriate.  Don’t mind Little John, I found him vomiting in the greenroom and we needed one more body.  Seven is the perfect number for a séance and I am determined to get it right this time.  So let’s get started.  Æ is loose among the living, he’s only just managed to go undetected, though just barely.  So far he has appeared in Scylla and Charybdis, but there is no telling where he’ll turn up next so we have to get him back.  Thoth, am I speaking too quickly?

Thoth:  No, I’m recording it all perfectly, thanks.  Learned from Chitragupta.

Cassandra:  We won’t get him back.

Lizzie Twigg:  He’s coming back.  Now, be prepared for paradoxes.  He is alive but he is also dead.  His body has regenerated and though he appears normal, he is greatly decayed.  But from looking he is what he was; his moles still appear in their usual places, but he is a bit soft.  Also, his molecules are shuttling to and fro much too rapidly.  Mother Dana, we will need your help to repair him when we get him back.

Cassandra:  We won’t get him back.

Caesar:  You said that already.

Mother Dana: I can weave and unweave bodies and reconcile him to himself, but I’m not sure what to do about sharpening him up.

Lizzie Twigg:  Well, we’ll cross that Rubicon when we come to it.  First, there can be no reconciliation if there has not been a sundering.  Should be simple after that.

Caesar:  [Simply] You think it’s so easy.

Cassandra: [Easily]  Down, boy.  Life was hard for us all.  No need to get worked up about it now you’re dead.

Caesar: [Deadly] Vixen.  Whore.  Who listens to you?  Your kind sickens me.

Little John: [vomits under the table] Shagart! Shagart!

Lizzie Twigg:  Bear with me people.  When Æ resurrected he took my heart with him.

Thoth:  What did it weigh?

Lizzie Twigg: And I want him back.  Besides, I may see myself as I sit here now, but by reflection from that which then I shall be.  And that future which casts its shadow before includes Æ.

Cassandra:  But this is eternity, honey, there is no future.  The future is the conjoined twin sister of the past.  That which was, is.  That which may come to be, is.  It’s an all-at-onceness, sweet girl, nothing more.

Lizzie Twigg:  Exactly.  And he’s not here.  My is, is missing an aeon.

Cassandra:  I warn you, Lizzie, bring him back and he will crave the world of the living.  But you won’t bring him back.

Brunetto Latini:  Dear Twigg, when he returns you must reassure him that he will live on in his work.  Glory gives the wise man a second life; that is to say, after his death the reputation which remains of his good work makes it seem as if he were still alive.

Cassandra:  It won’t be enough.

Lizzie Twigg:  [Tossing off a glass of brandy neat] Please, let’s get started.  Where there is reconciliation, there must have been first a sundering.

Caesar:  You said that already.

A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

• Scylla and Charybdis

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.

Any time he likes, tell him.

• Aeolus

12:53 pm

I raced the wind to get to Myles after having to kiss Keyes’ ass over the ad renewal and he blew me off.  He was on the street talking with J. J. O’Molloy, they came up together you know, started off together back in the day.  I don’t know, maybe I interrupted something.  O’Molloy had a long face.  Seemed a bit defeated.  More than usual that is.  Sad.  Tried to get to Myles fast before he’d be too far gone but I pretty much missed that window.  Ever brief.  And he was on the way to the bar behind a few of them, arm in arm, off for a drink.  Lenehan in front but I suspect Stephen Dedalus was the prime mover.  Wearing better boots today; last time he had holes in his heels.  And I saw him on the way to funeral, wonder what he does down there?  Weighing a bit on me.  Wanted to breeze it by Myles and I was so out of breath he didn’t get much more than Keyes would give the ad, but only for two months and if we put in a puff peace.  I can get the image at the library, House of Keys.  Keyes, get it?  Two crossed keys.  I must have interrupted something.  Myles turned his eye on me as best he could considering and said I should tell Keyes to kiss his ass.  Ths loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock’s wattles.  Kiss my hairy white ass.  He can kiss my ass he said, got that.  Kiss my ass, ok, Póg mo thóin.  Got it?   And for me kish mein touchess and more formally shakli b’tahat.  With heart.  Tell him any way you like.  Then no break red faced riffing gaand chaat mara besa me culo tel’has teezee kyss meg i raeva isskay ymay assay qabula izinga honi ko’u ‘elemu fila mou to kolo.   Ama kwana mwach ka boro too koonam cui mi gaza.  Soen my boudt.  Cusano fy asen.  And that’s straight from the horses mouth.  Tell him.

To give you peace, to hear you speak, now while the wind is silent in this place.

• Aeolus

I reached a place where every light is muted, which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest, when it is battered by opposing winds. The hellish hurricane, which never rests, drives on the spirits with its violence; wheeling and pounding, it harasses them. I learned that those who undergo this torment are damned because they sinned within the flesh, subjecting reason to the rule of will. 12:36 pm

I saw it.  I was present.  I saw with eyes that were no less amazed than his.  I was good but he was all their daddies.  Psha! you say.  Psha!  Well, it has been centuries and he is still the one who makes our gaze more ardent.  I see your mouth twitching, unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.  Who would wish that mouth for any kiss?  How do I know?  Well, why did I write it then?  Oh but what he does with words.  He writes about eternity using a temporal art and how?  By twisting it, entwining it, tossing in numbers and ratios and divine proportions.  He uses circles to move time into eternity and more impossible to move eternity into time.  He speaks the ineffable.  And then he serves it to us on a peaceful golden flame and we eat and drink and slurp it yum into our souls.  Oh we are all in the middle of the path of life, locked into a moving now between past and future and elsewhen.  Now is real, all else is a feature of imagination.  No matter our age, we are all in the middle of the path of life.  He knew this.  And he mimics this in his rhymes.  Here are some line endings:

Mouth / Womb / South

Tomb/ Time / Bloom

Rhyme / Now / Sublime

Rhyme now sublime.  Catch that movement?  Oh feel it move you.  Forward and backward.  The middle word of the first becomes the outer words of the next.  Forward and backward and forward and backward.  Whenever we are in our temporal trajectory, we are always in the middle.  Three by three, his words are female forms entwining.  His words are like a boat that, starting from its moorings, moves backward, backforeward, so he may move us forward.  Ah my friend, take no more from me, my eyes are all amazement.  Look at us now, old men.  Penitent.  Dressed the same, looking the same.  Await no further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole — to act against that will would be to err:  therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.  And when I said this he looked at me, his sight becoming pure, and he let me know that will is free, to a point.  And what’s the point?  The point in which all times are present.  The point that sent forth so acute a light that anyone who faced the force with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes.  The point on which depends the heavens and the whole of nature.  The point that has no extension in space or time.  The point indivisible.  The point that is the start of all geometric possibilities.  The one point all whens and wheres end.  The point that seems enclosed by that which it encloses.  The point that is both circumference and circle.  The point which says that separate things can be the same thing.  The point that says our own existence in the middle of the path of successive time necessitates these distinctions.  Oh my God, the point. 

Hush, I hear feetstoops

• Aeolus

12:16 am

Ok, stoop down here.  Don’t mind me, just picking up these racing forms. Figure this out on my own.  La la la. So what do we have.  Sceptre 5 to 4, Zinfandel 7 to 4, Maximum II 10 to 1.  Those are the most likely.  Will include least likely, Throwaway 20 to 1 for a control.  A throwaway.  So.  Ok.  Draw a circle, homogeneous non-differentiated space.  Divide into duality in order to create.  Division within unity.  Now.  Center is O and radius OA=1.  Diameters AA’ and BB’ at right angles and with centers on diameter BB’ draw two circles.  Ok,  each with a radius half that of original circle.  Yup. From point A swing an arc NM tangent to circumferences of the two inner circles.  Repeat from point A’.  Construct square ACB’O from the radius of the original circle.  That’s the racetrack.  Good.  Ok.  The arc of the semi-diagonal of the square and the radius AE of the arc NEM is Φ  and the arcs NEM and NDM divide the radii AO and A’O into the golden division of 1/Φ and 1/Φ2.  Hum. Paradox now. Divide a circle into a yin yang like that and the circumferences of the inner circles are equal to that of the larger circle but the area within them is only half that of the original circle. One has become two. So Zinfandel?  Not Maximum II.  That seems out.   A unity becomes a duality.   Homogeneity becomes polarized.  Separated.  Jockey falls off?  Which one?  Mutually repellent forms arise from a common source.  Well that’s life.  And that sounds like Zinfandel to me.  The pentahedron to the cube, the heptahedron to the cube, the decahedron to the unity.  The icosahedron to the unity.  Hm.  So now, construct a square equal in area to the original circle.  If only pi were 3.17, then it would be Maximum II and what a payoff!  But have to base this on reality.  So.  So.  Φ2= 1+r2 and r = √Φ-1 and r = √Φ and the circumference equals 2∏√Φ with √Φ=1.272. . . and ∏=three point one four one five nine do da do da, so, hm.  If the perimeter of the square is approximately 8.  But I don’t want approximates.  Then, well.  This isn’t very mathematically exact.  A bit like throwing money into a hurricane.  But it looks like Sceptre.  That’s just where it’s shaking out.  I can feel it in the numbers.  My money, all of it, on Scepter.  Respect.  A dead cert.

Shite and Onions, Life is Short

• Aeolus

12:10 pm

I, Hedges Eyre Chatterton, being of sound mind and body despite the indifferent care given me by the inflated windbags and weathercocks amongst my nearest and most dear relations hereby declare this document to be my last will and testament thus nullifying all previous versions. The Angel of Death nears and on this the occasion of my ninetieth birthday I note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, tho’ quarreling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters of Neptune’s blue domain, and my thoughts, fanned by the gentlest zephyrs, drift towards a meditation upon this our mortal coil and as I meekly resign my soul to its Creator in the humble hope (thro’ the merits of Jesus Christ) of its future happiness as in the disposal of a Being infinitely good. My body I direct to be decently buried with no damn cross or any other bloody instrument of torture at my tomb but instead at the discretion of my Executor hereinafter named as to such temporal estate wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me, to provide from said estate a suitably sized angelic statue in pensive posture which shall be placed at my final bed of rest to remind those sad mourners particularly amongst my dearest family that although they might subscribe to the charming principle that all blows over and this too shall pass they ought rather dwell on the far more apt verse from our most holy book being as follows: they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. As I have left no issue from my certainly most capable loins, and am unlikely to do so as the vernal green of my youth turns toward the the transcendent translucent glow of mysterious twilight, I hereby bequeath the following mortal possessions from this my earthly life to my most dearest ones, and once they get wind of my passing may they trample each other to death with pulling hair and biting to get their filthy hands on it thus consigning their wretched souls to burn forever in the fiery gales of miserable hell in their lust for a windfall the bastards. To the relations of my departed first wife Mary Halloran, because I promised the dear pitiful creature on her dying bed as she lay ‘neath the shadows cast o’er her pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest to remember her family upon my own sad demise, I hereby remember you. Agonizing Christ! how could I forget such a miserable batch of high falutin bladderbags, and in addition to a reminiscence of your kindness (as most certainly I love you as you love me) to each and every one of you I bequeath a pustulating heartburn on your arse. To my niece Jane Chatterton Steer I leave one dollar for the kindness and love she never showed me. To my nephew the Reverend Eyre Chatterdon I leave ten dollars to buy a book on manners. Make that twenty. To the Mr. Bell who married my niece Rebecca Chatterton Bell I leave my collection of antiques for the service he has done the family in taking a woman no man of taste would have taken. To Mr. Garcia the husband of my niece Susan Chatterton Garcia I leave my collection of aged scotch and other spirits and my crystal collection so he may drink therefrom to comfort him under the affliction of a slatternly wife. I leave my silver tankard to my grand-nephew Abraham Eyre Chatterton, son of my nephew Abraham Chatterton. As the representative of the family I ought to have left it to Abraham himself, but he would melt it down to make temperance medals, and that would be sacrilege — however, I leave my big horn snuff-box to him: he can only make temperance horn spoons of that. I leave all my landed property and furnishings therein to my nieces Mary Chatterton Berry and Martha Chatterton, the former because she is married to a man whom (God help him) she henpecks. The latter because she is married to nobody, nor is she like to be, for she is an old maid, and not market-rife. I wish peace and affluence to all my friends and a piece of effluence to all my enemies. And last and most certainly least I leave the entirety of my monetary fortune to my great-nephew Edward (Ned) Lambert under the condition that he touch none of it, not so much as a penny, but instead hold it safefully for the personal use of Jesus Christ, when He returns.

I do hereby constitute and appoint J.J. O’Molloy to be the executor of this my last Will and Testament. In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal the twenty-ninth day of February in the year of our Lord two thousand and twelve.

You might pick up a young widow here

• Hades

11:45 am

Molly caught me writing to Martha.  Almost killed the whole thing.  I wrote the wrong address on the envelope I used to cover the letter.  I hope it’s not in a dead letter office somewhere.  In the midst of life we are in death.  Like John O’Connell.  Life among the tombs.  Keeps it well, trimmed edges, nice grass.  Corpse manure best for plants.  Mastiansky said Chinese cemetery poppies make the best opium.  Could be a decent trade.  Carcasses for gardens.  Dig them under when they are green and pink still, decomposing.  Then they become a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy.  Then black treacle oozing.  This must be what the plants like.  Then dried up deathmoths.  How did O’Connell get a woman to marry him, come live at the graveyard?  Try dangling that in front of somebody.  Courting death.  Is thrilling I expect.  Love among the tombs.  Tantalizing for the poor dead, though, like smell of grilling meat for the starving.  Fields of them out there, ground honeycombed with them.  More room if buried standing up.  Except wouldn’t want a mudslide, head might come up with pointing hands.

Delectatio Morosa

• Proteus

I was a lamb among the holy flock that Dominic leads on the path where one may fatten well if one does not stray off. 11:40 am

No, not morose as in gloomy or sullen.  Morose from moror, a delay in time.  Not up on your Latin?  Keep in mind that one of my usual attributes is that of angels beating people about the head with my books.  Study up, you don’t want a particularly large copy of Summa Theologica crashing down on your skull.  And those copies the angels use — they are illuminated!  Heavy.  So is pleasure subject to time?  This is what I was getting at and the answer is yes and no.  It is and it isn’t.  You see?  Because The Philosopher says delight is a kind of movement, and all movement is in time, pleasure is subject to time.  But he also says that no one takes pleasure in time, so it is not subject to time.  Both.  How can this be you ask?  Careful, the angels are hovering.  I see a particularly weak armed one too struggling with an oversized edition of The Summa Contra Gentiles.  Pleasure of itself is not in time, because it not a movement, but if this pleasure be subject to change, then it will be in time accidentally.  So what delights you?  That will be the thing to make the difference.  If it is a good obtained, it will not be in time, but if there is movement of the imperfect in your pleasure, then, well, it is subject to time.  And there we get into sin.  The more morose, the more mortal the sin.  Does that help?  Do you need a good whack in the head with a book?  Would you enjoy a whackin the head with a book?  Careful with your answer, the angels are listening.  Ay me.  I’m hungry.  You know, delectation denotes a movement of the appetitive power.  Could use a little wine too.  I am a touch purple now from wine, did you know that?  They boiled me in it to render my fat from my bones.  They had to, I was too corpulent to be moved, so they transformed me into a more portable form.  I hope they drank some wine themselves, after the job they had trying to get me down the stairs and then the more difficult job of dislodging me from the staircase.  Hard to accomplish that with proper dignity.  Ultimately they broke open a window and dropped me down.  Did no harm to my bones, my flesh was ample enough to break the fall.  I wonder what they did with my rendered fat?  Light a candle, will you, it’s dark in here.

I made of my own house my gallows place.

• Hades

From every side I heard the sound of cries, but I could not see any source for them, so that, in my bewilderment, I stopped. I think that he was thinking that I thought so many voices moaned among those trunks from people who had been concealed from us. 11:26 am

Why do you tear at me?   So painful.  It is a pain that releases pain.  You don’t look like a harpy, what are you?  What do you want?  I can’t tell you anything but what I see from my rooted prison.  When I tore my spirit from my body I landed here, sprouted and now I am what you see.  Poetic, no?  I gave up my body and now I am unable to move.  There’s a word for that but I’m running out of time.  Oh! There’s some blood on you.  Is it my fault you chose a branch right above your head?  I’m clotting already.  So I should wait all day here for you to bleed out a question.  Spit out I mean.  Arlgrlarraa.  Ouch!  Are you without all sentiment of pity?  That’s your question, what do I see?  What do you see you ask me?  Open your eyes!  Graves and graves.  What do I see.  Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day.  Funerals going on all the time all over the world.  Everywhere every minute.  Thousands every hour.  Shoveling them under by the cartload; too many in the world.  Argblle.  Why do you break me off?!  I hadn’t fully clotted that time.  That day?  I saw a leanjawed harpy and her hatchling, dirty face, stained with tears, crocodile.  Mutes shouldering a coffin.  First the stiff, then the friends of the stiff.  That’s it, the pomp of death.  Arglulgrr.  Fine.  And my son moving soap from one pocket to another.  There.  You happy?  Now go.