Having my way with Ulysses

Too full for words

• The Lotus-Eaters

How incomplete is speech, how weak, when set against my thought!10:09 am

What do you want, I’m eating.  I see you.  I see what you think.  You think that I am a dumb creature and I have no sense beyond this bag stuck to my face.  Damn all we might know or care about anything.  Keep us, drug us with feed.  Condemn us to a mine somewhere until we die, no hope of fresh air or natural light again.  No problem.  We only want our feedbag.  Is that it?  Look I may be no Incitatis with gold flakes in my oats and a high paid job, but I am more than you think.  I am real.  I don’t speak, no.  But not because of this bag, whatever you might say.  We see you.  You think we are gently champing our oats, regarding you silently.  We see you.  And I cannot speak for us all but what I see, what I’ve seen, freezes me to a solid and chills me to silence.  I’m filled with it.  Look at the things you have done.  Don’t you get it?  Look between my legs for a start.  What do you want me to say?  Incomprehensible idea.  If I were to verbalize something I would be placing myself into human rationality.  No thank you. You poor brutes.

Turma Circumdet

• Telemachus

And, catching sight of us, he bit himself like one whom fury devastates within. 9:45 am

Buck has the building key and he has my money.  Wants to meet later to drink even more of my money, and we all know how far that will get him.  Not enough for a teenage girl to get a buzz on.  Speaking of teenage girls, Haines will be there too.  Beware the hoof of a horse, the horns of a bull, and the smile of a Saxon.  Usurper.  Killing me with kindness.  Part douche, part dumb ass.  This path I’m on is long, steep, and relentlessly curving to the right.  Three long horn blasts from a ferry just now.  Funeral.  Burial at sea.  Exiled.  Dump the ashes and note the time and coordinates.  A quarter to.

It seems to me

• Telemachus

9:24 am

What are you doing?  Me?  Oh, I’m typing.  Right now I am typing.  I am typing now.  Here, you see?  You can’t see.  But what are you doing right now?  Listen, I don’t know your now.  I can’t know it.  Nobody can and you can’t know mine.  Picture us together.  Go ahead.  No, not like that, sheesh!  Picture us together standing in a field.  We are standing and we see two bolts of lightning strike simultaneously one on the left horizon and one on the right horizon but a bit in front too so we can see them strike down at the same TIME HOLY SHIT GET DOWN!  That was close.  Did you feel that?  Did you feel it?  Ok, now rewind, the same lighting strikes are going to happen but this time we are going to stand next to one of them.  I know, I know.  Trust me.  Ok, now we are standing next to where one of them will hit and here IT COMES HOLY FUCKING CHRIST!  That was too close.  Sorry.  You ok?  You sure?  OK.  And look fast over there, the other lightning strike.  Did you see it?  5 seconds I’d say.  Those were the same ones (we rewound, remember?) but they are not simultaneous anymore because it took time for the light from that lightning strike over there to reach us over here.  Ok, so why did I drag you out into this field and nearly kill you?  Sorry again by the way, truely.  Because I wanted you to see for yourself that simultaneity is relative depending on our position.  The now of any event, typing for me and whetever it is that you are doing now (reading I presume, and whatever else you are doing.  I’m looking at you sunshine.)  You can’t know any now moment unless you know where and how fast.  Can any now moment be objective?  Don’t answer that.  It can’t.  It is relativity my dear, it’s relative.  And without objective now moments, how can we have such things as lapses of time?  Don’t answer that either.  We can’t.  If there is no absolute now dividing before from after, then no part of succession can have objective status.  Do you see where I’m going?  When I am going?  If successive moments in time depend on our frame of reference, whether we are standing here or there say, the moment we call now cannot be a feature of reality unto itself.  Relativity, you see.  Causality is gone.  Nothing can be said to cause anything now that the now has become so slippery, so protean.  Hume says causality is a fiction of the mind, Kant says that the only knowable objective world is a product of the mind, Einstein says successive time is our most persistant illusion.  I say this means that we have no free will.  But don’t ask me, let’s ask God.  Hey God.  God.  GOOOOD!

God [appears in a thunderclap]:  What do you want I’m busy.

No you’re not.  Don’t you exist in eternity?  You can’t need time to do things if you have all of it.

God:  Ok, you got me.  I was bluffing.  So what do you want?  And before you ask, I am not getting anyone to sleep with you and I don’t care if your team wins.  Conflicts of interest, you understand.  You see the bind I’d be in if everybody asks for opposite things.  So hurry up, what do you want?

A question, oh lord, supreme one, heavenly father, mother of heaven, holiest of holies, most beneficient

God:  Skip the filler, just get to it, cut to the chase, come on, I haven’t got all day.  Figures of speech, mind you.

Do you know everything?

God:  Yes.  Duh.  You got me here so at least ask me something challenging.

Well, if you know everything, then you know everything that has happened and you know everything that is going to happen.  You know all the past and all the future.

God:  Yes, I know everything that is a part of everything.  Yawn.

So if you already know everything that is going to happen, then everything we are ever going to do is already done, decided for us.  Written down in advance.

God: Yup.

Do we have free will?

God [blushing]:  Oh!  Shit.  Didn’t expect you to ask that question.  Well I did, but.  Uh. Um.  Yeah.  Yeah.  You have free will.  Sure.  Why wouldn’t you have free will?  You have it.  You have lots of it.  Yeah.  Um.  Anyway.   I hear sombody calling me.  My phone.  That’s my phone.  Got to take that call.  Coming!

[Exeunt]

I have no free will.  I am a servant to three masters, a woman for whom I would not kneel, a church for whom I will not kneel, and a third for whom I ask others to kneel, although mostly I have to take care of those jobs myself.

The Gods themselves are simply agents of a great high mystery, the secret of which is found in mathematics.

• Calypso

Before a thousand years have passed -- a span that, for eternity, is less space than an eyeblink for the slowest sphere in heaven -- would you find greater glory if you left your flesh when it was old than if your death had come before your infant words were spent? 9:24 am

Milly is fifteen but I remember like yesterday calling the midwife when she was born.  She was the same one.  She knew instantly Rudy wouldn’t live.  God is good she said and she knew better.  He lived eleven days.  He’d be eleven now.  If I could overreach, into this now or out of this now.  Oh it is a difference of all enormity.  I was so proud.  I’d give my every eyeblink.  She knew at once.  She knew.  From the first.

Steeeeeeeeeeeephen

• Telemachus

And note that they who will for exile say can for dog while them that won't leave ingle end says now for know.9:21 am

When you see the arrow coming it has a softer strike, and I can see one clearly aimed right between my eyes.  I can enfuture myself and hear him say it: give me the key it is mine, I paid the rent.  And what can I do?  I can’t afford this place on my salary.  I can’t afford any place on my salary.  I remember clearly that bitch who does payroll telling me, when her mistake lost me my funding, I should go live in a shelter.  Good thing I got a TA, or I’d be living under a staircase somewhere.  Well, with what I make that might as well be my next home.  No.  Instead I do what I do now; I go up and down other people’s staircases.  When I think of the scheming and the senselessness I put up with my mouth fills with a salty bitter taste.  I smell toast.  No.  I’ll keep my honor and keep to myself.  Exile.  Time is screaming toward me and I had better be prepared for the blow.