Having my way with Ulysses

You will see who

Thereupon the eagle changed into a piebald wolf and these two battled in the palace for a long time, when the cat, seeing himself overcome, changed into a worm and crept into a huge red pomegranate which lay beside the jetting fountain in the midst of the palace hall. Whereupon the pomegranate swelled to the size of a watermelon in air and, falling upon the marble pavement of the palace, broke to pieces, and all the grains fell out and were scattered about till they covered the whole floor. 11:36 am

My dream of the night before puzzles me.  Remember.  I am almosting it.  I was walking amongst my subjects in the street of harlots, disguised as a carpet merchant.  I found there amongst the tanyard smells a young man, quite lost, dressed in rancid rags illdyed black.  He looked near starvation so I offered him a melon, but he would not eat.  Instead, he delighted in its smell.  I led him to an open hallway and showed him the greatest treasure amongst my wares, a piece of tapestry that transports any who sit upon it in an instant to any person imaginable, without being stopped by any obstacle.  He asked who?  And I said you shall see.  But when we sat together on the red carpet it was as if in that instant of transformation I became not the dreamer but the dreamed.  I felt not myself.  I was not myself.  I had become my dark companion and what was left of me existed only as the name Haroun al Raschid within the memory of his dream, now my dream.  I sat on a beach watching an inrushing tide.  There were other people, but I could see only dimly, an Egyptian man and woman with hennaed faces, the woman’s hair trailing. There was a dog, dead with a creamfruit smell, and a live one too, lightly kicked by the Egyptian for a transgression I didn’t see.  I watched as well as I could, the dog sniffing a rock, then lifting a hind leg and pissing against it.  Then the dog repeated himself against an unsmelt rock.  I cannot be sure as something was terribly wrong with my vision, but I believe I saw the unhappy beast collapse into painful yelping and as his hind paws scattered the sand his forepaws stretched, altering itself into the paw of a leopard.  With a shake, screaming, the entire leopard sprung forth from the sand.  It was the offspring of a lion and a panther within whose womb, impatient with the delays of time, he had felt burdened by gestation.  He had torn and ripped until he was discharged forth into the world, his birth damaged and scarred his mother’s womb forevermore.  Horrible now, upon this beach, he roots and scrapes.  Scratching.  Stopping to listen.  Scratching.  His merciless bright eyes hungry, scraping the earth.  Salivating now, listening.  Scratching, then triumphant as a carrion vulture, revealing the carcass of his dead mother.

Looking for something lost in a past life

On a field tenny a buck, trippant, sable, unattired. 11:32 am

The dog on the beach was chasing a shadow and in my vision I saw in him wearing the tatters of a bear, a wolf, a calf, a buck.  He sniffed just like a dog the carcass of his dead brother before he moved to one great goal.  Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.  Me.  A yew on a field sable, couchant, fallen, blasted.

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here

Never has any thing produced by human reason been everlasting -- following the heavens, men seek the new, they shift their predilections. That man should speak at all is nature's act, but how you speak -- in this tongue or in that -- she leaves to you and to your preference.11:23 am

I am well out of it.  Wet but wet dries.  It was the wind of wild air of seeds of brightness that did it, I was thinking about those golden seeds windborne, impregnating mortals.  Harpies as fast as gusts.  Then I walked into the ocean.  Not for that reason, but why not?  My soul walks with me.  Take everything, keep it all.  I have my form of forms and whether I listen to Elsinore’s tempting flood and walk into the ocean (I turned back) or sit on a couch of sand makes little difference.  The flood is following me.  Lord will it attack me?  Enough.  Enough walking through memories.  I move and time and space conjoin.  Better to sit and kill time instead.  I’ve no loyalty there.  I’m not time’s bitch.  Think of that dead dog who sat with me, my loyal pointer Orthus.  There: decay.  Good dog.  Bloat and decay: evidence of time’s destruction.  It destroys us and we destroy it right back.  Kill it.  Blur it together with space, kill that too for all I care. Stone it to death and they collapse together. I no longer see distinctions. The running dog? Just a point. Hungry brother of Orthus. Peekaboo I see you. Not me. Or you. The dog.