Having my way with Ulysses

Like a cat sitting beyond a dog’s jump.

Beppo the cat watched us out of his eternity but did nothing to save me. Nor did the blue earthenware tiger I have in my bedroom, nor the magicians and genies in the volume of The Thousand and One Nights.

8:49 pm

They know what they are doing, eyes all over them.  Don’t even have to look, they know just what is where and who.  There’s a sense to it.  Walk into a room and feel which ones want what and who wants someone else.  It’s a pressure in the air or something.  I’ve seen it, what am I, blind?  They feel that I want to fuck you feeling coming from some corner or other.  Directly behind.  You think that turns off because of a husband?  Look at Molly after the Glencree dinner, telling me Val Dillon had his eye on her, and she cracking nuts with her teeth like a tiger.  She was sending a message in a bottle and no mistaking it.  And mister lord mayor sir knows a ball buster when he wants one.  She knew her own business on the way home too, and then telling me after about her first kiss with Mulvey up against the Moorish wall.  Just like a woman to camouflage with timing.  And me the blank clock.  She saw, fine eyes too, clear, she saw with her every eye what I wanted to hear and saw to it.  Sharp as needles.  Milly too, practicing in front of a mirror. Gets it from her father, mother I mean.

Beehives, soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline,

We accept reality so readily -- perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question. Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it. 5:54 pm

[Scene:  The Star and Garter Ballroom, Empyrean Building, Holy Mother Public Relations.  The party planning committee including Saints Martha, Agatha, Patricia, Augustine, Genevieve, Wenburgh, Cecilia, and the Holy Mother herself, Blessed Virgin, Queen of the Heavens, CEO Holy Mother Public Relations, etc. are preparing for the imminent arrival of what will be possibly most likely perhaps God willing a new saint: Saint (maybe) Ahasuerus.]

Mary [Frazzled] Jesus H Christ, where are Anne and Margaret?  They were supposed to be here a half hour ago with the welcome banners!

Jesus [Appearing suddenly as if from nowhere]:  Mom?

Mary: Holy Christ you scared the bejesus out of me!  What did I tell you about popping in unannounced like that?  I completely forgot what I was doing!  What do you want?

Jesus:  Sorry  Mom, I thought I heard you calling me.

Mary:  Well, you didn’t.  Go back to your father, it’s his week to have you.  Oh, but first, I need you to make some wine.  God I need a drink.  I tried to get some beer out of Amand, but it’s too late in the day to catch him sober.  Best I can hope is he doesn’t vomit on the guest of honor.

Jesus:  Who is it this time?

Mary:  Ahasuerus.

Jesus:  That guy?  I thought he was supposed to wander the earth until I returned.

Mary:  Well, there’s a chance he’s coming today, dead or not, unless it’s some sort of mistake.  He’s got some tunnel visioned meat head after him who’s getting ready to crack his head open with a biscuit tin, but that’s if he has the depth perception for it.  Personally I don’t want him here, I could do without yet another one of these enormous parties.  I’ve got Agatha and Patricia fighting over command of the kitchen and that sour bitch Martha complaining about both of them.  Look, here she comes.

Jesus:  Speak of the devil.

Martha:  Hey Jesus.  Mary, I could really use some help in there.  Why am I always the one stuck in the kitchen doing everything?  Patricia is beyond useless and I’d give my left breast to get Agatha to shut up about the Glencree dinner already.

Mary:  What are Margaret and Anne doing?  Aren’t they in there with you?

Martha:  Mina Purefoy went into labor and called on both of them.  They’ll be with her for days.

Mary:  Both?  Well get Aquinas then, where the hell is he?

Martha:  That fat ass?  He’s in the kitchen, but he’s eating everything in sight: loaves, hogs, stags’ horns, hawks, eyes on a dish, unicorns.  I have Wenburgh  in there resurrecting what she can, but I still have to cook it all over again.  And how do you resurrect a seed cake?

Jesus:  Yeah, that’s not easy.

Mary:  Well, Genevieve is working on the look of the room, I’ve got Fiacre on flowers and Cecilia is handling music.  You can have Amand, but he’s shitfaced drunk.

Martha:  Yeah, great.  Thanks.  Might as well give me a swarm of locusts or a rain of frogs for all the good he’ll do me.

Jesus:  Maybe we can delay Ahasaures’ arrival somehow?  You don’t want him here anyway, do you Mom?

Mary:  Oh Christ no.

Martha:  Really?  Oh that would be great.  I hear he’s bad news anyway.  Uses his wife to help him cheat at cards.  Son of a grifter too, who defrauded a bunch of people with unsecured loans before he killed himself.

Fiacre: [Carrying an enormous bunch of aconite]  Oooh, who are we talking about, Ahasuerus?  I heard that he won buckets of money on a horse race, and then refused to buy a round at the bar.  What a cheap ass.  Cute as a shit house rat too.

Mary:  All right, think.  What do we do to buy some time?

Jesus:  Who’s the one going to throw the biscuit tin?  We can mess with his aim.

Martha:  Good idea.  Maybe we can blind him?

Mary:  Well I can’t spare Genevieve, she’s up to her tits in work getting this place decorated.

Jesus:  What about Nicholas and Anthony?  Nick can steal his glasses and Anthony can hide them.

Mary:  That might do it.  Jesus, you find them and get them on it asap.  Martha, get your ass back into the kitchen.  I’ll see if your sister can help.

Martha:  Fat chance.

Jesus:  No. She doesn’t need to be here.

Martha:  See.

Mary:  And Jesus, get back to your father after you find Tony and Nick.  I can’t have him bitching to the lawyers again about me violating his visitation rights.  Costs me a fortune every time.

And what star is that, Poldy?

Money is indeterminate, it is everything, a kind of general equivalent, it is nothing, a kind of blank meaning. Information, as blank meaning, is in the process of taking its place, as a general equivalent.Rochford is Boylan with impatience for me to show Blazes his bit of code when I see him later.  I’ll sound him out.  This is it, whatever sense you want to make out of it:  010101000111010101110010011011100010000001001110011011110111011100100000010011110110111000100000001010000111000001100001011110010010000001100001011101000111010001100101011011100111010001101001011011110110111000100000011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000110111001101111011101110010111000101001 Richie Goulding on financial business for Goulding, Collis and Ward walked blindly toward a woman no longer young, smiling, as she rushed, fully absorbed, toward him, on her way from superior courtroom W-331 to courtroom E-173.  Money to be made, Tom says, telling people what they see now.  Label the now and they’ll enjoy it more.  Augment that reality.  From Boeing Field, a string of stretch suv’s, one bearing flags, made its way toward the freeway.   Maybe money there but I’ll get mine some other how.  I have my methods.  He’s a hero, Tom, you know that?  Saved somebody stuck down a manhole, the one just down there under the poster of that dauby chick with the yellow hair.  Poor devil stuck halfway to hell choking to death on sewer fumes and down went Tom, tied a rope around him and up they hauled them both.  The act of a real hero.  Ambulance.  Can’t hear myself type.  Anyway, the race is on soon.  Bantam Lyons is putting everything he’s got on a horse somebody gave him that hasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell.  McCoy kept himself out of it.  I can take my time; she doesn’t need these steaks yet.  I don’t think he appreciated my story about that dinner at Glencree either; he has some kind of feeling for Bloom maybe.  Says his wife sang there but did she?  Come on.  She a star?  Please.  The bright stars fade. Anyway, it was blue o’clock in the morning when we left with the car top down and I sat next to Bloom’s wife trying to get her top down.  Unfurnished Apartments, picked up and placed again on the window sash.  Bloom playing the astronomer pointing out this comet and that comet and stars and stars.  Left me to pay attention to his wife’s moon.  What star is that Poldy, she said.  Just a pinprick, needle dick.  He’s all right, though, Bloom.

They like buttering themselves in and out.

How chimant in effect! Alla tingaling pealabells! So a many of churches one cannot pray own's prayers. 'Tis holyyear's day! Juin jully we may! Agithetta and Tranquilla shall demure umclaused but Marlborough-the-Less, Greatchrist and Holy Protector shall have open virgilances. 1:13 pm

[Scene:  The kitchen of Tranquilla convent, well appointed with red Dockrell’s wallpaper and decorated with daguerreotypes from the studio of Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary.  The room smells of American elderflower soap and of winds that blow from the south.]

Saint Patricia:  Great Christ and Holy Protector we are running out of everything!  And even more curious, table twelve has used up their pillar of salt, do we have another?  Oh!  Oh!  Oh dear God you are bleeding!  What is that on your plate, bread loaves, bells?

Saint Agatha:  Don’t touch me!  I want to coagulate and your touch will just liquify everything.   It’s my breasts, I think we should fry them in butter.

Saint Patricia:  We fry everything in butter.

Saint Agatha:  No lard for us!  I’m hard pressed to think of anything else to give these albatrosses.  We already ran out of the rabbit pie, the port soup, the lap of mutton with chutney sauce is gone, and that base barreltoned man Ben Dollard ate the barons of beef.

Saint Patricia:  He drank all the Bass number one too.

Saint Agatha:  What, two?

Saint Patricia:  Too.  We still have some of the mulled rum.  This is a crowd to rival the Glencree dinner!  Remember?  For that one we had to bring out bread with drippings to satisfy them all.

[A priestylooking chap name of Pen something (Pendennis? My memory is getting.  Pen . . .?) opens the kitchen door and squints in with weak eyes.]

Saint Agatha:  Where are they all coming from?  Like flies to a picnic.  Perhaps we should start the entertainment now, then serve the sticky stuff.

Saint Patricia:  Good idea.  Where is old Goodwin?  Lucky we have him, I understand this will be his last performance.

Saint Agatha:  They always are.  Look behind you, we have lots of Plumtree’s in the cupboard, let’s send it out now.  After that we won’t have much left to offer.

Saint Patricia:  Not if that woman in the elephantgrey dress keeps sticking her fingers into every pie.  She can be rude.  Did you see her?  And after the band plays, we have.

Saint Agatha: We have sugarloaves with caramel.  Our staple food.  And once that’s gone that’s it.  We’ll have to barricade our doors with barbed wire.

Saint Patricia:  Well, I am glad to communicate with the outside world, but today I have suffered!

Saint Agatha:  I agree.  Just think back to our morning devotions.  Happy.  Happier then.  Here, let me straighten your brown scapular.  There you go.

Saint Patricia:  Thank you.  I’d better get back out there.  Some of them, Masons I think, are making noise about some lottery tickets.  Some scandal or other.  Thing like that spoils the effect of a night.

Saint Agatha:  Yes.  But it is all part of the stream of life, no?

Saint Patricia:  Yes, the stream of life.