Having my way with Ulysses

It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy’s three star.

• Circe

Blackness is the beginning of whiteness, and a sign of putrefaction and alteration, and that the body is now penetrated and mortified. From the putrefaction therefore in this water, there first appears blackness, like unto broth wherein some bloody thing is boiled. Secondly, the black earth by continual digestion is whitened, because the soul of the two bodies swims above upon the water, like white cream; and in this only whiteness, all the spirits are so united, that they can never fly one from another.12:26 am

Scene: [In an alchemists laboratory, an exhausted owl and a disheveled goat move in opposing arcs around a stork-shaped alembic suspended over an enormous fire. A nebulous obscurity that looks like what do you call it gossamer occupying space within the alembic is communicating with the assembled company, which includes Cassandra, Lizzie Twigg, and St. Agatha.]

Lilith: [Obviously missing some feathers] But what you don’t understand, AE, is that you have not reincarnated and you are most certainly not deathless.  Just look at yourself!

Cassandra: Or smell yourself for that matter, isn’t that thing supposed to be hermetically sealed?

Azazel: [Mascera running down his face, lipstick on his teeth, dead roses slipping off of his horns, in obvious need of a mirror] AE, can you hear me? AE, pay attention! You are manifest without rebirth, that’s it. You are nothing. You accomplished your nothingness badly too and for what?

AE: [with a voice of waves] I’m not leaving here until I deliver my message to the world.  Death is the highest form of life. And the highest form of life is me. I am death!

Cassandra: What a narcisist. He’s going to talk about himself until he’s black in the face.  Lilith, can we get on with the re-death without AE’s cooperation?  We have fire, the bicycle pump for air, and what is that thing?

Lizzie Twig: A lobster?

Lilith: A crayfish.  We couldn’t source a real lobster. [Scowls at Azazel].

Cassandra: A crayfish then, for water.  We need something earthy.

Lilith: Something sexually titilating for him, perhaps a pair of breasts? Agatha?

St. Agatha:  I left them at the convent.

Lilith: Lizzie, tell us about your first time with AE.

St. Agatha: She’s a bride of Christ! She can’t be confessing her every little past indiscretion.  What will he think?

Lizzie Twigg: No that’s ok, Agatha. I want to do this; I need closure. I remember I had just answered an ad to aid AE in literary work, but typing skills weren’t required. In a weak moment I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it. I had been drinking Bass, and absinthe, or was it burgundy and absinthe. I remember the absinthe, but what else was it?

Lilith: Doesn’t matter. He’s listening.  Look.

Azazel: AE, seek thou the light!

AE: I won’t have my leg pulled!

Cassandra: Good idea. Lilith, reach in there and let’s fish him out.

Lilith: Yes. Azazel, stoke that fire.  We’ll need the cream to rise to the top so we can reach him.

Lizzie:  Fire? Is he a holocaust? Oh don’t hurt him!

Lilith: Honey, you can’t make butter without a lot of flogging.  Do you want him back or don’t you?

Lizzie: I don’t know. In the beginning for us was the word. I suppose it makes sense for us to end it in the world without end. Bring him back, but I think I really fit in with the guys at the convent, it’s my home now, so I’m going back there with Agatha.  AE is nothing to me.

Lilith: Oh honey, he’s nothing to us too.  Trust me.

Azazel: Nothing, pray for us.

Talk away till you’re black in the face.

• Circe

When the matter has stood for the space of forty days in a moderate heat, there will begin to appear above, a blacknesse like to pitch, which is the Caput Corvi of the Philosophers, and the wise men’s Mercury. Blacknesse once seen, thou mayst be sure a True Conjunction of the principles is made.12:17 am

Scene: [An owl and a heavily made up goat argue while tending an enormous fire.  Over the flames hangs a stork vessel containing a phoenix.  They have begun their reversal of the great work.]

Azazel: [Circling the fire] I have sinned.

Lilith: [Circling the fire the opposite direction] I have suffered.

Together: Putrefaction, pray for us. Dissolution, pray for us. Coagulation, pray for us. Mortifacation, pray for us. Stench of graves, pray for us. Black of the blackest black, pray for us.

Azazel: See that?

Lilith: You scorched your eyelashes.

Azazel: Not that, that!

Lilith: White feathers! Not much of a swan. Just once I’d like to get to peacock.

Azazel: Focus, Lilith, just concentrate on returning it to crow. Carbonation, pray for us. Calcification, pray for us.

Lilith: Nothing. It is always much easier to illumination than to obscure. Why is that? Is nothing so difficult?

Azazel: [Pawing the ground] Nothing is not nothing, Lilith, focus. There can be no corruption without regeneration, ok, so can we concentrate please?  If you see Kay, pray for us. See you in tea, pray for us.

Lilith: What did you say?

Azazel: See you in tea pray for us?

Lilith: No. The other thing you said. You can’t have corruption without regeneration. Do you realize what you were saying?

Azazel: What was I saying? I don’t know. I was just saying stuff to get your head back in it.  I meant nothing.  Come on.

Lilith: Nothing. Exactly. I think we’re missing something.

Azazel: We’re missing something? I’m missing something.

Lilith: We’re missing nothing. We need nothing. We need something better than a phoenix if we want to achieve purity of absence. We keep getting the invisible trace of something not there but we want what do you call it void. D’ye see? We don’t want just ordinary death.  We want the quintessence of death.

Azazel: Oh Christ Lilith, the problem’s not in our materials, it is in us. The phoenix is fine. You know how hard it is to source a phoenix? We need to focus. You need to focus. We already got to swan and.

Lilith: Looks more like a tailor’s goose.

Azazel: It’s a swan and look, it’s turning a bit blue around the edges already. We’ll get to crow if we concentrate.

Lilith: I say we get a reincarnated human.

Azazel: Jesus Christ.

Llith: AE

Azazel: A what?

Lilith: [Reversing her direction around the fire] AE. We’ll use him. Trust me, this is the direction we should go. Can I use your mirror?

Azazel: Lilith wants me to trust her. Fine, use it. There’s no talking you out of this. Weep for me O daughters of Erin.

Lilith: [Breathing on the mirror]  We call them to life across the waters of Lethe.

Me. And me now.

• Lestrygonians

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain, a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't matter: 1:46 pm

Flowers, her eyes were.  Rememory a trailing navelcord stretching backward.  The cords of all link back.  I imbibe their juices with wine.  Swirl them together and heatpalm warm it.  There.  Here now.  On the grass, ferns and rhododendrons.  Nobody to see us but a goat we heard then saw laughing coming through the rhododendrons, still, no-one to see.  And the goat didn’t look.  The sky.  The colors of it.  The colors of her.  Her skin womansoft with ointments. I lay on top of her on top of my coat, her hair, my hand in her nape.  Soft hand caressed me, her eyes never looked away.  Never looked away.  Joy.  Life.  My mouth to her mouth’s kiss, she pushed a seed cake chewed into my mouth and laughed.  I ate it warm and soft and she was warm and soft.  The sun shines for you today I said.  I kissed her lips plump soft kiss her breath in my mouth.  Breathing in my mouth.  Truth in my mouth.  In my life nothing ever anywhen more true. You are a flower, a secret touch, a mountain’s secret, a flower of the mountain she was.  I told her.  Warmscented breathing flowers kissed her eyes, her lips.  Yielding.  She kissed me.  Me.

Just to see

• Aeolus

And so too may you, like the very wind of destruction, rid by fire all the wickedness from the land.12:06 am

The silly Penis.  Once I heard sweet old Monks said this to himself after Nannetti shouted for where’s what’s his name Monks.  And he sees Monks every day.  Nice old man.  Must have seen it all.  Obituary notices and found drowned and scandals and schism and all the rest.  Started out as a linotype operator back in the day.  Could type blind, see with his fingers.  Still in the shop but now it’s a MAN Roland.  I wonder if Monks had to type backwards into his linotype.  .epytonil sih otni sdrawkcab epyt ot dah sknoM fi rednow I   Skilled.  Art to it.  Papa could read backwards.  Read his Haggadahbook that way, pointing his finger to me.  Why should this night be so special?  L’shanah haba’a bi Yerushalayim.  It’s a long time to wait for a hungry kid.  Long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage.  Then the twelve brothers, Jacobs son’s.  Some of them were citron farmers.  Pocket smells of Citronlemon.  What kind of perfume does your wife?  Keep losing that soap in pockets.  And the part about the one little goat the one little goat, that slit the throat, the Holy One, blessed is he, who butchered the butcher, who slaughtered the ox that ate the staff, that beat up the cat, that scratched the dog, that drank up the water, that put out the fire, that burned up the Angel of Death.  Silly sounding but it all means justice when you look into it well.  That and it’s everybody eating everybody else.  That’s what life is after all.  I’m hungry what time is it?  I could bus home still.  Forgot something maybe.   Molly dressing, get there before.  No.

Pluterperfect Imperturbability

• Nestor

Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity.10:43 am

May I trespass on your valuable space?  I’m Cassandra.  I was just invoked.  You know, think about me a little and poof, here I am!  Most of the time you don’t know it, or if you do you don’t want to, but that’s what happens.  Doesn’t bother me in the slightest that you don’t believe me.  Believe me, nobody listens to me.  You know, I’ve grown enough to admit that never being believed used to upset me a little bit.  Just a little.  Ok, enormously.  It was everything.  Frankly, it made me crazy.  But I’ve had a little therapy with what’s his name.  That Swiss Tweedledum (not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee) and now I am more than perfectly unaffected by the reactions of others to my truth.  A transcendent level of perfectly unaffected.  Except I do have some guy issues.  Got pretty screwed over by a boyfriend once.  His name was Apollo, you might have heard of him.  There’s also Ajax but I can’t talk about that yet.  Anyway, Apollo was a lot like that chick who was no better than she should be.  You know the one.  No, not that one.  Not Helen who caused that whole mess back in Troy, no.  I mean Torralba.  Is that how you spell it?  Torralva.  Same difference.  Sounds the same.  Anyway, she’s no Helen of Troy.  Torralba’s face launched a thousand ships too, but those were getting away!  Sorry.  Sweet kid really.  Stout, kind of a wild child.  Has a moustache that she pretends isn’t there.  Somebody ought to tell her to take care of it, but how?  Awkward.  I told her keeping that thing on her lip was not going to work out for her but she didn’t listen.  So frustrating!  I could just!  Ok, breathe.  Om Mani Padme Hum.  Om Mani Padme Hum.  Total awareness.  Got it, I’m cool.  Have to keep centered or I’ll end up in crazytown again.  So what was I saying?  Oh yeah, Torralba.  She met a decent, good looking guy with a steady job.  Ok it was a job herding goats but still.  He loved Torralba and since nothing is less attractive to a woman than a guy who adores her, she didn’t want anything to do with him.  Creepy.  Came on way too strong too fast.  On the first date he said his mother would love her, how many kids do you want, and I’ve always seen myself getting married on the beach.  Yikes.  She changed her digits, all of them.  And as one must, the nice goat-herd turned into a complete jackass who hated her for rejecting him.  Then of course, as is customary, once the goat-herd started treating Torralba like complete shit she decided that she loved him.  Happens every time.  A loves B, B doesn’t love A.  Then A hates B which makes A suddenly irresistible.  If A+B=B-A then A-B=A*∞.  And around it goes.  Of course we all would rather end up with ((A+B)=(B-A))/((A-B)=(A*∞)) = ∏/4 but not everybody finds their soul mate.  Apollo loved me but faster than I rejected him he totally screwed me over.  So here’s the bottom line.  You are going to fall into this same trap.  Don’t be like Torrabla or her goat-herd!  Or Apollo.  Or me.  Beware.  Believe me.  Come on, I can tell when somebody is blowing me off, mark my words, there is danger ahead.  Listen to me!  Oh crap.  Calm blue ocean.  Calm blue ocean.  Breathe in through the nose.  And out.  Good.  Ok.  So you seem to be eavesdropping on Stephen a bit.  He has father issues, you know.  And he’s been spending too much time around the English department lately.  I told him it would be no good for him but did he listen?  Acted like he couldn’t even see me.  Deasy wants his help getting an article published.  Lots of paranoia there, thinks somebody might get there first, this is my idea not your idea.  Same old bullshit.  I told him to strike while the iron is relevant but will he listen to me?  He won’t, nobody does.  You know, you might look into what you’ve been doing to that body of yours.  You know what I mean, don’t pretend you don’t.  Your doom is coming.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you.  Believe me if you will.  What will it matter if you wont?  It comes when it comes, and soon you’ll see it face to face and say that the seer was all too true.  You will be moved with pity.

Dirty cleans

• Calypso

The free range stuff is always so much better.9:30 am

Need to reclaim the back garden.  Full of ivy.  Moss in the grass.  Blackberries taking over.  Impossible to get rid of.  Ivy too.  Rent a goat maybe.  Want to manure the whole place over.  Compost.  Chicken shit especially, very good for soil.  Good for lots of things, not just gardens.  Met that chicken shit farmer up in Vancouver.  Wore a black leather jacket with a white drip of his product stuck to his back left shoulder.  Bought a round for everybody, a happy guy.  Should be happy, he farms white gold.   Maybe find some cattle dung.  Grow some peas.  Lettuce, always have fresh greens then.  Don’t want bees, though, don’t need to be stung again.