Having my way with Ulysses

History repeating itself with a difference.

(5b) To change reality for everyone -- the one I told you goes on -- is to accept the fact that everyone is (ought to be) what I am, and, in some way, to meld the real with mankind. That means admitting history, that is, the human race on a false course, a reality accepted until now as real, and away we go. 1:46 am

All right ladies, hold the mirror just so, can everybody see me? Just like this. Adjust your positioning so you can get a good angle yet still feel perfectly comfortable and supported. If anybody needs an extra rolled up blanket go ahead and get one. I’m sorry, I forgot your name, purple mat? Yes, you. Try switching hands. There you go. Good? Everybody ready? Now take a deep breath in through the nose, and feel your breath flowing through every part of your body, moving warmly down your spine, and exiting your body toward the mirror as you breathe out. Good. And breathe in through the nose like an inward voice two, three, four purple mat, you are sitting too tight. If you have a possible need to satisfy by moving a motion, no? Then you’ll need to get into position from standing again. Ok, feet shoulder width apart, there you go, mirror in the other hand, yup, breathe in through the nose and on the exhale bend down as if you let something drop, nice, then let your body fell down, 32 feet, per second, per second. There you go and breathe in, two, three, down the spine, and out toward the mirror. Good. Everybody still breathing? Keep breathing and follow my voice. As you look into your mirror I want you to focus your awareness on the opening just a short distance under where the back changes name. This is your when point; think of it as an omphalos if it helps you. Focus your breath towards your when point and allow this to be your breath’s one great goal. Now I want you to keep feeling the rhythm of your breathing and on your next inhale allow your breath to encircle all the calcifications of history within your body. Now imagine your breath melting history away. Breathe history down your spine and push it out toward the mirror. Good. And inhale, really feeling those mineral accretions of history melting into tailings. Keep breathing. Down the spine. And out. Now breathe in and feel the tailings shifting, melting, like ice into water two, three, four and out,  and on the next cycle we’ll push the last of history toward our one great goal. Ready and in, two, three, four, good, really focus, down your spine, and out, two, three, purple mat, there are buckets and rags in the utility closet. That’s ok. There’s one in every class.

He gets the plums, and I the plumstones.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

8:54 pm

But I suppose a plumstone is a seed, so it can return a plum.  History repeats itself.  The year returns.  Plumstone becomes tree becomes plum.  Don’t swallow the stone, it will tear your guts out.  But the new plum, is it the same plum?  Plum metempsychosis perhaps.  O sweet little, you don’t know how nice you tasted.  Yum yum.  See you next time around.  The new I want but: nothing new under the sun.  Self similar but not the same.  Only once it comes.  Returning: not the same.  Plum, plumstone, tree, plum.  Depends on where will it land.  Sand, nothing grows.  Fall at 32 feet per second per second, then rise little tree.  Resurrection.  Are you not happy in your ground plumstone?  Ba.

The rich incrustations of time

he spat in careful convertedness a musaic dispensation about his hearthstone, if you please (Irish saliva, mawshe dho hole, but would a respectable prominently connected fellow of Iro-European ascendances with welldressed ideas who knew the correct thing such as Mr Shallwesigh or Mr Shallwelaugh expectorate after such a callous fashiion, no thank yous! when he had his belcher spuckertuck in his pucket, pthuck?)

5:51 pm

Sedimentary reality — that’s history.  Do you see?  History is made from memory, and the memories that make history, the ones that stick, the ones that calcify, you know the ones, the ones that start out as shifting sands until they become mineral accretions on our bodies, oh where to what to.  I’ll stand to say it.  The memories that make history are the ones compressed into our souls through force, through hatred, through persecution.  All the history of the world is full of it.  Persecution, injustice.  Look at your self.  Train your eye on yourself.  What is your nation?  And what about your race? What are these worlds?  Where dyoublong?  You think, you think, you think history is what was when?  It happened then?  Over there?  Back before whatchuyoucallitwhen?  No.  There is no over there back when.  It’s here now.  Now.  Right now.  This very moment.  This very instant.  Look, the hatred, the injustice, you think that goes away?  It hardens and sticks.  It creates layers all over the place.  Layers right here now, all over us.  Everywhere.  And it persists.  I don’t mean extension in time, no.  There’s no line here from then to when.  I’m saying it is all right here now persisting.  Calcifying.  Barnacling.  Do you see?  Force, hatred, injustice, history.  Insult.  History.  That’s history.  That’s history.  And it’s no way to live.  No life.  You can’t.  You can’t.  But you know it’s no use to stand up to hatred.  Hatred collects and and and it shifts, and it compacts and compresses and it calcifies into memory.  And then it becomes history.  That’s how it happens.  The layers become reality.  Sedimentary reality.  The real built on shifting sands, until it creates a nice hard surface.  No standing up to that.  It’s the opposite of that is life.  It’s.  Oh, what is it?  That world everybody knows.  You know it, don’t you.

On to the star! Now! On. . . rats. Eh, tot? No.

The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. 12:21 pm

 

Damnit I’m mad.  Arrrra!  Don’t nod.  No, it is opposition.  Aha.  In words, alas drown I.  Borrow or rob?  Do, God, no evil deed!  Live on, do good.  Never odd or even. n+(n+1)^2.  I prefer pi. Is it I?  It is I.  Live not on evil.  Drawn I sit, serene: rest is inward.  Are we not drawn onward to new era?  God’s dog, won’t it now?  Do geese see God? History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.  I wake straightaway. Hey, Mr. Transmogrification.  Hi.  Ohm.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

Neither vengeance nor pardon nor prisons nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past. To me, hope and fear seem no less vain, for they always refer to future events: that is, to events that will not happen to us, who are the minutely detailed present. I am told that the present, the specious present of the psychologists, lasts from a few seconds to a minute fraction of a second; that can be the duration of the history of the universe. In other words, there is no such history.10:50 am

Why is history a nightmare from which I am trying to awake?  I’ll tell you why.  We are consigned to the moment we choose to experience.  That’s it.  Done.  Once we’ve turned a moment of now into an event that’s past then that’s that.  Live with it.  All other possibilities are impossible.  History is a trap.  I’ll admit this to you, I don’t give a shit, I’m telling you.  I am paralyzed by my lot in time.  The pain of it.  I can’t help it.  None of us can.  You can’t either.  The events of my life have shaped me to what I am at this moment and I am afraid.  The choices I’ve made cannot be unmade.  And worse, the actions I choose not to perform can never be possible again.  No wonder I feel guilt.  No wonder I am estranged from the light.  Are you afraid too?  I’ll lay it on the line for you:  it is not just about the things I have done or not done.  History is nightmarish because the more choices I make, the more compounded are the infinities of possibilities that are no longer available.  Finito.  Untouchable.  Pick a slim number of things to do to say to never do to never say, and you leave an infinity unchosen.  I could have, I should have, I might have, I would have.  There is no waking from this nightmare.  I am trying but what if at that sweet moment of consciousness that nightmare gives me a back kick?  So I go back to lucid dreaming.  Deasy is waiting for history to perfect itself into deity.  But listen to that?  You hear that?  That shout?  That’s God.  There’s God.  A shout in the street is all the deity there is.  Come one, you know what I mean.  You can sniff out the truth.  Smell it.  When was the last time you shouted for any reason?  Joy, fear, rage, ecstasy, what have you.  Feel it now.  During that shouting moment, that tiny moment, in the space of that sweet bit of infinity in the palm of your hand, you have no idea of history at all.  No thought of it, no need of it, no influence from it, no back kick, no memory, no guilt, no remorse, no horrible regret, no nothing.  Shout and you are free.  You transcend.  You are the manifestation of God.

Glorious Pious and Immortal Memory

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. 10:36 am

Look.  I’m not going to bullshit around.  Everything depends on our understanding of Time.  That’s the bottom line.  Deasy’s memory of history is not my memory of history, and it is not yours either.  Deasy exists in a world of final causation.  He divides past present and future with mirrored boundaries all reflecting one great goal.  An example.  You want an example?  Here’s an example.  Today in his idolatry of Ronald Reagan he remembered the glory of a miraculous and masterfully designed arms reduction accord with the Soviet Union.  But under Reagan’s presidency the cold war’s arms race escalated to extremes and the reduction made only a small dent in the pile of history destroying weaponry.  History destroying.  If only we could.  How do we destroy the nonexistent?  Deasy remembers a great immortal statesman.  His version of temporality cannot remember the Alzheimers, the shaking, the fumbling of words, the confusion, the memory gaps, the days filled with photo-ops starting at noon and ending at five, the disappearances to his rooms, the handlers, minders, babysitters, doctors, the wife feeding him his lines.  There are people who hold this history.  Who?  Whose memory is this?  Whose history?  Is it created through symbolic causation?  Deterministic causation?  Probabilistic causation?  Does it matter?  It does.  I know it does.  Look.  If you divide past present and future and picture it on a line with the past receding back there somewhere and the future in front of us, then history moves away from relevancy.  That’s one way to understand time.  But is time a line?  Oh our memory returns things to us we thought had long drifted away.  Nothing drifts anywhere.  Think of a memory now.  Go ahead, root around in there and find a big one.  See that scar over there?  That one with the nasty scab?  Ew that looks bad.  Pus.  Infection, it has spread into memories around it.  What was that horrible thing that happened to you?  Jeez.  Ok, pick the scab.  Go ahead, you can do it.  I’m right here.  It’s ok.  Pick it right off and let it bleed a little.  That’s it.  There you go.  That memory sure feels like it is happening again now, doesn’t it?  Still hurts.  Or rather, it hurts again.  It’s not back; it’s always been there.  It’s real.  Is time a line?  You tell me.