Having my way with Ulysses

That is not more to stand.

And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

3:05 am

Instructions on how to kill yourself:

First, you must find a reason not to live. There exists uncountable reasons but you must choose at least one and try to make it as ineffable as possible so the people you leave behind may feel suitably at a loss for words when they find you. An added benefit: it will be easier for the people who attend your wake, interment, scattering of the ashes, memorial service, or what have you, to speak in hushed and reverent tones if they find themselves capable of speaking at all. Amongst the reasons not to live you might choose: you are suffering from progressive melancholia; by ceasing to exist you will bring your existence to the attention of the person who barely knows you exist, though you maintain a unique awareness of said person’s existence; pondering the great nothingness of everythingness has inverted your thoughts into a perpetual retrospective arrangement.

Once you have found your reason not to live, you must reduce said reason by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune. Take it all down to one point: a singularity which contains everything.

Compose a note to be found suitably near your corpse, but not in a place where it might slip beyond a finder’s field of vision. Clutched in the hand makes for great cinema and literature, but rarely works in real death. Include in your epistle a précis of your reason not to live. Ask somebody to be kind to your surviving pets.

Leave something in a book, marking a particularly resonant passage or one which will send the finder harkening back in a retrospective arrangement upon discovery. Possibilities may include leaving something in a book at a symbolic page number. One might even leave something in a book which will send the finder to something left in another book which will send the finder to more books always to the last term of the preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, originating in and repeated to infinity. Possible items to leave in books: puzzle pieces, scraps of a shirt, pages of other books. Possible symbolic number: 1132.

Select the method of suicide according to your own levels of drama, squeamishness, accessible materials, pain tolerance, or desire to leave a nice looking corpse. There is no need to be elaborate, if you are already poisoning yourself slowly with something: increase the dose; if you tend toward recklessness perhaps walk closer to the cliff edge until 32 feet per second per second takes care of the matter for you; have the light at the end of your tunnel be an oncoming train, or if your perambulations bring you near an oncoming Jagannath: toss yourself into his path. You’ll receive an added bonus for that last one.

If you have items locked away, say in a drawer, leave a key handy or better still, unlock the drawer before your demise so the living won’t have to destroy the furniture to access its contents. It’s just common courtesy.  Now go.

Beware of the steamroller.

The door to suicide is open, but theologians assert that, in the subsequent shadows of the other kingdom, there will I be, waiting for myself. 1:56 am

Our lives are in peril tonight. I know this because look, up close everything is shifting sifting just slightly into newness. Look at yourself, closer, there. Look yourself in the eyes and see that. You are your own deliverance from sin, see it? A different grouping of bones and flesh. Throw your used up old self under the wheels and absolve yourself for lifetimes. Let him crush you like a spider and you’ll walk with the kings of infinite space. Be a body present absent mindedness and chuck yourself under Jagannath’s wheels. Kill yourself: it will do you good.

The last straw.

Friends, I have forgotten two things. I wish all to know that I do not propose to sell any part of my country, nor will I have the whites cutting our timber along the rivers, more especially the oak. I am particularly fond of the little groves of oak trees. I love to look at them, and feel a reverence for them, because they endure the wintry storms and summer's heat, and not unlike ourselves seem to thrive and flourish by them. One thing more: those forts filled with white soldiers must be abandoned, there is no greater source of trouble and grievance to my people.

12:44 am

Scene: [Tranquilla convent, infirmary. Lizzie Twigg is unconscious and lying on a tinseled oak bed. The shading she has painted with loving pencil on her eyes, bosom, and shame is badly smeared. Sister Mary Peter lifts her from the secondbest bed while St. Agatha straightens the warm impress of her warm form.]

St. Agatha: Don’t jostle her like that.

Sister Mary Peter: I should drop her for what she’s done. She has sinned. We have suffered!

St. Agatha: Sister. Our Sister. Shh! Just look at her. Classic curves: a thing of beauty. Here, put her down on her stomach, we can take the powderpuff to the spot where her back changes name.

Sister Mary Peter:  No, please I beg you. What must my eyes look down on. [Nearly drops Lizzie Twigg but catches her with her leg.]

St. Agatha: Nekum! Remember your wounded knee! Come on, let’s see if she has hair there.

[Sister Mary Peter returns Lizzie Twigg to the bed, facing up.]

Lizzie Twigg: [Talking in her sleep] Where dreamy creamy gull waves o’er the waters dull.

Sister Mary Peter: Oh that’s it. [Gives Lizzie Twigg a hard shove with both hands. She rolls a dummymummy in the sheet off of the bed and onto the floor.

St. Agatha: Mary Peter!

Lizzie Twigg: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschb! What’s happening? I feel like I fell from a cliff!

St. Agatha: You fell out of bed. Sister Mary Peter help her up! [St Agatha rushes to kiss Lizzie Twigg in four places as she crawls jellily forward from under the bed, with dignity].

Lizzie Twigg: [Returning to bed] I’m fine. What happened? Mnemo? I don’t think I’m in full possession of my faculties. I feel like I’ve been run over.

Sister Mary Peter: You were run over, and me too trying to save you. I think I have a concussion.

St. Agatha: Ssh! She is right, our sister. Don’t you remember, dear? You tried to perform a solo ghost dance and then you threw yourself under Jagannath.

Lizzie Twigg: [Covers her face with her hands looking through parting fingers] Oh God. Where’s AE?

Sister Mary Peter: Where’s AE? Sacrilege! Who cares about AE? He’s nothing! What are you doing trying to re-kill yourself over a man? Your crucifix not thick enough? What do you lack within our barbed wire?

St. Agatha: Ssh! Lizzie, you can’t kill yourself again. We immortals have no word for that in our dictionary. I know AE’s return was difficult for you.

Sister Mary Peter: Difficult!

St. Agatha: Ssh, sister yes, it was difficult. Lizzie, you fell 32 feet per second per second for him all over again. But here at Tranquilla we are brides of Christ. You must have no more desire. We are only the ethereal.

Lizzie Twigg: Only ethereal! Then how do you account for that large moist stain on Mary Peter’s robe? And Mother Agatha, I can smell the cloud of stench escaping from your crack.

St. Agatha: [A button pops off of her sackcloth habit; she’s lost a charm] Listen sister, we know where we’d all be if we were only ethereal, but we won’t turn your strength into our weakness. Where do you think you were going to end up, after Jagannath squashed you? Where? Where was that ghost dance going to take you? To Sitting Bull floating in the ether? Rise up all you want, go ahead, but you’ll come back down. You think you were going to ghost dance yourself up to some cloudy waiting lounge, then sit around wondering when the vorex will open under AE’s feet? Circumstances alter cases, have you learned nothing from your time here? Don’t you understand anything? Our convent is built on buffalo holocausts. The skull mountains: we’ve shaped them into cathedrals. You think we don’t bleed? We are the sisters of the last straw and Grandfather Tatanka Iyotanka is our patron saint. [Looking toward Standing Rock] Father I come! Father give us back our arrows! [Looks at Lizzie Twigg with features hardening] You say you are done with AE then you try this? Fool someone else sister, not me.

You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.

IX. Do not write under the empire of emotion. Let it die, then invoke it later. If you are able then to revive it as it was, you have arrived in art, in the middle of the road. 12:07 am

Scene: [As McIntosh begins his return descent through the trap door, decreasing luminosity of ruby light burns inwardly.  The muses enter en masse from the grid.]

God [On the god mic]  And now, the 9 new muses present the 10 new commandments!

The Muse of Commerce:  [Stabbing herself through the heart] You shall have no other gods before me.

The Muse of Operatic Music: [Chained inside a water tank]  Create no images of any thing that is above, on, or beneath the earth. And nothing underwater.

The Muse of Amor:  [Drinking prussic acid]  If you do make images, you shall not worship them or buy them. You love only me. I get jealous and I’ll come after you, your children, your grandchildren, and their kids.

The Muse of Publicity: [Sucking on a pastille of aconite] My name is under copyright protection. Don’t invoke me.

The Muse of Manufacture: [Snorting arsenic] Only one day of rest, people, not two.

The Muse of Liberty of Speech: [Opening her veins]  Don’t talk back to your parents.

The Muse of Gastronomy: [Refusing food]  Don’t kill.

The Muse of Plural Voting:  [Casting herself under Jagannath]  If you’re married, don’t sleep around.

The Muse of Private Hygiene:  [Casting herself from the top of the Space Needle]  No five finger discounts.

The Muse of Seaside Concert Entertainments:  [Casting herself into a wine vat]  Don’t talk about people behind their backs.

The Muse of Painless Obstetrics:  [Asphyxiating herself in a gas oven]  Don’t lust after married people.

The Muse of Astronomy for the People:  [Hanging herself with stylish violet garters]  Just don’t even look at what other people have.

The Veiled Sibyl: [Leaping from Windows]  And don’t read fiction published on the internet; there’s no future in it.

What am I following him for?

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! . . . . . . . Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!11:44 pm

Don’t look, I’m not yet finished.  What, do you want me with no legs and only stumps for arms? Makes no difference to me, understand, the stream of life is always passing.  I’ll pass right over you regardless.  If you like, pull me, make my wheels turn, and if you touch me you might get close enough to look me in the eye.  And then! And then!  Then I will deliver you from all your sins.  Or throw yourself under my wheels and then see what I can do for you. Lifetimes worth of absolution. I can’t always save you understand, you’ll have to meet me at least halfway with presence of body and absence of mind.  Stop that! That’s my bucket of porter what the hell are you doing?  Good God now it’s all pig sticky! Have you no pride? Come closer and I’ll trample it for you.