Having my way with Ulysses

Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the end of the world.

In the stories I have mentioned the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plentitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies.

12:25 am

Are you a god too? You don’t say much do you. Wanna play dice? No? Do you know what i’m asking of you? Some other time, yes? Or maybe you don’t speak my language. How about this: 3.5 = A time, times and half a time. Yes? A little reaction. Now we’re sensing a little of the cosmic force. How about 77? 2+3+5+7+11+13+17+19? Oh did I offend you? Forgive my crudeness. I’ll rephrase that. My darling, I sort of believe strong in you. Would you join me in a little 4² + 5² + 6²? It’s up to you. You don’t have cold feet about the cosmos do you? Careful! Watch that infinite tightrope. It’s invisible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not sealed in here with us. That thing goes both ways, don’t you know, from zenith to vacuum, and we are damn close to vacuum now. Look at the clouds forming. My, it’s warm. It’s getting so hot in here; it must be the heat. We may be but a pair of squares, but seeings that we are all in a cauldron and everything, how about a 69 before we ? We can get all turned around and place our bets if we are coming or going.  Journey up looks the same as the journey down and the start and the end is the same point. Shall we put out heads between our knees and look around? Come on, before we evaporate to nothingness, let’s find out more about each other than we have forgotten.

Wander years of dreams return

Down through the generations men built the night. In the beginning it was blindness and sleep and thorns that tear the naked foot and fear of wolves. We shall never know who forged the word for the interval of shadow which divides the two twilights; we shall never know in what century it stood as a cipher for the space between the stars. Other men engendered the myth. They made it mother of the tranquil Fates who weave destiny, and sacrificed black sheep to it and the cock which presages its end. The Chaldeans gave it twelve houses; infinite worlds, the Gateway. Latin hexameters gave it form and the terror of Pascal. Luis de León saw it in the fatherland of his shuddering soul. Now we feel it to be inexhaustible like an ancient wine and no one can contemplate it without vertigo and time has charged it with eternity. And to think it would not exist but for those tenuous instruments, the eyes.8:59 pm

I am a dream and I am your dreamer and also, look close, I am a page torn from an old copybook you cannot read so leave it, leave me. Trust me I am a bread cast on the waters. What’s this in your hand? I am a stick see? Too dark. Throw me, goodbye dear, thanks. I’ll stick here. I am a stick with lines and scars and letters inked into my flesh.  Carved upon the winedark sea. Wait.  No.  That’s my kidney.  I am a kidney, burn me instead.  I am a holocaust provided by an angel in stead.  I am a recording angel.  Read me if you can see but only the bats can see in the dark. Sleep, but first bend to see my face there. I am a dark mirror breathe on me. I stir. I am a reflection, nothing grows on me. I am a reflection of you done half by design. We’ll never meet again, O sweety. I fly here. There. Here. No harm in me, I am a transparency, but you can’t see me now.  I am a dark mirror. Don’t look too close naughty Grace darling, lean back swoony lovey and sleep. That’s better. Shhh. There you go. Shhh. There you go. I am a sleep.

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.

  The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not manage to unearth anything in the way of a hrön except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. 8:55 pm

Getting dark now.  From within: windows turning into mirrors; from without: mirrors turning into windows.  Can be shocking to be within and turn the light on, suddenly see yourself as others see you.  From without, we get the gradual, surroundings disappearing, and what you’re doing in there, well, darling little wretch, I see your I see all.  Baby your longest way round is the shortest way home. Think you’re escaping?  You’ve run into yourself.  Naughty darling.  Now let’s lie on our back and watch until three stars apparate, maybe we’ll see something new.  It’s the new I want.  Nothing’s new under the sun; let’s see what charades the moon will play.  Or a comet, Rip Van-Winkling toward us: coming back after twenty years asleep.  We’ll kiss our shoulder and take a return voyage around our own little world.

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.

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.

Who am I and what is this and when?

Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.14:14 pm

Nostra. Our. We. I think about that word sometimes.  Dante doing Borges and I.  Borges doing Dante and I.  Joyce does Shem the Penman and I in Finnegans Wake (but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white) and whatever other colors you got.  Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes. Changed it to Veronica Tonkin.  Most people call me Vern.  But Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes was what it was until we moved to the States and people don’t have so many names here.  I didn’t have this name at the start, understand, they didn’t have my name picked out right away.  And as an aside which might be somehow related to the acquisition of my name, my parents referred to the day I was born as the night my dad killed the general.  I’ve asked.  More than once.  I got side stories and whatever else  I could get when they’d switch over to Castellano.  With a little symmetry under the cemetery wall I was born at 14:14 pm, so whatever else went down happened later that night.  There was some catastrophe going on in that I was supposed to be a boy so they never imagined a girl name.  Didn’t think one up.  But worse than having no name, they had no earrings.  There I am a girl and no earrings.  So you can imagine.  It must have been chaos.  There was never any doubt they were getting a boy; the opposite possibility never crossed their minds.  This was before finding out early, you understand.  I was supposed to be a boy because that is how it was supposed to be.  But, besides the complication of no penis so no earrings and no name.  There was, remember, the matter of the possible slaying of some sort of general at the hands of my father.  My uncle was a general.  But he survived my birth.  And I don’t know if he was a general yet.  He commanded the Peruvian army at some point.  War with Ecuador.  Cars with armed escorts.  This was all long before he went to America with his cancer dying in what was that hospital?  East coast somewhere.  My mother didn’t go.  But the night after the afternoon on the day I was born, my father killed the general.  And I didn’t have a name. I don’t know for how long, it was a blank period.  Not a lot of time passed, I’m guessing, but try telling that to a newborn.  Even two hours is everything.  All there is and was and has been and none of those things matter.  What is there of time at the start?  At that moment of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, what is it like?  I forget.  So I didn’t have a name for I’m now guessing a long time.  They wanted names that were spelled the same in Castellano and in English.  My sister already had one. Virginia Maria. Virgin Mary if you really want to translate; try living up to that one, girls.  She did what she could.  Me?  Why Veronica?  My uncle the general who survived the day of my birth had a thing for Veronica Lake.  You know the one, silver screen blonde hair covering one eye.  Sexy.  Ended up an alcoholic prostitute, and lost it a bit upstairs toward the end.  Imagine a spectrum starting with the Virgin Mary to no end point.  I did what we could.  Me.  Vern and I.  That’s me in the picture writing us.

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.

Philosophy. O Rocks!

Spinoza believed that all things wish to go on being what they are -- stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger to be tiger.4:43 pm

Espansivo

I remember.  I remember.  That night in the box Michael Gunn gave us, listening to the tuning, its’ own music like feeding time at the zoo.  That clown in box above with his lens staring down into Molly’s dress and she on the edge of her seat listening to me.  Me.  I told her about Spinoza, exiled Jew, glass in his lungs.  Imagine a worm in the blood, he said, a tiny worm that can see corpuscles moving and colliding and rubbing together, flowing.  The worm would think each particle of blood its own part, not a whole fluid stream coursing in and out of bodies.  Just like us.  We are parts in relationship together, part of an infinite whole.  Or we are the worm, maybe, seeing everyone else as parts wanting to be the infinite whole.  Or wanting to be worms. Or a bee.  A bee sing stinging and drawing blood, one corpuscle at a time OW!  And our mind is part of a larger intellect or is the worm that is to say bee listening in to the parts and has to listen again to know it is a song.  She was riveted.  Hardly moved a muscle.  Beestung lips.  I sounded like this:

Mirror there.

At times in the evenings a face looks at us out of the depths of a mirror; Art should be like that mirror Which reveals to us our own face. They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels, Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca, Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca Of green eternity, not of marvels. It is also like the river with no end That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same And is another, like the river with no end.4:38 pm

Proportio dupla

 

I’m no expert at it, but I’m good at feeling anyone looking at me. I’ll gaze this way. Yes. Gaze far sidewise. I see something thoughtfully just there, past the wall. Look at how deep thinking I am, mouth slightly parted, longing eyes. Not sure which is my best side. Move slowly, with the music just a little closer, almost there. Yes. Mirror. Now both sides are facing, yet I present the unapproachable profile. Irresistable. I feel you in the air. The weight of your gaze resonates according to your distance from my profile. Perfect. I’m busy looking far out this way, so you can busy yourself looking at me. Watch me breathe. Deep breathing from the chest. In through the nose, out through the slightly parted mouth. Makes my lips pucker just enough, fills out that bottom one. You are still looking. I can tell. I’m still gazing over there but farther now. I’m gazing into a distance so far so far. I gaze erotically into the other side of the world. Longingly. Soulfully. I’m not your average run of the mill. Not in the same way that Cowley isn’t a priest. More like how the guy in the song isn’t a priest. But don’t think about that. Just gazing soulfully next to the mirror so you can gaze openly. Take your time. I can do this as long as it takes.

None nought said nothing.

In the tenth book of the Republic, eight Sirens preside over the revolution of the eight concentric spheres of the heavens. "Siren: an imaginary marine animal," we read in one particularly uncouth dictionary.3:56 pm

Niente

Simon.  Simon.  You hear me.  It’s me again, into the porches of your ear I’ll pour.   You hear me, but nobody else does.  It can be our little secret honey.  Go ahead, busy yourself with me.  Blow out my ashes.  Once.  Twice.  There you go.  Now finger your tobacco a little.  Two fingers.  Good boy.  Mmm.  Fondle me with those two fingers maybe?  That’s it.  Yes.  How naughty of you, poor simple Simon.  Rub me a little more, my maidenhair.  Mina Kennedy can’t see you, and Lidia is pretending not to look.  Listen to her sing.

Yes.  A little Latina sabor.  A little something else too.  Feeling thirsty?  You can order a whiskey from her.  Mmm.  Don’t worry about skinny Dilly or Boody or any of them.  They have your five dollars and some change.  Never mind that now.  Just fill me up baby and listen to Lidia.  Dry in here.  How about some nice fresh water and a little whiskey to keep it company.  Here’s Lenehan.  Listen to him.  Your son’s been buying drinks.  He has an income he isn’t sharing with you.  Yes.  You need a drink after hearing this.  Go ahead baby, just a half glass.  Wet your whistle, I won’t tell.