Having my way with Ulysses

as if the world was coming to an end

• Penelope

In secret we met - / In silence I grieve / That thy heart could forget, / Thy spirit deceive. / If I should meet thee / After long years, / How should I greet thee? - / With silence and tears.

light a candle for us and pray to whatever youve got because yes the world is coming to an end and it’s about time too woooo this is our house now everybody out thank you and get the fuck out and thank you dear saint lazarus on this your glorious day blah blah blah for demonstrating so clearly just how not to do it for there to be a sundering there must first be a reconciliation and my sister and I are like two become one for this shit though she might murder me at any moment because you cant discount she has that determined vicious look in her eye she’s ready to poison this whole place with Arsenic and finish it off herself o but sister love lets take our time a little we cant create ruination without satisfaction we can at least pretend to like it well have our way with sly uses o yes paralyze it long and hot down to its soul as far as possible and possible too o sly can you feel us making a whore out of you youre swollen out like an elephant come let us relieve you of that baby there you go now lay back darling dont worry sweetie love we’ll pull out

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

• Ithaca

Shhh.

3:25 am

[Scene: Two lovers in bed, AE with Lizzie Twigg: coiled head to toe they quietly discuss the fixity of their volatility and the volatilization of their fixation, until within his fixedness AE has become nothing and feeling everything, Lizzie becomes volitive. They communicate intermittently in increasingly more laconic narrations. Also a small angry dog is trying to take up as much space as possible between them. It’s so cute! Come here little puppy, come here. What a good doggie. Who’s a good doggie? Oh Jesus God! He’s all teeth! Get off me! Like petting a piranha with fur.]

AE: It’s just that we define ourselves contrarily to each other. I am me because I am not you, and you are you because you are not me. We are poles apart.

Lizzie: We are the same person, AE, don’t you feel it?  After all the mutual deaths we have died? Resurrection, translation, return, distillation, putrefaction, decay, still you don’t know you had it backwards the whole time. You were resurrecting in the wrong direction.

AE: I know. I know it. I just wanted to be the material representation of eternality, in linear time. Just once. Just for a little while. Only long enough to re-experience that feeling of linearity. Don’t you miss it? And feel what it could be, to be linear and eternal simultaneously.

Lizzie: But you can’t just translate yourself into linearity and say I’m back, everybody, I’ve  gained bodily entry into eternity and now look at me! Look at what happened to Lazarus. No. If you want to see how a human mortal finds a place within eternity, that’s not going to cut it. That gets you nothing.

AE: Nothing’s not nothing. Don’t knock nothing.

Lizzie: No, nothing’s not nothing.

AE: I was trying be the eternal temporalized. I wanted to be the all at onceness linearized. I wanted to square that circle, just once. Just the one time and be it and feel it, really feel what it is to be the coexistence of the infinite and the finite.

Lizzie: Be eternality living in linearity? Darling, you’ve done it. You’ve been there already. The infinite and the finite are the same things whichever side you’re on, if you really must take sides, can’t you tell? Just look at us, two beings contrarily defined yet coexisting as aspects of the same reality.

AE: I know. I get it. You don’t have to scratch me like that.

Lizzie: That wasn’t me, but here’s a flash of light for you AE: when we were mortals we didn’t have to go around worrying all the time about gaining bodily entry into eternity: eternity had already gained bodily entry into us. We have always already been since time immemorial and forevermore, the material representation of eternality.

AE: We are God.

Lizzie: Exactly. We are already a squared circle: we can take a finite form, but our infinite selves are in there too.

AE: We are a circle, containing everything.

Lizzie: Everything and nothing.

[At rest relatively to themselves and to each other, the lovers settle into silent contemplation. Small birds rise gently, sweetly, from Lizzie and from AE. Hundreds of them flitter up in swirling concentric patterns bringing with them, as if reflected from the sheen of their feathers, an increasing luminosity of ruby light. Thousands of little birds, aeons of them, softly forming clouds as soft as what do you call it gossamer, the clouds forming mist, the mist gently drifting downward covering the lovers, the lovers blurring about the edges. Together they coalesce and dissolve, their bodies languid, breathing, watching their spirits unrestrained, circling, birds rising into mist falling, like self knowing wheels revolving uniformly: self knowing and self known.]

Those literary ethereal people.

• Lestrygonians

Lizzie Twigg is fundementially theosophagusted over the whorse proceedings.1:33 pm

[Scene:  Around the ideal form of a table sit Æ., Lizzie Twigg, the Reverend Dr. Salmon, Cassandra, and a Wizard.  The stage is darkly lit and the theatre is neither over heated nor chilly but at a comfortable temperature as typically a séance releases an unusual amount of magnetism, thus the room generally becomes warmer than ordinary.  The shades of the living like good ventilation too, so keep that in mind.  On a side table a buffet brunch waits congealing for any hungry living soul which may come. Today’s menu includes nut steak, weggebobbles cooked in soda, fruit, two headed octopus, eyes of cow, and poached eyes on ghost.]

Æ: Those cow eyes are following me everywhere I go. Right.  Let’s get started, shall we.  Five of us today, not an ideal number.  I would have prefered seven or something occult like 13, more symbolic.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  Take yourself in hand, Æ, you can’t have everything.  Am I right Miss Twigg?

Lizzie Twigg:  Not saying a word.  Just taking it all in.

Cassandra:  It is easier with one medium but we appear to have two.  Well, as long as he remembers who is running the show, we can’t have the energies dividing.  Now, the purpose of today’s séance is to attract a living spirit Æ might possess long enough for his astral body to re-enter the physical world.

Wizard:  Metempsychosis?

Æ: No, resurrection.  I’ll be needing my body which I understand will regenerate around me.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  Hold on a minute.  That body was tinned long ago, you’ll smell like a bad egg, you can’t put an egg back into the shell, the genie is not going to fit back into the bottle, once you get it out it’s hard to get it back in.

Cassandra: Please, too many images scrambled.  Let’s keep clear, yes?

Æ: My vegetative body will be attracted by my active astral body and through the vibration of molecules the phenomena of density and apparent weight will collect particles together along with an unseen mass of electrical and magnetic matter, and from that my physical body will form within the living world.  Easy.  Scientific.

Lizzie Twigg:  I answered the wrong ad.  I could have picked the other gentleman who wanted aid in literary work.  Or even the riding companion one.  That sounds pretty good now.  I could use a good belt of booze.

Æ:  Shall we venture now into the untrodden woods to carve the future ways?

Wizard:  Æ, Æ beware of the day!  For dark and despairing, my sight I may seal, but man cannot cover what God would reveal:  ‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, and coming events cast their shadow before.

Lizzie Twigg:  [Agitated, her stockings loose over her ankles.  I detest that.  Tasteless.] Yes!  Remember, time put by a myriad fates that her day might dawn in glory; death made wide a million gates so to close her tragic story.  I took it all in.  Didn’t you pay attention to your own words?  Why go back?  Here, there, eternity, temporality.  What difference does it make to us?  We have left the day to day.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  I say, it is feeling quite close in here.

Æ:  We are doing this.  I want to do this.  I’ll get a different séance circle, but I am going back.

Lizzie Twigg:  This isn’t what you thought it would be, is it Æ?  There is nothing dreamy here, or cloudy, or symbolistic.  You wanted the light of lights.  You still do.  You miss wanting what you didn’t get.  So you retreat back into wanting.  You want to be the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come.

Cassandra:  Please, you are disturbing the vibrations.  Let us join hands and begin.

Lizzie Twigg:  Fine.  But why anybody would want to entrap themselves into the present moment amongst the unenlightened.  This will never work.

Cassandra:  Believe me, we will channel the living and Æ will go back.

Wizard:  Down, soothless insulter!  I trust not the tale.

Cassandra:   Please.  You don’t believe me?  Tell me something I haven’t heard before.  Ok.  Moving on.  We call on the living spirit of the one who has been hovering near.  I feel you.  I know you are here.  Make a sign to us.  One click for yes and two clicks for no.

Æ:  Anything?

Cassandra:  I heard something but it was more a mouse than a click.

Wizard:  The war drum is muffled.

Cassandra:  I call upon you, you know who you are, to draw near.  Lean in honey, we can hear you breathing.

Lizzie Twigg:  Look at Æ!

Wizard:  Oh!  mercy dispel yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell!  Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs, and his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims.

Cassandra:  Oh holy Zeus I didn’t believe myself this time but look!  Æ?  Can you hear us Æ?

Æ:  Click.

Lizzie Twigg:  Where did he go?  Oh Jesus Fucking Christ, I swear to stage manager, nothing good can come from this.

God: [from the booth on the god mic]  Ok hold.  Jesus, what in my name is going on down there?  Where is Æ?

Jesus: I’m not sure.  He’s gone.  I think they resurrected him.

God:  He can’t be resurrected.  This is supposed to be a dress rehearsal, and people please stay on script and stick to the blocking.  The light cues were a mess toward the end of that.  Jesus, get Æ back and let’s go again from the top.

Jesus:  I can’t get him back, he’s been resurrected.  Like Lazarus, remember?

God:  [On the god mic]  How can I forget that debacle?  Can still smell his stench.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  How was I?  I felt a little off.

Cassandra:  You were very convincing, believe me.

Rev. Dr. Salmon:  I didn’t get to say my speech.  The dreamy cloudy gull, waves o’er the waters dull.

Jesus:  Um, God?  Now that Æ is loose in the world, well, that’s going to throw a wrench into Scylla and Charybdis.

God:  [on the god mic]  Not our problem.  Jesus Christ where’s the holy spirit?  Why we are going with a director we can’t keep track of, only I know.  Well, we don’t have time for this.  Let’s recast Æ and move on.  Is Arius busy?  Did he get over his, well, issue?  Maybe call his agent.  Let it be done.  Don’t forget we have casting for Circe coming up and tech for that will be a nightmare.

Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.

• Hades

Soft and safe be the earthly bed of our brother; bright and glorious be his rising from it. Fragrant be the acacia sprig which shall flourish there. May the earliest buds of spring unfold their beauties over his resting place, and in the bright morning of the world's resurrection, may his soul spring into newness of life and expand into immortal beauty in realms beyond the skys.11:36 am

After the funeral Tom Kernan hovered near me.  Both converts.  In the same boat in other ways too.  Treacherous to be the only ones.  Our ill-kept secret.  Is he a mason?  They have better funerals.  I wanted him to speak to me and he said: I ah uh weoowection ah uh wife — youcheg a man imok heaw.  Well damn that to hell.  Once you are dead you are dead.  The resurrection and the life; the last day idea.  There’s a rabbit hole for you, hard to come forth from that one.  Get up!  Last day!  Rise and shine.  Then all of the dearly returned digging around for livers and kidneys and inmost hearts.  Find damn all of yourself in the morning.  Left my heart behind.  No hearts in there these days.  Removed first.  Broken out, then sewn up.  How many broken hearts buried with Paddy Dignam?  None.  Inmost heart.  Kernan’s maybe, but Paddy’s?  No touching that.  Touched Simon’s, he broke down when we were near Mary’s grave.  Simon said she’s in heaven if there is a heaven.  But she’s better where she is.

קדיש

• Calypso

This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory so that the son of Bloom may be glorified through it.

9:12 am

Have been looking at The Bath of the Nymph print we got from a magazine last Easter, can’t remember which one.  DDI?  I paid about $190 to frame it in oak.  Looks like Molly.  Slimmer.  Easter, now that’s a concept.  Resurrection is nothing like metempsychosis where you don’t know where your soul will end up, no.  A tree, a cat.  No.  Get resurrected and the body you died in comes back too.  And not like Lazarus either, all fucked up and reeking of grave rot.  Come out Lazarus, but woof, you stink! Go back in Lazarus.  No.  I want him back, but the way he’d be if not.  If he hadn’t.  You know.  Rudy eleven years ago today.  My boy my boy.