Having my way with Ulysses

What are the wild waves saying?

• Sirens

The glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth. 4:30 pm

Armonioso

 

Stop.  Do you see the woman with the seashell?  She’s pretending to hear the ocean in a shell, holding it to the man’s ear.  He’s pretending too.  She found the shell with a gentleman friend she tells her gentleman friend.  Perfect tempo.  They are listening to their own blood moving, an echo in a kind of retrospective arrangement.  The corpuscles moving nicely in the man now.  There’s blood in the water.  Competition: a perfect chord. She’s doing well. Hiding her ears with seaweed hair, exposing to place the shell, now hiding again.  Neck: brief exposure.  Her proportions perfect, he speaks, she waits, speaks.  All done in precise phi ratios.  The ratio of the F holes to the violin’s upper and lower pins, the ratio of the woman’s waist to her hips, the ratio of perfect mathematical harmonies in a scale, the ratio of his desire to hers, yes, that’s the important one, as it moves through time.  She calculates nicely the ratio of her eyes above the sheet to the face remaining hidden, the speed of her corpuscles to his.  Patience and timing.  Rhythm.  Like waves on a beach.  She knows her business now.  Lean in baby, mathematically you could be much closer.

Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial.

• Sirens

Be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.4:21 pm

Penseroso

Mathematics is not arithmetic.  Is that what you thought?  Oh my darling.  Arithmetic is  2*2/2=1+1.  That’s just juggling numbers.  But please, my delightful, look around you.  Go ahead.  light on something.  That is not a something, that is a collection of number in relationships, in patterns, whispering the universal language.  Some people, eccentrics mostly bless their hearts, think God is an external force.  Now I know my dear that you know better.  God is universal harmony perceived through number.  And if God is this universal harmony perceived through number, and play along, then time is the soul of God.  But don’t listen to me, who am I?  I am only God.  Listen to this:

 

Hear that?  Numbers.  Music is the voice of mathematics.  Go look in the mirror (haven’t we done this before?) and open your mouth wide.  Look in there, all the way in.  Two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than all others: the human voice.  Vibrate those little silky strings and out comes number.  Double that number and there you are, one octave higher.  Divide it in half, one octave lower.  An octave is the sound of the number 2.  Divide by 3 and you get the musical fifth, the fifth note on the scale.  Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink.  Quite.  Octaves and fifths love to make love.  Men and women, when left undisturbed, naturally sing a 5th apart.  Harmonious.  The number 4 = 2*2 = the second octave.  The number 5 is the musical third  (Pat.  Glorious that symmetry under the cemetery wall).   Bald Pat Quite: a chord.  You want a little dissonance?  Try the numbers 7, 11, and 13.  Heavy mojo in those numbers.  I don’t even want to tell you about the number 20. Want to get a little irrational?  Play the strings.  Guitar frets are placed according to the 12th root of 2.  Oh the numbers.  Durations of notes have ratios too.  And now we get into geometry.  Oh my beauteous ones.  If I could only tell you.  Or show you.  Or sing you.  Or touch you.  Or taste you.  If only.  Then I will never leave you.  And you will never leave me.  We can entwine in mathematical harmonies and whisper eternality into each other’s vibrating tympanic membranes.  You will weave patterns with your body and look in triangular mirrors.  But then you will see God and leave me to suffer.  Snivel.  Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing.  Wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:’d.

Decoy. Soft Word. But look: the bright stars fade.

• Sirens

No life on earth can be hid from our dreaming.3:45 pm

[Scene: Lidia Doce y Mina Kennedy are hiding behind their bar counter drinking maté]
 
Allegretto
 

Lidia Doce:  Carajo como jodes!  What the hell’d you do that for?

Mina Kennedy:  Is that really a sunburn?  You just look darker brown.

Lidia:  Yes it’s a goddamn sunburn, what do you think?

Mina:  I don’t know, you just don’t look very red.  Oh wait, those are blisters.

Lidia:  Estupida gringa.  Burns only look red on pink people.  Hands to yourself.  Now, let’s pick some music, lure them into our green mirror.  Maybe some old chicha or cumbia, or reggaeton?

Mina:  More of that Peruvian crap?  Maybe later.  How about this:

 

Lidia:  Why this?  Purple.  What does purple have to do with anything?

Mina:  Nothing.

Lidia:  Perfect.  Anything, nothing, doesn’t matter.  We’ll say what we’ll say.

Mina:  Right.  The material is immaterial.  Besides, if you want purple, look around.  Look out that window:  Ned Lambert, Maginni, Boylan, Molly’s garters.

Lidia:  You been looking up her dress?

Mina:  Of course.  I look everywhere.  So do you.

Lidia:  Fine.  Fair enough.  I don’t even know what the damn song is about but whatever, we’ll use it.  Ok.  So.  Yeah.  Ha.   4/4 time signature.  Simple, common, and imperfect.  Perfect.

Mina:  We’ll divide it into 16 parts, obviously.

Lidia:  Obviously.  La la la la la lah.

Mina:  Then we stretch it, say 16 days.  Symmetry.  See what that gets us.

Lidia:  How does that get us anything?  Your helmet blocking your brain?

Mina:  It’s a matter of time.

Lidia:  That’s better.  Tempo.  Let’s tell some time.  And Mina, try to look human this time.  We don’t want them knowing we’re.

Mina: Yeah, no we don’t.

Lidia:  Ready?  Cleave!

Seems a long way off.

• The Wandering Rocks

The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament.

No-one is anything.  I am a ghost.  Well, I haven’t died yet, no need to look at me as if my mind is off in some happy hunting ground somewhere.  I mean I have moved to an atemporal state without ever having died.  This is not resurrection, not metempsychosis.  I have translated.  You’ve done this too, occasionally.  You’ve lost track of time, before, yes?  That can happen when your world speeds up, when so much is happening that the whirlwind around you speeds time forward until you say you were so busy, had so much fun, were so distracted with it all, there was so much, so much, that time took flight.  This is not translation.  Translation comes from a deliberate slowness.  A stretching of the nothingness between full moments.  A pulling apart of discreet events until you inhabit the eventlessness between.  Time cannot reach you there.  Try it again, you’ve done it before.  You might make it happen for short spaces of time, short times of space with practice.  Like a muscle, the more you use it, the more supple, the more pliant.  Begin by cultivating your vision.  Practice seeing without seeing:  use your unseeing eye.  It helps to develop an idée fixe.  Find something with symbolic power.  For me it is chess.  Ah chess.  It contains the entire universe.  All of being and non-being, ever facet of the soul and the spaces between the facets beautifully composed onto 64 white and black squares.  I found chess in America.  I went after an American war to purchase land cheap, thinking I would grow cotton.  Instead I grew peaches.  Peach trees need little care.  Plant them, they blossom, then they grow.  Then peaches.  All they ask is we permit their becoming by staying clear of their being.  Then one harvest and endless solitude.  While my trees grew in Alabama I went to Atlanta and played chess.  The beauty, the harmony, of Zarathustra’s great invention!  In chess our adversaries move according to our moves, and we to them.  We form a helix coiling in a beautiful deadly dance, a rhythm of infinite possibilities.  64 squares, 8 X 8, infinity times infinity.  8 is the number of judgement.  And 64, 6+4=10, the perfect number.  The first triangular number to have a center, and the only one whose center is half of its total.  Balance.  GOD MEND THINE EVERY FLAW!  A onelegged sailor with an idée fixe crutched angrily, translating himself from the sidewalk into a jagged alley.  CONFIRM THY SOUL IN SELF CONTROL!  Symmetry.  The number of the soul.  10 represents the wheel of destiny and of retribution.  This is the number that governs returns, reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis, and most especially translation.  Judgement in delicious tango with destiny.  Ponder it, hang your gaze over a chessboard, and you can translate into a ghostbright existence where nothing is wanting, nothing is required, and the only fear is the hell of dreaded stalemate.  And the joy!  The joy of creation!  Each game a new universe.  Each chess problem (oh the composition of chess problems!) a microcosm of temporal harmony.  Each piece on the board a representative of stillness and force.  I left America, and the glorious atemporality I found there, to become a politician in support of my younger brother.  I was his pawn in a greater cause.  We are all pawns in a greater cause.  Just what is the cause, well that is not the pawn’s business.  Pawn’s have to earn their power, to kill, to rule as Queen; that is the glory of being a pawn.  Most remain powerless.  We serve our purpose quietly, in a waking sleep, then translate to the side to await our next use.  The halls of government contain chess rooms and in my political service to my brother I played chess.  I spoke on record 13 times in five years.  My brother hated and feared the number 13 although I found it immensely satisfying to open my mouth and make 13 utterances, speak questions I didn’t care to have answered, and then stop altogether.  I played chess.  I play chess.  I thought to master it and instead learned that my salvation, my translation to the infinite, comes when chess masters me.  Elijah is coming!  Elijah, a crumpled throwaway, sails closer to the three masters, bound to its translation.

The voice of Esau.

• Scylla and Charybdis

At that very instant: Oh, what I would not give for the joy of being at your side in Iceland inside the great unmoving daytime and of sharing this now the way one shares music or the taste of fruit. At that very instant the man was at her side in Iceland.2:46 pm

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella, and in my case the reality of my existence has become reason for footnotes here or there.  And that’s it. A theory published in a lesser journal then even more delicious, a theory refuted in a much more promising journal.  Where am I going with this?  I forget.  Oh, I hate it when.  Completely gone from my head.  Wait.  Let me walk back to where I was when.  Positional memory, you understand, it will come back.  Can’t walk away though, busy borrowing a pair of typing hands.  I’ll wander with my mind.  Are those your shoes?  You walk around in those things?  Deplorable.  At least clean them up or something.  Rub the dirt off.  Here give them to me.  I’m a shoemaker;  I’ll fix them up for you.  Oh I forgot.  I’m here, you’re there.  Well, do it yourself then.  Oh yes!  That’s right.  I existed.  I exist.  I’ll keep existing if you’ll invoke me, but unfortunately I was the first of five surviving brothers and stories work so much better with three, so a couple of us had to go.  Banishment from heart and home.  And memory.  Most people even deny I was a relative!  As if there could just happen to be two unrelated John Shakespeares in Stratford.  So, exiled I went to the land of lost umbrellas.  People prefer to think of brothers in threes, you see that don’t you.  We crave things in threes.  Three is the magic number, yes it is, it’s the magic number.  No more, no less.  In comedy, three beats to a laugh.  In fairy tales, two bad examples then one good.  One two three, two two three, three two three five.  I was the first of five brothers, named for our father.  Then, forgetting our sisters if you’ll allow it, came my famous brother you know the one.  The others, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, were a haberdasher, a dimwit, and an actor, respectively.  Edmund, following Will’s footsteps, treaded the boards in my shoes.  But it was Will’s boots that changed the shape of Edmund’s feet.  Until he died too early, that is, carried out of the theatre feet first and put into the ground with a forenoon knell of the great bell.  We all felt the loss, though Will paid the bill.  Maybe he felt that inner gnawing bite of conscience.  William, the false, usurping, adulterous brother.  I was the eldest.  And I sold my birthright for so little.  But I did have what I had.  And I still have, thanks to eternity.  Whatever anywhere wherever was, is and is and is three and five times over and then some.  What else is there to want?  We all want what we already have.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?

• Lestrygonians

1:36 pm

The moon and the sun are the same size.  Apparent size, but what else is there for us on the ground?  They are both 110 times their diameters away from us.  Why the same?  Now that’s really a coincidence.  Maybe it has something to do with parallax?

Measure your diameter.  Then multiply by 110.  Now, stand that far away from Molly.  Go ahead, you’ll be in good company.  That’s where I am, apparently.  Welcome to my world.  She said she could never like it again after Rudy died.  Something changed.  She held up her finger.  Hold up your finger and measure your finger tip.  Multiply by 110 — that’s about your arm’s length, a coincidence?  Stretch out your arm with your finger erect and blot out the sun.  Go ahead, give it the finger!  Feel that power.  Sexual.  Yes.  Yes.  Ah.  Well.

It was a full moon that night walking with Molly, he on the other side of her.  The daughter of the moon and she’s beaming.  He’s blazing.  Their fingers touch palms.  Ask with finger in palm, a little tickle.  Touch me.  Answer back.  Yes.  Eclipse me baby.  Stop.  Stop.  If it was it was.  Is, is.  Done.  Stop.  Something else.

Would I go back to times before fingers and touches and apparent distances?  Can’t bring back time.  Can’t bring back anything.  Like holding water in your hand.  I am the water.  Time is not a thing, it is an experience and even a feature of me.  And I was happier then.  I was.  Was that I?  Am I now I?  If it is true that I am someone, and that I was also someone, are we (this I, that I) the same I?  If we were all suddenly somebody else.  I was happier then.  Absolutely.  There is no absolute.  And I.  I am not I.  I am a multiple divided creature.   I am we.  We are legion.  Enough.  The machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

No-one is anything

• Lestrygonians

He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary -- not too dusty a cicada of neurtiment for a chittinous chip so mitey. 1:30 pm

We die.  Mors Certa, Hora Incerta.  So how can we be anything?  No-one is anything.  From the void and to the void, and again and again.  Things go on the same.  One born every minute.  Well more like, let’s see, carry the one.  Stop a minute so I can calculate this.  Women all over in their life throws.  Sss. Dth, dth, dth!  They won’t stop so I can count.  There’s more born, washing the blood off.  All are washed in the blood of the lamb.  Not stillborn of course.  They are not even registered.  Trouble for nothing.  Well, I am almosting it.  So.  So.  So far this year there have been 30,275,000 births rounding up.  84 days so far this year.  360,417 births a day, rounding up. That’s 15,018 births an hour.  251 births a minute.  Wait a  second.  That’s, yes, 5 births a second.  No point rounding down.  How long did it take your eye to move from we die to 5 births a second?  Cities of people coming and coming.  Lives and lives.  Passing away too.  In your life were you the Gracehoper or the Ondt?  Doesn’t matter, back to the void with you!  How many?  How many.  Wish I had paper.  Um. 12,930,000 deaths this year, might as well round up.  People die and we don’t even know.  Months later somebody smells something.  A drip through the ceiling from the tenant above.  153,929 deaths a day.  That’s 6,414 people every hour.  107 a minute and every second 2 people die.  1.78 really.  One dies and one gets 78% of the way there.  Mostly dead.  There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.  Mostly dead is slightly alive.  Give it a second.  You can’t be mostly dead all day.  There you go.  Welcome to the void.  You have been unmade.  It will be the making of you.  You were a being.  You filled space.  Now you are a becoming.  Not changing, no, I mean fulfilling.  You took a form intended for you all along.  That is, your form is gone.  Your form is formlessness.  I know, death is new to you.  You’ll get there.  Destruction and creation are simultaneous.  Death and rebirth are the same thing spelled different ways.  You hungry?  Of course not, what am I saying.  Sorry.  It’s this time of day.  This is the very worst hour of the day.  Vitality.  Dull, gloomy: hate this hour.  Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.  Intended.  Caught that did you?  Well.  Well, well.

Never the same

• Lestrygonians

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.1:10 pm

Saw a good idea today, a rowboat with a sandwich board ad on it, anchored in the ship canal.  Kino’s selling pants for $49.99.  Not bad.  Can spend that much just getting a pair altered.  A good idea is a good idea.  Better than hiring human directionals to carry the signs around like Hely pays for. Pays Boylan?  Must be McGlade’s work. Those bring in nothing. Still, people will look at anything, even nothing.  Stand and stare; other people will too.  Or be like Maginni dancing around.  He is his own ad.  Can put ads for std doctors in urinals.  Feel the burn?  Somebody standing there can relate and oh Christ.  What if he?  Oh God no.  No.  He wouldn’t, would he?  I don’t believe it.  No.  I can’t.  I can’t think about that.  What’s the time?  The diameter of the sun as seen from.  Oh God.  Focus.  As seen from earth is one half of a degree.  24 hours in the day divided by 360 degrees times 60 minutes to one hour times the radius of the sun or 1/4 of a degree.  It moves by its own radius every minute.  That’s the time.  As seen from wherever on earth.  No?  What about parallax views?  Never quite got parallax.  Greek word.  Should look it up.  Parallel parallax.  I feel like Molly with her met him pike hoses until I explained about the transmigration of souls and the stream of life.  Life is a stream.  Flowing and flowing.  Not like time.  Time doesn’t flow.  What is it flowing through if it is flowing?  Not flowing.  Fluxing.  Time a phenomenal flux.  Fluxing along in the flux of life.  Changes and changes.  Like water.  Who was it said that?  We can’t walk into the same ocean twice.  The ocean is different every time and we are different every time.  Yet we stay the same.  Stay the same by changing, dissipative structures.  Like the Argo, not a toothpick on that ship the same as when it began, yet always the Argo.  Look in the mirror, not the same hair, not the same skin, not the same cells as when we were born.  We flux like the Ocean.  Walk in to our death and come out of other waters in a new body.  Not resurrected.  Transmigrated.  Only the soul is the same.  Somebody asked Plato if the soul gets tired.  Does it wear out like old pants?  Can get new ones for $49.99.  See?  A good idea is a good idea.

To give you peace, to hear you speak, now while the wind is silent in this place.

• Aeolus

I reached a place where every light is muted, which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest, when it is battered by opposing winds. The hellish hurricane, which never rests, drives on the spirits with its violence; wheeling and pounding, it harasses them. I learned that those who undergo this torment are damned because they sinned within the flesh, subjecting reason to the rule of will. 12:36 pm

I saw it.  I was present.  I saw with eyes that were no less amazed than his.  I was good but he was all their daddies.  Psha! you say.  Psha!  Well, it has been centuries and he is still the one who makes our gaze more ardent.  I see your mouth twitching, unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.  Who would wish that mouth for any kiss?  How do I know?  Well, why did I write it then?  Oh but what he does with words.  He writes about eternity using a temporal art and how?  By twisting it, entwining it, tossing in numbers and ratios and divine proportions.  He uses circles to move time into eternity and more impossible to move eternity into time.  He speaks the ineffable.  And then he serves it to us on a peaceful golden flame and we eat and drink and slurp it yum into our souls.  Oh we are all in the middle of the path of life, locked into a moving now between past and future and elsewhen.  Now is real, all else is a feature of imagination.  No matter our age, we are all in the middle of the path of life.  He knew this.  And he mimics this in his rhymes.  Here are some line endings:

Mouth / Womb / South

Tomb/ Time / Bloom

Rhyme / Now / Sublime

Rhyme now sublime.  Catch that movement?  Oh feel it move you.  Forward and backward.  The middle word of the first becomes the outer words of the next.  Forward and backward and forward and backward.  Whenever we are in our temporal trajectory, we are always in the middle.  Three by three, his words are female forms entwining.  His words are like a boat that, starting from its moorings, moves backward, backforeward, so he may move us forward.  Ah my friend, take no more from me, my eyes are all amazement.  Look at us now, old men.  Penitent.  Dressed the same, looking the same.  Await no further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole — to act against that will would be to err:  therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.  And when I said this he looked at me, his sight becoming pure, and he let me know that will is free, to a point.  And what’s the point?  The point in which all times are present.  The point that sent forth so acute a light that anyone who faced the force with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes.  The point on which depends the heavens and the whole of nature.  The point that has no extension in space or time.  The point indivisible.  The point that is the start of all geometric possibilities.  The one point all whens and wheres end.  The point that seems enclosed by that which it encloses.  The point that is both circumference and circle.  The point which says that separate things can be the same thing.  The point that says our own existence in the middle of the path of successive time necessitates these distinctions.  Oh my God, the point. 

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

• Aeolus

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.