Having my way with Ulysses

You’ll soon be over it.

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12:14 am

They’re not cute. Just look at them. They say all babies are beautiful, but these — woof! Maybe it’s because there were eight of them all crammed into one manwomb? Might be that. That and the metallic faces, that’s just weird. But they’re all alive and here so who’s complaining. Still, what octomom is going to want a home birth for eight babies at the same time? If I didn’t charge by the baby I’d have said oh god the liability, no. No way. No thank you. As it is I don’t think I was insured for this many simultaneous deliveries. But done is done. We ought to write their names on them so we can tell them apart. No not on their diapers! What is the use of that? Within two hours the whole system will go to shit. Oh fuck it. What do I care, put their names anywhere you want. I’m halfway out the door. It’s up to their momdad now. Poor kids, their stars are fixed. They’ll be mid-level managers of failing banks. At best. Poor ugly babies. I’ll say a prayer for them before I go. I call upon the watery, the dark, the invisible, and the kings of infinite space. Come primordial pairs swing your partners into a double quaternity then lay them down and hear my plea, for these, what are we calling them babies were born to a man who so wanted to be a mother. He is a simple and lovable person, a young soul clearly unfamiliar with metempsychosis. A dear person, kind of nuts really, wears a hair shirt for godsakes. Somehow somebody has made him forget the memory of his past but I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning. Embrace these babies tight, dear, and provide for them an abundance of scholarships because he’ll never afford tuition for them all.

One ear could hear what the other spoke.

[It] was of an oblong and concave figure, four feet in length, and two and a half in breadth, framed of a light wood, coverd with a bulls hide, and strongly guarded with plates of brass.10:36 pm

Well you know what I heard, I heard she commissioned a mechanical something that would turn her somehow into a cow.  Not that she needed a machine to do that, am I right?  Seriously though, I heard that she had this like plasmic memory, you know, she remembered everything ever in her head, but all at once.  It was like a noise or something like all her lives talking at the same time but sometimes she could hear the differences between the voices and one of them said moo. Moo! Just like that, she decided she was once a cow and obsessed about it. That’s why she’s always wearing that cowhide jacket and pants. Even in heat. I thought she was nuts. Turns out she is nuts! And you know what I heard, I heard that she heard this double moo in her head, like voices stuck together.  And the voices had one body like cows cleaved into the one and the two simultaneously.  I don’t know what that means, I mean come on.  Both one and two but not as in three. Whatever. She hears voices. I’m just telling you. I’m just saying.

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.

Seems a long way off.

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.

Those literary ethereal people.

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.

Wheels within wheels

pigeony linguish1:26 pm

[Scene:  Percy Apjohn (killed in action) and Pen …?  Pen something.  Of course it’s years ago.  Percy Apjohn and Pen Something recent graduates of metempsychosis, have taken a nice supper of human leavings and are now engaged in a little after meal frolic.  Must be thrilling from the air.]

Pen Something:  Who will we do it on?  I pick the fellow in black.

Percy Apjohn:  Hold on, I think I knew that one.  What was his name?  Hard to remember anything after metemwhatever.

Pen Something:  Really have to squint to see him.  Yeah.  I think I knew his wife.

Percy Apjohn:  Mack something.  We called him Mackerel.  Mmm, could go for one of those.

Pen Something:  Well, ready for the attack.  You?

Percy Apjohn:  Here goes.  Here’s good luck!

Never the same

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.

קדיש

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.

Some say they remember their past lives

And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquiades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

9:09 am

After thousands of years of people reincarnating, with all the coming and going and waiting in chairs and general foot traffic, heaven’s lobby had become a crumbling old ruin. Indra asked Vishvakarma, who was an archetect along the lines of Dedalus and Frank Gehry, to fix up the place a bit and so he did. It was splendid. Dripping with jewels. Gardens. Towers. There were walls that could sing and there were stairs that rotated to the past. In some rooms you could smell the light just by virtue of the placement of the windows in ratios corresponding to the sacred formula (√5+1)/2. In one room he had squared the circle and in another he had trisected an angle and doubled a cube. I don’t even have to tell you what he did with time. Anyway, it was a ton of work and when he was done he was done and wanted to leave. Get paid and leave. Problem was, Indra wanted more. Wasn’t satisfied with good enough. More building if you please and even if you don’t please. So Vishvakarma had no choice, really. He went over his head to the supreme being. Well, this god in charge, this divine fixer, told Vishvakarma not to worry, be cool, just go back and I’ll take care of everything. The next day a kid all in white with a tattoo on his forehead (what parent is going to let that happen? must have been fake) showed up and marched right up to Indra as if Indra wasn’t The Man. And this kid said look, when are you going to be done with all this construction? No other Indra before you has ever built, well paid to be built for him at any rate, anything half as big or a third as great. And Indra, amused that this kid had what appeared to be the balls of a water buffalo to talk smack to his face just like that, said what the hell do you know about other Indras? And the kid said look dude, I’ve seen it all. I was there when they built the pyramids and that was like yesterday. I’ve seen the bang at the start of the universe and the one before that too. I’ve seen all the universes and all possible moments and the containers of moments and the things those are packed into besides and each one has an Indra, so don’t give me your shit. And while the kid was talking and Indra was turning purple with rage a line of ants marched in like they owned the place, which in fact they did. The kid cracked up to see this and laughed until Indra was nearly apoplectic with fury. Finally the kid took pity and revealed his true form. He was the fixer, the man in charge of the man in charge of the man in charge fifty five times over the whole time. Indra fell all over himself apologizing and in his curiosity which he could not contain even in front of the Supreme One, he asked what was it about the ants that was so funny? And the supreme being said those ants? Every one of them are former Indras.

Did you finish it?

Tell me, I am all eyes. 9:06 am

I remember that trapeze artist who fell at Teatro Zinzanni.  I had to look away, difficult to do in that place.  Everybody stopped.  Everything stopped.  Time stopped as they say, although in that case it would have to have started and all my evidence says something else.  One of the preformers was wandering around the tables offering people tastes of ice soup for a laugh and when it happened she was staring directly into my eyes bent over the table lifting my spoon toward me.  Dark liner.  Glitter lids.  Only the music kept going, a jazzy soundtrack to horrible pain.  She never looked away.  We locked.  I still see those eyes.  And I heard what she didn’t say.  I looked away.  I had to look away.  The staff played it cool, professionals, and had people laughing and eating again fast.  Tough job that.  Break your neck so we break our sides.  Breaks my heart.  Start them off young I imagine so they metempsychosis.  The soul of a trapeze artist in the body of a what?  Our souls after we die.  After before, no difference.  When is Dignam’s soul?