Having my way with Ulysses

Where’s the great light?

Satan astonished, and with power above his own controll compell'd the Gnomes to curb the horses, & to throw banks of sand around the fiery flaming Harrow in labyrinthine forms. And brooks between to intersect the meadows in their course. The Harrow cast thick flames: Jehovah thunderd above: Chaos & ancient night fled from beneath the fiery Harrow: The Harrow cast thick flames & orb'd us round in concave fires A hell of our own making. see, its flames still gird me round.11:32 pm

Who? Who? Are you blue? Oh its you, my little gnome. I should have expected you, darling, here between evil and deliverance. No no, come back here. I see you, come out. Lurking around your lair. Peering from your warren. Adorable. Don’t want to be seen here do you? Too many danger signals? Oh sweetheart, come dance with me, with all of us. Just a minute I have to take this.  Si? Espera, mi amor, y yo estaré contigo. Alrededor detrás del establo. Sorry about that. You waited! Oh my love, dance with me. What’s that? Oh sweetheart, don’t you see I can’t hear you? Please, my soft soul of flowers, don’t be mislead by appearances, my eyes are larger than my ears! Let’s dance together ’till we’re dead or cured. Doesn’t matter which, gnomey, same difference really. Ah but what’s real here you want to know? This is the dance of delusion, my onliest, my lovey, my luring bird of Eden.  We’ll tango through miserileading doors, and side with fuguist appearances. So how’d you get here?  Must have been Elijah’s horses. Here, hold my pen. Let’s unhitch them, shall we? They’ll dance with us, they dance too you know, then my eagle will bring us a leg of a duck and we can insert it directly into our bodies. You’ll be delicious my diminutive one, my pigmy, my  sweet smiling pestilence, my swan.  We’ll bathe in my cauldron (mind that bubbling lead!) and emerge nice and clean and refreshed and as beautiful as a many colored bow and oh I see, you’re a bit stunted. Well, I’ll hold you up. Not a problem. And then and then

God: Ok, hold.  Vitus, you’re far off script, and did you just take a call?

St. Vitus: [adjusting his peaked cap 180°]  and then we’ll grind our teeth growl howl owl and growling and grinding and teeth ghahute, go first my plunder, go my prey, salute the west gone to rest, ghaghaest, go my guest, my stranger, my destitute, my sterile my wanting, you go my dear ghost, my soul, my demon or my angel, whichever, and then and then

God: Vitus. Vitus!

Jesus: Salute him with your left hand, that’s the password in his language.

Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish.

The Twofold form Hermaphroditic: and the Double-sexed; The Female-male & the Male-female, self-dividing stood Before him in their beauty, & in cruelties of holiness! Shining in darkness, glorious upon the deeps of Entuthon. 8:47 pm

Scene [Tranquilla convent, in the back garden.  The sisters are preparing to receive a novice for initiation into the order.  St. Agatha and Sister Mary Peter wait with ten fingers locked for her to arrive. ]

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, have you seen my breasts?

Sister Mary Peter:  You left them in the rectory Reverend Mother, shall I retrieve them for you?

St. Agatha:  No, no.  No.  Nuisance they are anyway, really, although I do feel like I lose a charm every time I take them off.  Still, we have a new novice coming and it would be a waste of this whitewashed face and cool coif not to long to appear, well, complete.

Sister Mary Peter: It is a natural craving, Reverend Mother, but you’re looking splendid.  Dressed up to the nines.

St. Agatha.  Never mind, no time.  I can see her coming with my dexter optic!  O look who it is for the love of God! I thought they were dumping Martha on us and instead it’s Lizzie Twigg!  How are you at all?  What have you been doing with yourself? [kiss] and delighted to [kiss] see you!

Lizzie Twigg:  Hello Agatha.  I would have been here sooner but there was all that barbed wire.

St. Agatha:  We do like to cloister ourselves here!  But never mind never mind.  No hurry, my dear sister soul.  I’m just so happy you’re not Martha!  So vindictive for what she can’t get.  Oh my child!  So, here you are, giving up your desire to aid gentlemen in literary work.

Lizzie Twigg:  Yes, I’m done with men.  I loved an Aeon and that ended badly.  Felt like I was drowning half the time.  Now I want to dedicate myself to somebody more, I don’t know, along the straight and narrow.  Linear minded.  Gets us from then to when.

St. Agatha:  Well as a fellow bride of Christ you will have that, even the calendar starts with him, to some end point.  So, let’s have a look at you.  Nice well-filled hose, though they are a bit down around the ankle.

Sister Mary Peter:  Voice like a pick axe, no good for the choir.  Are you lame?

Lizzie Twigg:  No.  My boots are a bit tight though.

St. Agatha:  You might have a high arched instep.

Lizzie Twigg: Um.  I have a question.  I’ve heard things about the sisters here.  That some of you get a bit, well, odd.  I’ve heard about some sisters licking pennies all the time, and wanting to smell rock oil, and all kinds of.  Is this, is this true?

St. Agatha: It’s only the virgins who go mad in the end.  I take it you’re?

Lizzie Twigg: Not. No.

St. Agatha.  I thought not.  You have that I’m all clean come dirty me look.  Now, when was the start of your last menstrual period?  Must have been within the past couple of days.

Lizzie Twigg:  Today.  And it’s awful.  Feels a ton weight.  How did you know?

St Agatha:  The plants are withering.  And the fiddle strings have all snapped.

Sister Mary Peter:  The milk is turning too.

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, go get St. Patricia, she can coagulate Miss Twigg’s blood.  Now Miss Twigg, we’ll stop your menstruation for now, but you’ll have to get into step with the rest of us.  We all bleed together according to the moon.

Lizzie Twigg:  I’m sorry.  I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or question is it all a fake or anything but, none of you look like, well, like the menstruating type.  No offense.  How many women?

St. Agatha:  Listen sister, we feel it ourselves too, ok, all of us together.  We can be a pack of devils when it’s coming on, I can tell you, especially Sister Mary Peter!

Lizzie Twigg:  She’s a hot little devil all the same.  We were girlfriends at school you know.

St. Agatha:  Oh were you?  And how do you find her now?

Lizzie Twigg:  Well back then she was yours for the asking!  And not to pick holes in her appearance or anything, but she does have fewer teeth than before.

St. Agatha:  Never you mind that now.  We all have bodies, we all have curves inside our deshabillé, but if you are to undertake a novitiate with us you’ll find within our walls sanctity and corporeality intermingle.  Bring your agenbite of inwit, but don’t forget your frillies for Raoul, honey, He likes them both.  Now come with me child, that’s a lovely shirt shining beneath your what? But we must get on with dressing each other for the sacrifice.

Space: what you damn well have to see.

Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time And drew it out to Seven thousand years with much care & affliction And many tears & in Every year made windows into Eden. She also took an atom of space & opend its center Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. 2:06 pm

Forming.  Forming.  And I thought the afterlife was for fulfilling.  Try resurrection some time!  I died.  I came back.  Who does that?  I must be, yes, I am a God.  Yes. Yes.  Feel it.  I was the formless spiritual and now I am the Allfather, Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man.  Jesus Christ I’m a magician now, the magician of the beautiful!  Oh yes, I am back.  I was never an ordinary person.  I lived the life esoteric, and look at me now!  Get a glimpse of my elemental!  Not so blurry today.  This is the virgin birth, right here.  In this space.  At this time.  Soul reinserted into body.  I am God!

Krishna:  Stop!

Wait, what just happened.  Who are you?  Why did everything just freeze in place?  Why are you blue?

Krishna:  I have stopped time.  Listen to me, I will tell you the secret of life.

I already know the secret of life.  I am the secret of life!  Look at me.  I’m back, baby.  I’m here.  I’m in a library talking Hamlet with a kid and an old new critic.  And I am the only one here who knows the truth of the afterlife that the kid dances around.

Krishna:  Those who are without faith in my teaching cannot attain me; they endlessly return to this world shuttling from death to death.

Ah, but that’s where you are wrong blue man, I haven’t been reincarnated.  This is not your ordinary metempsychosis.  You are looking at resurrection!  This is altogether a different kettle of fish.

The Ondt:  [Clipping the end of a cigar.  Havana.  A fine Romeo y Julieta]  You smell like a kettle of fish, Æ, your Auric egg’s gone bad.

Krishna:  That rotten egg smell is your sulfuric breath, Ondt.  What are you doing here?  How did you get into this moment?  I stopped time, this is our now.  Out, Ondt!

The Ondt:  [making faces at himself in the window] Honey, this is my space.  I can crawl into your now through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood and back out through Blake’s buttocks into eternity if I like.  You hold to the now all you like, but it is the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Krishna:  Fine.  Æ, we shall proceed regardless.  You have not become deathless; you have merely become manifest without a rebirth.  You are most certainly not God or even a god.  I am God!  I am known by everyone as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face.  I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.

The Ondt: [Taking the form of the Lord of Loaves]  Got a light?  And hey, don’t burn up all that butter.

You both need to cool it.  Look, I used to think that the world’s revolutions were born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside, from the people for whom the earth is a living mother.  But I don’t think so anymore.  The world’s revolutions are born from those of us who say this verily is that.  I took my own fate by the balls.  The point is I am the point.  I have free will!  I used to think that God is a stage manager in the theatre of the eternal, but I am beyond that now.  I am God if I say I am God.  What of it?  You can be God too if you like.  And look there, you see that person breathing all over us?  That one who clicks instead of talks?  And stares and stares, eyeballs moving here and now here and then over to here.  There is God.  God is a click in the street.

The Ondt:  [Blowing smoke rings] The peatsmoke is going to his head.

Krishna: [Crossing his arms defensively.  He is caught between the devil and the ocean of Theosophy]  I know all beings who have passed, and all who live now, Æ, and all who are yet to be.  In the face of the one who can see all temporalities, how can you be so distressingly shortsighted?  How can you believe your will is free?

You guys can blow smoke up my ass all day if you like, I don’t care.  I know what I know.  Talk until you are blue in the face.  I’m making plans.

Thought is the thought of thought

10:10 am

Hello.  We have not yet met, though I confess I have been watching you.   I hover in the background around these parts.  Your name?  I’m Genevieve.  Pleased to meet you in person at last.  You have nice eyes.  I’m sorry, have I embarrassed you?  I notice eyes.  I keep my eye on a young man who frequents this place.  I’m using his hands now.  Not his eyes, oh no, they are terrible.  He can hardly see!  You should see the font size he uses.  Still he is much better off than my mother was, before I cured her blindness.  Yes, that was one of my miracles.  Love me.  Hey!  I saw that.  Don’t give me that look.  I did cure her.  I did.  Ok fine, I was the one who made her blind in the first place.  I’m sorry, ok, but she was being totally controlling; she didn’t want me to get married because she thought I was too young.  It’s not like he wasn’t a nice guy, he was God!  I wanted to be a bride of Christ, so shoot me.  Ok, yes, I was only seven years old.  But still.  Anyway once when I asked to go to my boyfriend’s house to hang out, do a little worshiping, get out of doing housework, she grounded me and slapped me across the face.  So I made her blind.  But then I unblinded her.  Eventually.  Let’s not make a federal case of it.  I am a saint.  That means I am pure and good and people worship me.  Now where were we.  Oh yes. Stephen has terrible vision, that guy Jim is all but blind, and Stephen spent the morning trying to teach blind old Milton to a bunch of hung-over eye-rollers.  Freshmen in the winter quarter aren’t scared anymore and it is clear he lost authority pretty much on day one.  You can see it from space.  So here I am, doing my community service.  I look out for Stephen sometimes because he can’t very well look out for himself.  See?  I like the way your eyes move, back and forth like that.  It’s nice.  Steven was all about movement today.  In his head, right behind his eyes.  He had his students droning on about Lycidas “And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.  Now Lycidas the Shepherds weep no more.”  Bore me to tears.  I wish Stephen could see his student’s eyes when he teaches.  Or be like me just once and peek under their lashes at what they are thinking.  They would be much more interested in his thoughts than in his so-called lesson plans.  Stephen was thinking today that reality must be the actualizing of whatever is possible.  The movement of it.  You see?  Look over there, headed this way.  It’s possibility, you see?  Teeming multitudinous potential now moments.  Not now yet.  To be, but not is.  Then there is the chosen one.  I don’t mean my boyfriend!  Not that kind of chosen one.  I mean the now moment that rides between what could be and what was.  The verb of the thing, you see?  Reality doesn’t live in the multitudes of possibilities or in the chosen one event that turns into history.  It is in the movement from what could be to what was.  At least, that is what Stephen thinks today.  Is he right?  Well, that’s not for me to show you.  He’ll figure it out in his tranquil brightness.  His soul, you see?  The form of forms.  He was also thinking about dragons.  That was fun.  Blake’s dragons, you know.  You know him?  A real visionary that one.  Nice eyes too.  Big, widely set.  Blake’s dragons emerge from their caves whenever there is a real battle that needs fighting.  A war, the intellectual kind that happens in eternity.  The kind of war that clears the way for creative work.  And our boy Stephen, as reluctant as he may be, has some fights ahead.  Anybody with eyes can see that coming.