Having my way with Ulysses

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.

Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.

• Lestrygonians

Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake. 1:16 pm

Ran into Josie Powell today.  Breen.  Still beautiful eyes.  Womaneyes.  How are you, How’s Molly, Milly at a photographer’s, yours?  Not sure how many.  I didn’t ask.  Sad to lose old friends she said when I told her about Dignam.  Was once Molly’s closest and mine too, well that’s quite enough about that.  Asked about her lunatic husband.  Hard to get around to that.  Just: quietly: husband?  She answered by looking in her purse, chipped rattlesnake.  He’s a caution to them she said.  Women’s purses.  Rummaging, wide open.  Money, change, credit cards, used tissues, tampon, lipstick, lipstick, lipstick, phone charger, clean diaper, altoid that was: fell, receipts, hair clips, wrappers, take a number: D26, phone, checkbook, who carries those around anymore, medicine bottle, postcard.  Up?  U.P.  U.P: up.  Somebody taking a rise out of him.  He went to oyster eyes Menton wearing slippers on his feet; sue for libel.  Well he has kids, so there’s the proof of that particular pudding.  If that’s what, I don’t know.  Up?  Meshuggah.  The guy is nuts.  Not as nuts as Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell who swung past us on the outside of the lampposts.  That rat fell into a brewer’s vat and never recovered.  Can say the same for Josie Powell.  Breen.  Shabby, old clothes.  Used to be a tasty dresser.  Beautiful eyes that night at Luke Doyle’s.  Only a year or so older than Molly.  Lines around her mouth.  Lunch on her shirt.  Smells, maybe from her, of butter, flour, demerera sugar.  A rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior.  I could still eat her up.

They like buttering themselves in and out.

• Lestrygonians

How chimant in effect! Alla tingaling pealabells! So a many of churches one cannot pray own's prayers. 'Tis holyyear's day! Juin jully we may! Agithetta and Tranquilla shall demure umclaused but Marlborough-the-Less, Greatchrist and Holy Protector shall have open virgilances. 1:13 pm

[Scene:  The kitchen of Tranquilla convent, well appointed with red Dockrell’s wallpaper and decorated with daguerreotypes from the studio of Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary.  The room smells of American elderflower soap and of winds that blow from the south.]

Saint Patricia:  Great Christ and Holy Protector we are running out of everything!  And even more curious, table twelve has used up their pillar of salt, do we have another?  Oh!  Oh!  Oh dear God you are bleeding!  What is that on your plate, bread loaves, bells?

Saint Agatha:  Don’t touch me!  I want to coagulate and your touch will just liquify everything.   It’s my breasts, I think we should fry them in butter.

Saint Patricia:  We fry everything in butter.

Saint Agatha:  No lard for us!  I’m hard pressed to think of anything else to give these albatrosses.  We already ran out of the rabbit pie, the port soup, the lap of mutton with chutney sauce is gone, and that base barreltoned man Ben Dollard ate the barons of beef.

Saint Patricia:  He drank all the Bass number one too.

Saint Agatha:  What, two?

Saint Patricia:  Too.  We still have some of the mulled rum.  This is a crowd to rival the Glencree dinner!  Remember?  For that one we had to bring out bread with drippings to satisfy them all.

[A priestylooking chap name of Pen something (Pendennis? My memory is getting.  Pen . . .?) opens the kitchen door and squints in with weak eyes.]

Saint Agatha:  Where are they all coming from?  Like flies to a picnic.  Perhaps we should start the entertainment now, then serve the sticky stuff.

Saint Patricia:  Good idea.  Where is old Goodwin?  Lucky we have him, I understand this will be his last performance.

Saint Agatha:  They always are.  Look behind you, we have lots of Plumtree’s in the cupboard, let’s send it out now.  After that we won’t have much left to offer.

Saint Patricia:  Not if that woman in the elephantgrey dress keeps sticking her fingers into every pie.  She can be rude.  Did you see her?  And after the band plays, we have.

Saint Agatha: We have sugarloaves with caramel.  Our staple food.  And once that’s gone that’s it.  We’ll have to barricade our doors with barbed wire.

Saint Patricia:  Well, I am glad to communicate with the outside world, but today I have suffered!

Saint Agatha:  I agree.  Just think back to our morning devotions.  Happy.  Happier then.  Here, let me straighten your brown scapular.  There you go.

Saint Patricia:  Thank you.  I’d better get back out there.  Some of them, Masons I think, are making noise about some lottery tickets.  Some scandal or other.  Thing like that spoils the effect of a night.

Saint Agatha:  Yes.  But it is all part of the stream of life, no?

Saint Patricia:  Yes, the stream of life.

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.

Just to see

• Aeolus

And so too may you, like the very wind of destruction, rid by fire all the wickedness from the land.12:06 am

The silly Penis.  Once I heard sweet old Monks said this to himself after Nannetti shouted for where’s what’s his name Monks.  And he sees Monks every day.  Nice old man.  Must have seen it all.  Obituary notices and found drowned and scandals and schism and all the rest.  Started out as a linotype operator back in the day.  Could type blind, see with his fingers.  Still in the shop but now it’s a MAN Roland.  I wonder if Monks had to type backwards into his linotype.  .epytonil sih otni sdrawkcab epyt ot dah sknoM fi rednow I   Skilled.  Art to it.  Papa could read backwards.  Read his Haggadahbook that way, pointing his finger to me.  Why should this night be so special?  L’shanah haba’a bi Yerushalayim.  It’s a long time to wait for a hungry kid.  Long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage.  Then the twelve brothers, Jacobs son’s.  Some of them were citron farmers.  Pocket smells of Citronlemon.  What kind of perfume does your wife?  Keep losing that soap in pockets.  And the part about the one little goat the one little goat, that slit the throat, the Holy One, blessed is he, who butchered the butcher, who slaughtered the ox that ate the staff, that beat up the cat, that scratched the dog, that drank up the water, that put out the fire, that burned up the Angel of Death.  Silly sounding but it all means justice when you look into it well.  That and it’s everybody eating everybody else.  That’s what life is after all.  I’m hungry what time is it?  I could bus home still.  Forgot something maybe.   Molly dressing, get there before.  No.

Pure fluke of mine

• Hades

Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks.11:56 am

John Henry Menton, how grand we are this morning.  He might have said thank you instead of nothing.  As if I turned him into stone.  Hates me.  Hate at first sight.  A guy doesn’t like to be beaten spectacularly at anything.  But in front of women, well.  And Molly and Floey Dillon laughing under the lilac tree didn’t help.  The root of his dislike.  Mortified him.  He did nothing but stare with those oyster eyes until Martin, helpful, also told him your hat is a little crushed.  He thanked Martin.  Never mind.  He’ll be sorry when it dawns on him.  Get the pull over him that way.  Leave him under an obligation: costs little.

You might pick up a young widow here

• Hades

11:45 am

Molly caught me writing to Martha.  Almost killed the whole thing.  I wrote the wrong address on the envelope I used to cover the letter.  I hope it’s not in a dead letter office somewhere.  In the midst of life we are in death.  Like John O’Connell.  Life among the tombs.  Keeps it well, trimmed edges, nice grass.  Corpse manure best for plants.  Mastiansky said Chinese cemetery poppies make the best opium.  Could be a decent trade.  Carcasses for gardens.  Dig them under when they are green and pink still, decomposing.  Then they become a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy.  Then black treacle oozing.  This must be what the plants like.  Then dried up deathmoths.  How did O’Connell get a woman to marry him, come live at the graveyard?  Try dangling that in front of somebody.  Courting death.  Is thrilling I expect.  Love among the tombs.  Tantalizing for the poor dead, though, like smell of grilling meat for the starving.  Fields of them out there, ground honeycombed with them.  More room if buried standing up.  Except wouldn’t want a mudslide, head might come up with pointing hands.

Puzzling two long keys at his back

• Hades

11:40 am

John Henry Menton was at the funeral.  Still hates me over that fight at Mat Dillon’s.  Never forgets a rival.  Aion there too with his keys crossed behind his back.  I mean Zurvan.  No wait, that’s Pluto.  Hades.  That is, Janus I mean.  Somebody’s job it is to lock the living from the dead and the successive from the eternal.  And look good holding keys.   Can’t have one of us slipping through, as much as we might want to force our way in.

Peter:  You forgot that I have the keys, Leopold, or Bloom, or Nowthen, or Sly, or whatever else it is you call yourself.

Sly:  Simon.  Honey.  Or do you just go by Rock?  Maybe it’s The Rock.  Child, you are late to this party.  Check your pockets sugarstick.  Now would you look at that.  Where’s those keys baby?  Two words.

Which end is his head?

• Hades

And they poured em behoiled on the fire. Scaald!11:30 am

I asked if Paddy was insured and he was, but his policy was heavily mortgaged.  Martin Cunningham is getting up a collection for the boy, Ned Lambert trying to do something too.  Great blow to his wife.  She has the laugh now. No more of his bullshit, his parenting, his secrets, his drugs, his crack whores, his attacks on her peace, her mind, her normalcy, her justice, her safety, her money, her forward, her backward.  She got burned.  She got so burned.  It was a damn bad hand she got dealt and what’s worse, in her universe time cleaves here.  Everything will be about before it happened and after it all went down.  And her boy.  God only knows what.  There’s no.  I just.  Oh god that sweet boy.  Not yet.  I can’t say it yet.  But she might marry again.  Me?  No.  Him?  And Molly marry again?  No.  Him?  Yet who knows.  And then.  And then.  Somebody has to go first, underground.  Lie no more in her warm bed.  Here’s a cold one for you.  I hope you’ll soon follow.  Well, he is more dead for her than for me.  Condole with her.  Your terrible loss.  Nobody to haggle with over the boy.  My day, your day, you are late, he needs this, drop him off when.  And then ineffably worse, what will this do?  Oh that sweet boy.  What does he understand?  How much of this is he taking on?  When we look at this kid down the road, what will be naked for all to see and then incomprehensible, what will he show only when he trusts, when he is most naked?  He was there with his father dead.  Three days alone.  Both unconscious.  Then wake up Daddy.  Wake up.  Nothing.  Nothing for three days.  But not nothing.  I can’t.  For three days bodies don’t do nothing, they do plenty.  And the boy too little to know what to do.  Please wake up Daddy.  Here, I’ll open your eyes for you.  Daddy?  Did Paddy know?  Did he lighten at the last moment?  Did he recognize all he might have done?  Could he see?  And all for a shadow of nothing.  Stop.

Fast fading on the frayed breaking

• Hades

Soft politeness11:06 am

Dignam’s funeral just when.  Caught off guard on the way.  At just that moment, I was thinking.  I was thinking and then right there, the worst man.  A type like that.  What do she they see?  I just looked at my hands, thinking alone.  Soft politeness.  Didn’t want to show.  I thought Molly her skirt stuck between her cheeks.  Yes.  That helps even now.  Power asked about her concert tour.  I’m not going.  I would like to and I wouldn’t like to.  Would miss poor Papa’s deathday; a year now he’s been oot.  Many happy returns.