Having my way with Ulysses

Their two or four eyes conversing.

Others asked such questions as "Why should we care what happens after we are dead" or "If this Rebellion is to happen anyway, what difference does it make whether we work for it or not?"

1:33 am

Scene: [A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar. The rabbi says:]

Rabbi: Where is everybody, are we the first ones here?

Priest: Must be. Good, I wanted to talk with you alone. You and I need to take control of this thing before it bloats to an inmanagable size.

Rabbi: Yes. Our revolution must come on the due instalments plan, if we expect to pull this thing off at all.

Priest: [Turning away from the others who probably and speaks nearer to, so as the others in case they.]  Shush for Christ sake.

The Rabbi: Am I not right?

The Priest: Yes, but this place is all eyes. I don’t want to indulge in any, orthodox as you are.

Rabbi: Right. Of course. Listen. We want to homogenize all faiths yes, but some faiths are, you understand. I mean, all faiths are equal.

Priest: But some faiths are more equal than others.

Rabbi: Indeed. So your plan to raise money, I don’t see it.  How do your people do it? It seems you raise your money on false pretenses, fork it over and you’ll go to heaven. What heaven? Show me heaven.

Priest: The abstract future reward is always more powerful than immediate gain or punishment. Don’t you know that yourself? Heaven, its glories, its boundless bountiful plenitude, the sheer everythingness of the whole concept can take any size, it can stretch to any or no limit, it can fill every space, it can

Rabbi:  Save it for your congregation, father, you can be all their daddies but not mine. Try selling buy now receive later to people who concern themselves with life here and now. I walk in with future reward and say pay money for it, I might as well sell crosses. Mine won’t be the only ones, prepare yourself, and what about the Muslims?

Priest: That’s where self sacrifice for eternal reward will pay off.

Rabbi: Yes, but their temporality, so unpredictable. So branching and forking.  Touch it and it folds up on itself, how do we manage that? Call something a crusade and they feel it like it happened yesterday. And so it did happen yesterday. Bring up any event of any kind and bam, it’s now. We’re in it now. We’ll need a work around.  I’m assuming we’ll want everyone to go linear?

Priest: Makes sense to me. The Hindus are persuadable, but the Buddhists, the Taoists especially.  They’ll make trouble, and that’s not trouble we want.

Rabbi: No.

Priest: No.  To keep linear time we’ll have to speak of other things. Distract them with other issues. Look, we’ll have to say: it’s hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is. We pose to them that we all resent violence or intolerance.

Rabbi: Yes. It never reaches anything; It never stops anything.

Priest: Never. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular.  No. We must be practical.  We must imbue ourselves with the proper spirit.  It will be the only way to create our New Bloomusalem.  By the way, do you like the symbol I came up with?

Rabbi: It’s a little busy. The Hindus might like it. It’s a good job you didn’t add a bleeding saint to it, or we’d never convince the Muslims to get on board.

A new era is about to dawn.

Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time for lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day Appears upon our Hills: Awake Jerusalem, and come away.12:02 am

It can’t be done. I won’t do it. You’ll need another architect, I can’t do this shit. What do you take me for? I’m no magician. Ok. Ok. listen. Just look at your plan here, 40,000 rooms and only 12 doors.  In what universe does this make any sense: 40,000 rooms arranged in a perfect square, excuse me, cube. It will be hideous. No architect will touch it.  A big ugly cube — it will look like a Wallmart. You want your new Bloomusalem to be a Wallmart? I mean, maybe we can do 200 x 200 rooms with tall ceilings, which might be our only shot at symmetry under the cemetery wall, but look how tall the damn rooms would have to be. The ceilings will have their own weather! Otherwise we can stack 34 or 35 but we won’t get anywhere near your perfect 40,000. Maybe we can get there with an octahedron, and make the sides 44 of whatever measure you like, in length. Close enough to 40,000. We can include an annex for the rest. But that brings us to another problem, how big is this place? Your plan uses stadia and furlongs. And cubits! Who measures anything with cubits? None of your numbers make sense. Seriously. What are we using to measure this thing? It’s a beast! You want cubits, fine. It’s your deal. But you have here each side of the cube measures 12,000 stadia. That’s four million nine hundred thirty three thousand thirty three cubits.  So a cubit being 1/1000 the distance the earth rotates at the equator during one second of time, we are talking about the length of about an hour and twenty minutes of Earth’s rotation. What planet are you on man? Do you know how big that is? By the time I even get the foundations laid (12 foundations? Dude!) the Earth’s rotation will have slowed down enough that we’ll have to redefine the length of the cubit. And then what, we start over? And with what work force? Who is building this thing? Where are they going to live eat shit? Schools for their kids? Hospitals? Food? We’ll have to build a new Bloomusalem just to house the people who will build the new Bloomusalem, which will require Bloomusalems for those builders recursive to no end point. I’ll take the lake of fire. Really. I’d rather have a good eternal swim in the lake of fire. I don’t want any part of this. Find another contractor, I’m out.