Having my way with Ulysses

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Shhh.

3:25 am

[Scene: Two lovers in bed, AE with Lizzie Twigg: coiled head to toe they quietly discuss the fixity of their volatility and the volatilization of their fixation, until within his fixedness AE has become nothing and feeling everything, Lizzie becomes volitive. They communicate intermittently in increasingly more laconic narrations. Also a small angry dog is trying to take up as much space as possible between them. It’s so cute! Come here little puppy, come here. What a good doggie. Who’s a good doggie? Oh Jesus God! He’s all teeth! Get off me! Like petting a piranha with fur.]

AE: It’s just that we define ourselves contrarily to each other. I am me because I am not you, and you are you because you are not me. We are poles apart.

Lizzie: We are the same person, AE, don’t you feel it?  After all the mutual deaths we have died? Resurrection, translation, return, distillation, putrefaction, decay, still you don’t know you had it backwards the whole time. You were resurrecting in the wrong direction.

AE: I know. I know it. I just wanted to be the material representation of eternality, in linear time. Just once. Just for a little while. Only long enough to re-experience that feeling of linearity. Don’t you miss it? And feel what it could be, to be linear and eternal simultaneously.

Lizzie: But you can’t just translate yourself into linearity and say I’m back, everybody, I’ve  gained bodily entry into eternity and now look at me! Look at what happened to Lazarus. No. If you want to see how a human mortal finds a place within eternity, that’s not going to cut it. That gets you nothing.

AE: Nothing’s not nothing. Don’t knock nothing.

Lizzie: No, nothing’s not nothing.

AE: I was trying be the eternal temporalized. I wanted to be the all at onceness linearized. I wanted to square that circle, just once. Just the one time and be it and feel it, really feel what it is to be the coexistence of the infinite and the finite.

Lizzie: Be eternality living in linearity? Darling, you’ve done it. You’ve been there already. The infinite and the finite are the same things whichever side you’re on, if you really must take sides, can’t you tell? Just look at us, two beings contrarily defined yet coexisting as aspects of the same reality.

AE: I know. I get it. You don’t have to scratch me like that.

Lizzie: That wasn’t me, but here’s a flash of light for you AE: when we were mortals we didn’t have to go around worrying all the time about gaining bodily entry into eternity: eternity had already gained bodily entry into us. We have always already been since time immemorial and forevermore, the material representation of eternality.

AE: We are God.

Lizzie: Exactly. We are already a squared circle: we can take a finite form, but our infinite selves are in there too.

AE: We are a circle, containing everything.

Lizzie: Everything and nothing.

[At rest relatively to themselves and to each other, the lovers settle into silent contemplation. Small birds rise gently, sweetly, from Lizzie and from AE. Hundreds of them flitter up in swirling concentric patterns bringing with them, as if reflected from the sheen of their feathers, an increasing luminosity of ruby light. Thousands of little birds, aeons of them, softly forming clouds as soft as what do you call it gossamer, the clouds forming mist, the mist gently drifting downward covering the lovers, the lovers blurring about the edges. Together they coalesce and dissolve, their bodies languid, breathing, watching their spirits unrestrained, circling, birds rising into mist falling, like self knowing wheels revolving uniformly: self knowing and self known.]

What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?

You only dwell within yourself, and only you know you; self-knowing, self-known, you love and smile upon yourself!

2:41 am

I’d rather die than sleep with you Echo, if you really want the truth. It’s not going to happen so please, come on, enough already.

But. Narcissus, you can’t hold out forever. I know what you’re doing. You have this image of yourself you are so in love with, but that’s not really you. Saying all the time you won’t have sex you won’t have sex, do you think that makes you so much more pure than everybody else? You have youth and you have beauty. And you’re a rock star. I’m just saying give it up already. You owe it if not to me, to yourself. You are missing out and here I am. Right here. Telling you and telling you. I could disappear tomorrow you know, and then who will you have to love you? I mean more than I love you.

I have myself. I have my integrity and I know my worth, and I am more valuable to me than I am to anybody else.

You are so transparent. You can love yourself all you want Narcissus, but yourself won’t love you back. God it’s like I’m empty air here, can’t you hear me? I’m telling you!

I’ve learned something, Echo, I can see myself as others see me. But more importantly I see my self as I see myself. I look into my own eyes looking into mine and there is nothing between us. No fears, no doubts. Nothing. The everythingness of nothing. Together we feel very simply, but strongly, the purity of a oneness made from the two of us. We feel it like radiance, projecting outwardly from our center in concentric circles. It feels like waves, Echo. When we connect together within that moment, we are the meaning and even the source of the two in the one and the one in the two. And we feel together, I and I, I feel that this truth has been and always will be true since time immemorial and forever more. Desde siempre y para siempre.

You’re killing me! Narcissus, I love you like you’ve never seen before. I beg you to listen to me.

I can’t even look at you.

Nought Nowhere was Never Reached

But time between one and the other when was brief -- I mean the whens of waiting and of seeing heaven grow more radiant.2:26 am

Look at the stars if you can see them. I see clouds and darkness but I know the stars are there. No. I don’t know that. I know that they were there. The little lights which I do not see in the sky but possibly you do, come from a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators (excluding myself) had entered actual present existence. That which I do not see might not be there now, most certainly is not there now, as by now they will have red-shifted position. All those stars running off, taking their planets with them. Ours too. Such a fearsome isolation, all this expanding outwardly from each other, temporality stretching between us. So lonely, having no contact with each other. Yet if we did, our loneliness would compound. We could look up at the stars (I at starless clouds) into distances numbering nine to the ninth power to the ninth power and find our double, as if in a mirror shining back to us: we are here too. The joy of recognition; the first sighting of a lover! And then, and then. And then we will understand in advance the impostvidibility of the past. We will know as if we have already harkened back in a kind of retrospective arrangement that we are already and always have been ever alone. There is our lover, shimmering through lakes of dreams, seas of rains, gulfs of dews, oceans of fecundity, simultaneously loving us back yet already gone. Infinity rendered finite. We would be as the new moon with the old moon in our arms, but our state of solitude is one where there can be no entry. They are gone. The world is gone.

Simply abounding in immortal numbers.

After that holy soul had, with his silence, showed he was freed from putting in the woof acrose the web whose warp I set for him, I like a man who, doubting, craves for counsel from the one who sees and rightly wills and loves, replied to him: I clearly see, my father, how time is hurrying toward me in order to deal me such a blow as would be most grievous for him who is not set for it.1:55 am

Let’s look at music. No, I said look. Can’t you see music? No? I’ll help you. Good grief who can’t see music? Music finds its reality in time, so how blind must you be never to consider its spatial component? Never mind. I do apologize and I take that back. Some people can’t help being, ah, different. We are all equally special and so on. Perhaps you are only looking in the one place. Sound waves expand in space: you must adjust for that. So, let’s look at music. Here, take my arm and I’ll guide you. You’ll feel like a different person after, trust me. Let’s take a peek at Mozart, or is that too predictable? How about Wagner maybe? or if prefer something a scoach less antisemitic we might spy a little at the Gloria from the Twelfth Mass. I find Catholic music the most geometrically pleasing, don’t you? Much better than what comes out of the opposite shop. Doesn’t really matter, they are all the children of mother matrix and papa pattern, but one does have one’s favorites. Now then. See for yourself the musical notes numbered and grouped into symmetry and written into proportion, now watch when they, yes! No? You didn’t see? They sound aloud together in tessellating patterns. See them? Numbers in proportional bunches running this way, now transposed, now running that way. The woof and the warp: weave weaver of the wind. Peek at the numbers and you’ll see inversions, rotations, reflections flipped vertically or horizontally, even reflections that glide and slide along sideways. Sure there are deviations here and there in the numbers, just to wake us up a little, see if we’re still looking, but look close and you’ll see numbers arranged into self-similarity across scale. Forget your ears. Listen with your eyes! And your body. Wait, what did you say? I can’t allow myself to hear that. Don’t say it. Just don’t. You can’t feel music? Oh honey, you really are special.

Stars all around suns turn roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls.

Not because more than one unmingled semblance was in the living light on which I looked, for it is always what it was before; But through the sight, that fortified itself in me by looking, one appearance only to me was ever changing as I changed. Within the deep and luminous subsistence of the high light appeared to me three circles, of threefold colour and of one dimension, and by the second seemed the first reflected as Iris is by Iris, and the third seemed fire that equally from both is breathed. 12:50 am

Come on you nasty little devils, I know you’re dripping for a couple of rounds of it, yes? No? Oh yes so here we go. And one two three two two three three two three spin. Yes, now that’s the spirits. Let’s keep it going round round, square dance in circles, the best square lacks corners, and three two three four. Anybody here for there? Wheel whirl twirl simply swirl. And the room wants to cut in. Please, twirl right round baby. Room wind this way we’ll twine that. We’ll do a May pole dance right down the middles three four and turn and one two three. come on in snakes, your turn, and spin your partners right up that pole and fandango. Go for baroque babies, may I touch you? You may touch my, O but lightly! And three two three four and one two three two two two by two three four.

Thou, abortion, thou.

Shee therefore is not to bee accounted impious or hereticall as if shee acted contrary to Nature, but it is to be imputed to her imagination. For her imagination is alwaies the cause of it. And the imagination of a breeding woman is so powerful, that in conceiving the seed into her body, shee may change her infant divers wayes: because her inward starres are so strongly bent upon the infant that they beget an impression and influence upon it. Wherefore the infant in the Mothers wombe in its forming is put into the hand and will of its Mother.10:12 pm

If you do indeed find yourself put in a pod, and wish to remove the djinn from the bottle, focus your spagyric efforts within the first three months, keeping your work to the proper day of the week and planetary hour.  Solve et coagula, for a successful outcome so to speak. that is to say one must dissolve the fix and fix the volatile.  Begin with enough marjoram, gathered when just coming into flower.  Only 2% of the plant is volatile oil, so gather as much of it as you are able, in your condition.  Grind it up as finely as you can and steep it in warm brandy for two weeks, to bring out the essential oils.  Filter it. Keep the brandy and the macerated marjoram. Next, separate the essential and the subtle from the inessential and the gross.  Dry the remaining plant matter and burn it to ashes.  Mix the ashes in a pot with 20 times their volume of rain water.  Boil for 20 minutes then filter it.  Evaporate the remaining liquid until it calcinates in the pan.  Keep it in your pan at 500 degrees for several hours.  Cool it and dissolve it in filtered rainwater.  Repeat the calcination at least twice more until you are left with a chalky white substance in crystalline form, the Marjoram’s volatile salt.  You have now in your possession the bridge between plant and mineral, the essential component of your upcoming purge.  Wait for the waxing moon and spread it on plates.  leave the plates outside overnight, raised off the ground.  Go to bed and allow in your house rest to reign, as the time’s occasion is most sacred and most worthy to be most sacred.   At sunrise collect the liquid and whatever has not yet dissolved, avoiding contact of it with skin or metal.  This is the marjoram’s angel water.  Distill it until the salts are dry, and save in a dark glass jar.  Now you are ready to separate the false from the true.  Gather your angel water, the salts of marjoram, fresh marjoram, and the brandy infused with marjoram’s essential oils (good God you didn’t throw that away!).  Boil water and make an infusion with the fresh marjoram, allowing it to steep for at least 10 minutes.  While waiting, pour the brandy into a glass and mix into it the salts of marjoram.  Pour the angel water into a third glass.  Now in silence, hist! All three cups you must straightways now attack.  Staboo.  Stabella.  Feel her approach.  Lilith, those broad wings.  Listen, she is all eyes.  Swallow.  Drink.  Focus all your soul, every pit of every little apart of your self that ever wanted anything before wants now to want.  Your truth centers both your speech and your belief.  You are a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.  Come on baby girl, chug a lug.  There you go.  Take a breath.  That which never dies and that which dies are only the reflected light of that idea which love with love begets.  Keep sipping now.  Just nice sips.  And put all your everything you’ve got into your womb.  There now Staboo, Stabella’s here.  The closer of openings, yes, she makes possible the best of all possibilities.  Hello Lilith.  You feel it go now and look. Look under her feathers, see that? Right there. That. See it? The living light that pours out so from its bright source.  Notice that it does not dis-one itself from love or from the love that enthreed itself with them.  Ok baby, you ok?  Go clean up now, there you go.

A liquid womb of woman eyeball.

The world, when still in peril, thought that, wheeling, in the third epicycle, Cyprian the fair sent down her rays of frenzied love, so that, in ancient error, ancient peoples not only honored her with sacrifices and votive cries, but honored, too, Dione and Cupid, one as mother, one as son of Cyprian, and told how Cupid sat in Dido's lap; and gave the name of her with whom I have begun this canto, to the planet that is courted by the sun, at times behind her and at times in front. 4:47 pm

Accarezzévole

Well I can’t leave now, look at her.  Her eyes, my eyes.  She sees I’ve been watching, it’s in that blank face.  Must be a virgin.  Or fingered only.  She sees me, her hand, look, moving on the beer pull.  Thumb, index and midfinger softly feeling its shape.  Practiced unconscious, expert.  For me.  Me.  No wait.  Lidwell there, not for me.  Yet she knows, my eyes, her eyes.  His eyes.  Liquid eyeball, can see her beauty in her eye when no words.  Her hand moving her fingers making a hole.  Your hand was thin.  Your hand was stiff.  Three holes, women.  Those goddesses three.  Holes?  Didn’t see.  Interrup.  Young goddess.  Milly too, with a young student.  Like him, probably.

 

Women like money and rough treatment.  That’s why.  That must be why.  Take them into the bushes and there lay until the morning.  My dreams were white but life is so dark.

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

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. 

Hush, I hear feetstoops

12:16 am

Ok, stoop down here.  Don’t mind me, just picking up these racing forms. Figure this out on my own.  La la la. So what do we have.  Sceptre 5 to 4, Zinfandel 7 to 4, Maximum II 10 to 1.  Those are the most likely.  Will include least likely, Throwaway 20 to 1 for a control.  A throwaway.  So.  Ok.  Draw a circle, homogeneous non-differentiated space.  Divide into duality in order to create.  Division within unity.  Now.  Center is O and radius OA=1.  Diameters AA’ and BB’ at right angles and with centers on diameter BB’ draw two circles.  Ok,  each with a radius half that of original circle.  Yup. From point A swing an arc NM tangent to circumferences of the two inner circles.  Repeat from point A’.  Construct square ACB’O from the radius of the original circle.  That’s the racetrack.  Good.  Ok.  The arc of the semi-diagonal of the square and the radius AE of the arc NEM is Φ  and the arcs NEM and NDM divide the radii AO and A’O into the golden division of 1/Φ and 1/Φ2.  Hum. Paradox now. Divide a circle into a yin yang like that and the circumferences of the inner circles are equal to that of the larger circle but the area within them is only half that of the original circle. One has become two. So Zinfandel?  Not Maximum II.  That seems out.   A unity becomes a duality.   Homogeneity becomes polarized.  Separated.  Jockey falls off?  Which one?  Mutually repellent forms arise from a common source.  Well that’s life.  And that sounds like Zinfandel to me.  The pentahedron to the cube, the heptahedron to the cube, the decahedron to the unity.  The icosahedron to the unity.  Hm.  So now, construct a square equal in area to the original circle.  If only pi were 3.17, then it would be Maximum II and what a payoff!  But have to base this on reality.  So.  So.  Φ2= 1+r2 and r = √Φ-1 and r = √Φ and the circumference equals 2∏√Φ with √Φ=1.272. . . and ∏=three point one four one five nine do da do da, so, hm.  If the perimeter of the square is approximately 8.  But I don’t want approximates.  Then, well.  This isn’t very mathematically exact.  A bit like throwing money into a hurricane.  But it looks like Sceptre.  That’s just where it’s shaking out.  I can feel it in the numbers.  My money, all of it, on Scepter.  Respect.  A dead cert.