Having my way with Ulysses

That is not more to stand.

And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

3:05 am

Instructions on how to kill yourself:

First, you must find a reason not to live. There exists uncountable reasons but you must choose at least one and try to make it as ineffable as possible so the people you leave behind may feel suitably at a loss for words when they find you. An added benefit: it will be easier for the people who attend your wake, interment, scattering of the ashes, memorial service, or what have you, to speak in hushed and reverent tones if they find themselves capable of speaking at all. Amongst the reasons not to live you might choose: you are suffering from progressive melancholia; by ceasing to exist you will bring your existence to the attention of the person who barely knows you exist, though you maintain a unique awareness of said person’s existence; pondering the great nothingness of everythingness has inverted your thoughts into a perpetual retrospective arrangement.

Once you have found your reason not to live, you must reduce said reason by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune. Take it all down to one point: a singularity which contains everything.

Compose a note to be found suitably near your corpse, but not in a place where it might slip beyond a finder’s field of vision. Clutched in the hand makes for great cinema and literature, but rarely works in real death. Include in your epistle a précis of your reason not to live. Ask somebody to be kind to your surviving pets.

Leave something in a book, marking a particularly resonant passage or one which will send the finder harkening back in a retrospective arrangement upon discovery. Possibilities may include leaving something in a book at a symbolic page number. One might even leave something in a book which will send the finder to something left in another book which will send the finder to more books always to the last term of the preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, originating in and repeated to infinity. Possible items to leave in books: puzzle pieces, scraps of a shirt, pages of other books. Possible symbolic number: 1132.

Select the method of suicide according to your own levels of drama, squeamishness, accessible materials, pain tolerance, or desire to leave a nice looking corpse. There is no need to be elaborate, if you are already poisoning yourself slowly with something: increase the dose; if you tend toward recklessness perhaps walk closer to the cliff edge until 32 feet per second per second takes care of the matter for you; have the light at the end of your tunnel be an oncoming train, or if your perambulations bring you near an oncoming Jagannath: toss yourself into his path. You’ll receive an added bonus for that last one.

If you have items locked away, say in a drawer, leave a key handy or better still, unlock the drawer before your demise so the living won’t have to destroy the furniture to access its contents. It’s just common courtesy.  Now go.

From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.

Thanks eversore much, Pointcarried!
2:00 am

Sit down and take a walk with me, won’t you? I’m remodling my treehouse, getting extravagant. Hyperbolic space simply has more room than Euclidean, so you can’t really blame me. Shall we parallel? You’ll have to project yourself over here, honey, steriographically. Form a point, there you go. Now circle that square; I’ll give you a hand. Pivot. Pivot. Mind the möbius transformation! Oh whacked your head right on it: sorry about that, it was in a different place yesterday. There you go and square the circle. That’s better! Now shall we be asymptotic or ultraparallel? I know, six of one. Though it does seem the older I get the fewer I know.

The point was the least conspicuous point about it.

Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is set upon by other gauchos, and as he falls he recognizes a godson of his, and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read): Pero, ¡ché! He dies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.
1:26 am

Scene: [An endlessly large room once belonging to to all the infinite possibilities but now cavernously empty save for Caesar who is curled up on the floor patting his knife wounds with smooth caresses.]

Time: [On the god mic, sotto voce] Are you ready to listen?

Caesar: What’s the point?

Time: You must stop looking at the point of everything. This particular version of you has no point. Or rather, you have many points. You are legion.

Caesar: Blah blah blah.

Time: You’re tired, you’re not taking it in. Maybe some solid food? I’m a stickler for solid food. Here. [A cup of coffee appears on the floor next to Caesar. It’s over-roasted, must be Starbucks.] Now Caesar, honey, you do know that history is a tale like any other too often heard. But darling, your history, your place in Roman history, is only one manifestation of infinite possibilities. You have ousted all the others and now here we are, at a standstill until you can accept it. You are at a crucial point.

Caesar: But if I have other selves, some which did not die, then they are not to be thought away.

Time: They are, but not by you. You occupy a non-dimensional point, the stilled eternity. Move to become a line, then a plane, then a tetrahedron and you’ll gain some perspective. Trust me on this one. Your other selves did.

Caesar: I refuse to accept other selves.

Time: They are the possibilities you have ousted. You did that. Get used to it. You think you can square the circle lying there in a puddle of yourself? Stand up, man, form a line. Until then you are both center and circumference. Unless you straighten up beyond this particular singularity, that thing you call “self” to which you stubbornly cling, sweetie love, you will understand nothing, and only nothing.

Caesar: Leave me alone

Time: The point is always alone.

Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.

This was his first and never-forgotten image of the city; those massive buildings that seemed to say We are here forever.12:52 am

What made time? This is the western world I’m swimming in; within these waters I know deep in my gills that time was made. I open my eyes and see fish; perhaps you open yours and see flow. Maybe your temporality isn’t something that can be said to have begun. What the hell do I know about that, I’m breathing water here. Your geographical location will tell your gills other truths. Maybe your temporality has no need of a beginning. So. What made time? This time, yeah? A god? A god made time? Nice work dumbass, you made something that breaks too easily. Your temporality is too fragile. It smashes whenever we make something formed from what is that word everybody knows? What’s the point (ah the point!) of a temporality that breaks whenever we corrode sublimate smash something into nothing. Break it down boys. We can clear this place out in no time flat. Make quick work. Sudden, sometimes. But look at the materials: creatio ex nihilo, so what do you expect? Shows what you get when you make something from nothing. Must not have been much of a primary void. You want void? You want nothing? We have nothing. We have plenty of nothing right here. In this country. Right here. Go look at the sky just above our greatest city. That particular nothing ranks with some of our greatest and most terrible nothings ever to cleave time, and we’ve had some enormous nothings on our record. Millions of leaping final flames. Tear stained trails of them. When a world watches with hearts in mouths while receiving a nightmare’s bad kick, what is the more grievous sight? The buildings falling? The dust clouds and smoke rising spreading filling smothering settling? No. It’s the oh my god the towers aren’t there. That. It was that. Remember that? That ripple of obvious entwined with inconceivable? It was visceral, that moment. That’s the sight that cleaved time. There’s what rent temporality. That monumental nothing. We look into that nothing. That hole in our sky. That hole in our temporality.  And we look into that nothing and name everything on that side “before” and on this side “after.” Why have we yet to build something to fill nothing? Our monument of nothing is too compacted, too dense; it won’t just drift off with the tide just like that. You want something not nothing? Good luck to you. Put what you like there, go ahead, put it all there. Make it everything, that nothing’s not going anywhere.

Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the end of the world.

In the stories I have mentioned the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plentitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies.

12:25 am

Are you a god too? You don’t say much do you. Wanna play dice? No? Do you know what i’m asking of you? Some other time, yes? Or maybe you don’t speak my language. How about this: 3.5 = A time, times and half a time. Yes? A little reaction. Now we’re sensing a little of the cosmic force. How about 77? 2+3+5+7+11+13+17+19? Oh did I offend you? Forgive my crudeness. I’ll rephrase that. My darling, I sort of believe strong in you. Would you join me in a little 4² + 5² + 6²? It’s up to you. You don’t have cold feet about the cosmos do you? Careful! Watch that infinite tightrope. It’s invisible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not sealed in here with us. That thing goes both ways, don’t you know, from zenith to vacuum, and we are damn close to vacuum now. Look at the clouds forming. My, it’s warm. It’s getting so hot in here; it must be the heat. We may be but a pair of squares, but seeings that we are all in a cauldron and everything, how about a 69 before we ? We can get all turned around and place our bets if we are coming or going.  Journey up looks the same as the journey down and the start and the end is the same point. Shall we put out heads between our knees and look around? Come on, before we evaporate to nothingness, let’s find out more about each other than we have forgotten.

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. 

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here

Never has any thing produced by human reason been everlasting -- following the heavens, men seek the new, they shift their predilections. That man should speak at all is nature's act, but how you speak -- in this tongue or in that -- she leaves to you and to your preference.11:23 am

I am well out of it.  Wet but wet dries.  It was the wind of wild air of seeds of brightness that did it, I was thinking about those golden seeds windborne, impregnating mortals.  Harpies as fast as gusts.  Then I walked into the ocean.  Not for that reason, but why not?  My soul walks with me.  Take everything, keep it all.  I have my form of forms and whether I listen to Elsinore’s tempting flood and walk into the ocean (I turned back) or sit on a couch of sand makes little difference.  The flood is following me.  Lord will it attack me?  Enough.  Enough walking through memories.  I move and time and space conjoin.  Better to sit and kill time instead.  I’ve no loyalty there.  I’m not time’s bitch.  Think of that dead dog who sat with me, my loyal pointer Orthus.  There: decay.  Good dog.  Bloat and decay: evidence of time’s destruction.  It destroys us and we destroy it right back.  Kill it.  Blur it together with space, kill that too for all I care. Stone it to death and they collapse together. I no longer see distinctions. The running dog? Just a point. Hungry brother of Orthus. Peekaboo I see you. Not me. Or you. The dog.