Having my way with Ulysses

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.

5 5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.

The happy precision of gears and well-oiled thoughts; the concurrence of energies as they converge into a single victorious trajectory. 2 hours 10 minutes 54 6/11 seconds ante meridiem

Now watch the clock. Keep your eye on it. There. That was one. Did you blink? I can slow it back down for you if you like, I’ve done it before, but we’d be here forever.

Let’s try again. There’s another one coming and there! See it? The longer hand and the shorter hand were at exactly the same angle of inclination. That’s the moment, that’s the way in, you understand. When the longer is the momma and the shorter is the girl, the way to shorter leads through longer and the way to longer leads through shorter.

Now pay attention, here it comes again and now! You missed it. Listen. You think this is easy tinkering with time for you? Try to focus. You think it’s everyday a mother and daughter feel simultaneously inclined? Yes it is every day, twenty two times a day, but I’m making a point, you owl, so don’t give me your shit. I can go. You know that, don’t you, I’ll leave. And then when will you be? I thought so. And we just missed another one, so. Yeah. Are we doing this? You ready? You’re not ready. I’m going to have to stop time or I’ll be explaining this until I’m blue in the face.

Stop.

Now let’s do the math. The hands kiss every hour and five and five elevenths minutes. Get that? Keep up. The daughter moves twelve times as fast as her mother, but that doesn’t mean momma’s not moving too. Frankly I’ll take a woman who understands a good slow rotation any day. But you are young, you like it fast, that’s your deal. So. Just know that momma is moving too, thirty degrees to her girl’s three hundred and sixty, so little miss chica moves fast, but she always plays catch up. Oh so much for her to learn. Do the division, divide little missy’s speed by momma’s endurance. Feel that eleven rising? Right there in your face. And start. And we just missed another one. Right. Right. Kid. Enough mathematics, we need to get scientific now. And musical, let’s try a higher octave. Yes? We can philosophize until the owls come home but that doesn’t get either you or me any nearer either one of them. You ready? Really feel it this time. Now go!

The difficulties of interpretation.

A small cronopio was looking for the key to the street door on the night table, the night table in the bedroom, the bedroom in the house, the house in the street. Here the cronopio paused, for to go into the street, he needed the key to the door.2:06 am

First it happens, then it means something. Rarely, the bolt of lightning will hit one directly (perhaps from a forty five degree angle like a shot off a shovel) and there within the simultaneity of the electrical discharge and the acoustic report you know as it’s going down that this now this is it is this moment (this very instant) that means already in advance and simultaneously what it will come to mean. But really what are the odds of an event and its significance occurring simultaneously? We can’t know all the conditions so there must be some sort of calculable probability. Twenty to one? And this is assuming of course that there is indeed such a thing as simultaneity, but this is no time for parlor games. There is no simultaneity, event and meaning intersect only with lovers, and there is no free will. Oh yes, also: do not risk, do not expect, do not be disappointed, be satisfied, sustain no positive loss, bring positive gain to others. Now, finish carving that on the tablet, make a duplicate to use as light to the gentiles, and bear it down the mountains in your arms, the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.

Swiftly she set out, with joy. But he gave her, stealthily, the honey-sweet berry of the pomegranate to eat, peering around him. He did not want her to stay for all time over there, at the side of her honorable mother, the one with the dark robe.12:28 am

Think back. Remember. I am almosting it. I spent those summer months, the first ones after, with circles and squares. As one would. It’s natural. Look at that circle there. You see it? A reflection of your eye looking at me.  I’ll reflect mine back to you in case you need, no? Fine then. So beautiful your circle. A circle is a circle because it is not a square.  A square is a square because it is not a circle.  The perfect square lacks corners, but I get ahead of myself. But I can’t get ahead of myself, that’s my predicament. Nor can I get behind myself either, damn it. But let’s return to the roundness, the fullness of your circle. All points of your circumference are equal from your center. Such pretty, such sublime perfection. Such infinity. Such simultaneity of number. Ba! Look at that square, now, ugly thing. In front of you, see it? Around where you stare. You should blink more, this is very bad for your eyes holding them open like that. Blink. Now see that ugly square binding your reflection. My reflection back. Corners. Angles. Limited. Linear. Like me. Ba, this has been an unusually fatiguing day. And this day, like any other day is this day now. Here. Now. Endlessly now. Nothing but now, only now forever and always now. I know for you it is different. I see it is different from here. Good Christ you can see it from space, but for me, when I look at myself I see only this and no other then. When? I exist between before and after in a durationless instant, and I unite them. Before and after exist because of me. You exist because of me. But I heard once of a way, a secret way. Closer, I’ll tell you. If the square married the circle, yes? You see it? Forgive the allegorical language but this is top secret understand. If the square married the circle they would mate, yes, and be united. Unified. If the perfect square lacked corners and if the circle had rationality. Think of the implications! Imagine what it could mean! The eternal and the temporal entwining. Infinity plunging into linearity. We can do it. So gently, so carefully. This is virgin territory. The past that was can be caressed into the now. And the future that beckons, we shall be the ones saying come hither sweet little thing you are. Aren’t you curious? Nobody’s looking baby love, we can do it. The cause is sacred. Stop. You don’t agree, do you. You think I’m wasting time. But the quadrature of the circle is all I have left, don’t you see? I live in temporal succession and this compounds my grief. You think it’s so easy to? You. Your center is everywhere and your circumference is nowhere. Ba. When have you ever needed to resurrect anything? Simultaneity. You are nothing. Leave me. Sorrow lives only in linearity; what do you know of my troubles? Now go.

Let everything rip

Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. 12:21 am

Well would you look at us.  Meeting again, are we? One traveler weary as hell from daily travels and besmeared with sulfur dung of lion reek of every last bit of shit along the slog. But well hey, what the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for. And then the other wants to play musemathematics with time. And so here we are a cork and a bottle.  What shall we talk about? insanity? Patriotism? Sorrow for the dead? No need for that. Death is the highest form of life. The future of the race then? Music? I thought so. Guarenteed to lull one of us and stimulate the other.  The rite is the poet’s rest. Well now, after you is good manners.  Well, what about the octave, a traveler like us. How like us? The octave moves in a simultaneity of departure and return. Oh octave, sweet sweet octave, you never know if you are coming or going do you? It’s both and, darling, you’re coming and going at the same time.  Whichever direction you go, ascending and descending other people’s staircases, you find yourself at both ends.  If you go forth tonight it is to your own steps you will tend.  It must be tedious always meeting oneself whichever direction you tend. Stop. What’s that noise? An exhale and a click; what a distracting sound.  Can you stop that please, we were just getting somewhere.

One ear could hear what the other spoke.

[It] was of an oblong and concave figure, four feet in length, and two and a half in breadth, framed of a light wood, coverd with a bulls hide, and strongly guarded with plates of brass.10:36 pm

Well you know what I heard, I heard she commissioned a mechanical something that would turn her somehow into a cow.  Not that she needed a machine to do that, am I right?  Seriously though, I heard that she had this like plasmic memory, you know, she remembered everything ever in her head, but all at once.  It was like a noise or something like all her lives talking at the same time but sometimes she could hear the differences between the voices and one of them said moo. Moo! Just like that, she decided she was once a cow and obsessed about it. That’s why she’s always wearing that cowhide jacket and pants. Even in heat. I thought she was nuts. Turns out she is nuts! And you know what I heard, I heard that she heard this double moo in her head, like voices stuck together.  And the voices had one body like cows cleaved into the one and the two simultaneously.  I don’t know what that means, I mean come on.  Both one and two but not as in three. Whatever. She hears voices. I’m just telling you. I’m just saying.

Her sweet flowerlike face

In reality everything occurs in a (is) simultaneity: door, smile, and the rest of the elements that make up the pattern appear as facets of links, like a lightning bolt that transforms the glass outside of time. It is impossible to retain this vision, since we don't know how to dis-place ourselves. There remains only an anxiety, a trembling, a vague longing. Something was there, perhaps quite near. And now there is nothing but a rose inside a glass, on this side where a rose is a rose is a rose, and no more. 8:46 pm

I’ll say goodbye using the only language deemed acceptable by the conventions of Society with a big ess.  Here, my love, I send my message in the language of flow wafting softly through the evening and that little bat flying around to and fro just to show what a good bat she is had better not tell.  Little bats don’t tell.  Smell me! Smell me!  Wonder if he is too far to?  I’m no she-rose.  But he’ll forgive me that.  He’ll give me a sweet forgiving smile verging on tears.  There will be no goodbye.  We shall meet again.  Then, tomorrow, in good time or outside of time no matter, and we’ll dream together of yester eve.  Here, right here!  Please, don’t imagine what we will do then, I’m blushing like a girl!  Look at the color of me!

We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. 2:50 pm

Look in the mirror.  See that person there?  You think that is just one person looking back?  Look into those eyes looking into your eyes.  Stare hard.  Wait for the melting away of edges, loss of borders, wait for all to fade but eyes then BAM! that’s you.  That’s who you are.  And that feeling?  Felt it, did you?  You found another you in there.  A you you don’t often see.  More than one.  Multiple, really, you are simultaneously you and you and also you sharing one body that is itself an illusion of singularity.  You co-exist with yourself, and without full integration.  I don’t mean public and private parts of yourself.  Look in the mirror again.  Or look into other eyes; use them as mirrors.  Every one you see (I say one, but they are all multiplicities too) reflects back a version of yourself.  All those strangers are familiar parts of yourself.  And look at your beloved.  Go ahead, look into those eyes until all else is gone.  See that?  That’s you, looking back.  You are surrounded by yourself, isolated into a temporality of your own experience.  And who are you?  Go ahead tell me.  Tell us all.  We’ll only hear versions of you which reflect versions of ourselves.  What does this mean?  Well, you tell me.  It is the self alone who can make meaning, and only for the self.  And what might be insensible to me might be meaningful to you.  Who are you?  You are me.  Who am I?  I am you.  Who am I?  I am God. Who are you?  Well.  Well, well.  You go look in your mirror honey.

No-one is anything

He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary -- not too dusty a cicada of neurtiment for a chittinous chip so mitey. 1:30 pm

We die.  Mors Certa, Hora Incerta.  So how can we be anything?  No-one is anything.  From the void and to the void, and again and again.  Things go on the same.  One born every minute.  Well more like, let’s see, carry the one.  Stop a minute so I can calculate this.  Women all over in their life throws.  Sss. Dth, dth, dth!  They won’t stop so I can count.  There’s more born, washing the blood off.  All are washed in the blood of the lamb.  Not stillborn of course.  They are not even registered.  Trouble for nothing.  Well, I am almosting it.  So.  So.  So far this year there have been 30,275,000 births rounding up.  84 days so far this year.  360,417 births a day, rounding up. That’s 15,018 births an hour.  251 births a minute.  Wait a  second.  That’s, yes, 5 births a second.  No point rounding down.  How long did it take your eye to move from we die to 5 births a second?  Cities of people coming and coming.  Lives and lives.  Passing away too.  In your life were you the Gracehoper or the Ondt?  Doesn’t matter, back to the void with you!  How many?  How many.  Wish I had paper.  Um. 12,930,000 deaths this year, might as well round up.  People die and we don’t even know.  Months later somebody smells something.  A drip through the ceiling from the tenant above.  153,929 deaths a day.  That’s 6,414 people every hour.  107 a minute and every second 2 people die.  1.78 really.  One dies and one gets 78% of the way there.  Mostly dead.  There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.  Mostly dead is slightly alive.  Give it a second.  You can’t be mostly dead all day.  There you go.  Welcome to the void.  You have been unmade.  It will be the making of you.  You were a being.  You filled space.  Now you are a becoming.  Not changing, no, I mean fulfilling.  You took a form intended for you all along.  That is, your form is gone.  Your form is formlessness.  I know, death is new to you.  You’ll get there.  Destruction and creation are simultaneous.  Death and rebirth are the same thing spelled different ways.  You hungry?  Of course not, what am I saying.  Sorry.  It’s this time of day.  This is the very worst hour of the day.  Vitality.  Dull, gloomy: hate this hour.  Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.  Intended.  Caught that did you?  Well.  Well, well.

What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me?

Supposing we grant that all things known as substances are homogeneous as possessing something denied to the other genera, what precisely is this something, this individuality, this subject which is never a predicate, this thing not present in any thing as in a subject, this thing which does not owe its essential character to any other thing, as a quality takes character from a body and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to motion and motion to the moved? 12:43 pm

But it wasn’t planes of consciousness I was asking about.  I could give two shits about planes of consciousness.  No.  And there is AE, thinking me a timid boy, declaring absolute knowledge involves understanding the totality of life.  To explain something means to show its connection to everything else.  But tell me something, AE, show me the everything else.  Where exactly will we stand?  How do we sufficiently remove our temporal selves so we can enter into this eternal totality?  Where will we in our opalescent hush experience this absolute?  Shall we lay on our backs in the grass and looking up into the blue try to think ourselves into the absolute?  But our backs, and the grass and the blue, won’t these temporal things get in our way?  It is an utter blotting out of self you quote Plotinus (who like you covets out of body experiences, but he is a hydrophobic leper so no wonder), a rapture of peace which will present to us, the more lucid souls amongst the rabblement, the experience of the absolute, the totality of life.  Please.  Tell me.  How do we sufficiently remove ourselves from the totality in order to experience it?  We are in it.  Where else is there?  When else?   And we see features of this totality through our individual conceptual and relative frameworks.  Emphasis on relative.  Absolute, in your mystic envelope my dear AE, it is the merging of the soul with the all the absolute.  But for you this must be done independent of relative content.  Put yourself in and simultaneously take yourself out.  Give me the relative.  Well, you don’t have to give it me.  I’m filled with it.  Infected by it.  And so are you.  The perception of the observer creates the reality of the observed.  I see you.  Not you, you.  There is no higher absolute, more Godly than the relative, clear to the sensitives.  Look at relativity.  Do you see it?  According to relativity, we can perceive events in time, but not time itself,  All time perception is relative to position and velocity, thus there is no absolute time, no absolute.  Tell that to AE messiah to the mastermystics.  He never packed relativity into his case of tricks.