Having my way with Ulysses

as if the world was coming to an end

In secret we met - / In silence I grieve / That thy heart could forget, / Thy spirit deceive. / If I should meet thee / After long years, / How should I greet thee? - / With silence and tears.

light a candle for us and pray to whatever youve got because yes the world is coming to an end and it’s about time too woooo this is our house now everybody out thank you and get the fuck out and thank you dear saint lazarus on this your glorious day blah blah blah for demonstrating so clearly just how not to do it for there to be a sundering there must first be a reconciliation and my sister and I are like two become one for this shit though she might murder me at any moment because you cant discount she has that determined vicious look in her eye she’s ready to poison this whole place with Arsenic and finish it off herself o but sister love lets take our time a little we cant create ruination without satisfaction we can at least pretend to like it well have our way with sly uses o yes paralyze it long and hot down to its soul as far as possible and possible too o sly can you feel us making a whore out of you youre swollen out like an elephant come let us relieve you of that baby there you go now lay back darling dont worry sweetie love we’ll pull out

Bueñas noches, Señorita Blanca.

Whoso therefore knows how to conjoin the principles, or direct the work, to impregnate, to mortify, to putrify, to generate, to quicken the species, to make white, cleanse the vulture from his blackness and darkness so he is purged by the fire and tinged, and purified from all his spots, shall be possessor of a treasure so great, that even kings themselves shall venerate him.11:36 pm

Careful that whore riding the dragon. Password. This way to the lower world, three turns to the right then you’ll find your divine spirit in the depths of matter. Don’t believe me? Doesn’t matter. Not important. You’re in, you figure it out. A hint, friend. The more you putrefy the more likely you’ll purify. Understand? Have you no soul? You have hope, you say. Hope. you think that’s enough? Please. Pandora, you know her? Cheap whore that one but a nice kid. She let all the evils out of her jar for the world’s grief and left hope inside. Smart girl.  Oye tell me, yeah, if you’re so smart, if you know everything about sin then what’s hope? What was hope doing in the jar with all the other baddies? Lucky it stayed in there. Right. So. See there my vulture’s shadow? Follow it. Now go. Estúpido. Quién no tiene fuerza para matar la realidad no es lo suficientemente fuerte como para crearlo. Hablar conmigo de esperanza. Estoy grandeza tres veces. Estoy palabras en acción. Te ves en todos los estratos del ser y es mi cara que ves. Soy el mago que creó magia! Estoy sentido inagotable. Hice el culo sólo pensar en ello. Hablar conmigo de esperanza.  You still here?  I said go.

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

And now, O Alcibiades, the divine thing having been performed, tell me, are the girls and the youths and the philosophers as fond of thee as ever?10:42 pm

Scene: [Around the ideal form of a table sit Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pistritus, and a mirror reflecting an even more ideal form of a table around which sit Glycera, Chloe, Phyllis and a mirror reflecting ooh look at that table, way more ideal, around which sit Anemone, Posie, Echo in a mirror, and a mirror reflecting ok now I like this one best, wait, can I see that first table again? reflecting Mars, Venus, and Juno and a mirror reflecting turtles all the way down.  On each ideal form of a table sits a container of plums. Some of the containers are coffins, some are eggs.]

Glaucon: [Brotherly, breathing on the mirror while the others stare hard at the plums] On behalf of Alcibiades, for the fulfillment of his one great goal, I call them to life across the waters of Lethe.

Juno: [Chewing a plum] You hear that?  Venus, get off of Mars, we have to troop to the call.

Anemone: Poor ghosts. I really anticipate disaster here.

Echo: Disaster here.

Posie: [Carving into the table with a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife reminiscent of Roman history]  e ar space ach e ar e period.

Alcibiades: Anything yet?

Anemone: He is so expectant!

Echo: expectant!

Posie: [Carving]   tea ay en tea exclamation point.

Glycera: [Wearing a frock of muslin and yellow shoes]  He wants me again.  Already.

Phyllis: Well don’t go.  That man would make his own mother an orphan.

Chloe: Isn’t his father the son of his own mother?

Anemone: He heard her say that.  Look his face is growing dark.

Echo: Growing dark.

Posie: eye en gee space dee ay ar kay period.

Pisistratus:  All is lost.  I’m leaving.

Glaucon: Stay, we have all the mirrors aligned in perfect harmonic proportions.  This will work.

Pisistratus: It will work if we bribe somebody.

Alcibiades: Glycera’s soul is far away.  What if she won’t assume her etheric double?

Juno: Ok, place your bets. Will she assume her etheric double?  I say yes.  A whore like that? Come on.

Mars: I say yes too. Last time she had her leg up over our left shoulder.  I could watch that again 16 times in a row.

Venus: Alcibiades’ left shoulder. She won’t.  He’ll beg until he’s black in the face but I’ll have to incarnate for her.  Where’s my ruby dress?

Phyllis: Huzzah! I think Venus will go for you. I wonder if she has a ride?  She can take Aristotle, he’s parked out back.

Juno: Venus your bet’s a throwaway.  Just listen to her heart beating! Can hear it two mirrors over.

Glycera: I guess I can go, but I won’t use a condom. I hate condoms. Well at least I had my period last week so there’s that.  He bites, though.  It’s off putting.

Chloe: You’re fertile!  Oh you’ll have a nice ripe egg for him.

Glycera: Oh fabulous, I’ll get pregnant.  Great.

Anemone: Will she?

Echo: She?

Posie:  capital ess ach e question mark.

Glycera: What do you think, ladies?

Phyllis: It’s a holocaust; you’ll get burned.

Chloe:  Yes she’ll burn. The young green shoots of new plumtrees require putrefaction first. End it now and go to him, it will be the beginning of something.  And the Gods are involved, so there will be mirror effects all over the place.  Lose yourself in it.  I mean, look at these plums.  They’re dying. They won’t be fully empowered until putrefied. The tomb of death is the womb of new life.

Glycera: Ok, here I go.

Juno: You hear that? Let’s get started.

Juno, Venus, and Mars: [Breathing on the mirror] We call them to life across the waters of Lethe.

One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What's to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure. 2:10 pm

I married a ghost.  And I died before I was born.  Liliata rutilantium.  Well, I died sixty-seven years after I was born, but what is it to you how we lived or died?  Forget me.  He did.  He left me and he gained a world of pretty theatre boys in the cast off armor of court ladies.  The world believes William made a mistake marrying me.  And got out of it as best he could and quickly too.  Stephen thinks a man of genius makes no mistakes, that his errors are volitional, to be used as portals of discovery.  Well William’s genius discovered my portal sure enough.  Made use of me.  And don’t think that because I was twenty-six and he a full eight years younger than me that I drew him in, trapped him into bed and then ruthlessly wed.  Listen to greenroom gossip if you like, but consider:  what would I want with a boy pauper for a husband?  Call me a whore before and a shrew after, what do I care, but the truth is he came after me.  The mistake was mine and he knew it.  He made it Ophelia’s mistake too.  But instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I told my family and they fixed it.  Took care of business.  Five months after our wedding I gave birth to our daughter, my sweet light-of-love.  But did he care?  No.  Gone he was to London and no agenbite of inwit to it.  And for me what was he, a ghost by his absence to haunt me.  And my status?  Not widow.  Hardly a wife.  A stationary target for his debt collectors.  As he rose I became conspicuous.  Like a bad smell in the room, worse than that stench hovering around Æ.  The smell of him!  I may not have a nose left to my face but wow!  That reek will raise the dead.  But the point odoriferous Æ makes is valid.  What use is it to pry into my husband’s life, the bastard.  Good for nothing.  Lousy father.  It was no use to me, that I can assure you, I wept alone.  Leaving us to starve on our own in Stratford.  His drinking, his debts.  Stephen owes AE almost $100, did you know that?  But did he catch AE’s hint?  Bringing up my worthless husband’s financial incontinence.  He caught it.  Then he rationalized his way out of it.  Stephen five months ago was a different set of molecules went his logic.  It wasn’t me.  It was those molecules of Stephen that borrowed the money, the Stephen now is composed of entirely new stuff and cannot be blamed for what any prior Stephen has done.  Free and clear.  No agenbite of inwit, eh Stephen?  Nice try kid.  Good use of physics.  That handy second law of thermodynamics, those molecules from five months ago will decay as plainly as did the nose on my face.  But don’t you forget that first law.  There are still constants to deal with and your memory persists.  It changes things, does a little rearranging here and there, always a bit of phenomenal fluxing within grey matter, but memory persists.  And don’t forget your form of forms.  That soul rattling around within those nice new molecules of yours persists too.  Just look at me if you need a bit of proof.  Or get a whiff of AE  if you prefer your proof to be more on the measurable side of things.  You owe what you owe.  Pay your own damn way.

Met him what?

It must have fell down.9:00 am

Molly looks at me with the same young eyes as that first night when.  She saw a word in a book, “metempsychosis” and wanted to know what it means.  I told her it was an idea from Orphism, that it is the transmigration of souls.  Schopenhauer talks about it in The World as Will and Idea  but he sees it more as a dichotomy of will which persists (male, from the father) and intellect (from the mother) which does notThe Orphic idea has more poetry to it.  The soul is eternal and desires freedom, the body is finite and holds the soul captive.  It is a contract broken by death.  Death.  But the soul ends up reimprisoned in another body and so it goes.  Nice, no?  Beautiful, yes?  Well.  Anyway, I remember Schopenhauer said something like there is a contradiction in every individual existence because all that rises is worthy of being destroyed.  She mocked me with her eyes (young, a contradiction) and her response was O, balls! Tell me in plain words.

Am I repeating myself?

All art is quite useless.8:21 am

Buck pointed that cracked mirror of his at me today.  Says he stole it from the cleaning crew his Aunt hired.  Made me look.  I took a look but it took more from me.  Made me see myself as others see me.  Is that something crawling on my head?  Nobody saw that, right?  I feel a bit like Dorian Gray revealing that mirror of his soul to Basil.  Wilde was right about that one.  God isn’t the only one who can look at my soul, I can too and there are too many of me.  We.  So many possibilities buzzing past, and I can watch them go in the mirror and join the multitudes.  The twenty-first century dislike of web fiction is the rage of Calibans seeing multiplicities of his own face in the screen.  Get used to it.  Or maybe just help me up from this hall of mirrors.  I would ask for an infinite rock so I could do some smashing but cracks turn one mirror into several and I cannot bear more multiplication.  Enough.  Stop it.  Don’t look at me.  You look at yourself.