Having my way with Ulysses

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.

And what star is that, Poldy?

Money is indeterminate, it is everything, a kind of general equivalent, it is nothing, a kind of blank meaning. Information, as blank meaning, is in the process of taking its place, as a general equivalent.Rochford is Boylan with impatience for me to show Blazes his bit of code when I see him later.  I’ll sound him out.  This is it, whatever sense you want to make out of it:  010101000111010101110010011011100010000001001110011011110111011100100000010011110110111000100000001010000111000001100001011110010010000001100001011101000111010001100101011011100111010001101001011011110110111000100000011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000110111001101111011101110010111000101001 Richie Goulding on financial business for Goulding, Collis and Ward walked blindly toward a woman no longer young, smiling, as she rushed, fully absorbed, toward him, on her way from superior courtroom W-331 to courtroom E-173.  Money to be made, Tom says, telling people what they see now.  Label the now and they’ll enjoy it more.  Augment that reality.  From Boeing Field, a string of stretch suv’s, one bearing flags, made its way toward the freeway.   Maybe money there but I’ll get mine some other how.  I have my methods.  He’s a hero, Tom, you know that?  Saved somebody stuck down a manhole, the one just down there under the poster of that dauby chick with the yellow hair.  Poor devil stuck halfway to hell choking to death on sewer fumes and down went Tom, tied a rope around him and up they hauled them both.  The act of a real hero.  Ambulance.  Can’t hear myself type.  Anyway, the race is on soon.  Bantam Lyons is putting everything he’s got on a horse somebody gave him that hasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell.  McCoy kept himself out of it.  I can take my time; she doesn’t need these steaks yet.  I don’t think he appreciated my story about that dinner at Glencree either; he has some kind of feeling for Bloom maybe.  Says his wife sang there but did she?  Come on.  She a star?  Please.  The bright stars fade. Anyway, it was blue o’clock in the morning when we left with the car top down and I sat next to Bloom’s wife trying to get her top down.  Unfurnished Apartments, picked up and placed again on the window sash.  Bloom playing the astronomer pointing out this comet and that comet and stars and stars.  Left me to pay attention to his wife’s moon.  What star is that Poldy, she said.  Just a pinprick, needle dick.  He’s all right, though, Bloom.

A star by night. A pillar of the cloud by day. What more’s to speak?

2:43 pm

My cousin.  I attended his funeral.  He drowned, you know.  Did you know?  His father, Nuncle Dedalus murdered him as sure as he did me.  But it wasn’t Icarus who flew too close to the sun for Nuncle D’s comfort.  No.  It was I who burned too brightly, who flew too well.  My growth revealed his decline.  My talent became his enemy.  He didn’t want a rival, plain and simple.  He drew me, hawklike man, predator.  Drew me away from the ground to the top of the Acropolis (and I am the one called lapwing!) my shell still crowning my stephanos. Jealous. He pushed me, his sister’s child, and called it an accident.  Then the artificer wept false tears.  And I thirty-two feet per second per second fell into Athena’s grace.  She enfeathered me.  Now I disguise his agenbite of inwit.  His secret.  Hold me in abomination if you will.  I’ll come to your funeral.  I went to my cousin’s grave after they fished him out, drowned man, seabedabbled.  Weltering in the whirlpools of his father’s agenbite of inwit with no help or care.  Well, I’ll take care of him now.  I’ll lead the hawk away from his grave.  I’ll lead you too.  Yes, you.  Follow my compass.  I’ll be your star by night and your pillar of cloud by day.  We shall stay low to the ground.  I have lost my faith.  Now this is how I disguise my secret.  You disapprove?  You think me too false?  Well, I’ll hide mine, what do you care how,  you hide yours any way you like.

A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.

O, there be players that I have seen play -- and heard others praise, and that highly -- not to speak it profanely, that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made man, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. 2:40 pm

[Scene:  Empty theatre.  The stage manager is sitting in the house seats next to the director, who is eating seeds from a broad silver and gilt bowl.]

God:  List.  You hear that?  Must be seventy people out there.  Jesus!  Jesus Christ!  Where the hell is he?  [on the god mic] Jesus!

Jesus: [Materializes suddenly behind God, startling the director who flies up into the grid, landing on a downstage line set.] God damn it, it’s a mess out there.  Actors are showing up before their check in times, and without their sides.  We ran out of extras and I’m

God:  Can’t you just make more?

Jesus:  I’m not a miracle worker!

God:  Well, how did you do that water into wine thing?

Jesus:  Never mind that.  What’s going on in here?  Whose bright idea was it to hire a bird to be the director?

God: Oh please let’s not get into that.  The whole Arian thing and the meetings in Nicaea and Constantinople, the Nestorian business.  It’s in our contract.  We’re stuck with him, and he likes to be a dove so what can we do?  Anyway, I’m not entirely sure, but I think he’s ready to see the Bella Cohens.  Anybody promising?

Jesus:  Let’s see.  A  bunch of girls who had decent to middling parts in The Tempest, Pericles, Winter’s Tale.

God:  Too young.

Jesus:  Well, Cleopatra is out there.

God: Who?

Jesus:  Fleshpot of Egypt.  Also Cressida and Venus.

God:  Venus might work, but she’s a big star.  Can we afford her?  And is she willing to do drag?

Jesus:  Probably not.  Will do nudity though, she’s naked now.  And she’s not really a star.  She’s flaming out.  Also, we have a crowd of people out there claiming to be Shakespeare’s relations. Brothers, mother.

God:  Mother?  Mary Arden?  Can she act?  Would she be a good Bella?

[Bird droppings fall from above.]

God:  Fine, we’ll tell Mary we’re going another way.  Jesus, send in Venus.  And warn her she might want to put some clothes on, the director is in a temper.

A Chemistry of Stars

The perfect square lacks corners.

9:27 am

There are fifty-five stars contained herein. There are other fifty-fives too, signposts to here or there.  And yes, there is yes, fifty-five times.  You’ll see.  We won’t get there until next winter, but what is time for us really?  It is winter now, it will be winter then.  But to focus.  Star one: alchemy.  Not the transmutation of lead into gold, no.  That’s a red herring.  We are talking about transcendence, not transmutation.  And not the achievement of endless duration, life extending for years and years.  No, another red herring.  What we want is the movement from linear experience, one word in front of another,  to eternality, the great all-at-onceness of it all.  It is a secret but the word is out.  And we won’t get there through rationality, no no.  Throw that out the window right now.  A circle is a circle because it is not a square and a square is a square because it is not a circle, yes this is so.  Nice and rational.  But square that circle and we have something else altogether.  There is this and there is that, and then there is the third thing that they combine to make, two things contrarily defined coexisting as aspects of the same reality.  I get ahead of myself.  Star one.  Alchemy: the catalyst for finding the eternal within the sequential.