Having my way with Ulysses

People usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the other fellow.

The question is, have I learned anything about life? Only that human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun. The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death. If you've ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean. The key here, I think, is to not think of death as an end, but think of it more as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses.1:21 am

Hello, yes, thank you for waiting. Sit down, sit down please. Coffee? No? So. Great to see you, great to see you, how’s your day, good? Follow any sports teams? Listen. You are real smart to come in today, truly, it is a fucking genius move and I’m not kidding, between you and me the time is precisely now if you are looking for good premiums on cash value whole resurrection insurance.  Here, take a look at this chart, where the hell is it? here.  You see here this is what you save by buying young, younger I should say, before you sin too much. What religion? None? I suggest you get one, you could lower your premium by another three quarters of a percent.  But I’m going too fast here.  Coffee? No? Water? Listen. If you die and go to hell tomorrow what would happen? Suffering? Pain? How do you feel about that? And tell me, how many years do plan on living?  The longer your life the more opportunity you have to sin, you realize.  And you will do it.  Listen, The chances are 20 to nil that you’ll get married, have a couple of children, get drunk at a party and fuck somebody in a closet, destroy your marriage, damage your kids’ psyches, get nasty in the divorce, then drip venom on all around you in your ongoing seething bitterness.  That’s a fact.  How do you feel about that?  Now I’m not asking you to be sentimental about your decision, remember, the sentimentalist is he who would incur too immense a debtorship for a thing done.  I’m saying take sentiment out of it.  Let hell be for the other guy.  Am I right? Why take chances. Do you want to take risks with your afterlife? You might as well buy lottery tickets to heaven and cross your fingers.  Do you believe in letting your hereafter depend on luck?  How do you feel about that?  Friend, think of whole resurrection insurance as a work around you can’t afford not to buy.  Don’t think of it as $1132 annually, think of it as 13 cents an hour. Thirteen cents! Thirteen cents an hour for peace of mind that the only hell you’ll experience is the one in this stream of life and no other.  Now, are you ready to purchase?  Let me rephrase that.  Will you be paying with cash or credit?

What am I following him for?

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! . . . . . . . Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!11:44 pm

Don’t look, I’m not yet finished.  What, do you want me with no legs and only stumps for arms? Makes no difference to me, understand, the stream of life is always passing.  I’ll pass right over you regardless.  If you like, pull me, make my wheels turn, and if you touch me you might get close enough to look me in the eye.  And then! And then!  Then I will deliver you from all your sins.  Or throw yourself under my wheels and then see what I can do for you. Lifetimes worth of absolution. I can’t always save you understand, you’ll have to meet me at least halfway with presence of body and absence of mind.  Stop that! That’s my bucket of porter what the hell are you doing?  Good God now it’s all pig sticky! Have you no pride? Come closer and I’ll trample it for you.

They like buttering themselves in and out.

How chimant in effect! Alla tingaling pealabells! So a many of churches one cannot pray own's prayers. 'Tis holyyear's day! Juin jully we may! Agithetta and Tranquilla shall demure umclaused but Marlborough-the-Less, Greatchrist and Holy Protector shall have open virgilances. 1:13 pm

[Scene:  The kitchen of Tranquilla convent, well appointed with red Dockrell’s wallpaper and decorated with daguerreotypes from the studio of Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary.  The room smells of American elderflower soap and of winds that blow from the south.]

Saint Patricia:  Great Christ and Holy Protector we are running out of everything!  And even more curious, table twelve has used up their pillar of salt, do we have another?  Oh!  Oh!  Oh dear God you are bleeding!  What is that on your plate, bread loaves, bells?

Saint Agatha:  Don’t touch me!  I want to coagulate and your touch will just liquify everything.   It’s my breasts, I think we should fry them in butter.

Saint Patricia:  We fry everything in butter.

Saint Agatha:  No lard for us!  I’m hard pressed to think of anything else to give these albatrosses.  We already ran out of the rabbit pie, the port soup, the lap of mutton with chutney sauce is gone, and that base barreltoned man Ben Dollard ate the barons of beef.

Saint Patricia:  He drank all the Bass number one too.

Saint Agatha:  What, two?

Saint Patricia:  Too.  We still have some of the mulled rum.  This is a crowd to rival the Glencree dinner!  Remember?  For that one we had to bring out bread with drippings to satisfy them all.

[A priestylooking chap name of Pen something (Pendennis? My memory is getting.  Pen . . .?) opens the kitchen door and squints in with weak eyes.]

Saint Agatha:  Where are they all coming from?  Like flies to a picnic.  Perhaps we should start the entertainment now, then serve the sticky stuff.

Saint Patricia:  Good idea.  Where is old Goodwin?  Lucky we have him, I understand this will be his last performance.

Saint Agatha:  They always are.  Look behind you, we have lots of Plumtree’s in the cupboard, let’s send it out now.  After that we won’t have much left to offer.

Saint Patricia:  Not if that woman in the elephantgrey dress keeps sticking her fingers into every pie.  She can be rude.  Did you see her?  And after the band plays, we have.

Saint Agatha: We have sugarloaves with caramel.  Our staple food.  And once that’s gone that’s it.  We’ll have to barricade our doors with barbed wire.

Saint Patricia:  Well, I am glad to communicate with the outside world, but today I have suffered!

Saint Agatha:  I agree.  Just think back to our morning devotions.  Happy.  Happier then.  Here, let me straighten your brown scapular.  There you go.

Saint Patricia:  Thank you.  I’d better get back out there.  Some of them, Masons I think, are making noise about some lottery tickets.  Some scandal or other.  Thing like that spoils the effect of a night.

Saint Agatha:  Yes.  But it is all part of the stream of life, no?

Saint Patricia:  Yes, the stream of life.

Never the same

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.1:10 pm

Saw a good idea today, a rowboat with a sandwich board ad on it, anchored in the ship canal.  Kino’s selling pants for $49.99.  Not bad.  Can spend that much just getting a pair altered.  A good idea is a good idea.  Better than hiring human directionals to carry the signs around like Hely pays for. Pays Boylan?  Must be McGlade’s work. Those bring in nothing. Still, people will look at anything, even nothing.  Stand and stare; other people will too.  Or be like Maginni dancing around.  He is his own ad.  Can put ads for std doctors in urinals.  Feel the burn?  Somebody standing there can relate and oh Christ.  What if he?  Oh God no.  No.  He wouldn’t, would he?  I don’t believe it.  No.  I can’t.  I can’t think about that.  What’s the time?  The diameter of the sun as seen from.  Oh God.  Focus.  As seen from earth is one half of a degree.  24 hours in the day divided by 360 degrees times 60 minutes to one hour times the radius of the sun or 1/4 of a degree.  It moves by its own radius every minute.  That’s the time.  As seen from wherever on earth.  No?  What about parallax views?  Never quite got parallax.  Greek word.  Should look it up.  Parallel parallax.  I feel like Molly with her met him pike hoses until I explained about the transmigration of souls and the stream of life.  Life is a stream.  Flowing and flowing.  Not like time.  Time doesn’t flow.  What is it flowing through if it is flowing?  Not flowing.  Fluxing.  Time a phenomenal flux.  Fluxing along in the flux of life.  Changes and changes.  Like water.  Who was it said that?  We can’t walk into the same ocean twice.  The ocean is different every time and we are different every time.  Yet we stay the same.  Stay the same by changing, dissipative structures.  Like the Argo, not a toothpick on that ship the same as when it began, yet always the Argo.  Look in the mirror, not the same hair, not the same skin, not the same cells as when we were born.  We flux like the Ocean.  Walk in to our death and come out of other waters in a new body.  Not resurrected.  Transmigrated.  Only the soul is the same.  Somebody asked Plato if the soul gets tired.  Does it wear out like old pants?  Can get new ones for $49.99.  See?  A good idea is a good idea.

Every Friday eats a Thursday

I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias. I ate him.1:06 pm

Fed gulls today, like that time out with Milly.  Food tastes like what it eats.  Feed pigs lots of stout and they come out tasting of it.  Robinson Crusoe ate swan meat, what do swans eat?  What would I taste like?  Well, no accounting for it.  And no need to know what’s in it, just eat it.  Every morsel.   I tried to fool the gulls with the throwaway given me.  Look out below, Elijah is coming!  What goes up must come down, at 32 feet per second per second bombs away!  That’s the law.  Did he get lifted up in a tornado?  He left his clothes behind so he’ll be coming back down naked.  If I threw myself down?  Likely to swallow lots of water like Reuben J.’s son.  Elijah will be hungry after his splashdown but plenty are well prepared to feed him.  Birds wouldn’t touch the paper I threw away for them.  Not a bit of it.  They know what’s good for them.  Spread foot and mouth disease though.  Mouth and foot, foot and mouth.  Mouth south.  That’s how writers write.  The flow of language.  The stream of it.  Write it and send it into the stream of life, doomed like Hamlet’s father to walk the earth.

Always passing, the stream of life

And it is all one to me, where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. 10:19 am

Who?  Oh, it’s you.  Float with me a little.  Mmmmmmm.  Nice womb of warmth under a bud of flesh.  Floating around.  A languid floating flower.  Oh this stream of life.  Round like a wheel.  With spokes too.  And life, it doubles up, it turns like a horseshoe.  Never mind.  You are too young to understand.  Not like me.  Float with me.  In the stream of life we trace.  Oh this womb of warmth is dearer thaaan them all.