Having my way with Ulysses

Simply abounding in immortal numbers.

After that holy soul had, with his silence, showed he was freed from putting in the woof acrose the web whose warp I set for him, I like a man who, doubting, craves for counsel from the one who sees and rightly wills and loves, replied to him: I clearly see, my father, how time is hurrying toward me in order to deal me such a blow as would be most grievous for him who is not set for it.1:55 am

Let’s look at music. No, I said look. Can’t you see music? No? I’ll help you. Good grief who can’t see music? Music finds its reality in time, so how blind must you be never to consider its spatial component? Never mind. I do apologize and I take that back. Some people can’t help being, ah, different. We are all equally special and so on. Perhaps you are only looking in the one place. Sound waves expand in space: you must adjust for that. So, let’s look at music. Here, take my arm and I’ll guide you. You’ll feel like a different person after, trust me. Let’s take a peek at Mozart, or is that too predictable? How about Wagner maybe? or if prefer something a scoach less antisemitic we might spy a little at the Gloria from the Twelfth Mass. I find Catholic music the most geometrically pleasing, don’t you? Much better than what comes out of the opposite shop. Doesn’t really matter, they are all the children of mother matrix and papa pattern, but one does have one’s favorites. Now then. See for yourself the musical notes numbered and grouped into symmetry and written into proportion, now watch when they, yes! No? You didn’t see? They sound aloud together in tessellating patterns. See them? Numbers in proportional bunches running this way, now transposed, now running that way. The woof and the warp: weave weaver of the wind. Peek at the numbers and you’ll see inversions, rotations, reflections flipped vertically or horizontally, even reflections that glide and slide along sideways. Sure there are deviations here and there in the numbers, just to wake us up a little, see if we’re still looking, but look close and you’ll see numbers arranged into self-similarity across scale. Forget your ears. Listen with your eyes! And your body. Wait, what did you say? I can’t allow myself to hear that. Don’t say it. Just don’t. You can’t feel music? Oh honey, you really are special.

Their two or four eyes conversing.

Others asked such questions as "Why should we care what happens after we are dead" or "If this Rebellion is to happen anyway, what difference does it make whether we work for it or not?"

1:33 am

Scene: [A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar. The rabbi says:]

Rabbi: Where is everybody, are we the first ones here?

Priest: Must be. Good, I wanted to talk with you alone. You and I need to take control of this thing before it bloats to an inmanagable size.

Rabbi: Yes. Our revolution must come on the due instalments plan, if we expect to pull this thing off at all.

Priest: [Turning away from the others who probably and speaks nearer to, so as the others in case they.]  Shush for Christ sake.

The Rabbi: Am I not right?

The Priest: Yes, but this place is all eyes. I don’t want to indulge in any, orthodox as you are.

Rabbi: Right. Of course. Listen. We want to homogenize all faiths yes, but some faiths are, you understand. I mean, all faiths are equal.

Priest: But some faiths are more equal than others.

Rabbi: Indeed. So your plan to raise money, I don’t see it.  How do your people do it? It seems you raise your money on false pretenses, fork it over and you’ll go to heaven. What heaven? Show me heaven.

Priest: The abstract future reward is always more powerful than immediate gain or punishment. Don’t you know that yourself? Heaven, its glories, its boundless bountiful plenitude, the sheer everythingness of the whole concept can take any size, it can stretch to any or no limit, it can fill every space, it can

Rabbi:  Save it for your congregation, father, you can be all their daddies but not mine. Try selling buy now receive later to people who concern themselves with life here and now. I walk in with future reward and say pay money for it, I might as well sell crosses. Mine won’t be the only ones, prepare yourself, and what about the Muslims?

Priest: That’s where self sacrifice for eternal reward will pay off.

Rabbi: Yes, but their temporality, so unpredictable. So branching and forking.  Touch it and it folds up on itself, how do we manage that? Call something a crusade and they feel it like it happened yesterday. And so it did happen yesterday. Bring up any event of any kind and bam, it’s now. We’re in it now. We’ll need a work around.  I’m assuming we’ll want everyone to go linear?

Priest: Makes sense to me. The Hindus are persuadable, but the Buddhists, the Taoists especially.  They’ll make trouble, and that’s not trouble we want.

Rabbi: No.

Priest: No.  To keep linear time we’ll have to speak of other things. Distract them with other issues. Look, we’ll have to say: it’s hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is. We pose to them that we all resent violence or intolerance.

Rabbi: Yes. It never reaches anything; It never stops anything.

Priest: Never. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular.  No. We must be practical.  We must imbue ourselves with the proper spirit.  It will be the only way to create our New Bloomusalem.  By the way, do you like the symbol I came up with?

Rabbi: It’s a little busy. The Hindus might like it. It’s a good job you didn’t add a bleeding saint to it, or we’d never convince the Muslims to get on board.

A new era is about to dawn.

Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time for lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day Appears upon our Hills: Awake Jerusalem, and come away.12:02 am

It can’t be done. I won’t do it. You’ll need another architect, I can’t do this shit. What do you take me for? I’m no magician. Ok. Ok. listen. Just look at your plan here, 40,000 rooms and only 12 doors.  In what universe does this make any sense: 40,000 rooms arranged in a perfect square, excuse me, cube. It will be hideous. No architect will touch it.  A big ugly cube — it will look like a Wallmart. You want your new Bloomusalem to be a Wallmart? I mean, maybe we can do 200 x 200 rooms with tall ceilings, which might be our only shot at symmetry under the cemetery wall, but look how tall the damn rooms would have to be. The ceilings will have their own weather! Otherwise we can stack 34 or 35 but we won’t get anywhere near your perfect 40,000. Maybe we can get there with an octahedron, and make the sides 44 of whatever measure you like, in length. Close enough to 40,000. We can include an annex for the rest. But that brings us to another problem, how big is this place? Your plan uses stadia and furlongs. And cubits! Who measures anything with cubits? None of your numbers make sense. Seriously. What are we using to measure this thing? It’s a beast! You want cubits, fine. It’s your deal. But you have here each side of the cube measures 12,000 stadia. That’s four million nine hundred thirty three thousand thirty three cubits.  So a cubit being 1/1000 the distance the earth rotates at the equator during one second of time, we are talking about the length of about an hour and twenty minutes of Earth’s rotation. What planet are you on man? Do you know how big that is? By the time I even get the foundations laid (12 foundations? Dude!) the Earth’s rotation will have slowed down enough that we’ll have to redefine the length of the cubit. And then what, we start over? And with what work force? Who is building this thing? Where are they going to live eat shit? Schools for their kids? Hospitals? Food? We’ll have to build a new Bloomusalem just to house the people who will build the new Bloomusalem, which will require Bloomusalems for those builders recursive to no end point. I’ll take the lake of fire. Really. I’d rather have a good eternal swim in the lake of fire. I don’t want any part of this. Find another contractor, I’m out.

I’ll run ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum.

Talis is a word often abused by many passims (I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantumising state of affairs). A passim may frequent you to say: Have you been seeing much of Talis and Talis those times?8:38 pm

What’s the time?  Well, there’s a conundrum.  I might have to cry uncle on that one. Excuse me, please, I’ll just, I’ll just catch my breath.  My watch.  Have to take my hands out of my front pockets and find my watch.  Don’t mind me. Startled a bit.  Was a bit busy doing never you mind doing what.  What is the time you say?  The time, that irritable little gnat.  Always will be too.  No-one can get on with anything without time poking her nose into what is no concern of hers. It is after dark so the sundial will be shaded.  It takes 24 hours for us to move around the sun.  The diameter of the sun as seen from this beach, when the sun was up you understand, but it is now down, but up the diameter is 1/2 a degree and we call a minute the amount of time, yes, time that gnat, the amount of time it takes to move the length of its own radius.  But this particular minute? Let’s see.  I can count on my hands, Oh look at that, back in my pockets, pardon me.  I do have a passionate nature you understand, and it takes enormous control to determine the time once the sun is gone.  We’ll have to take into account gravity, constant acceleration, the square of time.  What was it that Uncle Peter said about that particle?  It has the same properties viewed from every direction, makes it indistinguishable from empty space so in that sense the time the time.  And given that it decays rapidly on microscopic time scales, please don’t look at my hands, without any intrinsic angular momentum.  I’m spinning!  Your question collides with my purpose.  Of course inside an event horizon time-like vectors become space-like vectors and vice versa.  One can no easier move spatially away from a singularity as one can move backwards in time outside an event horizon.  My goodness, I feel an electroweak symmetry breaking.  And me without my clepsydra!  I do apologize, my watch appears to have stopped at half past kissing time.

A visit to a house of mourning

Even if the whole universe did not recollapse, there would be singularities in any localized regions that collapsed to form black holes. These singularities would be an end of time for anyone who fell into the black hole. At the big bang and other singularities, all the laws would have broken down, so God would still have had complete freedom to choose what happened and how the universe began.6:07 pm

[Scene:  The lights in the house are down except for one single lit candle sitting comfortably on a stool in the center of the stage.  The candle gives off a darkness shining in brightness which brightness cannot comprehend.]

God [on the god mic]:  Let me ask you this: is there a difference between the world as known by ordinary mortals and what they think might be my world?  Well I’ll tell you, all the world’s a stage.  What’s different from here to then?  It depends on if you think mortality is about duration.  Linear duration.  And if you thus imagine my theatres exist in another kind of time entirely.  Do you think that?  Many have done before you.  Well who am I to say when’s when.  What’s the opposite of a line?  I don’t know.  I guess an all at once condition.  Plenitude of being.  That sort of thing.

Here, I’ll give you a piece of my mind.  Wait.  What?  Aw, Jesus Christ!  What did I say about headset chatter?  Come on.  What did you say?

Jesus [Appears on stage is if from nowhere and talks to the booth]: I said, maybe here is where we should put in that bit about number.  You know, the insertion between acts 1 and 2.

God [on the god mic]:  That?  Come on.  Even the director thinks it’s crap.

[Bird excrement falls from the grid, lands on the candle and puts it out.  A faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light becomes gradually visible].

Jesus:  I get it.  Can we at least try it?  For Bloom’s sake?

God [on the god mic]:  Bloowho?  Oh him!  Yes.  Yeah.  He’s in a bit of a black hole right now.  A dark period of time.  In his world it is between 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm.  He started the day at 8:00 am and went dark at 6:00 pm.

Jesus: Six to eight.  Eight to six.  6 is the number of creation, 8 the number of death.  Symmetry under a cemetery wall.

God [on the god mic]:  Yes.  So it was 10 hours from starting bang to dark period.

Jesus:  The number of unity and perfection.

God: [on the god mic]: This is a one man show, kid.  Yes, unity, perfection.  There’s the 1, the source number which adds to itself and makes all the other numbers, and Queen Zero, the female number, and if I may speak phallically and yonically, just look at them together:  10.  One goes through all the other numbers to join with 0 and she gives birth to the next set of ten.

Jesus:  Ten hours of wandering to get to 6:00, and then two hours go by: the blank period of time.  And then?  And then?

God: [on the god mic]  Don’t interrupt, we’re going here.  Line?

Jesus:  Onan.

God [on the god mic]:  And then he pulls out.  Like Onan.  And is stranded for a time.  For a time.  Line?

Jesus:  For a time starting at 8:00 pm.

God [on the god mic]: For a time starting at 8:00 and following a moving now through linear duration to an end point at line?

Jesus: 2:00 am

God [on the god mic]: 2:00 am.  6 hours.  6 is a revolving sphere so he goes from linearity to oblivion (wilderness) to circularity and then ends up in bed with eternity.  Do people still care about circular numbers?

Jesus:  Hell if I know.

God [on the god mic]: 6 squared is 36, 6 to the third power is 216, 6 to the 4th power is 1296, to the 5th power is 7776, to the 6th power is 46656 and so each and so on to no last term.  The last digit of every one of them is 6.

Jesus:  It circles back to itself.

God [on the god mic]: It circles back to itself.  Mortals get that, right?  This thing is getting too long.

Jesus:  Yeah, we can leave that out.  The six circles fit around one thing too.  Anybody with seven maneuverable circles knows that one.  Goes back to six is the number of creation too.  That whole 6 days thing and on the seventh you rested.

God [on the god mic]:  Yeah right.  I wish I had that much time off!  But there’s no rest for the wicked, eh boy.

Jesus:  You said it.  Should we take it from the top?

Who am I and what is this and when?

Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.14:14 pm

Nostra. Our. We. I think about that word sometimes.  Dante doing Borges and I.  Borges doing Dante and I.  Joyce does Shem the Penman and I in Finnegans Wake (but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white) and whatever other colors you got.  Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes. Changed it to Veronica Tonkin.  Most people call me Vern.  But Veronica Maria Robertson Gonzales de Reyes was what it was until we moved to the States and people don’t have so many names here.  I didn’t have this name at the start, understand, they didn’t have my name picked out right away.  And as an aside which might be somehow related to the acquisition of my name, my parents referred to the day I was born as the night my dad killed the general.  I’ve asked.  More than once.  I got side stories and whatever else  I could get when they’d switch over to Castellano.  With a little symmetry under the cemetery wall I was born at 14:14 pm, so whatever else went down happened later that night.  There was some catastrophe going on in that I was supposed to be a boy so they never imagined a girl name.  Didn’t think one up.  But worse than having no name, they had no earrings.  There I am a girl and no earrings.  So you can imagine.  It must have been chaos.  There was never any doubt they were getting a boy; the opposite possibility never crossed their minds.  This was before finding out early, you understand.  I was supposed to be a boy because that is how it was supposed to be.  But, besides the complication of no penis so no earrings and no name.  There was, remember, the matter of the possible slaying of some sort of general at the hands of my father.  My uncle was a general.  But he survived my birth.  And I don’t know if he was a general yet.  He commanded the Peruvian army at some point.  War with Ecuador.  Cars with armed escorts.  This was all long before he went to America with his cancer dying in what was that hospital?  East coast somewhere.  My mother didn’t go.  But the night after the afternoon on the day I was born, my father killed the general.  And I didn’t have a name. I don’t know for how long, it was a blank period.  Not a lot of time passed, I’m guessing, but try telling that to a newborn.  Even two hours is everything.  All there is and was and has been and none of those things matter.  What is there of time at the start?  At that moment of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, what is it like?  I forget.  So I didn’t have a name for I’m now guessing a long time.  They wanted names that were spelled the same in Castellano and in English.  My sister already had one. Virginia Maria. Virgin Mary if you really want to translate; try living up to that one, girls.  She did what she could.  Me?  Why Veronica?  My uncle the general who survived the day of my birth had a thing for Veronica Lake.  You know the one, silver screen blonde hair covering one eye.  Sexy.  Ended up an alcoholic prostitute, and lost it a bit upstairs toward the end.  Imagine a spectrum starting with the Virgin Mary to no end point.  I did what we could.  Me.  Vern and I.  That’s me in the picture writing us.

Decoy. Soft Word. But look: the bright stars fade.

No life on earth can be hid from our dreaming.3:45 pm

[Scene: Lidia Doce y Mina Kennedy are hiding behind their bar counter drinking maté]
 
Allegretto
 

Lidia Doce:  Carajo como jodes!  What the hell’d you do that for?

Mina Kennedy:  Is that really a sunburn?  You just look darker brown.

Lidia:  Yes it’s a goddamn sunburn, what do you think?

Mina:  I don’t know, you just don’t look very red.  Oh wait, those are blisters.

Lidia:  Estupida gringa.  Burns only look red on pink people.  Hands to yourself.  Now, let’s pick some music, lure them into our green mirror.  Maybe some old chicha or cumbia, or reggaeton?

Mina:  More of that Peruvian crap?  Maybe later.  How about this:

 

Lidia:  Why this?  Purple.  What does purple have to do with anything?

Mina:  Nothing.

Lidia:  Perfect.  Anything, nothing, doesn’t matter.  We’ll say what we’ll say.

Mina:  Right.  The material is immaterial.  Besides, if you want purple, look around.  Look out that window:  Ned Lambert, Maginni, Boylan, Molly’s garters.

Lidia:  You been looking up her dress?

Mina:  Of course.  I look everywhere.  So do you.

Lidia:  Fine.  Fair enough.  I don’t even know what the damn song is about but whatever, we’ll use it.  Ok.  So.  Yeah.  Ha.   4/4 time signature.  Simple, common, and imperfect.  Perfect.

Mina:  We’ll divide it into 16 parts, obviously.

Lidia:  Obviously.  La la la la la lah.

Mina:  Then we stretch it, say 16 days.  Symmetry.  See what that gets us.

Lidia:  How does that get us anything?  Your helmet blocking your brain?

Mina:  It’s a matter of time.

Lidia:  That’s better.  Tempo.  Let’s tell some time.  And Mina, try to look human this time.  We don’t want them knowing we’re.

Mina: Yeah, no we don’t.

Lidia:  Ready?  Cleave!

Seems a long way off.

The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament.

No-one is anything.  I am a ghost.  Well, I haven’t died yet, no need to look at me as if my mind is off in some happy hunting ground somewhere.  I mean I have moved to an atemporal state without ever having died.  This is not resurrection, not metempsychosis.  I have translated.  You’ve done this too, occasionally.  You’ve lost track of time, before, yes?  That can happen when your world speeds up, when so much is happening that the whirlwind around you speeds time forward until you say you were so busy, had so much fun, were so distracted with it all, there was so much, so much, that time took flight.  This is not translation.  Translation comes from a deliberate slowness.  A stretching of the nothingness between full moments.  A pulling apart of discreet events until you inhabit the eventlessness between.  Time cannot reach you there.  Try it again, you’ve done it before.  You might make it happen for short spaces of time, short times of space with practice.  Like a muscle, the more you use it, the more supple, the more pliant.  Begin by cultivating your vision.  Practice seeing without seeing:  use your unseeing eye.  It helps to develop an idée fixe.  Find something with symbolic power.  For me it is chess.  Ah chess.  It contains the entire universe.  All of being and non-being, ever facet of the soul and the spaces between the facets beautifully composed onto 64 white and black squares.  I found chess in America.  I went after an American war to purchase land cheap, thinking I would grow cotton.  Instead I grew peaches.  Peach trees need little care.  Plant them, they blossom, then they grow.  Then peaches.  All they ask is we permit their becoming by staying clear of their being.  Then one harvest and endless solitude.  While my trees grew in Alabama I went to Atlanta and played chess.  The beauty, the harmony, of Zarathustra’s great invention!  In chess our adversaries move according to our moves, and we to them.  We form a helix coiling in a beautiful deadly dance, a rhythm of infinite possibilities.  64 squares, 8 X 8, infinity times infinity.  8 is the number of judgement.  And 64, 6+4=10, the perfect number.  The first triangular number to have a center, and the only one whose center is half of its total.  Balance.  GOD MEND THINE EVERY FLAW!  A onelegged sailor with an idée fixe crutched angrily, translating himself from the sidewalk into a jagged alley.  CONFIRM THY SOUL IN SELF CONTROL!  Symmetry.  The number of the soul.  10 represents the wheel of destiny and of retribution.  This is the number that governs returns, reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis, and most especially translation.  Judgement in delicious tango with destiny.  Ponder it, hang your gaze over a chessboard, and you can translate into a ghostbright existence where nothing is wanting, nothing is required, and the only fear is the hell of dreaded stalemate.  And the joy!  The joy of creation!  Each game a new universe.  Each chess problem (oh the composition of chess problems!) a microcosm of temporal harmony.  Each piece on the board a representative of stillness and force.  I left America, and the glorious atemporality I found there, to become a politician in support of my younger brother.  I was his pawn in a greater cause.  We are all pawns in a greater cause.  Just what is the cause, well that is not the pawn’s business.  Pawn’s have to earn their power, to kill, to rule as Queen; that is the glory of being a pawn.  Most remain powerless.  We serve our purpose quietly, in a waking sleep, then translate to the side to await our next use.  The halls of government contain chess rooms and in my political service to my brother I played chess.  I spoke on record 13 times in five years.  My brother hated and feared the number 13 although I found it immensely satisfying to open my mouth and make 13 utterances, speak questions I didn’t care to have answered, and then stop altogether.  I played chess.  I play chess.  I thought to master it and instead learned that my salvation, my translation to the infinite, comes when chess masters me.  Elijah is coming!  Elijah, a crumpled throwaway, sails closer to the three masters, bound to its translation.