Having my way with Ulysses

See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense of volume.

• Lestrygonians

He is divested of the diverse world, of faces, which still stay as once they were, of the adjoining streets, now far away, and of the concave sky, once infinite. Of books, he keeps no more than what is left him by memory, that brother of forgetting, which keeps the formula but not the feeling and which reflects no more than tag and name. Traps lie in wait for me. My every step might be a fall. I am a prisoner shuffling through a time that feels like dream, taking no note of mornings or of sunsets.

1:56 pm

Blindness.  I wonder what they see?  Can do things we can’t.  Read with their fingers.  Senses heightened.  Nose like a dog’s.  Why then do dogs eat their vomit?  Must smell good.  Fingers feel things the rest of us miss.  Feel a fingerprint.  Feel colors.  Maybe they really can smell fear?  What would that?  Smell hope.  Smelling into the future for that, for fear too.  Whiffs of things to come.  That’s one way out.  Smell your way.  Taste.  Better with eyes closed?  Helped that blind kid cross the street.  Piano tuner.  Sizing me up by the feel of my hand.  Pious looking face.  Penrose!  That’s the name I couldn’t.  Penrose.  Wished I could have sniffed that one out back when I.  Smell coming events.  What do blind people dream?  Smells and tastes?  Dream the feel of a woman, this curve, that hip bone.  Taste and feel together.  All of life, every part of every now would be a dream.  Maybe a nightmare.  Next step could be your last.  Could fall into a manhole and need Tom Rochford to fish you back out of sewer vapors, smell heightened.  Choked.  Breathing your own death.  Fall from the dark into blacker than dark.  A waking nightmare.  And yet, we all.  More or less all.  A waking dream for us all.