Having my way with Ulysses

You’ll have to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Amighty God.

It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.11:07 pm

Oooooh I feel a fight coming on. I feel us a fight a coming on.  Lord there’s a something a coming on. You hear me jesus? Your hear me Jesus? Jesus Lord Christ anointed son of the fullness of God our Messiah anointed in the blood of the lamb I feel it a coming. It’s a coming. Call down Elijah for us O Jesus, bring us the holy ghost into our bodies there’s a gonna be a fight. You coming long Jesus? I see Brother Dick, I see Brother Davy and all you beautiful brothers and sisters in this here tabernacle.  You sir, the guy in black.  Have you sinned against the light Brother Black?  Are you ready to declare your sins and be washed in the bloo of the lamb, Brother Black? The day is at hand when he shall come to judge the word by fire.  Yes Jesus.  He will come to judge us that the scriptures might be fulfilled. Elijah is coming. Shout salvation in Jesus Christ! Come on brothers and sisters and follow my pitiful endeverance to explain to you good sinners that we are all of us living in the last day. All that’s done is all for the kingdom of God. Feel it now brothers and sisters. Feel the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. You will be made whole by the power of Jesus. Throwaway your sins and blaze on to Edenville for Elijah is coming! Come on now. Come on all you harddrinking gutpuking bloodspilling gasguzzling facebooking tweettwittering existences. Bring your afflictions for He’s got a cough mixture for you in His back pocket and we shall all drink the blood of the lamb!

There under starshiny coelum.

Checkmate. King to tower.10:56 pm

Thank you kindly, much obliged my man.  We have to all pull together, am I right, and these things can be damn expensive. When there’s a girl like that a ripe and a ready, a little venus of the people, and no man has yet gone before, then I want to be the man for the job, hey don’t spill on my new pants. We live but to die and there’s hair in your eye. I know it. I’ll never be a poet. I am a little sentimental about the girl, but the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.  Much obliged to now where did he go?  Oh there, getting some wine.  Two guinness for me.  And two for yourself?  Ah yes, she’s a bold bad girl.  Who’s paying? Well sir, it’s who’s invited us! Whoa! That one’s passed out. You don’t say? Had the winner until you? Wasn’t such a dead cert then.  Who gave him the winner? Him? Him that gave me the condom for my photo girl? With the wife in the window? Have to see her to be believed. Pull the blind baby, somebody’s watching. Wait, Bloo? He’s the one she calls papli? Ok then, is that the time. Getting late. Just slide over here by the door, Mulligan, look alive, look at that there by the door. A round of  absinthe? Sure sure, green poison the devil take the hindmost. Don’t mind us just going to take a look at something out here. Just outside. See ya adios bye bye catch you later gotta 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.

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.

Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing.

But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.1:43 pm

Why does no one starve in the desert? Because of all the sandwich is there. Had a gorgonzola sandwich with mustard. Easy on digestion. Cheese digests all but itself. Ate it trying not to see the drip from Nosey Flynn’s nose. Davy Byrne quiet, ingratiating. Puts up with Nosey Flynn talking horse racing, money to throw away. A regular is like the roommate you never wanted. Nosey curious about Molly’s concert tour, is Blazes Boylan involved. Well, a free ad is a free ad even if it does bite at the heart. Told him. Word of mouth. Word is he’s covered in fleas, or worse. Scratching in his pants pockets, talking about a fight at Lewis-McChord. That place breeds the worst of them all. Something about the Northwest maybe. The rain? More serial killers here too. Train them up here, make them into murderers. Teach them war is a live action video game. Get them to like it. Then off they go to sunny places, full of power, false authority, prescription drugs and hash. Make the mission vague and change it up so they won’t wonder about why. License them to kill farmers for fun, murder holy men and whole families. Villages. Toss the candy out the front of the convoy and drive over the little ones. Leave behind a Russian gun. Murder staged to look like combat. We were attacked, they’ll learn to say. Then bring them back to Lewis-McChord so they can implement their education. Watch them put their cigarettes out on their women’s skin and don’t forget to torture the children. Waterboard a little boy because he can’t say the alphabet. Another because he wet his bed. Killing each other and themselves and everybody else. War is the safest bet: heads all lose, tails all lose. Easy money. Dark thoughts to chew over. Scars on the anima mundi. A shock to the heart. Nosey’s ambush, unintentional presumably. Collateral damage. Think about something else. Something else. Nice quiet bar, Davy Byrne has. Nice counter wood; like the way it curves. Nicely planed. Look how the light touches it just there. Gentle.

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.

Hush, I hear feetstoops

12:16 am

Ok, stoop down here.  Don’t mind me, just picking up these racing forms. Figure this out on my own.  La la la. So what do we have.  Sceptre 5 to 4, Zinfandel 7 to 4, Maximum II 10 to 1.  Those are the most likely.  Will include least likely, Throwaway 20 to 1 for a control.  A throwaway.  So.  Ok.  Draw a circle, homogeneous non-differentiated space.  Divide into duality in order to create.  Division within unity.  Now.  Center is O and radius OA=1.  Diameters AA’ and BB’ at right angles and with centers on diameter BB’ draw two circles.  Ok,  each with a radius half that of original circle.  Yup. From point A swing an arc NM tangent to circumferences of the two inner circles.  Repeat from point A’.  Construct square ACB’O from the radius of the original circle.  That’s the racetrack.  Good.  Ok.  The arc of the semi-diagonal of the square and the radius AE of the arc NEM is Φ  and the arcs NEM and NDM divide the radii AO and A’O into the golden division of 1/Φ and 1/Φ2.  Hum. Paradox now. Divide a circle into a yin yang like that and the circumferences of the inner circles are equal to that of the larger circle but the area within them is only half that of the original circle. One has become two. So Zinfandel?  Not Maximum II.  That seems out.   A unity becomes a duality.   Homogeneity becomes polarized.  Separated.  Jockey falls off?  Which one?  Mutually repellent forms arise from a common source.  Well that’s life.  And that sounds like Zinfandel to me.  The pentahedron to the cube, the heptahedron to the cube, the decahedron to the unity.  The icosahedron to the unity.  Hm.  So now, construct a square equal in area to the original circle.  If only pi were 3.17, then it would be Maximum II and what a payoff!  But have to base this on reality.  So.  So.  Φ2= 1+r2 and r = √Φ-1 and r = √Φ and the circumference equals 2∏√Φ with √Φ=1.272. . . and ∏=three point one four one five nine do da do da, so, hm.  If the perimeter of the square is approximately 8.  But I don’t want approximates.  Then, well.  This isn’t very mathematically exact.  A bit like throwing money into a hurricane.  But it looks like Sceptre.  That’s just where it’s shaking out.  I can feel it in the numbers.  My money, all of it, on Scepter.  Respect.  A dead cert.