Having my way with Ulysses

To substitute other more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed.

In order to cry, steer the imagination toward yourself, and if this proves impossible owing to having contracted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered with ants or of those gulfs in the Straits of Magellan into which no one sails ever.2:25 am

A father is a necessary evil, though it’s damn hard to feel necessity for something that might easily be nothing. How would I know anything? Coming into this mess: I’m a baby. I have no need of memory.  What do I want with a memory until I have some shot at using it for my own interests? I sure as hell knew who Momma was, but him? Was he even there? And me? I’m a newborn. I’m busy proceeding energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void. I’m dealing with the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence. Take any other baby born on the day of my birth, take them all: he could have been all their daddies. I can see why the immaculate conception sold so well. I’ll buy one of those and I’ll take a little apostolic succession on the side.  But these recurrent frustrations, just when I can see a critical turning point just there, just there, then down we tumble faster than 32 feet per second per second. It’s a battle against hopelessness carrying on like this. He’s my only begetter; I am his only begotten, but disarmed of fatherhood what is he? Who is he to me? All babies have fathers. Some fathers are not fathers. Therefore, some babies have not fathers. Take the imposition of natural law out of the picture and what, does that make life infinitely perfectible? Upward to some great goal. Suppose I am a father. Am I a father? If I were? A father is an unnecessary evil.

Three seekers of the pure truth.

They never listen to the voice of reason without being tied up by their prejudices, as Ulysses was by his fellow travelers, and giving them the order in advance: "Pull the rope tighter, the more I squirm and beg to be set free, until we will have lost sight of the Sirens."2:17 am

[Scene: Atop Mount Pisgah in Madaba, Jordan, Moses greets two more Moseses who have come to play a little chess, grill up some lamb, and argue, always argue. Always the same fight about the same damn thing.  Move on already.]

Moses: Welcome gentlemen, Moses, your face.  Not this again.

Moses Maimonides: [His badly scarred face sports wounds in varying stages of freshness. Some of them weep a yellow pus. Stinks. Moses, put a bandage on or something. A mask. Nobody wants to see that.]  Nothing.  A mirror.  Nothing.

Moses Mendelssohn: [Back bent double but nicely dressed]  Oh I’ve done that. Hurts.

Moses: You have to stop. This ridiculous pursuit. It must end. Let it go.

Moses Maimonides: I just wonder, if I could just, if I could just hear it from him once and for all.

Moses Mendelssohn: He was not Jewish. Aristotle was not a Jew. Don’t waste his time asking him that, please, man, have some dignity.  Remember who you are. From Moses to me there was none like you.  You talked Aristotle into the void! Why does his faith mean so much to you?  My closest friend is a, well, not a Christian per se, certainly not a Spinozist or some sort of athiest, more of a pantheist. He’s not Jewish anyway and you don’t see me trying to make him into a Jew.

Moses: It is Plato who is Jewish, not Aristotle. Or Socrates rather.

Moses Mendelssohn: Nonsense. Must anyone be anything? Aristotle. He dealt in reason: his philosophy conjures the purity of truth found only in mathematics. If this equals that then that equals this. Mathematics, not superstition. Most of humanity embark on the journey of life with delusion of superstitions and with the firm resolve to complete that journey with them.  You think a man who rejected the infinite and the void with an even greater resolve was a Jew?

Moses: Stop. Superstitions! I did not lead my people, God’s chosen people, all the way to the holy land for superstitions! With kids too! Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And feeding everybody, and everybody all cooped up together bickering and sick to death of each other already, and can we stop here, and can we stop there every five minutes.  I can’t tell you how many times I threatened to pull the whole thing over and turn around.

Moses Maimonides: And you did it for what? You died here!

Moses Mendelssohn: But the view, Moses, it’s soultransfiguring.  The light in the morning hours must be magnificent.

Moses: It’s a nice place to end up, I’ve got to say.

Moses Maimonides: Your barbeque pit is phenomenal, you could roast just about anything in there. How do you keep such a good smolder going?

Moses: Eternal fire. Really, it comes down to how you shape your burning bush. I like a nice pyramid with a pan of water next to it.

Moses Maimonides: Get that from the Egyptians?

Moses: Yup. You know, Moses, I’m going to ask Plato if he was Jewish. I just have to ask.

Moses Maimonides: I know, right?

Moses Mendelssohn: I can’t listen to these words.

Moses: It’s too late Moses, we are deep into the quicksand now. Our world without end is a different kind of world without end, so don’t give us your mathematical rationality. Parallel lines meet at infinity now.A = A + B.  Mathematics has been entangled in strings of its own making for infinities beyond infinities now.

Moses Maimonides: And all that bound into a finite space too.

Moses: Exactly. Everything is made from infinity and void as you well know. And was Aristotle a Jew? It was Socrates I’m sure of it, or Plato rather.  Was Aristotle Jewish? Let Moses ask him.  See what he can do.

Moses Mendelssohn: Fine. Go ahead Moses, it’s your face.

Moses: Good. Now how do you like your lamb?

Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.

This was his first and never-forgotten image of the city; those massive buildings that seemed to say We are here forever.12:52 am

What made time? This is the western world I’m swimming in; within these waters I know deep in my gills that time was made. I open my eyes and see fish; perhaps you open yours and see flow. Maybe your temporality isn’t something that can be said to have begun. What the hell do I know about that, I’m breathing water here. Your geographical location will tell your gills other truths. Maybe your temporality has no need of a beginning. So. What made time? This time, yeah? A god? A god made time? Nice work dumbass, you made something that breaks too easily. Your temporality is too fragile. It smashes whenever we make something formed from what is that word everybody knows? What’s the point (ah the point!) of a temporality that breaks whenever we corrode sublimate smash something into nothing. Break it down boys. We can clear this place out in no time flat. Make quick work. Sudden, sometimes. But look at the materials: creatio ex nihilo, so what do you expect? Shows what you get when you make something from nothing. Must not have been much of a primary void. You want void? You want nothing? We have nothing. We have plenty of nothing right here. In this country. Right here. Go look at the sky just above our greatest city. That particular nothing ranks with some of our greatest and most terrible nothings ever to cleave time, and we’ve had some enormous nothings on our record. Millions of leaping final flames. Tear stained trails of them. When a world watches with hearts in mouths while receiving a nightmare’s bad kick, what is the more grievous sight? The buildings falling? The dust clouds and smoke rising spreading filling smothering settling? No. It’s the oh my god the towers aren’t there. That. It was that. Remember that? That ripple of obvious entwined with inconceivable? It was visceral, that moment. That’s the sight that cleaved time. There’s what rent temporality. That monumental nothing. We look into that nothing. That hole in our sky. That hole in our temporality.  And we look into that nothing and name everything on that side “before” and on this side “after.” Why have we yet to build something to fill nothing? Our monument of nothing is too compacted, too dense; it won’t just drift off with the tide just like that. You want something not nothing? Good luck to you. Put what you like there, go ahead, put it all there. Make it everything, that nothing’s not going anywhere.

Talk away till you’re black in the face.

When the matter has stood for the space of forty days in a moderate heat, there will begin to appear above, a blacknesse like to pitch, which is the Caput Corvi of the Philosophers, and the wise men’s Mercury. Blacknesse once seen, thou mayst be sure a True Conjunction of the principles is made.12:17 am

Scene: [An owl and a heavily made up goat argue while tending an enormous fire.  Over the flames hangs a stork vessel containing a phoenix.  They have begun their reversal of the great work.]

Azazel: [Circling the fire] I have sinned.

Lilith: [Circling the fire the opposite direction] I have suffered.

Together: Putrefaction, pray for us. Dissolution, pray for us. Coagulation, pray for us. Mortifacation, pray for us. Stench of graves, pray for us. Black of the blackest black, pray for us.

Azazel: See that?

Lilith: You scorched your eyelashes.

Azazel: Not that, that!

Lilith: White feathers! Not much of a swan. Just once I’d like to get to peacock.

Azazel: Focus, Lilith, just concentrate on returning it to crow. Carbonation, pray for us. Calcification, pray for us.

Lilith: Nothing. It is always much easier to illumination than to obscure. Why is that? Is nothing so difficult?

Azazel: [Pawing the ground] Nothing is not nothing, Lilith, focus. There can be no corruption without regeneration, ok, so can we concentrate please?  If you see Kay, pray for us. See you in tea, pray for us.

Lilith: What did you say?

Azazel: See you in tea pray for us?

Lilith: No. The other thing you said. You can’t have corruption without regeneration. Do you realize what you were saying?

Azazel: What was I saying? I don’t know. I was just saying stuff to get your head back in it.  I meant nothing.  Come on.

Lilith: Nothing. Exactly. I think we’re missing something.

Azazel: We’re missing something? I’m missing something.

Lilith: We’re missing nothing. We need nothing. We need something better than a phoenix if we want to achieve purity of absence. We keep getting the invisible trace of something not there but we want what do you call it void. D’ye see? We don’t want just ordinary death.  We want the quintessence of death.

Azazel: Oh Christ Lilith, the problem’s not in our materials, it is in us. The phoenix is fine. You know how hard it is to source a phoenix? We need to focus. You need to focus. We already got to swan and.

Lilith: Looks more like a tailor’s goose.

Azazel: It’s a swan and look, it’s turning a bit blue around the edges already. We’ll get to crow if we concentrate.

Lilith: I say we get a reincarnated human.

Azazel: Jesus Christ.

Llith: AE

Azazel: A what?

Lilith: [Reversing her direction around the fire] AE. We’ll use him. Trust me, this is the direction we should go. Can I use your mirror?

Azazel: Lilith wants me to trust her. Fine, use it. There’s no talking you out of this. Weep for me O daughters of Erin.

Lilith: [Breathing on the mirror]  We call them to life across the waters of Lethe.

Little recked he perhaps for what she felt

You wanna know my thing? If I really have it solid for a girl, I'll ride by her house on my bike. I'll do it, like, a hundred times in a day. It's really... it's intense.8:09 pm

I have a secret and you have to promise not to tell Cissy.  Edy guessed, because she wouldn’t have said that just now about who is little Tommy’s girlfriend.  She thinks that just because my man isn’t riding his bike past my window anymore that he’s over me or something.  But love isn’t like that!  Mrs. Gerty Wylie.  Edy wouldn’t know love if it bit her on her ass.  (Like Reggie would ever ride his bike in front of her skank ass house!)  Not like me.  Love is indescribable! Or just so _________ that I don’t want to box it in by describing it.  It’s like Christmas morning.  It’s like being on the best drug ever.  I’ve never been in love before this, so that just proves I’m able recognize it because now it is totally real.  I can say “I love him” and really know I mean it.  That’s how I know I’m in love.  And it will be just like that for Reggie too, soon enough.  Give him time.  He only stopped riding his bike past my window because he is still in school and his dad wants him to study to go to college and be a doctor.  Mrs. Dr. Wylie!  He’ll be a doctor and I’ll be like a princess and he’ll be a doctor prince riding in on his white horse to rescue me!  Love is so hard.  I feel a dull aching void in my heart.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief.

God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. 2:52 pm

Eureka!  Come in my darling, the water’s fine.  The tub is small, but we’ll get comfortable.  Watch that displacement!  Oh well, what’s a little water on the floor.  Is that your foot?  Shove over baby, make some empty space.  We must have space independent of things.  Get that matter out of the void!  Can we do that?  Create from void?  Creatio ex nihilo?  The Greeks believed not.  Most of their creations come from water, although Heraclitus prefered creation from fire.  Imagine a tub of that!  No, this is much nicer. And cosy too, eh baby?  Come, let’s fingerponder the materia prima a little. Honey, you are filthy!  Look at that sheen forming on the water.  All those layers of belief you carry around.  Here, have some soap, nice citronlemon.  Get behind those ears.  Wash every nook and cranny.  Especially your cranny.  Want me to get that for you?  Not yet?  Now, where does everything begin?  Well of course, it begins with me.  I am God.  Yes.  Yes.  Wait, you don’t believe me?  Well you should.  And don’t worry, you can be God too.  You are God, ok?  God.  Oh I see.  You believe in a different God.  Well you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.  Go ahead.  He’s a he.  Ok.  White guy.  Yup.  Seated, gotcha.  A throne?  A king of some kind?  When was the last time you listened to a king?  Ok, ok, it is your belief.  Keep going, rinse it out of there.  Facial hair.  Old.  A light.  A heart.  An eye in the sky.  Well now, you’re just riffing.  Tell me, have you ever seen God?  Ok, I get it.  Faith needs no proof; you do not need to see to believe.  But what about unbelief?  That is so much harder to accomplish, you know.  What will it take for you to unbelieve?  What do I have to do to wipe away that God stain marring your vision?  You’re putting a sticky film on the surface of everything.  Ick.  Smells too.  Wait, what did you say?  What about my stains?  My sheen on the water?  Do I believe my own theory?  No, of course not.  I neither believe nor disbelieve.  I need help too, a nice push one way or the other.  Want to take care of it for me?  Tell me, do you push both ways?  Now relax a little baby, roll over and let me get to that cranny.

No-one is anything

He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary -- not too dusty a cicada of neurtiment for a chittinous chip so mitey. 1:30 pm

We die.  Mors Certa, Hora Incerta.  So how can we be anything?  No-one is anything.  From the void and to the void, and again and again.  Things go on the same.  One born every minute.  Well more like, let’s see, carry the one.  Stop a minute so I can calculate this.  Women all over in their life throws.  Sss. Dth, dth, dth!  They won’t stop so I can count.  There’s more born, washing the blood off.  All are washed in the blood of the lamb.  Not stillborn of course.  They are not even registered.  Trouble for nothing.  Well, I am almosting it.  So.  So.  So far this year there have been 30,275,000 births rounding up.  84 days so far this year.  360,417 births a day, rounding up. That’s 15,018 births an hour.  251 births a minute.  Wait a  second.  That’s, yes, 5 births a second.  No point rounding down.  How long did it take your eye to move from we die to 5 births a second?  Cities of people coming and coming.  Lives and lives.  Passing away too.  In your life were you the Gracehoper or the Ondt?  Doesn’t matter, back to the void with you!  How many?  How many.  Wish I had paper.  Um. 12,930,000 deaths this year, might as well round up.  People die and we don’t even know.  Months later somebody smells something.  A drip through the ceiling from the tenant above.  153,929 deaths a day.  That’s 6,414 people every hour.  107 a minute and every second 2 people die.  1.78 really.  One dies and one gets 78% of the way there.  Mostly dead.  There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.  Mostly dead is slightly alive.  Give it a second.  You can’t be mostly dead all day.  There you go.  Welcome to the void.  You have been unmade.  It will be the making of you.  You were a being.  You filled space.  Now you are a becoming.  Not changing, no, I mean fulfilling.  You took a form intended for you all along.  That is, your form is gone.  Your form is formlessness.  I know, death is new to you.  You’ll get there.  Destruction and creation are simultaneous.  Death and rebirth are the same thing spelled different ways.  You hungry?  Of course not, what am I saying.  Sorry.  It’s this time of day.  This is the very worst hour of the day.  Vitality.  Dull, gloomy: hate this hour.  Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.  Intended.  Caught that did you?  Well.  Well, well.

The Wind Weaver, Starring Michael The Archangel, with The Apostles, introducing Matthias and featuring four Heretics!

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause.9:30 am

God: [On the god mic] Alright everybody, settle in.  We have a 7:00 curtain for tomorrow’s opening and you have a 6:30 half hour so for the love of me let’s be ready for it.  Jesus did you call the understudy for Judas?

Jesus:  He’s here.

Matthias:  I’m here.

God: [On the god mic]  Good.  Ok.  We reblocked so remember heretics you enter from downstage right and your exit is the trapdoor.  Apostles your entrance is upstage center.  Try to remember this time Simon, and don’t come charging out from downstage.

Simon the Apostle: Sorry about that.

God: [On the god mic]  No problem Simon, just a bit less zealous this time.

Michael the Archangel: Do you want me to actually strike down the heretics or

God: [On the god mic]  No no, just take their weapons away and kick them into the void.  Right.  Let’s see if we can get through this quickly.  We need to tighten up cues and everybody be on top of your entrances.  Head in the game people, angels.  Places everyone, from the top of the show.  Standby on lights 1 through 5.  Standby sound A.  Let me know when you have places.

Jesus:  We have places.  [To self] Does he need to say everything on the god mic?

God: [On the god mic]  I heard that.  No headset chatter please.  Go to black.  Light 1 go.  Light 2 go.  Sound A go.

 

[Apostles enter from upstage center and sing polyphonically.  Michael the Archangel enters from upstage left.  Heretics enter from downstage right.]

Michael the Archangel:  [disarmingly] Halt heretics!

Photius: [mockingly] Whatcha gonna do about it?  [sing-song voice] You are too weak to stop me!

Arius: [aggressively] Word!

Valentine:  [in a spurning tone]  Your god has no body!  Your god has no body!

Sabellius:  [subtly] Whatever.  You are all the same to me.

God: [On the god mic]  Ok, hold.  Thomas, what in my name are you doing?

Thomas:  I don’t think this is working.

Peter:  Shut up Thomas, do you have to question everything?

Phillip:  Was I any good?

Andrew:   You were marvelous!

Phillip:  Really?  I was?

Thomas:  I’m just saying that I’m not feeling this.  I don’t believe what we are doing here.  Doesn’t seem real, I have to feel it to be on board.

Michael the Archangel:  Thomas I swear to stage manager, I’m going to kick your ass.

Thomas: I’m just saying, I’m not buying it.  The superstition, the void.  I mean come on, what’s under that trap door?

God: [On the god mic]  Nothing’s under there, it’s a void.  Thomas if you don’t get back to your place and do your job I’ll strike you down, I swear to me I’ll do it, so help me me!

Thomas:  That’s it.  I’m sick of this shit.  MACBETH!!

Peter: No! No! No!

Michael the Archangel:  Shit!  We have enough problems, do you have to borrow trouble?

Arius:  You cursed the show!  And I wanted to be the one to do it.

Sabellius: Whatever.

Photius:  Who here wants to run this show our own way somewhere else?

[Apostles spit over their shoulders, heretics turn three times, crew led by Jesus run outside to circle the theatre three times.]

God: [On the god mic]  Holy mother of me it’s going to take an act of me to get this thing off the ground.