Having my way with Ulysses

Yes. Hwaet! Attend. So

I'll destroy your illusions.8:00 am

I need some sort of god or goddess or something to invoke.  You know a muse, to keep it amusing.  Which one though?  Well, maybe one will come to me.  Where was I now?  Now.  My roomate Buck.  Buck fat in his yellow robe wide open shaving on the balcony, making a ritual of it.  I sacrifice this beast in the name of the goddess.  It would have been much more impressive with a real blade and strop.  In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!  I sacrifice for you this stubble, so mote it be.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Black Panther

The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people. We didn't want to give a long dissertation.
8:03 am

Haines from Oxford sleeping on the couch tapping my brain for his diss on poco anarchism in America.  He went on and on about his brilliant “deconstruction of western hegemonic tropes of whiteness as seen throught the lens of the objectified other.” He speaks a well trained jargon intelligent and empty.  Had a huge argument about the Black Panther Party which unfortunately mostly boiled down to carrying a visible weapon as fashion statement pro or con.  Discuss.  He had much to say about the leather jackets and weaponry.  Didn’t want to entertain much else.  He wants vampirically to extract my knowledge and my soul with it about the objectified Native American and a post postcolonialist vision of body of the radicalized other but when I told him I had heard that Leonard Peltier had been moved to solitary confinement nearly 6 months ago he said who?  He screams in his sleep.  Last night moaning about black panthers and I swear some time soon I’m going to wake up with him standing over me wearing fangs and holding a rifle pointed at my head.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Mother Sea

When is this now?8:06 am

Looking out the window you’d think this would be a choice place to live but I’m sitting on lawn furniture right now and I sleep in a hammock.  If Haines stays much longer then I am out of here.  Gone.  Where?  Buck on and on this morning about the great mother sea, fist to fist as we sit by the sea.  Our mother the ash grey sea.  Just look at it.  The ballbusting snotgreen sea.  Terrifying.  Calling me Kinch the knife but I am not the knife.  I can’t be knife.  My knife would be made out of the infinitely small, forever dividing within itself the closer you look before it could ever slice something so sinewy as life or thought or time.  Somebody show me where Augustine says the now is a knife edge without thickness.  So many quote him on that without specific attribution but where does he say this.  Show me specifically where.  Perhaps I am blind.  It is what he believes though, that this now moment, this one, right here and not the one where your eyes were moving when I began this sentence about the now moment but this one now this one divides the past infinite and exploding multitudinous and infinite to nausea from the future singular one.  But which one?  To be or to be?  That is the question.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Standings לֹא אעבוד

Are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?8:09 am

Buck thinks he is a stand up guy, speaking without a filter about everything, bleeding me for money too  He wants me to get some money out of Haines but I can’t stand the thought of bowing down to him.  I will not serve.  And if Buck thinks I’m a bit sinister for my beliefs so be it.  Better friends than he have questioned my disbeliefs.  My mother asked me to pray for her while she was dying but I still cannot pay a false homage even to the most logical and coherent of absurdities.  That may shock Buck’s Aunt, but I will stick with my usual defenses.   Cunning.  Exile.  And this time silence.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Toys of Desperation

This is not a bowl of vomit.8:12 am

I can’t sweat for speaking no speak for sweating.  It was my mother I dreamed dead in her body.  I thought I was sleeping but I had to be dreaming, it was bits of both and there she was bent over me.  I could smell her breath wet ashes and formaldehyde.  She had a tube, there in the hospital, that went down into her body and out from it came green and yellow and sometimes bloody mucus.  Neverstopping.  It was all I could see while pretending not to look.  How are you you look good today.  Other bags of waste too.  Unbearable to sleep on the floor watching those bags fill and waiting.  She bloated toward the end.  Her skin puffed and filled with fluid until the geography of her hands stretched smooth.   Maps of wrinkles none of us needed consult until they were unrecognizable.  She couldn’t breathe out very well, but they were filling her with oxygen to keep her alive and poison her slowly.  She was bent over me where the wall should be.  There she was.  Silent.  Repoachful.  Vomiting into her white china bowl.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

General paralysis of the insane

A wellknit trunk.8:18 am

Buck’s friend says I’m one taco short of a combo plate.  That I’m a few cards short of a deck. He thinks I’m a few fries short of a happy meal.  A few bricks short of a load.  A few clowns short of a circus, a few bradys short of a bunch, a few bits short of a byte, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a few states short of a map, a few kernels short of a cob, a  few ladies short of a gaga, a few minutes short of an hour nouns short of a verb heres short of a there nows short of a when trains short of a wreck ifs short of a then me short of a you you short of a me.  I’m staying silent.  I am not going to argue that I’m not bat shit crazy.  That my cheese didn’t slide off my cracker.  My lift goes to the top.  The lights are on and I’m home and my deck is full and I’m on my rocker and hinged, and I am knitting with both needles.  My screws aren’t loose I’m screwed if they are.  Who says I’m barking and loco and bonkers and bananas and insane in the membrane, and cookoo for coco puffs mental mad multiple potty loopy.  Who? Who?  Have I lost the plot?

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Am I repeating myself?

All art is quite useless.8:21 am

Buck pointed that cracked mirror of his at me today.  Says he stole it from the cleaning crew his Aunt hired.  Made me look.  I took a look but it took more from me.  Made me see myself as others see me.  Is that something crawling on my head?  Nobody saw that, right?  I feel a bit like Dorian Gray revealing that mirror of his soul to Basil.  Wilde was right about that one.  God isn’t the only one who can look at my soul, I can too and there are too many of me.  We.  So many possibilities buzzing past, and I can watch them go in the mirror and join the multitudes.  The twenty-first century dislike of web fiction is the rage of Calibans seeing multiplicities of his own face in the screen.  Get used to it.  Or maybe just help me up from this hall of mirrors.  I would ask for an infinite rock so I could do some smashing but cracks turn one mirror into several and I cannot bear more multiplication.  Enough.  Stop it.  Don’t look at me.  You look at yourself.

One Response to Am I repeating myself?

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Armed

The cold steel pen8:24 am

Cranly once held my arm and told me that I am an excitable man.  I have no fear of being alone, even without a friend who would be more true and more noble and more than a friend.  It is Buck who wishes to excite me now (his arm Cranly’s arm) this time into borrowing money from Haines before kicking him out.  Even said he’d call Seymour and we could call him out, kick his ass, but I don’t think so.  Let him stay.  Nothing wrong with him except at night.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Navel gazing

For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel that that is what I am -- an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.8:27 am

Yes this is a blog.  Omphaloskeptics  unite; we are a society of navel gazers.  You read these words and trust my voice to speak the truth, from a first person.  Read on pastfacingwise and you skip. You’re scanning. And you trust me maybe.  So I speak what has been written for me to think according to the will of the creator, that writer of the great book into which we are all recorded.  Or at least into which I am recorded and a few others.  I don’t know what you believe.  I don’t believe it in the slightest but I am telling you that I do.  Some believe, like Phillip Gosse whose book Omphalos (written last  thursday) that all the world was created with past intact and fossils of dinosaurs were created to be found, but the dinosaurs themselves never were: effect without cause.  Sometime after last thursday Borges wondered if he had ever heard an ancient (that is to say, written around last thursday) sentence quoted by Rafael Cansinos Assens’ Talmudic anthology: “It was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it.”

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Beastly dead

Why this text came to be written? It was intended to be a Trojan horse allowing a bit of mathematical esoterica to infiltrate surreptitously hence near-painlessly, the investigation of the messiness of raw nature. 8:30 am

Here’s what happened.  And it happened, by the way, not by accident of matter or the motion or immovability of things in the space we occupied, but encased within one of the ineffably ridiculous number of possible ways in which it could have gone down.  Buck had hold of my arm and I moved away from him and he asked so I finally told him look, do you remember what you said the day after my mother died?  I came to your place and your mother asked who was in your room and you said O it is only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.  I don’t care that he sees death all day and night at the hospital and the blood and the smells and the bits of meaningless matter.  What is dead, he said.  Anybody’s death, what does it matter but the matter that he has to shovel away.  I saw my mother die and I wouldn’t (couldn’t) humor her.  End of story (that particular version). Cranly said the same, just kneel and think what you want.  No.  What does the Sound care?  Look at it he said.  Well look at it.  It ebbs and it flows but it also swirls and eddies.  It can be anywhere do anything move in all directions simultaneously.  And when you look in infinite directions at its contact with dry (relatively) land, it is contained by nothing.  No different in length than the coast of Britain.  The Sound doesn’t have to care.  It doesn’t have my problems.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Sun break, slowly.

Grey. Far. No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters.8:33 am

The Sound is a mirror today, at least while the sun break lasts.  But I can see now the clouds are beginning to cover the sun, slowly wholly and the water’s morning peace is turning dim.  I sang for her while she was dying.  Her door was open and I sang so she could hear until she cried and I went to her.  The words she said made her cry, love’s bitter mystery.  I was silent.  The Sound from here is a bowl of bitter waters.  Where now?

One Response to Sun break, slowly.

  1. I have the book Ulysses Annotated, and to me, it is more intimidating than the book! It doesn’t have the text of the book in it, by the way. It is a farily thick book that just explains all the many obscure references on each page of the original book. And many of the references make you feel as if you should have read not only the original Odyssey but also Hamlet, the Bible, and every other book in creation (it seems) before even trying to get all Joyce’s references. So my feeling about it is, just try to enjoy it as is, because otherwise you could be working on it forever!!!

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Phantasmal mirth: her secrets.

Not could. Will. I want to. So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won't know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. Yes he thought between grief and nothing I will take grief. 8:36 am

Memory is more than ideas and sensations.  Yes, Buck is right.  Ok.  I give him that.  But it is also an experience, my experience and my memory of it is a feature of me with a logic internal only to me.  What am I but memory?  That’s it.  Memory of the past that was and the past that never was (but might have been was).   A growing, solid, massive, increasing expanding thing, and just over there, look there, the paltry and shapeless future.  Small.  I hope (not much) I fear (too much).  I had hoped more but that is part of the past now too, lurching away.  I remember my mother and here she is now, enormous.  She fills my now.  She’s right here, do you feel her filling the room?  Of course you don’t.  I do.  Her things, her smells, her tap water before mass, her baked apple filled with brown sugar.  You can’t smell it but I can.

One Response to Phantasmal mirth: her secrets.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Mute secret words

No, mother! Let me be and let me live. 8:39 am

While she died everybody prayed and the priest came with his recommendation for her departing soul.  We all (but one) kneeled, bowed our heads, and listened with pious reverence to her loud rattling breath.  Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet:  iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.  That breath makes the dream not a dream.  I can smell wet ashes still and it tangles into my soul.  She comes staring at me, striking me down with her eyes.  Speaking and help me I hear nothing.  Her agony on me alone.  We were all (save me) chewers of corpses.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Listen to that warm running sunlight

8:42 am

Haines apologized for screaming in his sleep again.  Buck told him what I said about web fiction which earned the distinction “clever” then suggested I ask Haines for money.  Twice a month Buck has plans for my paycheck; wants to drink it later.  Thinks it will be $700.  He sang this all morning:

 

 

I brought his shaving bowl in from the balcony.  This is the song my mind sang all morning, pushed around a bit by Buck’s bellowing:

 

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

When I makes water I makes water

And it has been said elsewhere: This body produced from marriage, and endowed with growth in darkness, came forth by the urinary passage, was built up with bones, bedaubed with flesh, thatched with skin, filled with ordure, urine, bile, slime, marrow, fat, oil, and many impurities besides, like a treasury full of treasures.

8:45 am

Buck spent morning talking like an old woman.  Burned breakfast, we had to open the door to let the smoke out.  Key in the lock, but Buck thought I had it.  Made coffee too strong for Haines and no milk.  Haines interested in the seventies feminist movenent now, Gloria Steinem teaching women how to piss standing up.  Where you truss be circumspicious and look before you leak, dears.  Treating everyone like God in drag.  There is a restaurant in BC that prohibits men from peeing standing up.  Told Haines that would not exist in or out of the Northwest.

One Response to When I makes water I makes water

  1. Excellent goods from you, man. I have understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely great. I really like what you’ve acquired here, really like what you are saying and the way in which you say it. You make it enjoyable and you still take care of to keep it wise. I can’t wait to read much more from you. This is actually a terrific web site.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Glory be to the collector of prepuces

If we could live on good food like that we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Time enough.8:48 am

Milk delivery today.  Old woman this time.  A lowly form of an immortal delivering a message.  Buck invited her in.  Haines tried to impress her with his knowledge of working class movements in America and it was like he was speaking a foreign language.  Haven’t paid the milk bill in a while, Haines made the woman wait so we could pay.  Buck paid most of it, an oblation, said we’d owe the rest.

One Response to Glory be to the collector of prepuces

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

It is a disease

You put your hoof in it now.8:54 am

Haines asked for little pieces of me to insert into his dissertation.  Asked.  I say asked but it was more of an announcement closely followed by assumption.  Wants to collect the things I say and contain them into his pages as his discoveries.  How charming.  Buck wants me to give him my Hamlet theory but I don’t put out for free.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It devours itself and spits itself out, kills itself and generates itself again.9:00 am

Buck likes to dress in front of a poster of Oscar Wilde like it is a mirror.  Today he told off everything he put on for being stiff, rebellious, etc.  Wants puce gloves and green boots.  Not quite over Wilde and paradoxes no matter what he says.  And he thinks my hat is artsy.  Called himself Mercurial Malachi, that Mercurius that is made up of all conceivable opposites, a contradiction and I suppose it is one but not how he sees it.  He is vulgar mercury, hardly the anima mundi.  He is both creative and destructive, though, I give him that.  And he is solvent, despite what he pretends.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

The Butterly Effect

Down, sir! How dare you, sir!9:03 am

So we each have a key to the apartment but there is only one do-not-duplicate key for the building, and from the very initial moment of our shared existence we have struggled over it, clandestinely.  At the moment I have it.  Haines wanted to know what’s the rent?  $700.  There are several studios like ours along the Market, but Buck told Haines ours is the omphalos, which would be about the right size of our place if the Market were a body but in that case our little hole in the wall would be located a bit farther south and around the back.  They say all dynamic systems are sensitively dependent on initial conditions, and the current one I am flapping around in is starting to bug me.  I’m feeling denied.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

55 reasons

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea, and there assume some other horrible form which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness? Think of it. The very place puts toys of desperation, without more motive, into every brain that looks so many fathoms to the sea and hears it roar beneath. 9:06 am

Buck still leading Haines on about my Hamlet theory, although so far I am not tempted to break my silence.  I’ll tell it when I tell it, it can wait.  Whatever.  To him it won’t be worth more than the price of a pin.  He told Haines I prove by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.  Haines probably thinks I am my father’s ghost.  He also thinks Seattle is much like Elsinore (I don’t see it).  With the full weight of ownership of his rightful property that can only come from an Englishman who hasn’t read it, Haines called Hamlet a wonderful tale.  How delightful.  Isn’t that special.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

I just saw my own ghost

Begin by breaking all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to your size, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget yourself. Sing one single note listen to it from inside. If you hear (but this will happen much later) something like a landscape overwhelmed with dread, bonfires between the rocks with squatting halfnaked silhouettes, I think you'll be well on your way, and the same if you hear a river, boats painted yellow and black are coming down it, if you hear the smell of fresh bread, the shadow of a horse.9:09 am

It was a moment, like a recollection of things to come, walking between Haines and Buck when Buck turned to look at me and said nothing.  In that silence I saw my own image, looking shabby in dusty black (insincere?) between the two of them looking hip and expensive.  Is this how others see me? 

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

I tried hard to have a father but instead I had a dad

For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.9:12 am

My dad says he doesn’t believe in being a stern father and he makes a point of talking to me as a friend and an even bigger point of telling everybody he talks to me as a friend.  Wants to be my brother, but my big brother who can still eclipse me and be the better man for it.  Or fade me out like he is the sun and I’m a shadow that doesn’t stand a chance.  He’s like that. Likes to think he’s so badass he’s everybody’s daddy.  Lazy bitch.  He called me that once.  We’re as old as we feel he says and he is feeling my age.  Buck called me Japhet in search of a father, looking for atonement.  Iapetos more like.  The Greek version of Japhet fits the bill a bit better I’d say.  Iapetos the god of the mortal life span, who with his brothers the other Time gods turned their father into a bitch.  Their mother Gaia, the earth, started it.  She wanted a divorce.  An old school divorce.  Their father Uranus was an asshole of mythic proportions.  He would hide the brothers in the earth once they were born just to keep them down.  You can be a man, sure, but not as good a one as me.  Mama Gaia got sick of this, as you can imagine, and made a plan.  Then she gave Kronos a sickle.  Now Kronos is the god of all-devouring Time so Mama’s plan fed right into his destructive side and he hopped on board fast as lightning.  The rest of us needed little persuasion.  Krios, my brother who runs the measurement of the year felt ripe for it, and Hyperion with his days and months always wanted to be a part of whatever Krios did, so he came along too.  It took just a little longer for Koios to come around.  He is the god of the axis of heaven and even though he said he saw it coming he couldn’t decide what was in it for him.  Sheesh, you’d think the world revolves around him.  He’s the one married to Omphalos, that blowhard, you know her?  She’s full of hot air.  Anyway, the only one of us who didn’t want to get one up on the old man was Okeanos, but he’s just in charge of moving of the planets and he does a piss poor job of it too apparently, with them going backwards whenever they want.  What does he know about Time?  So here’s what we did.  We knew Uranus was on his way to sleep with our mother (the less I describe about that the better, don’t want this thing to start sounding like a Greek tragedy) and just as he was spreading himself all over the top of her, Krios, Koios, and Hyperion each grabbed a corner of daddy dearest and I grabbed the fourth. Then Kronos, who had hidden himself somewhere near the omphalos, jumped up fast and cut his dick right off.  Just like that.  One slice.  Balls too.  He howled so much you can still hear it now.  Listen, hear that?  Blood splashed all over the place like Carrie at the prom and a whole lot of shit happened after that, but that’s another story.  The upshot is there was no atonement; it was an ambush plain and simple and now dad sings soprano.  And Kronos still likes carrying that sickle around.  He’s working as a travel agent these days.  Wait.  Hold on.  Who is telling this story?

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

All or not at all

God is Not-Being, even he, who made the world out of what was not; Not-Being made Not-Being.9:18 am

Haines, steeped in a study of American fundamentalism, asked me if I had ever accepted Jesus as my personal lord and savior.  Jesus Christ.   He must suspect all Americans think that if dinosaur bones exist then there must be dinosaurs roaming around somewhere.  What God created must always be, no?  Or more likely he must think that in America everybody thinks the bible is a voice talking about us now.  Right now.  See here in Psalms, it says that the economic downturn will end soon.  Such good news!  Good God.  Yes, Haines, all America believes that in the beginning God said let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth and also under the earth, bones of dead things with aged appearance, and let humanity find these things and argue about Time’s beginnings and how long everything took to make, and big bangs and original sins and first floods and first falls and lines of time and a beginning and an end and a guy on a throne who created it all and has since kept busy involving himself in the daily minutia of our lives.  Jesus it took six thousand years to get through one conversation with Haines.  He wanted to know about creationism in schools and that sort of thing, but Haines, most (I do not say all) Americans have a fine understanding of Darwin.  Let’s hear some nice reasonable science from the man himself and end this discussion right now:

Charles Darwin:  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.

Shut up, Darwin!  Come on man, back me up.  What the hell are you doing?  Good Christ take it back.

Charles Darwin:  I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown process.

Nice save.  (rolls eyes).

I deny successive Time and the deity it creates.  You behold in me a horrible example of free thought.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Steeeeeeeeeeeephen

And note that they who will for exile say can for dog while them that won't leave ingle end says now for know.9:21 am

When you see the arrow coming it has a softer strike, and I can see one clearly aimed right between my eyes.  I can enfuture myself and hear him say it: give me the key it is mine, I paid the rent.  And what can I do?  I can’t afford this place on my salary.  I can’t afford any place on my salary.  I remember clearly that bitch who does payroll telling me, when her mistake lost me my funding, I should go live in a shelter.  Good thing I got a TA, or I’d be living under a staircase somewhere.  Well, with what I make that might as well be my next home.  No.  Instead I do what I do now; I go up and down other people’s staircases.  When I think of the scheming and the senselessness I put up with my mouth fills with a salty bitter taste.  I smell toast.  No.  I’ll keep my honor and keep to myself.  Exile.  Time is screaming toward me and I had better be prepared for the blow.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

It seems to me

9:24 am

What are you doing?  Me?  Oh, I’m typing.  Right now I am typing.  I am typing now.  Here, you see?  You can’t see.  But what are you doing right now?  Listen, I don’t know your now.  I can’t know it.  Nobody can and you can’t know mine.  Picture us together.  Go ahead.  No, not like that, sheesh!  Picture us together standing in a field.  We are standing and we see two bolts of lightning strike simultaneously one on the left horizon and one on the right horizon but a bit in front too so we can see them strike down at the same TIME HOLY SHIT GET DOWN!  That was close.  Did you feel that?  Did you feel it?  Ok, now rewind, the same lighting strikes are going to happen but this time we are going to stand next to one of them.  I know, I know.  Trust me.  Ok, now we are standing next to where one of them will hit and here IT COMES HOLY FUCKING CHRIST!  That was too close.  Sorry.  You ok?  You sure?  OK.  And look fast over there, the other lightning strike.  Did you see it?  5 seconds I’d say.  Those were the same ones (we rewound, remember?) but they are not simultaneous anymore because it took time for the light from that lightning strike over there to reach us over here.  Ok, so why did I drag you out into this field and nearly kill you?  Sorry again by the way, truely.  Because I wanted you to see for yourself that simultaneity is relative depending on our position.  The now of any event, typing for me and whetever it is that you are doing now (reading I presume, and whatever else you are doing.  I’m looking at you sunshine.)  You can’t know any now moment unless you know where and how fast.  Can any now moment be objective?  Don’t answer that.  It can’t.  It is relativity my dear, it’s relative.  And without objective now moments, how can we have such things as lapses of time?  Don’t answer that either.  We can’t.  If there is no absolute now dividing before from after, then no part of succession can have objective status.  Do you see where I’m going?  When I am going?  If successive moments in time depend on our frame of reference, whether we are standing here or there say, the moment we call now cannot be a feature of reality unto itself.  Relativity, you see.  Causality is gone.  Nothing can be said to cause anything now that the now has become so slippery, so protean.  Hume says causality is a fiction of the mind, Kant says that the only knowable objective world is a product of the mind, Einstein says successive time is our most persistant illusion.  I say this means that we have no free will.  But don’t ask me, let’s ask God.  Hey God.  God.  GOOOOD!

God [appears in a thunderclap]:  What do you want I’m busy.

No you’re not.  Don’t you exist in eternity?  You can’t need time to do things if you have all of it.

God:  Ok, you got me.  I was bluffing.  So what do you want?  And before you ask, I am not getting anyone to sleep with you and I don’t care if your team wins.  Conflicts of interest, you understand.  You see the bind I’d be in if everybody asks for opposite things.  So hurry up, what do you want?

A question, oh lord, supreme one, heavenly father, mother of heaven, holiest of holies, most beneficient

God:  Skip the filler, just get to it, cut to the chase, come on, I haven’t got all day.  Figures of speech, mind you.

Do you know everything?

God:  Yes.  Duh.  You got me here so at least ask me something challenging.

Well, if you know everything, then you know everything that has happened and you know everything that is going to happen.  You know all the past and all the future.

God:  Yes, I know everything that is a part of everything.  Yawn.

So if you already know everything that is going to happen, then everything we are ever going to do is already done, decided for us.  Written down in advance.

God: Yup.

Do we have free will?

God [blushing]:  Oh!  Shit.  Didn’t expect you to ask that question.  Well I did, but.  Uh. Um.  Yeah.  Yeah.  You have free will.  Sure.  Why wouldn’t you have free will?  You have it.  You have lots of it.  Yeah.  Um.  Anyway.   I hear sombody calling me.  My phone.  That’s my phone.  Got to take that call.  Coming!

[Exeunt]

I have no free will.  I am a servant to three masters, a woman for whom I would not kneel, a church for whom I will not kneel, and a third for whom I ask others to kneel, although mostly I have to take care of those jobs myself.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

A Chemistry of Stars

The perfect square lacks corners.

9:27 am

There are fifty-five stars contained herein. There are other fifty-fives too, signposts to here or there.  And yes, there is yes, fifty-five times.  You’ll see.  We won’t get there until next winter, but what is time for us really?  It is winter now, it will be winter then.  But to focus.  Star one: alchemy.  Not the transmutation of lead into gold, no.  That’s a red herring.  We are talking about transcendence, not transmutation.  And not the achievement of endless duration, life extending for years and years.  No, another red herring.  What we want is the movement from linear experience, one word in front of another,  to eternality, the great all-at-onceness of it all.  It is a secret but the word is out.  And we won’t get there through rationality, no no.  Throw that out the window right now.  A circle is a circle because it is not a square and a square is a square because it is not a circle, yes this is so.  Nice and rational.  But square that circle and we have something else altogether.  There is this and there is that, and then there is the third thing that they combine to make, two things contrarily defined coexisting as aspects of the same reality.  I get ahead of myself.  Star one.  Alchemy: the catalyst for finding the eternal within the sequential.

2 Responses to A Chemistry of Stars

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

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.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Of his bones are coral made

Here, said she, is your card, the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)9:33 am

Somebody drowned in the Sound nine days ago.  Got dealt a bad hand.  The death card.  Wait, that’s a good card.  The happy squirrel card.  I overheard a businessman and a boatman talking about it.  They were guessing when the body will surface.  The water is about 45 degrees so the boatman said that means it will be 14 days, shave off a day or two for salt water.   The businessman knew that the man was overweight and went in alive.  That’s worth a couple of days easy.  He was drunk and beer means gas, so that will float him another day.  They think he will come up today during the high tide.  His fate.  Bloated.  Rolling, face to the clouds.  Here I am.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Thus Spake Zaraϑuštra

Also Spuke Zerothruster.9:39 am

Who am I?  So many have told of me and have spoken with my mouth.  They say I invented magic and then poof! I made astrology appear.  With that I gained the foreknowledge of truth that diligent stargazing affords the patient.  But those who lived my life didn’t stop there, oh no, not when it was relentlessly clear that I had invented truth itself.  Believe me.  That’s when my magic, they tell me, turned to the black variety and I became fearsome.  Those closest loved me, especially for the words they said with my voice.  He that stealeth from the poor lendeth to the lord.  I became for some a prophet of God!  Imagine that.  Nietzsche even said that the priests, those poets of the Veda, were unfit to unfasten my sandals.  Of course I too was a Vedic Priest.  As I understand, in that capacity I wrote millions and millions of lines of verse.  To give myself enough time for such a task, I invented the week.  You’re welcome.  And born from necessity, I invented hieroglyphics; I used them to hide my invention of Alchemy.  Well to speak the truth that element of my curriculum vitae never quite stuck; Those who move Hermes Trismegistus’ mouth had that particular market cornered.  Better PR.  In my later career I denied to oblivion many deities so I could invent a singular monotheistic morality.  Then Nietzsche used my voice to deny morality in favor of truth, my prior invention.  Ay me.  Well, what could I do?  My life is an accomplishment of others.  Rather grand and famous others too, I might add.  I was the teacher of Pythagoras, they say.  Plato liked the words in my mouth so much that he passed them off as his own.  Excuse me, Socrates’ own.  I was even Yeats’ pen pal!  There’s a laugh to rival the one I had on the day I was born.  My head came out pulsating and there I was, infant tiny thing giggling away.  To my mother’s horror my head could repel the touch of a hand.  You can’t touch this.  Oh a unique birth to be sure.  And rather an unnatural death as well.  I’m rather proud of this one.  By the time of my doom people were calling me a living star.  Can you imagine?  Me, a star!  So how does a star die?  I was murdered by another star.  Was it really a meteor?  Maybe lightning?  You’re asking me?  You show me what’s real.  I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Turma Circumdet

And, catching sight of us, he bit himself like one whom fury devastates within. 9:45 am

Buck has the building key and he has my money.  Wants to meet later to drink even more of my money, and we all know how far that will get him.  Not enough for a teenage girl to get a buzz on.  Speaking of teenage girls, Haines will be there too.  Beware the hoof of a horse, the horns of a bull, and the smile of a Saxon.  Usurper.  Killing me with kindness.  Part douche, part dumb ass.  This path I’m on is long, steep, and relentlessly curving to the right.  Three long horn blasts from a ferry just now.  Funeral.  Burial at sea.  Exiled.  Dump the ashes and note the time and coordinates.  A quarter to.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.