At first he pickled her
Then he licked her
Then he kissed the maternal snack
For he was a student
Folly young stud…
“It appears, my dear elect, you will need additions for Ulysses. Eighteen is death to the pedophilic mind. The waning year he says of them.”
Tear stained, his halo crooked against his chipped skull, seeking faces, the prayerful, the holy seers of wisdom, prostrated to the priest’s words. He giggled a low scissor giggle of Father and Son: absent.
Bureaucrat SATAN (Security Administration Tenant Analysis Network), lamenting many lives
The grief such as saint’s express.
Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
It chains my melancholy to hostages.
Nicholas’ impotent army freeing their brothers. Deep-breasted Kitty, her four limbs like long coils, an invasion in her womb. And another one for sport. The Players. The shadows of masks of the park. My misfired oaths. It is time, gentleman. It is time. God bless. Good night, sweet ladies, goodnight.
They have my letters.
“Our contemporary authors,” he rejoined in chorus, “have yet to develop a personality we may compare with this Irish John’s dreams. Although I speak of him, as Ezra did, on my side is no religion.”
“All these debates are cerebral jousts,” a terrier belched Voltairianly from his bardic splendor. “I see no point in whether he is Bloom or the architect or the maid. Scientist’s symposiums on the wayward voyage of the Beagle. Art has to reveal to us the sublime, emotional quicksand. The big question about a work is how does it reinforce our achievable dreams. The pictures of Kinkaide or Rockwell are the art of lifestyle. The sincerest poetry of Keyes, the words of Stephen step close to tranquility amidst madness, Plato’s dungeon of reality. All other talk is artificial intelligence left best to the thinking machines.”
“The machine is the child of the mind first,” the phantom offered genuinely. “The compass once guided Michelangelo’s hands.”
“And so it has remained, one would hope. We are tourists into the realm of the subjective, we must focus to comprehend the setting, so imperfect.”
Formless intellect. Author, Language, and Electric Breath. All knowing, the utopian man. Magnus incognita, the poet of the analytical, the Logos who labors for us with every wire and every chip. This is the laud of that. I am the virus within the bladder. I am the martyr’s zealous last meal.
“That perfect machine,” Joseph deliberated, “would find his musing’s concerning the mortality of time, the fodder of primitives, insignificant and selfish, as shallow’s as Shakespeare’s.”
“I’ll say our visitor lacks sophistication if he intends to compare the Saxon to the Irish.”
“Neither of the two,” replied our angel, “would have flourished in our commonwealth.”
One movement forward equals four in retreat. The knight takes three and veers left. A volley on the line is conservative but faithful. The board is the field, shaken slightly by his adolescent shifting above bed sheets as she hisses into her ventilator. Remember those words, Joseph. These are the forgotten saints of language. I recall their yellow pages, their mildew stench, their aspirations outside of the circular window of the attic. This game is of no consequence, there cannot be wisdom without knowledge. Follow my hand as she takes your rook. The drama of the monologue (Eliotian in all of its morose experimentalism), the swords dancing, the blood trickling, the metal against the chain, the hooves of the war horses, the voyage home to Ithaca. This is all mishandled, dear.
“Of course, it is not common knowledge how dangerous passions can be, the lexicon of Bierce suggests rather demonically. The movements, which orchestrate the great revolutions of history, were born from fancy and delusions of grandeur. For them, civilization is not an opportunity but the nipple of an expectant mother. The will to be indifferent and violence invented the novel, sexuality and vulgarity created music, narcissism and conversation the poem, nationalism the patriot and the pauper, the life of Swift’s horse-headed, midgets, and giants.”
Upon which, the eyes searched for the invisible guest.
“Mandeville wrote these incredible stories my nurse used to read to me in the hospital. The one about half-men, one leg, one arm, etc, if you believe Plato, this is Aristophanes’ land of the loveless. How nice for them to be so obvious in their insufficiencies.”
“How quaint of you. Such a beggar’s point-of-view, really. Excellent, I’ll admit, but surely too short-sighted to enliven the topic with any sort of dialectic from which we can synthesize a new understanding.”
“A comedian, he called himself, rather like Dante,” Joseph said. “Not for nothing was he a musician and genial lounger’s son, unrepentant and splitting the sireland into thirds. A rogue’s life for every failure of his father. Our Father who art in limbo, hollow be thy name. Odysseus was an absentee landlord with horny guests and an ineffectual son, incapable of saving his mother.”
“He’d have you believe that it is therapy, like the son of Asheville surrounded by granite angels.”
“What is a journey?” the ghost asked with nerves plundered. “A voyage of discovery, a missing plate at the dining table, an absence and a reunion. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the son waiting for the return of his father, coming back from a world that has been near death and seen the eyes of gods? Who is the character reliant on the biography?”
Silence, save a few coughs hiding juvenile curse words.
“It is a cool day outside of Dublin, in the homogenized suburbs. He is returning after a year abroad, deep in studies of medicine, returning to see the last few droplets of life release out of the eyelids of his mother. She is waiting, refusing the final prayers until her son returns, hoping for a religious circle jerk that will send her on her way up to Peter’s rosy cheeks and pinchable buttocks.”
More locality, less commentary, be Firthian if need be. These are scholars, they will not feign the darkness.
“Joyce has stepped off the ship and with ceremonial irises bunched together under his arm and a book on Gaelic verse occupying his thoughts, he treads silently towards his boyhood home. This was where his father sank them into poverty, unable to save his family, the anti-Odysseus. He stands outside for a brief reflective moment. His mother will die today and he cannot save her.
“The story begins, two boys in a protective tower, a phallic projection edging its way into the sea. One is testy, wry, verbose, the other is witty, dry, patient. The latter is the author, for a time. He is artist, he is prophet, he is jester, and he has been an expert on this subject all of his life. He tells us:
In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
“It is the mother of whom he speaks, not as her son who has remained with her, but of her son who has voyaged out, away from home. It is Odysseus beside the blood river.”
A musing of confusion, I think.
“Is it so impossible to think that the voice that was so artfully manufactured is not the figure, a missing father, husband, and son? He left himself, a voluntary exile from his home and his family, with a woman who could not cling to him like her namesake, but gave him children, of whom, like his father, he would not return in kind any prosperity. He is Bloom’s lazy ease, he is Stephen’s masturbation and poetry, he is idle, he is thoughtful, he is as absent as a phantom, and he is the guilty protagonist. Do you truly believe that he did not plan for these attributes to be suggested, he is Dadelas, the father whose devices drowned his son, who’s own inventions imprisoned him and his family on an isle of labyrinth mythology. He is drunk in a maternity ward, of all places. For the day Odysseus leaves, is the day that his son shall follow in his footsteps.”