__ Little remains: but every hour is saved
__ From that eternal silence, something more,
__ A bringer of new things; and vile it were
__ For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
__ And this grey spirit yearning in desire
__ To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
__ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
________Tennyson, Ulysses
feel, .:*ghost*:.
it rains.
to make certain of it, since eyes can be deceiving and the ear often confuses the patter of 10 million tiny gnomes running through city streets as rain, i smell. no. it is. that's rain.
*__*__*
that fragment is from one of my favorite poems, Ulysses by Tennyson. I am thinking perhaps of writing several pieces to different parts of it that i love mostest. I could start now, and in fact, am trying to, if it weren't for a somewhat debilitating writer's block thing that it seems everyone kinda has at the moment.
*__*__*
I am planning on writing an essay. The problem is, if I don't begin at the beginning, if I just start writing, it all seems to come out. If I sit and determine to structure it, I cannot. Watch, I'll show you:
Not so much houseless, but more homeless... Stephen (Telemachus), (me) starts the day trying to win back the key to our front door, and Bloom (Odysseus), (still me) collapses into his wedding-bed at 2am, after a day of prancing and pushing and masturbating and thinking and drinking and dreaming and hating and forgiving, never once managing to cross from one border to another, loves his wife and cannot cross three words to tell her. and languishes in a house that is his and rocks at the foundation due to men's silence
and perhaps silence got me here too. This confined world which at every turn we try and push out- like being trapped in some massive balloon whose frontiers we discover as run forward, hands ahead...__ more red plastic. And continue to run and push: from dusty Shanghai streets, to poor.rich drug-dealers in Watts who say to me you wanna go to Compton Blvd?! ____You sure?! and I laugh and say with a stupid smile yes!, and he smiles and says alright then (all the while listening to Brown Eyed Girl), to the familiar streets of a rainy winter Adelaide day... thrice we crossed two oceans and manage only to turn what-was-once into once-what-was, and that is to say: we deconstruct ourselves and sell organ and soul to memory, leaving behind ghosts in castles, and beaches, and at Ashley's house watching SYTYCD, and carry on as Tennyson's grey spirit, as Joyce's Leopold Bloom, dark-eyed, confined to a massive universe of a few small streets, the pub down the road, a few rocks here, a public library there, where we stare at too many books and dusty faces that house them, the beach, our idle loneliness which sometimes we outrun... and sometimes outruns us and waits in our bed with out wife at 2am.
and all the while, Bloom in Adelaide, Q in Dublin, Odysseus hiding out in Ithaca, ____such that in his own housetown he searches for his home, and along known streets he tries to exceed the familiar and discover the intimate
______in short, in his bedroom he feels unwelcome and cannot reconcile the edifice of bricks (or names and history (or as Joyce laments: O Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not) and experience and dwelling) with a feeling of belonging or meness, and so, lost amongst the streets of Dublin (Osaka, Haifa, Troy, Los Angeles, Adelaide) a pale-too dark(ed) man-boy seeks reconciliation with a memory long since striven towards but rarely ever glimpsed:
home.
home.
______and with the passing of timelessness, memory, with its faculty to adjunct anything, takes Los Angeles, and turns it into a dance I watched on a television screen, and a song titled Hometown Glory, and the elderly lady who in the airport looked at me and said:
____she: i'm from israel... though we still call it palestine. it's there, but the rocks have different names now.
____me: [...]
____she: of course i love australia.
____me: [nod]
____(and she looks away, and in her mind, beyond the utmost bound of human thought, she grasps at a thing... once held, and so precious, and so fragile, and that grows, and lives, and sprouts branches, and... flowers that wilt, and then a whole room smells as sweet, and the wind pushes a petal out a door, and we follow to retrieve, and the scent flows outside, and we follow to retrieve, and...
Odysseus sits on the sandy bank, the waves breaking in his lap, and he slams his fists and watches the water bounce... jeux du, ____and cries. and cries. (until Calypso tells him to come in again)
and Bloom, in his own house, lays in his bed and stares Penelope...
and cannot put the scent into words
and q...
follows scraps he left behind, slips, and falls
behind the horizon like a sinking star.
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