my generation

lost the greeks

our parents gave them away

jim was their last mask

you dont need matter

at a beginning

just energy

a push

long

matter

is chilled energy

creating space

and time

gravity is a process

of matter

and space

so energy?

where is yours

the  unexplainable

but behind the stalls

nestled in the bone

reading me

youre not chilled energy

youre a flower in a field

of radiation

trying to brighten

lone or in

Lonely Frisco for me  then--which  would  buzz a few years  later when my soul got stranger.  Now I was only a youth on a  mountain.  I stooped, looked  down between my legs,  and watched the world upside down.  The  brown  hills led  off towards Nevada; to  the South  was my legendary Hollywood;  to the North the mysterious Shasta country.  Down  below was everything; the barracks where we stole our tiny box of condiments, when  Dostioffski's tiny face had glared  at us, where  Henry had me hide the toy gun and where our squeaking yells had  transpired.  I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I'd  fall down as in a  dream, clear off the precipice.   "Oh where is the girl I  love?"

I  thought, and looked everywhere,  as I had looked everywhere in the little world below.

And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across gloomy crazy New York was throwing up  its cloud of dust and brown steam.  There is something brown and holy  about the  East; and California is white like washlines  and  empty souled --at least thats what I thought then.  I'd learn better later.  Now it was time  to pursue my moon along.

In the morning  Henri and Diane were asleep as I quietly packed and slipped out the  window the same way I'd come in, and left Marin City with my canvas bag.  And I never spent that night on the old ghostship and Henri and I were lost.

                                 jack's scroll -1949

Some one will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end?

To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

Whereas, upon your view, the heroes who fell at Troy were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him, that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would die himself--'Fate,' she said, in these or the like words, 'waits for you next after Hector;'

He, receiving this warning, utterly despised danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live in dishonour, and not to avenge his friend. 'Let me die forthwith,' he replies, 'and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth.' Had Achilles any thought of death and danger? For wherever a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace.

And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.

Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving advice and busying myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in public and advise the state. I will tell you why. You have heard me speak at sundry times and in divers places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment.

This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician. And rightly, as I think. For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to myself. And do not be offended at my telling you the truth: for the truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a public one.

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things--either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.

Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making.

What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs.

Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions!

In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.

Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that the time had arrived when it was better for me to die and be released from trouble; wherefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason, also, I am not angry with my condemners, or with my accusers; they have done me no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them. Still I have a favour to ask of them.

When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you,

if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing,

--then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you to live.

Which is better God only knows.

                  apologia  399 bc

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or you could just kiss someone

The same room and hour,  the same wisdom:

and I the same.

Three times now. Three nooses round me here.

Well?   I can break them in this instant if I will.

Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger.

You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.

He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

The seas' ruler.

His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast.

I paid my way.

I paid my way.        I never borrowed a shilling in my life.

Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?

For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Old England is dying. He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.

The harlot's cry from street to street shall weave old England's windingsheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.

A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?

They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely.

And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats.

Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain.

Vain patience to heap and hoard.  Time surely would scatter all.   A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on.

Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

Who has not? Stephen said.

What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked. He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly.

Is this old wisdom?               He waits to hear from me.

    History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher,  I think.   Perhaps I am wrong.

A learner rather, Stephen said.  And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.   Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.

But he adds: in bodies.

Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How?

By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy.

Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in?

Diaphane, adiaphane.

If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door.

Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever.

I am, a stride at a time.

A very short space of time through very short times of space.

Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably!

I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do.

My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander.

Sounds solid:  made by the mallet of  Los Demiurgos.

Am I walking into Eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare?

Open your eyes now.  I will.

One moment.           Has all vanished since?       If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane.

     Basta!         I will see if I can see.

See now.

There all the time without you:    and ever shall be,  world without end.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will.

From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him.

Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.

Illstarred heresiarch'  In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last:

euthanasia.

With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne,

widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion,

with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs.

They are coming,  waves.

The whitemaned seahorses, champing,  brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.

And after?

The Ship, half twelve.    By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.

Yes, I must.

       ulysses  1918

be come a myst ic

to know the end is not to cause it