Musemathematics

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations : chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see any mourning. Callous : all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

Ah, Joycean mathematics

2 x 2 ÷ ½ = 2(1)

1 + 2 + 6 = 7

7 x 9 - x = 35 000

where, x ≠ -34 937
since symmetry lies under a cemetery wall

Our Worlds at Word

A letter to "Henry Flowers" Leopold Bloom:

I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

My oath to postmodernism:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

--Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita

We knew the world would not be the same.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the word would not be the same.

Go to sleep, everything is alright.

I'm finding it increasingly harder--harder and harder--to differentiate between reality and dreams. It's troubling in a non-crazy way. I swear, completely non-crazy. It just makes memory recall, a bitch. It must be the stress of my day-to-day life. Not stress, like stress, but stress as a static fluidity to my schedule. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. The constant media inputs do not help. They make all the dreams that much worse. It's like a repeat of my day. But the realization of this only comes at the dawn. Like two different versions of the same thing, a troubling rashomon of my past. There are the events as they really happened; there are the events as I remember them, and; there are the events as I dream them. The first two are to be expected. The object and the subject of everyday occurrence that all experience. But in the third--a terrifying simulacra exists. This unreal representation is standard discourse to start, the seams are visible, I can see the strings, but as I move farther away, I fall into this artifice of eternity. The line between the mirror and mirrored becomes increasingly blurred as certain details of the simulacrum attach themselves to eidetic. And frequently, as a result, I find myself asking, Did this really happen? or, Did I dream it? It's usually just the small things. I try not to fret the small things. But what if everything is small. And what if I like the dream version better? Its too bad all these things can only happen in my dreams, only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.

He wanted to sin with another of his kind

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man