black

From the binary stars a whisper

The singer James Joyce, author of a short story about a man who heard distant music, shelved this concert review in Leopold Bloom’s library.

“The Dead”; Ulysses 17.1373

Observing a bewhiskered black body in morning sun, Mr. Bloom remembered nights before and thought, “They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips.” The hungry black body moved toward him, was captured by his field, and became a satellite. Two desiring bodies making a little island group, his cat and he were seen by a storyteller to be orbiting each other in harmony.

Ulysses 4.15-42

An idol, beginning

Action and event record themselves in memory, but the record isn’t the memory. After it has made contact with the ongoingness of time, memory is no longer bound to its priors. After time flows into a story and separates it from its origin in action and event, the story becomes readable in the languages of other senses. The flowthrough of time delivers cargoes of words that weren’t in the original. But we’ll never again be able to read the original, because the original was only one word long and that word was Eden, and it couldn’t mean.

It couldn’t mean because it couldn’t refer to anything except itself. It only was. It wasn’t a term but a world: “everything that is the case.” In the silent dark around it, it couldn’t be seen or heard, and now, in the aftermath of its beginning, the light that emerges from it into the beginning of a future meaning doesn’t yet illuminate. The flow of time hasn’t yet started delivering its cargo of meaning.

But that is to arrive in a moment, because now the emerging light is letting us see. Unseen, something turns out to have been present all along: a black mouth opening, despite the dark, into undark.