Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Jogging With Roussel 19 (Part 4)



Two pretty Eloi waitresses in blue velvet jumpsuits waited on Dr. Uyūshitan, and Canterel. Canterel was served a small avocado and geoduck salad with fruit salsa while Dr. U. drank his customary vitamin shake. Canterel was reading a newish looking newspaper called Le Salut Public. “I snatched this out of the hands of Baudelaire himself. I opened up a frame right there at rue Saint-Andre’-des-Arts and snatched it as he gawped like a madman when I reached out of the time-frame as if from a Berlin coach. It’s interesting to imagine Baudelaire in 1848 as a sort of perilous version of Debord in 1968. Le Salut Public only produced two or three issues, but they all profess a love of the Republic, and hail a socialist Christ. And I think it’s the quote from Baudelaire on the revolution itself which will determine our actions in terms of Etienne Cabet.” Canterel pulled out a small volume on the history of Baudelaire. Here’s the quote, Dr. U., “1848 was entertaining only because everyone was building utopias like castles in the air. 1848 was delightful only because it reached the very heights of Absurdity.” “What’s the idea then, Martial?” said Dr. U. “I think we should install Icaria in its own utopian castle in the air, perhaps in O/x space, as something like Magritte’s Le Chateau Des Pyrenees,” said Canterel.  “But surely you haven’t finished explaining the painting’s complex symbolism,” said Dr. U., processing the declaration as a potential increase in his own workload. “Ah, yes, let me see, the question of the banner, and I believe, or did I mention the crux of the confusion to be the ownership of the banner, or flag itself?” said Canterel laying down his fork. “I think there was somewhat more than that,” said Dr. U., ‘for I was never quite clear on any interpretation on the nature of the composition, you said that there was a black knight who, with his helmet removed, was gazing at the stars in rapt amazement while at the same time about to stamp down with the sole of his boot on the back of the neck of another man looking up in terror at the former’s grace, and neither of them noticing that the sole of knight’s boot like a red-hot branding iron was about to inscribe the symbol of the Christian Ichthys on the back of the fallen man’s neck, and that the black knight bore a striking resemblance to the most common representations of Jesus Christ, while at the same time resembling none other than Étienne Cabet while the fallen man looked remarkably like Franz Xaver Winter-halter, or Louis Philippe I, the King of France, though with one striking difference. This gentleman appeared to have a strange and bulbous nodule which, like a continuation of the bridge of the nose culminated in what could only be a cranial blow-hole situated like a third eye in the forehead of this fallen warrior.” “So I did,” said Canterel. “and then I got off into the material on the banner.” “Right.” “Well, one thing I think which seems important, is the fact that neither party seems parti-cularly aware of the action of the boot. The Cabet-Christ is looking to the stars, but ‘the alien’, so to speak is right at his feet, and the fallen man, while supposedly the enemy, regards the victor with adoration. One way of thinking about this might be that curious phrase of Jesus himself, namely ‘They know not what they do.’ And since it is on Christ’s boot, the phrase might be rewritten as “I know not what I do.” Now, as far as I can tell, there is one very simple reading of this which I must mention, and that reading is what I would call the Ironic-Prophetic-Humorous reading whereby Tinck has unconsciously identified Cabet as an unworthy, or false messiah to the subsequent malaria victims of the North Texan Icaria, a ‘star-gazer’, if you will.” Canterel was touching lovingly one of the illustrations by Courbet in Le Salut Public, an image which might very well have been based on Baudelaire wearing his newsboy’s smock and a top hat, and raising a rifle. Dr. U. smiled. “But you had led me to believe this was some sort of conspiracy image based on Templars involved with ancient Sumerian alien gene lines, that Louis Philippe I was some sort of descendent of Oannes, or Nommo, of the Dogon, or a Dagon..” Canterel nodded. “And it may very well be, there is some material to suggest, albeit highly suspect, that the Merovingians had some sort of Quinotaur, or beast of Neptune in their bloodline, which has also come down as a conspiracy code for Jesus via the Ichthys iconography, but I think in the case of Louis Philippe I, we must opt once again for a humorous interpretation. The Bourbon line which ostensibly is what LPI descended from came out of the ‘Capetian’ dynasty. Can you guess the connection, U.?” “Not at all, Martial. Is this merman an alien king or not?” said Dr. U. “Not quite, I think. Capetian sounds very similar to Capiscean, but its actually etymology comes from Capet, or Caput, like ‘head’, but also Kaput, like ‘dead’.. It might be phrased in a sentence as: “Something’s fishy here!” or “Death to the Fish Heads!” or “I brand, by the right of Christ / Socialism that the fishy reign of the Capetians is finally over!” which it was in fact, for LPI was the last of the French monarchs save for one more of the Napoleon brood.” Canterel motioned for one of the waitresses, and pointed to an icon of a coffee cup on a little menu written in Eloi. Dr. U. looked disappointed. “So after all that, there’s no mermen, and Jesus was just a kind of socialist?” Now it was Canterel’s turn to look disappointed. “There’s still something of a paradox here. LPI was descended, it’s true, from the Bourbons and Capetians, but his father Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans was actually a supporter of the Revolution of 1789, and changed his name to Philippe Égalité to commemorate this, but due to the murderous fervor, this well-meaning aristocrat was beheaded like the rest during the terror, and I guess there is one more thing I forgot. Louis Philippe survived an assassination attempt. Can you guess the name of the person who tried?” Canterel smiled broadly. Dr. U. looked nonplussed. “What is it?” “The assassin’s name who attempted the life of Louis Philippe I, King of all France was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi!” Dr. U.’s eyes widened. “Joseph Fish Mark!” “Correct,” said Canterel, “but here is where there is perhaps some room for a ‘deeper dive’, so to speak. The entire name of the father of Louis Philippe I was Louis Philippe Joseph, and notice this,  Giuseppe sounds like ‘G is Sept’ or seven, which it is, G is the seventh letter of the Roman alphabet. Now then, do you know the history of the letter G? No? Okay, but wait, so let’s just recap this if we can: The star-gazing Cabet-Christ, and notice how Capet and Cabet are just one inverted letter different from one another, is about to make LPI ‘kaput’ with the mark of the fish, but really can we say that? Maybe, it’s something closer to ‘capisce’, I mean maybe the ‘Cabet’ is attempting to make the ‘Capet’ understand something as in ‘you capisce?’ Like an Italian-American mafia character.. But then, we have to talk about G. Let’s say Cabet does want to Kaput Capet, then that means that he wants to remove the G, or really, he’s saying his name isn’t Christ, but Ghrist, or Gabet, or Gapet.. Okay. Let’s think about this G. The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant 'c' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'g' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, 'k' had fallen out of favor, and 'c', which had formerly represented both /ɡ/ and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environments. Ruga's positioning of 'g' shows that alphabetic order, related to the letters' values as Greek numerals, was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson, 1985, suggests that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a 'space' was created by the dropping of an old letter." According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign. Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, 'c' and 'g' have different sound values depending on context. Because of French influence, English orthography shares this feature.  So for Christ, or Crist, we get Grist or Zrist. Grist comes from the Middle English grist, or gryst, from Old English grist, gyrst, “the action of grinding, corn for grinding, gnashing”, from a derivative of Proto-Germanic *gredanan “to crunch”, from Proto-Indo-European *ghrēu- “to rub, grind”. Cognate with Old Saxon gristgrimmo (“gnashing of the teeth”), German Griesgram (“a grumbler, a grouch, peevishness, misery”).. okay, so that picture works, Christ becomes ‘the cruncher’, or “The Crunch-Christ grinds “You Capisce” the Head “Capet” wearing the face of Cabet, or something like that. Now Zhrist is a little trickier. There’s zřít in Czech, which is an archaic form of ‘to see’ and the Czech lands border Germany, so by putting together, zřít and ist, we get zříst, which, in a way equates being and seeing,  which is sort of a way of saying ‘Capisce’, but I think it might be another prophetic moment, as in “Czarist” which were the last monarchs in Russia to fall before the communists, or proletarians took over. So in some way, the painting makes cognate the vicissitudes of history, with the vicissitudes of orthography, and in this sense shows that relationship to be a “fishish-etude”, Kapeesh?” Dr. U. rolled his eyes back in his head to look like a voudou zombie. He was chuckling a little despite himself, but he was still a little pissed. “Martial, I will be damned if I will work on a hovering rock hotel for dingbat French Christian commies of the 19th century! Or at least not unless I can be in charge of their re-education as students of semiotics, or do scientific experiments on them to change them into Ichorians, blood true time-travelers!” “That was a ‘bold delay’ wasn’t it?” said Martial. “Bad layering!” said Dr. U. The two sat there in a bemused stupor for a moment. Martial Canterel was fiddling with his tablet. “Here, look at this:”

žabètina f (Cyrillic spelling жабѐтина)
big and/or ugly frog  

Dr. U. nodded, and then said only, “Er gibt es gut, and gabby," (...)
“So I guess that means you don’t want to hear the Joseph of Arimathea tie-ins?” said Canterel. “Only if he’s a merman with seven green horns!” barked Dr. U.

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