Jogging with Roussel 6

At 391 Av. Victor Hugo, Montmorency, a retired post-mistress, MME Vera Surgyne was performing her own Tarot atop a curiously covered table. The table was a large, perfectly square affair, somewhat Edwardian in character, but whose  top MME Surgyne had covered in 28 non-identical copies of René Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstrator, or Meditations on First Philosophy, as it is often called in the later editions such as many of these. Then, laid perfectly atop each book, was a post-card of Raphael’s Madonna as Beautiful Gardener, each of which had been detourned by a friend of MME Surgyne, as she was a Mail Artist involved in a global conspiracy of philatelic dimensions, being a rather good-natured, jaunty, head post-mistress. Then the whole construction was fitted under glass, atop which, at present, she was rather lazily practicing Tarot, having seen in it some principle she thought might be used to govern both music and gardening, two of her other passions.  The deck she was using was something of a masterpiece as well. Crafted by a Mail Art friend of hers whom she knew only as “Willy”, the deck was a lovingly rendered replica of the Visconti Tarot, what is sometimes called the Cary-Yale pack, whose author Bembo Bonifacio had created in 1445, and which included a female knight and valet, perhaps signifying its use by the female members of the Milanese court. At present, that very card had come up, and MME was glancing down at it, absent-mindedly fantasizing, associating the female knight’s crown-wreathe with a kind of toroidal garden city in outer space housing a bizarre all feminine world of nude gardeners, and a strange cascading system of basins which some of the angelic gardeners were taking water from in glass gourds, gourds that held tiny homuncular men, completely green in color, when her cellphone rang, but which she did not answer, but instead, entered further into her Tarot induced trance, and moving deeper into the toroidal garden city, spied a luminous cupola where the gardeners were preparing a female ‘time-knight’ by feeding her in exact sequences, specific herbs whose names were being read ceremonially by a kind of gardener priestess at a leafy podium. Behind the lovely ‘time knight’, whose skin was exceedingly pale and luminous, there was a marvelous machine of stone and metal inside of a crystalline seed, and a dull hum pervading the scene, a vegetable drone of growth. As MME Surgyne became annoyed at the ringtone which had returned several times, she slowly came back to earth, but as she did, she realized, the time knight was in fact a sort of sacralization of the universal postal object, a love letter, a teleplastic hagio-extropic-iconism.. “Hulloo!” she announced, smoothly enacting the gui-phone’s surface, “Vera?” “Yesss..”“What’s up?” It was her friend Levi Hikaletik. “Just doing this visionary Tarot thing I do sometimes..” Levi chuckled, “Aah, yess, le dessous—Descartes?” “Cogito Ergot Sum!” replied MME Surgyne, placing her eye on a yellow apple across the room, and rising to fetch it. It was then, that Vera realized that the ‘time-knight’ had been her fitness instructor Flora Crinis-Sane, and that the vision was an echo of both the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the curious imagery inside the Voynich manuscript.