Jogging With Roussel 16 Part 5

           That night, while still under the aegis of a mood of slight suspicion over the motives of Canterel, Abu Dakni had a dream, the landscape within it resembling much those well-known paintings by Le Douanier, or Henri Rousseau. Abu Dakni was jogging with Raymond Roussel, a strange man Abu Dakni had met through Canterel at one of the meetings of their Orientalist society. Down a winding lane in a dense wood they went. “What of the family origins of Canterel, then?” said Abu Dakni. “That old Alpha Centaur?” replied Roussel, and at that moment both of them became centaurs, and they jogged along naturally at some speed before a gallop. Roussel continued, “Do you know the name for what we are doing?” Abu Dakni said the first thing that popped into his mind. “Running?” “Jogging?” replied Abu Dakni quickly. “Jogging is not far from being correct, but since our lower regions are Equid in nature, the precise term would be ‘canter’,” instructed Roussel, “or a ‘Canterbury gallop’ which is a three-beat gait, sometimes called a ‘hand-gallop’, but a canter is also a machine used in sawmills, to cant or roll over the log within the cutting carriage.” “Isn’t a ‘Cantor’ a singer, like a Chanteuse,” said Abu Dakni, but when he looked at Roussel, he saw that his head was inside of a large glass vessel, a ‘decanter’, and was mouthing the words ‘I can’t hear you’. Abu Dakni repeated the phrase, “Isn’t a ‘Cantor’ a singer, like a Chanteuse?” “You’ll grow hoarse if you keep talking like that,” said Roussel, the decanter now vanished. “Hors?” queried Abu Dakni. “Yes,” mused Roussel, “Hors, or Khors, from the name of the old Slavic sun god, whose name was descended from the old Scythian, or Sarmatian, old Iranian languages, which rendered in Avestan was hvarə хšаētəm, and middle Persian was xvaršêt, and in Persian, xuršēt, or ‘Shining Sun’.” “I can’t relate to what you’re saying very well, Roussel,” said Abu Dakni. “Ah, yes, but your internal, or infernal relays are ‘singing’, are they not?” Roussel went on sphinxishly; “A gait will carry you through a door, and a gate is like a door, but outside, hors dehors ala porte, or ala poetry, the chant orale, which comes out a little door, the mouth, like a relay, really, or hors, which comes from the Latin word foris meaning door, gate, opening entrance, and which descends from the PIE dʰwer, or door, or gate, and foris gives us forum, or in Lithuanian dvãras, or estate!”
           Abu Dakni was growing impatient. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with the family origin of Canterel. You are simply playing word games with his name!” “Keep jogging with me Abu Dakni,” said Roussel kindly, “and keep listening. Now, what is the name of Canterel’s Estate?” Abu Dakni felt a bit queasy, “Uh, I don’t see what this has to do with..” “It’s Locus Solus, correct?” beamed Roussel. “But it’s also ‘Logos Solus!” Abu Dakni was starting to feel a little better, but he felt like he was being led deeper and deeper into a sort of shining pit of infinite correspondence, and that his mind was becoming too loose, too airy, as if in this expanded state the molecules of his brain were too far apart. “Loco Logos?” said Abu Dakni a little sheepishly.. “What is your name Abu Dakni, or should I say Abode of Agni, or acne? What is the family of a solo solar locomotion of the singing word sun relaying clarity, light, the inner, the outer, the threshold, the animal, the deity?” Roussel was smiling broadly. “Do you know how I died?” said Roussel. “You’re dead?” said Abu Dakni. “Do you know what book they found in my dead hand? Well? It was the chronicle of the Kievan Rus, ‘The Tale of Bygone Years,’ and in an expanded edition also containing ‘The Tale of Igor’s Campaign’! I was laid up against a door, and~” Abu Dakni’s mind was growing very tired, and it seemed as if Roussel were becoming a gibbering madman, speaking faster and faster, until Abu Dakni simply stopped jogging, and looked off into the distance alone at the setting sun. The grandeur of it astonished him, and he found that he was completely alone, that within the locus of aloneness resided everything, but that everything was at a wordlessness, or form, waiting to be born for only outlines could perform the radiance of the universal aloneness. He awoke feeling somehow distantly 'oranged’ and deeply perplexed. He remembered the image from Canterel’s lodger’s ‘Ideal Shop’, the quote, : ‘La Perfide Albion’, and then he rolled over and began to have a kind of half dream, a vision. He saw a horizontal monolith of milk hovering in a forest, smooth and serene as liquid alabaster, then a small white boy, paler than any albino, made of the same materielle, sit up within it, and sit at the edge of it like a bed. He was dreaming the dream of awakening.