Jogging With Roussel 19 (Part 3)

          The next day, once again, Canterel, after working in his laboratory in O/x space during the early part of the morning, took a coffee break in the trans-temporal library and was once more looking at the picture of “Le mystère et la menace de «je m'en fiche” in the volume ‘Dumb Fortune’ when Dr. Uyūshitan, a chlorlock mathematician friend of Canterel’s walked up and said, “Did you reach any further conclusions upon the nature, or overall scheme of the image, or the banner?” Canterel folded his fingers together, and pursed his lips, then took up his coffee, and blew across the surface, then sipped.  “It’s the title of the book itself, I’ve just now been considering. I am thinking that ‘Dumb Fortune’ is in fact a cryptic message for ‘Domme’s Fort Tune’. At Domme in the Dordogne, there is graffiti supposedly inscribed by Knights Templar when the Catholic church held them there as prisoners in 1307.  The drawing is crude, but what should we expect from prisoners scratching on rock? There is a crudely drawn figure of a person holding a rod that looks like a downward pointing arrow, or perhaps a stylus to me. Beside the figure is a spread eagle Jesus on a cross. This surprised me in its similarity to early fifth century Christian depictions that show a muscular, almost superhuman Jesus spread out against the cross; so different from the giant crosses with  small, or often  no Jesus, that Christians usually display. Why, I wonder, would the Templars carve crucifixes on the wall of their prison at all? Denial of the crucifixion, or a Savior who hangs on a wooden cross, was the requirement of initiation into their order. To get in they spit on the cross. The reason for this remains a closely guarded secret, but long ago I discovered it was because they had correctly sussed the puzzle, that ‘Jesus’ was himself, itself, an iconological extension of the ancient Egyptian word for oil, gesu, as well as an iconological echo of the Hebraic Nehushtan. Gesu, the anointed word, raised up, as a brazen snake, the word, as technology, a conquering fetish. Jesus, like a new human Adam cut from the rib of Moses' history. Moses, mysteriously, who cast out the false gods, but left entact in the temple, the brazen snake, because it was in fact, a shrine not to a snake god, but an icon of the pharmakon, gesi, a god, gesu, indigestion, the dual power of words as toxin and tocsin, or touch-sign, and Gesu, the unguent of equanimity, lubricant, fuel, but also the peak of the pyramid. Encoded in the name of Jesus is also revolution, Ges is bystander, or beside, the marginal. The revelation of Jesus is a revelation of Egyptian vocabulary, a metissage of linguistic double sense, poly-sense. The bystander of ‘gesi’ conflated with the ‘ges’ of the peaks of pyramids and obelisks, the very part most closely associated with the sun, or light. The small deity of the brazen snake was actually a priestly message to later priests, that the great tradition of logos is a wave, a wave lifted up, and technologized in the image.”

Dr. U. interrupted then. “But what does all this have to do with the Templars, the banner, The Icarians, Nathanael Tinck, Étienne Cabet, The Painting, North Texas?” “Not sure Hiro! I was just pulling your leg a bit! I haven’t exactly checked those times with any degree of detail. The scholarship needed as to when and where to place the time frame viewers is a bit daunting, and this is why, or partially why, I was looking at the last of the crypto-Templars, to see what they might have discovered. There is also the odd historical significance of the Icarians, which was essentially a Templarist Communism expounded as a fictional world.  The Templar’s denial of the crucifixion is similar to that of the Cathars, who were first terrorized, then systematically slaughtered by the Church only 60 years before, and their rejection of the cross as a symbol because it was an instrument of torture, essentially, the false idol of those they considered terrorists, although, as the Domme graffiti shows, The Templars had mysteriously also conflated the crucifiction with  the Sephirotic Tree of Life which they placed beside their gemstone fish icon, but to return to my earlier thread.  The only source that Christ, as ‘annointed’, means ‘crucified’, claimed the Templars, is the belief and the doctrine of the Church. The Templars rejected this belief because they knew from being in Jerusalem, and mingling with all sorts of people, and searching for ancient knowledge, and pursuing archaeology both linguistic and material, that Jesus, or Jesu was just too close to still extant Arabic words of their time, namely the Arabic word for ‘beside’ which they correctly traced back to ancient Egyptian to find a baroque matrix of senses. That baroque matrix of senses itself like a map, or nodular icon cognate with the Sephirotic tree, or Soph-erotic circuitry," said Canterel. "Illuminism?" queried Dr. U. drawing a dollar sign in the air with his stylus.

"The true priestly religion is an eros of knowledge, and the external political machinations closer to theater, or fiction, as in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow! Think of it like this. ‘Jesus’,then, is something like a cryptic lamp fuel, or something to write by, about, in the long night, or the ‘dog days’ of the great (technological) work of the alchemists.  The phantasmic reality of light at night containing all the essentials for the unfolding of our subsequent technologies. The Nehushtan encoding the wave particle duality of light, The Jesu, like a sacrificial semiotics of social agency in which the wave is transfigured into the particle, a prophecy of the digital culminating in a bardonics of code as in the later Morlock supereons long after the fall of Technossos, the first of the post-human mega-singularities. Many of your genes Dr. U., come from that period, and are purely aleatoric code poetry wrought by oceans of wild nanomorphs exchanging gynthetic organelle poems like molecular myths of pattern memory.” Canterel produced a tablet on which he had sketched out a kind of rough diagram of the senses and lineages of ges.” Dr. U.’s eyes sparkled as he took the tablet from Canterel’s hand, and he spoke as he looked it over.  “Somehow, all this also reminds me of that poem about the origins of drawing written by J.M.W. Turner called ‘The Origin of Vermillion’. And the fact that you mentioned the term tocsin, as touch –sign, or talk-sign, and the whole metissagic Ovidian encoding of pharmakon itself recalling the Pygmalion complex, the Medusa complex, and the Narcissus complex in one great sweep, the ironical disjunctivity of metissage into metis, and sage, like ‘clever sage’. This is fascinating. But aren’t you joking?”

Canterel laughed, “You think my thought in jest? Haven't you ever studied the Morlock sun-sphere, the delirious odes of Nibogipfel?” Canterel put his finger on the tablet just under the word ‘gesture’, then ran it across to the ancient Egyptian word ‘gest’. Dr. U. read aloud, “Course, stride, plural, Lord of Running, the jackal.” “Syntaxis,” said Canterel, in a deep proud booming voice of triumph, then, ran his finger on to one of the many senses of ges which again Dr. U. read aloud. “The pens of shepherds..” Then Canterel stood up. “Can you guess, or rather, deduce what the caption under the flag might mean now, or just how it might be read?” Dr. Uyūshitan squinted at the small image of the painting, and after a while said, “Chaos’ Irrsign lied?” “That is one way of arranging the nodes. And lied can be song as in the German, but also lead, as in ‘the Shepherd leads the flock’. There are also ‘linguistico-harmonics’ such that it become Chaos’ Ursign, or Arcsign, or Ichor sign sing, or lie, or Chaos’ Arson, Cower arsine, etc, because Ars synthesis leads quaqua-versally in so many directions. But look at this, Dr. U.” Canterel touched the screen and brought up an anagram program, where he had stored his latest little discovery. “CAUSE ARCSIN LIED is an anagram of DIES CANICULARES.” Dr. U. grinned a little bit. “Dog days!” “Exactly,” said Canterel, “The Greeks and Romans supposedly associated the hot days with the rising of the star Sirius, the Dog Star, in Canis Major. The term is mentioned in Aristotle’s Physics. But was that really the reason. The Egyptian word for Sirius was Sothis, another name for Isis, or Ea-Chem, or Iwako, as the torch-bearing son of Persephone was called to the Cretans. Were the dog days perhaps the time when the Mermen of Sirius came down to Earth?” “I thought you said that idea was from a translation error, or a purposeful iconological mnemonic encoding,” said Dr. U. “I’m wacko, my vocabulary did this to me!” said Canterel, “and I’ve got to go drain my copula.. Let’s have lunch tomorrow in the library, and continue this.” "I think we should start calling ourselves 'Ichorians' Martial, and devise a synthetic blood based on Erythrite which would somehow render us both immortal and allow us to time-travel without the need of any external technological appurtenances.." Canterel looked confused. He knew that Dr. U's idea was perfectly laudable inspiration, but he also felt, a distinct sensation in his penis, often referred to as 'the call of nature'. Dr. Uyūshitan bowed and smiled and they parted ways.