In the Anthropogeny, works in which arts echo the scientific cosmologies of their era are known as cosmogonies. With a view of further explaining this, the website anthropogenie.be contains several studies under the more general title Contemporary Cosmogonies: Mc Cay for comics, Micheline Lo for painting, Pierre Radisic for photography, and Reich, De Mey, Wilson, Handke, Gehry and Mayne for music, dance, theatre, (archi)tecture. This study on Luc Eranvil’s Zelsa completes the mechanism for literature.

CONTEMPORARY COSMOGONICAL EPICS

First, we shall observe that for some revolutions – here the passage from Greece-inaugurated WORLD 2 to WORLD 3, that searches for its identity before our very eyes – literature has weaknesses and strengths. Indeed, the four anthropogenic layers of the language, the phonemes, the glossemes, the sequencemes and the phrasing allow the language to speak of everything and of itself, and therefore of every revolution. Yet, if it is a question of making certain changes concrete, to realize them in its language exercise, it is embarrassed.

Hence, since 1900, Biology has shown us that the living are made not only using plastic intentions as when Yaweh sculpts Adam in clay, or Platon’s Demiurge assembles his geometrical forms and modules, or still, when the Tao’s Yin and Yang model the mountains of China from their waters and winds. The living derivate also and largely from sequences, sequentiations and resequentiations. They are the (re)sequentiation of twenty amino acids, each of which has its particularities of attraction, repulsion and fixation producing, when their chains coil up, balls known as proteins, which are different every time according to the attractions-repulsions-fixations of the amino sequences from which they are derived. This produces (for the most part) all the anatomies and physiologies of terrestrial animals, which will in turn be selected by the perpetually changing milieus in which they appear. Proteins were cleverly baptized by Berzelius who discovered them. In Greek, proteios means of ‘first (foremost) importance’. If proteins are often plastic in their consequences, they are in no means plastic (in the artistic sense) in their origin.

This passage of the Justified and Finalized of artistic actions to the Non-justified and Non-finalized of sequences that are re-sequenced through encounters is the most fundamental mental revolution that Homo has known since its distinction from the anterior animality, then with the introduction of Archimedean science in -250. Homo had never imagined formations by re-sequentiations before encountering them by chance during organic chemistry experimentations in the early twentieth century. For artists wanting to create cosmogonies that echo this new cosmology, dance, music, painting, and photography manage (each with its means) to mime something of this formation (Gestaltung) by (re)sequentiation. At the same time, the phonemes, glossemes, sequencemes and the phrasing of the language all resist, for the simple reason that they are not or so slightly re-sequentiable.

However, language is particularly apt at expressing another cosmologic revolution, which also happens to be linked to the first. Homo no longer sees the Universe before and above him, but behind and below him. He knows that he is a state-moment of an Evolution of the living, that in turn is a state-moment of a much vaster Becoming, that of the Universe. On top of his birth date, each hominoid specimen has three other ages, that of the three billion years since the first living, five billion years since the Sun, and fifteen billion years since Big Bang. A scientist recently said: ‘When I look at you, I only see the past’.

We have just written ‘Universe’ instead of ‘Cosmos’. This was not done to vary the terminology. WORLD 2 – inaugurated by Greece – in its desire to reduce things to wholes made up of integral parts (‘integrating’ wholes), thereby powerfully taking the forms out of their backgrounds, had reduced the Universe to a Cosmos. The latter was a finalized order (one that could even be expressed mathematically) that the Latin would translate into Mundus (the non-vile one). This Cosmos-Mundus, traditional horizon of the western world, was then a long way before Homo, like an object (ob-jectum, thrown across). Proud Greek Anthropos deemed that he was the microcosmos of the macrocosm. In that sense, everything was theatre on a stage (skènè) of a theatre. We must always keep in mid the fact that ‘tHeatron’, ‘tHeoria’, and ‘tHeastHaï’ all share the same root: tHeF (embracing with the eyes). Contrasting with this self-importance, contemporary Homo, measly evolutionary relay, simple state-moment of Universe, is – at the opposite – a Little Nemo, a Little Ne-homo, like the title of Mc Cay’s first comic inaugurated in 1905. This date is decisive, because it is also, in the Cosmology, the date of the Quanta and Relativity.

We shall consider Luc Eranvil’s Zelsa (www.zelsa.be), completed in 2000, as an expression of this cosmological revolution leading to a Universe behind and below. To measure the point to which literature – which produces cosmogonies, as all the other art forms do – may and may not echo our scientific cosmologies.

1. SEMANTIC INVERSIONS

The semantic of a language is, of course, words with the meaning of words, isolated, or opposed, making a system. It is also the way in which (in wording) some words appear in first position, working as the frame of semantic framing, which are then only intelligible from them. On this point, the passage from the Cosmos before to the Universe behind will be the easiest to point out.

1A. Luc Eranvil « he »

From the very first page of Zelsa, we read: ‘son corps à lui pétrifié dans l'habitacle soutient sa tête tendue à la limite du cou elle ouvre la bouche pour crier jurer sa rage mais son souffle hésite (...)’. Then: ‘ses yeux en s'écarquillant ont laissé leur regard se perdre (...)’. Or still, before the smoke rising from an overheated engine: ‘lorsque l'urgence de sortir de cette caverne lui fait lancer la main vers la portière les doigts capturent la poignée en tâtent le galbe et pareils à un coquillage se fermant sur sa proie ils en épousent le métal et le pressent jusqu'à ce que (...)’. Finally: ‘ses orteils plongent au sol d'une détente sèche ses jambes le propulsent au dehors (...)’.

This is at the opposite of the western Greek-Roman-Christian-Neoplatinician perception. Indeed, in an artistic and finalist world as WORLD 2, goals are determined in at first, to activate the contours of bodies. Eventually, to conclude, we note the internal resources, which are either organic or physiological. In this sense, Greek sculpture is exemplary. It only delivers envelopes, the first and usual objects of the thinking. Sculpturally, the role of the curvature rates of these envelopes is to betray the forces from which they proceed. Yet, these forces of the inside are never thematised as such. The classic manner of grasping things culminates in nineteenth century ballet. Suzan Langer explains this view, recommending that the dancer should firstly forge a powerful mental image of the mobile contours that his body will have to produce. With Kant, the moral subject also supposed an intense preliminary conscience of the finality of the actions to produce.

However, Zelsa’s text expresses the opposite semantic referential. The initiatives come from the organs, better still, from their anatomy and physiology. It is no longer about an outlook that would use eyes, but of eyes generating an outlook, leaving it be ‘ont laissé son regard se perdre’. This outlook does not get lost in or on something, but ‘a travers les galleries et les nefs du cèpe brumeux’ created by the steam rising up from the engine. Behind the wheel of the car is ‘he’, Zelsa’s son, who will be the narrator and the actor of the initiatory voyage. He is not someone that would use a vehicle to get to a destination, but is a ‘corps à lui’, that ‘à la limite du cou’ ‘soutient une tête’ which ‘ouvre une bouche’, the whole producing – in retroaction – the movement of an arm about to open a door, and drop ‘he’ on the ground. In fact, ‘he’ does not really have opinions (as in western motivation), but his actions – and to conclude himself – come from organic urgencies before all.

All five senses function according to the same inversion of the semantic frame. Hence, the hearing is no longer the ears of a listening I, involving a nervous organization, but: ‘« et lui ainsi tendu déployé il absorbe l'entour s'emplissant de l'air de la lumière et du bruit il est delta mer ou océan cette chose où tout vient se jeter les sons menus qui imprègnent l'espace d'ondes élastiques s'engouffrent dans ses pavillons mobilisant son appareil auditif excitant l'organe de Corti ils y créent des multitudes de différences de potentiel et tout ce bordel électrique qui parcourt les voies afférentes traverse les noyaux olivaires et cochléaires et d'autres tubercules encore finissant sa course en feu d'artifice éclatant sur la voûte du cortex le sabbat neuronal génère des réminiscences en cascade dans sa mémoire qui (...)’.

In the same way, sight is: ‘tous ces photons qui ont des longueurs d'ondes petites moyennes grandes et qui forment des groupes des hordes des légions chacun ne pesant pour ainsi dire rien non vraiment rien il leur a fallu des millions d'années et bien plus parfois des milliards d'années pour arriver ici dans le dépouillement de la nuit il peut les voir rebondir sur les objets et migrer jusqu'à ses yeux ou tout aussi bien disparaître sans qu'il entende leur émoi quand au bout de cet invraisemblable voyage ils disparaissent se fondent dans la mer dans la coque dans les meubles de la cabine ou encore dans sa propre peau mais parfois ils traversent indemnes la série de structures qui composent sa cornée son humeur aqueuse son cristallin son humeur vitrée sa rétine et s'infiltrent dans l'enchevêtrement de cellules ganglionnaires bipolaires horizontales heurtent finalement de plein fouet cônes et bâtonnets où transmués par chimie transductrice en signaux nerveux ils montent de synapse en synapse jusqu'au corps géniculaire latéral et puis encore jusqu'au cortex là leur présence construit l'image exubérante de cette voûte étoilée qui hallucine sa conscience quand (...)’.

Finally, all this is understood as being the result of proteins, and before them of amino acids building them, sometimes identically so that they may be identifiable living, species and genres, and at other times differently so that the living may be the result of an Evolution. This then erects the living’s Digestion of the others in a first, archetypical action that is never subject to enough exploration. And here is Zelsa digesting:

‘(...) emportés par l'oesophage les restes des trayons ballottés en son sein se demandent s'ils franchiront ou non la porte du pylore quelques-uns l'ont dépassée défigurés par l'atmosphère corrodante de l'endroit et leurs mines ne sont plus belles à voir depuis qu'ils sont entrés dans ce long couloir coulant en circonvolutions partout de minuscules échappatoires les attirent mais ces sorties latérales sont sévèrement gardées et seuls certains passent alors que de la paroi déboulent des hordes sauvages tailladant dans la foule pourtant il y en a qui réussissent à franchir les portes ils suivent le labyrinthe des canaux de son sang certains sont massacrés à l'instant le capitaine se sent de partout salle de tortures mais d'autres continuent leur dérive jusqu'au foie qui élabore leur transformation lipidique cela nappe ses muscles d'une douceur qui fond ses traits virils et ainsi habillé de délicatesse du sommet de son front au fondement de son cul il se sent plus à l'aise lorsque perçant la clarté vaporeuse nourrie de la combustion de sa cigarette par sa chemise entrouverte le regard de l'enfant se nourrit à ses seins’.

Recently, neurophysiologists verify that at the instant when we become conscious of something, our brains already knew it and have already answered in a previous time to that of ‘our’ decisions. In that sense, the narrator and narrated of Zelsa can only be a ‘he’, sometimes a ‘him’; a ‘he-him’ whose name – and first name – we will never need to know. 

1B. Salman Rushdie « It »

The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, belong to the same era as Zelsa, which was completed in 2000, but whose first states date back to 1985. However, despite the differences related to the contrast between French and English, Europe and India, we find the same reversal of the semantic framing.

This time, the events (coming, former) are grasped as births or re-births, metempsychosically, in the strong sense of Indian tradition. At the beginning, two actors from Bumbay-Mumbay – the city of Indian cinema – go to London. From the very first line, Gibreel, one of them, declares them born-again. During their journey, they are aware of their conversion from one civilisation to the other and experience it like a delivery. The plane that transports them is itself a newborn that has crossed the vagina of the Himalaya clouds, and that in turn become the vagina for those for whom he is the parturient, filled with women with swollen wombs linking their glances to their husband’s genitalia. Their landing and exit from the plane, head bowed, completes the crossing of the fauces of this cultural birth by a birth on Heathrow’s blossomy earth: ‘is birth always a fall?’

If a friendship forms between the two men in mid-air, it is stressed that neither has the ‘pathetic personality’ of western heroes, ‘that half reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices’, but that they are the transitory results of a ‘will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure’. Between the two men, friendship is no longer the combat of two contours or two intentional words, but the invasion of a body by another, in another, where each one becomes ‘as if he were a bystander in his own mind’, more still, ‘a bystander in his own body’. To the extent that the ‘he’ and the ‘his’ used at first give way, in the same sentence, to an ‘it’ and ‘its’, central hearth spreading its energy whilst it clasps the other as an unbearably tight, intolerably soft fist. ‘It began in the very centre of his body, and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was unbearable tight and intolerable gentle’. Which can only be completed in a declaratively copulating clasp: ‘until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and when it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls’.

This conception of human actions as being pushed from a within to an outside, or still, of a past towards a present with eventualities of a future is common to Eranvil and Rushdie, and could be generalised in a formula where a ‘means and ends’ would replace the classic ‘ends and means’. The ‘means’ of a Universum that is only ‘versus unum’, hence with opened potentialities, having substituted itself to a Cosmos dominated by the ‘ends’ that Aristotle deemed as the noblest of causes. The anatomy on this reversal is most enlightening. Vesalius drew his bodies inside out; Professor Von Hagen’s ‘plastinated’ bodies – which are going around the world – propose Körperwelten, from within to outside.

2. THE CURVATURES OF SYNTAX

The layer that is least available to language revolution is their syntax. This is obviously true in positional languages, where the position of words in the syntagm usually marks their grammatical function. In French, in English, in Spanish: ‘Pierre bat Paul’ is in no way ‘Paul bat Pierre’. Even in non-positional languages, such as ancient Greek, Latin, or Russian, where the declination suffices to indicate the grammatical function, the sentence respects some great syntagmatic articulations. In any event, in all the languages that express WORLD 2, wordings and their referents were considered as wholes made up of integral parts and taken from their background. Mental punctuations were sufficiently predictable to be subject to written punctuation.

The only truly relevant punctuation is mental. Plato and Aristotle – like other tragic and historians of the great Greek creation – managed without written punctuation. It is only when, in the Hellenist era, the classic language begun to divert that, to save its comprehension with increasingly numerous and popular students, we started using graphic punctuation. Until the seventeenth century, written punctuation was quite free, as we see with Pascal. As for Bossuet, his thought is so intrinsically rhythmed that he often forgets or puts aside punctuation in his manuscript. On the other hand, the increasingly scholar rationalism of the eighteenth century set punctuation so tightly that any texted modification, like that conceived by Flaubert, was without much future. In any event, with the arousal of WORLD 3, which no longer sees wholes made up of integral parts, syntax had a brush with punctuation; at least since Mallarmé.

2A. Mallarmé « Coup »

In the work of Mallarmé, the weakening of written punctuation was declared through the abrupt declaration that mental punctuation is the essence of syntax, and even of a text. Seeing the nature of WORLD 3 that it inaugurates, this led to replace punctuation with diversely disposed blanks. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard only distinguishes small, medium, great, huge blanks that – to have more room to manoeuvre – are no longer placed page after page, but simultaneously on the double page opened by the codex on both sides of the central fold. This is done so that ‘les blancs assument l'importance’. For ‘le blanc se pose, insiste, rend prismatique...’ The text was published in 1897 in magazine Cosmopolis, with a preface that we shall turn to. In 1913, Gallimard published a monumental edition, which has just been re-printed.

We have understood that Mallarmé’s white is no longer the white of liaison that linked between them the propositions of an Egyptian or Sumerian text in WORLD 1B, hence in the intense and sculptural writings of the primary empires. It is a white of nullification; a white of cancellation like the white determined by a prism between the discontinuous images that it produces. At the same time, Dedekind started asking himself whether the Number begun with One (as was thought since the Greeks), rather than the Multiple (Cf. Le Nombre et les nombres, Badiou). The visible that we think we see as a collection of units would be, at the opposite, constellations (‘except perhaps one constellation’), these pseudo-unitary figures that the Greeks had supposed to be mythological characters (Perseus, Hercules), and that, in reality, are made of stars of immensely different places and eras. Let us get to the end. If the Universe is Multiple ‘except perhaps for one constellation’, then ‘every thought provokes a dice throw’. And ‘Un coup de dé jamais n’abolira le hasard’.

Mallarmé had seen that his ‘coup’ – because it is indeed a ‘stroke’– did not fall from the heavens. That it was inscribed in ‘dans des poursuites particulières et chères à notre temps, le vers libre et le poème en prose’. Claudel, who attended the Mallarmé Tuesdays, will stoutly declare that his own verse is ‘une idée entourée par du blanc’. He will aso say that ‘la pensée bat, comme la cervelle et le cœur’.

2B. Syntaxes since James Joyce

Indeed, as soon as 1914, James Joyce begins writing his Ulysses, in which Mallarmé ‘prisms’ are borne through over-compositions . We shall remember that, at the opposite of French syntax, which is substantialist and puts the determinant after the determined, English syntax – like most other languages – puts the determining before the determined, which de-substantialises the latter and reduces it in advance. On the other hand, it invites to create composed, even over-composed words. From the third page of Ulysses, the Sea surrounding Ireland is ‘the grey-sweet mother’, but also ‘The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton’. The result of Valéry Larbaud’s and James Joyce’s French translation was this: ‘La mer pituitaire. La mer contracticotesticulaire. Epi oinopa ponton (ouverte au grand large)’.

From 1920, Joyce takes a huge leap and begins Finnigans Wake, where the horizontal over-composition becomes a vertical over-composition. Lewis Carroll had demonstrated that it is possible to create portmanteau words, like ‘snark’ (snake and shark) and purely invented words that were comprehensible phono-semically. One of his French adaptations reads ‘Tout fliroreux vriblaient les Borogoves’. However, the awakening of the wake goes way further than the portmanteau word. The horizontal, still syntagmatic over-composition (hence rather metonymic), becomes vertical, paradigmatic (hence rather metaphorical). Each glosseme, whether it is plurisyllable or even monosyllable, supports a multiplicity, almost an indefiniteness of shots that has intrinsically become prismatic. This process is relatively familiar in an Ireland where, through birth and culture, each brain of each speaker packs, in liturgically pronounced words (Ulysses’s Introïbo ad altare Dei) a dozen linguistic layers: Celt, Finish, Greek, Roman, Christian. Hence, the six hundred pages of the complete text of Wake are indeed illegible (unreadable as the writer of the Penguin preface notes). Yet, this illegibility is cosmogonist. It literarily allows seeing and feeling the origins of the gesture and the language, hence of the thought, once referred to a Universe in the back rather than a facing Cosmos. Comas subsist, but the end mark disappears in the great moments. 

Claude Simon’s Route des Flandres, which was published in 1960, does not suppress punctuation. It keeps comas and end marks. However, they are no longer there to distinguish integral parts from wholes. To the contrary, they support the breathing that aims at being cumulative, of a dissolving accumulation, where the writing moving along the line is a harvester-grain binder-thresher climbing up the slopes of heavy earth with great effort, never going down again except to climb back up immediately in other apneas, more deadly and erotic. In the collection ‘Les sentiers de la création’, the writer will explain that he is a Orion l’aveugle: ‘Je ne connais pour ma part d'autres sentiers de la création que ceux ouverts pas à pas, c'est-à-dire mot après mot, par le cheminement même de l'écriture. Avant que je me mette à tracer des signes sur le papier il n'y a rien, sauf un magma informe de sensations plus ou moins confuses, de souvenirs plus ou moins précis accumulés, et un vague - très vague – projet’. Therefore, here too, no more Ends and Means, but Means and Ends.

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez pursues the same spirit using another mean. The beginning of Cien Años de Soledad shows a suite of locutional groups: ‘Muchos años después, / frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, / el coronel Aureliano Buendia / había de recordar / quella tarde remota / en que su padre / la llevó à conocer el hielo’, where the first group – along with its referential content – triggers a fantasy whose second group enunciates the referent, which is referentially explained by the following group, retriggering in turn a fantasy, which is referentially explained by the following group, and so on. It is the syntax of the Columbian Mamagallo, this continuous sinusoidal overlapping of reality and the imaginary, and where the imaginary has such a strong victory over reality that 1975 Otoño del patriarca hardily dares replace the referential/fantastical couple by the fantastical/referential couple. Here, it is a governmental palace, where birds devour the balconies with their beaks among a ‘tiempo estancado’, a ‘tibia y tierna brisa de muerto grande y de podrida grandeza’, a ‘ámbito de otra época’, a ‘silencio más antiguo’, under the light of a ‘luz decrépita’; which assuredly could only open with the words: ‘Durante el fin de semana / los gallinazos se metieron por los balcones / de la casa presidencial’. An Amazonia summed up in the senile brain of a South-American President General, who already has more than one foot in the grave, but whose insanities are more real than the real, or rather, shows the real (assuredly unreal) of Reality. Where the abnormal frames the normal. Almost the absolute of the Universe in the back. Readers from everywhere – even popular – who already belong to WORLD 3, were not mistaken. This book was made to measure for its 1982 Nobel Prize.

In that same era, Micheline Lo, who was not yet a painter, also pursued presents from pasts, but this time, in the syllable from before the syllable, in the letter from before the letter. We could already read in Finnigans Wake: ‘for old daddam dombstom to tomb and wamb humbs lumbs agamb, glimpse agam, glance agen (FW, p349)’. This was another ascent of the language built up by superimposition. However, Micheline Lo’s ‘flexts’ no longer construct, they no longer write. Their only aim is to inscribe the cerebral neuronal movement evermore retroactively, with something of Phèdre’s startled ‘Qu’ai-je dit?’ And the ‘Employé’ then inscribes: ‘La presimière qui se présente en prinsitil, en princesse épanamourée, oh le verbe, oh les frondaisons päles et vertes de ses sourcils de peinture. Oh verte et matinale, printilineuse etchatilen herbette, oh la vertigineuse z seize ans primale, oh fruit fleuri tout clair, oh que je l'aime quand elle ouvre la porte, faisant sonner le digeu, le diguelidindon de la clh cloche tinette que j'ai pendue à ma porte. Elle demande comme ça d'un coup : c'est un paquet de Gitanes pour ses saisis saisisson seizë saizons (....)’. However, wanting to re-read herself, to improve herself, the author noted how any alteration – which was still possible and even called for in Joyce – contradicted her project, even transforming her truth into lie. And from writer, Micheline Lo became a painter, because in painting sequences are adapted to indefinite re-sequentiations. The paintings she made around 1997 will bear the symptomatic title Les chemins des écritures (Cf. supra, Micheline Lo et les paradigmes des formations vivantes).

Finally, in Salman Rushdie’s 1988 Satanic Verses, the syntax is not perverted but it juxtaposes formulations that are typical to English, Hindi, and Arabic. In particular, it crosses whitout any cement every type of discourse (referential, imprecating, shouting, exclaiming, etc.) and every nature of word (substantives, adjectives, verbs, exclamations). To the extent that the whole text dances: ‘Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting << dancing fiercely >> in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spread-eagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity’. In such case, the only link could be the borgorisms of comics. Whereby the ‘Ho ji ! Ho ji !’ and ‘tat-taa ! Takathum !’ of the first lines. And the ‘Dharrrrraaaammmm ! Whalm, na ?’ of the last.

2C. Luc Eranvil’s syntax « overlapping »

Zelsa, completed in 2000, is such that everywhere we find propositions that are faithful to french syntax, hence with a beginning and an end that can be located. Everywhere, these propositions encompass one last portion that also works as the first portion of the following proposition. This is a bit like for a roof, where each tile has a terminal section overlapping on the first section of the next tile, in such a way that we could speak of this overlap as an overlapping. We shall borrow the term tuilage (overlapping) from Andrée Desautels, musicologist at the Montreal academy. In the 1960’s she used it to describe some of Stravinski’s chords that she stated as being bipolar, in the sense that their notes simultaneously belonged to two tonalities, the ones continuing the preceding tonality, whilst the others initiated the new tonality and some had an active function in both tonalities.

We have seen that the language syntax is not particularly apt at miming (re)sequentiations, where contemporary biology sees the biochemical root of the anatomic and physiological formations (Gestaltungen) of the Living. Yet, through the creation of syntactic limbs that have a double-belonging, anterior and ulterior, Eranvil’s propositional overlapping manages to create, if not the full amino re-sequentiation of proteins, at least a thematisation of sequentiation as such, the motor of the biological Evolution in general, and the neuronal Evolution (semiotic) in particular. This syntax goes forth through the pleats of re-launch, bifurcating with each breath into openings of possible. Not through leaps of states of consciousness that would occur on a brain, as Bergson still believed, but through true biochemical modifications of neuronal cells, as we have learned through the studies of Kandel on Aplisia in the seventies. Since then, these studies have allowed understanding our different memories, at short, medium, and long term, according to the levels of these chemical modifications.

In brief, at the opposite of Micheline Lo’s ‘flext’, which is not correctable, Zelsa’s syntactic overlapping allows and even stimulates correction as was the case with Valéry, who was more preoccupied with ‘poïèsis’ (poetic action of producing) than with ‘poïèma’ (finished poetic product), which made the Valerian poem infinitely re-workable. However, even then there was a state that every transformation – to add or to deduct – could only degrade. This was the case for Zelsa in 2000. Ten years at least had been necessary. One decade, which is roughly the amount of time separating the first and last states of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, he too preoccupied with poise. Here, there is a relationship between poetry and music, and we shall come back to it.

What is the tempo of the Zelsian overlapping? It works through the withdrawal of waves, and is therefore very slow, or equally rapid, but in any event excessive, as is the case for extreme works in general. What about the rhythm in all its ressources? Is can be organized in successive cores (Bach, the Rolling Stones), in envelopes (Mozart, the Beatles), by resonances (Beethoven, Led Zeppelin), or through interfaces (Wagner, the Who)? In fact, a overlapping does not produce cores, as did Salammbô’s massive ‘a’ (‘glyschroids’ said Minkowsky) and Claude Simon’s ‘moule poulpe pulpe vulve’ (‘glebous’ would have said Chouraki). And the overlapping also contradicts the under-envelopes of envelopes, the lest phrases of Stendhal. But of course, coverings and overlapping give way to interfaces and to universal resonances like those that triggered, for half a century, between deca-syllables and alexandrines, the 4+6 and 6+6 verses of Saint-John Perse.

In any case, these generalized covering exclude every form of punctuation. It hence echoes the Universe of our cosmologies that no longer exists in wholes made up of integral parts but develops one same, immense long phrase, which is already old of fifteen billion years. If there is punctuation, it is at great scale, like those of these ‘punctuated equilibrium’ evoked by Gould, or like those ‘evolutionary gullies’ that De Duve noted in the Evolution of the living. Because although the cells of each living individual experience re-sequentiations from instant to instant, muting the species, there are still some species, some genres, some families, some orders, some branching, at least transitorily. Zelsa’s syntax is therefore devoid of end marks or chapters, but does have page breaks.

Thinking about it, we could also have invoked a certain overlapping for Garcia Marquez. The overlapping he practices when a referent triggers an imaginary that explicates itself in a referent that triggers an imaginary. Yet, the Marquezian overlapping cannot be visualized in a text, whilst it is easy to point out Zelsa’s. The Zelsian overlapping makes visible the order of darting and bifurcation of concepts and fantasies, meaning the essence of the extreme literary art, whereby Claudel could have said that Virgil, supported by the least positional of languages, i.e. Latin, was the greatest genius of humanity. Zelsa makes textually palpable that, still according to Claudel, an extreme literary text ‘ça a une espèce d’air sur le papier de se mouvoir’.

3. THE THEMATIC OF ELEMENTS

A thematic plays with elements, and it exalts the latter both referentially and fantastically. In an epic, these elements determine heroes. The feats of the heroes give way to narrativity. Narrativity gives way to sites. The ensemble of heroes, their feats, and their sites blossoms around a dominating theme. And all this stands out on a background where the Origin rises to the surface.

3A. The four common elements to terrestrial cosmogonies

For contemporary, scientific cosmologies, the factors of the Universe are varied: photons, leptons, hadrons that are in turn subdivided into sub-classes: neutrinos, baryons, etc., with continuous action types, discontinuous in Relativity, and granular in Quanta. Classes and sub-classes of these elements become increasingly refined from year to year, throughout the work of physicists and biologists, who have become the only ones to be competent on first principles, which used to be the business of philosophers.

But here, as we are dealing with cosmogonies, which are the business of artists, the elements remain close to Homo’s body and sensorial systems. And since – despite the evolution of the species – body and sensory organs have not changed much since Classical Antiquity, we shall not be surprised that they remained, even during the passage from WORLD 2 to WORLD 3. The elements have been there since Empedocles; five in China (where the Centre is the fifth) and four for us. Earth, Water, Air, and Fire (Ether) if we are to list them from the lowest to the highest. However, Empedocles believed them to be simultaneously cosmogonical and cosmologic. We know that they are only cosmogonical.

Hence, the dazzling white of the first page of Jamais un coup de dé is completely taken up by:

JAMAIS

QUAND BIEN MÊME LANCÉE DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES

ÉTERNELLES

DU FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE

Et la double page blanche qui suit précise : ‘SOIT / que / l'Abîme // blanchi / étale/ furieux // sous une inclinaison / plane / désespérément // d'aile // la sienne.’ And the double white page that follows continues to precise: ‘BE / that / the abyme // whitened / spreads / furious // under an inclination / glides / desperately // from wing // his’. To the initial Water, the following pages add the Air (of wind) and Fire (of lightning). The Earth alone stands back for the poet of ‘L'azur ! L'azur ! L'azur !’. 

Ulysses also opens with Water, the water of the Irish Sea, which is both interior and oceanic. The one-day tour of Dublin completed by Joyce’s Ulysses is somewhat inspired by the ten years voyage of the original Ulysses around the Mediterranean, the Mare nostrum that Le Corbusier – before drowning in it – referred to as the ‘Ancient’, perhaps in memory of Hölderlin’s Archipelagos. The pen of La route des Flandres pushes its tip in an Earth whose mud, when it is war time, is sculpted by the hoods of the corpses of dead horses; and when the land is at peace, with the caterpillar wheels of the tractors. Around Macondo, in Cien Años de Soledad, then in L'Otoño del Patriarca’s ‘el tiempo estancando en el interior’, it is indeed the Earth, Water, the Air and the Fire of the Andes and the Amazon that carry the ‘mamagallo’ of the columbian real and imaginary. Furthermore, when their author will one day decide to summarize his fundamental fantasy, it is ‘the last voyage of the ghost ship’, El ultimo viage del buque fantasma, Water and Air, that he saw. Similarly, it is a ‘flext’ – flow and flux – that Micheline Lo marries to go back to the source of the neuronal engendering; until she baptizes the fifty or so paintings and drawings of her first pictorial suite: La Tentation de Saint Antoine. In the work of Flaubert – and like Flaubert himself – Saint Anthony wanted to become the Water of the Nile, the Earth of the Desert, the Air of dreams, and the Fire of annihilation. As for the vagina of the airplane, which itself is a vagina from which emerge the two born-again of the Satanic Verses, it is, at first, the ethereal Air of the Himalayas, before their landing on England’s ‘blossomy earth’.

 Zelsa, a long-course captain, never felt so much at home than under the Fire of the starry sky through the Air of the winds that sculpt storms in Water, and in the Earth of coombs, these ‘upturned cathedrals’.

3B. Metamorphic heroes

Sons and daughters of the compost of our four cosmogonical elements: who are the heroes? A hero (from the Greek Hèrôs) is a master, a notable, an example, an ancestor. There are only heroes in epics. Tragedies are works driven by the tale. They have agonists, protagonists, deuteragonistes, and tritagonistes. Novels are peopled with characters.

In the logic of WORLD 2, heroes were substances that were highly finalised and finalizing, with endings and ideals that were that of the Group, and in the background, the Cosmos, whose group members were microcosms ; specimens, it is true, but of eternal species. Homer writes his Odyssey around and from Ulysses; Virgil his Aeneid from Aeneas; La Geste de Rollant is indeed Roland’s. Considering this, what happens can only be accidents of substance. Etymologically, an accident is something that falls towards or on, here in a substance, and hence it is attributable, predictable. The first verse of La Geste de Rollant, contemporary of Saint Ansleme who reformulated Western substantialism for the last millennium of the entire Western world, rhythmically makes the difference. ‘Carles li reis’ in the closed metre (- . . -) for the substance; ‘nostre empereire magne’, in the three propulsive legs ( . - / . - / . - ) for accidents, which are here so totally identified to the substance that they are ‘properties’.

Yet, according to new cosmologies, the Earth, Water, Air, and Fire could only give way to local, transitory formations (Gestaltung). The heroes of the epics of WORLD 3 will thereby all be metamorphic, meaning portions of matter going from one form to another, and from one species to another.

3B1. Human metamorphic heroes

With Mallarmé, ‘LE MAITRE’ is said to be ‘surgi inférant de cette conflagration’. Irishman Joyce’s Ulysses is a language and cultural Proteus. Among the mud of the 1940 retreat, Claude Simon’s Georges can give himself substance, but not form. Micheline Lo’s employee’s (like its comic strip model, Gaston Lagaffe) is a Marsupilami. The hero of the Otoño del patriarca enlightens the normal through the metamorphisms of his senility. The hero of the Satanic Verses is double, both Gibreel and Farishta, but also Mahound and one hundred others – both men and women –without us knowing exactly which bodies inhabit the souls, and which souls inhabit the bodies. On page 282, we do not even know into what the other mutates: ‘Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha (the ‘Salad baba' of the first page) was turning into some sort of science-fiction or horror-video mutey, some random mutation shortly to be naturally selected out of existence, - or whether he was evolving into an avatar of the Master of Hell, -  or whatever the case (...)’. Science fiction and horror videos are indeed a product of WORLD 3.

In that sense, Hero Z./Zelsa is explicitly man/woman, thrown out chest and big-breasted. And, when dead, his/her decomposed corpse will go through its successive appearances once again, layer after layer, until the initial face of Captain Z. rises up. ‘la métamorphose du visage a la puissance du dégel mais alors que des flancs du nez ruissellent de lactescents écoulements et que s'étirent majestueuses des plaques glissant en mouvement tectoniques au pied du massif nasal des forces lentes et sûres montent des entrailles de ses masséters font prospérer le paysage des lèvres qui semble s'orner d'un sourire lequel bride aussi les paupières et plisse les tempes donnant à la tête non pas le masque fade éteint du sommeil éternel mais l'éclat du réveil (...)’

His companion Heroine is as metamorphic, albeit inversely. Initially, she is a Savage Negress of the Island, a culinary witch, a pure female who conceives ‘it’ in the enthusiasm of a coupling, continuing the ‘gestures of creation’. Yet, she ends up as Sister Marie-Ange in an orphanage where a declared exercise of reason, softness, and ‘civilised’ tenderness reigns.

Finally, the engendered Hero, fruit of the two former heroes, is metamorphosis itself to such an extent that he could only be a ‘he’ without a name, without even a first name, not even Claude Simon’s Georges. Mixed-blood by birth, hence until his very genes, he will interbreed his blood even more with all the cultural cross-breeding proposed by his initiatory voyage, of which he is the theme, the chronicler, the reader. He is in particularly – aside from his reminiscences – the Mallarméan Master of memorization. In this essential brain activity, the brain completes, from instant to instant, the compatibility process of its new and preliminary experiences, conciliating their contradictions. With that goal, it constantly reconfigures the ones with the others, particularly through its paradoxical sleep, but also through its other phases of wakefulness and sleep. Otherwise, in the ever-changing environments in which it intervenes, how could its reactions remain adapted?

Then, since there are no agonists or characters in an epic, the other intervening passersby could only be Figures. Tourists are first in visiting the Bateau Aquarium: ‘(...) il découvrit un midi stupéfait la vraie plage où les flots flirtent avec la côte il vit la crique sablonneuse poudrée de corps d'un bronze étincelant et la vue de ce bûcher où les communautés d'homme de femmes et d'enfants oints d'huiles aux parfums denses et tenaces gisaient grillant sous le soleil s‘offrant sans doute en sacrifice braquant leurs têtes inertes fixant la mer comme s'il devait surgir de ses fonds quelque divinité fantastique (...)’. Further along, it will be the Mother Superior, with her ‘maternités inépuisables’. Then, the successive crews of Captain Z. Finally, along the last initiating road, the old women that seem to be delocalized Amerindian. From the car, near the end of the voyage, we glimpse at these women, who are one thousand miles away from their birthplace and constantly smoking a cigar.

3B2. Animal metamorphic heroes

And, it is obvious, in the era of metamorphosis, heroes have to be as animal as they are human. In Zelsa, the semi-God, or God himself, will be the Cow. It would probably be capable – if we ingested with her ingestions and excretions – of converting a man into a woman, a Father into a Father-Mother. With an almost mythological good fortune, Z., when his lifeboat takes him to an Indian bank, sees the goddess in the streets and right up to his veranda…

 « pendant que Z. avec l'enfant sur ses bras abrité par une feuille de bananier qui le protégeait des jets d'une divinité pissant sa mousson sans retenue continuait sa route hypnotisé par les danses des flûtes de voleurs des poètes des singes des savants et des marchands réincarnés dans l'une quelconque de leurs vies en charmeurs de serpents et traînait sa raison vaincue par les regards des vaches étonnées drogué par les odeurs s'élevant des crémations sur les bords du fleuve cédé aux gourous aux putains et aux autres par les dieux las de s'esquinter à le dompter et partis s'amuser danser avec les comètes et autres giclées de bouse de la Grande Vache dont une incarnation grand-guignolesque broutait l'herbe entre les dalles sous la véranda où Z. s'était réfugié levant la tête ruminant sa pitance la bête pétait avec fracas durant ses lentes digestions sa tête flottait dans la réverbération à chaque meuglement l'enfant avait un sursaut se réveillait la regardait engouffrer sans repos ce que son cul dispendieux dispersait sans relâche ne détournant la tête de la bouseuse sacrée que pour se rendormir à ce point que le capitaine en acquit la conviction que cette grande Dame brune avec son pis massif devait être l'expression dans son essence même de la Mère ».

Once having found this model of perfect Maternity, Zelsa could only dream of assimilating it ‘et il se mit dès cet instant à épier les faits et gestes de la gent bovine femelle traînant dans les rues les maisons les temples les bureaux et les institutions sanitaires clairement omniprésentes comme des mères il apprit patiemment de la vache ses deux cents façons de marcher et ses trois cents manières de faire avec une incontestable dignité ce qui passerait sinon pour odieusement roter péter chier pisser il apprit à distinguer au premier coup d'oeil la petite vache de la grande vache celle dont c'est la première vie de celle dont c'est la quatrième il acquit enfin la conviction que c'est seulement en mangeant de la vache de quatrième réincarnation proche du nirvana qu'il pourrait s'attacher cette qualité femelle bien nécessaire pour s'occuper décemment de l'enfant tenu contre son sein par ses mains maladroites’. 

However, « comme il lui sembla une évidence que ses dents ne pourraient plonger en ces lieux dans la chair des vaches sacrées et que leur sang ne pourrait se mêler ici au sien sentant l'urgence de rebâtir son corps avec leurs protéines essentielles il résolut de rentrer au port ».

3C. « Through shortcuts, in hypothesis ». From tale to story. 

In any case, the metamorphic heroes of WORLD 3 are no longer adapted to the tale, the narration, and the novel, whose full coherence supposes the western ‘I’. The Arabian Nights are tales. They would be more hearths of stories, in the sense that Claude Simon gives the word when he entitled one of his books Histoire, and when he says, in Blind Orion, that what he does is this or that, but ‘surtout Histoire). The first meaning of the Greek Historia is research, exploration, the quest for a terrae incognitae, to finish with the unknown itself, the Grail itself, Homo the unknown. History is initiatory. And like every initiation, it has no end.

Once again, Mallarmé opens WORLD 3 by decidedly saying ‘tout se passe par raccourci, en hypothèse ; on évite le récit’. Why would we take charge of factual likelihoods, which distract from the project? Captain Z. leaves his ship in the same way as mythological Ulysses. He lands on an island that he will not have time to explore, because: ‘le capitaine avait plongé dans les profondeurs moites de la forêt et alors qu'il croyait trouver l'objet de sa chasse une jeune femme noire était passée devant lui telle un souffle qui l'avait emporté à sa suite entre les paquets de végétation comme si les pas de la négresse étaient plus décisifs qu'un chant nuptial’. And it is indeed via ‘un raccourci, en hypothèse’ that the Negress finds herself on the small boat as it draws alongside the boat and the two climb up on the deck from which they immediately went down to the holds, where finally ‘he’ will be conceived.

Mythologies still with the naïve and grandiose swelling of the belly of the pregnant savage who fattens sailors in culinary debauchery from port to port until the birth occurs amidst a storm, from which Zelsa’s crew survive by leaving the ship, forgetting the parturient on her bed, in spite of every rule of the sea. ‘L'équipage et le Capitaine quittent le vaisseau en dernier’. Myth still, assuredly, when the next morning, as the mist surrounds the ship of the rescued, they discover that – probably through some divine vengeance – their masculine breasts have become feminine teats. Zelsa, guilty in chief, decides to redeem himself by becoming simultaneously Father and Mother, feeding the newborn with imaginary breastfeeds before prostituting himself to accomplish his feminity semantically. He is then a transvestite at the brothel of the Caravanserai. Salman Rushdie also perceived his Satanic Verses as ‘this modern Mahabharata, or, more accurately, Mahavilayet’. His Mischal had developed ‘the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a mythological battleground’. 

Still according to the logic of the myth, the engraved Z on the medal of captain Z was lengthened into ‘Zelsa’ by the Negress satisfied of their embrace. In a premonition of his destiny, Z, decided sailor, became Zelsa the undetermined, the planetary, the stellar, the universal. Until one day, suffocating with her feigned maternities, ‘she’ ends up telling ‘him’, after a night filled with even more diabolical travesty than usual, the only violent sentence of the book, a sentence that is outside the myth: ‘Je ne suis pas ta mère’. The following morning, ‘he’ was left in the orphanage where the savage had had the time to metamorphose herself into Sister Marie-Ange.

We see that the hence understood history is not so much related to events than to processes of invisible forces, - in fields of probability, say the theoreticians of Quanta, - unexplained for the actors. Every Sunday of holiday, when other boarders had left to spend the day with their facilities, Sister Marie-Ange stayed alone with ‘him’. Both of them were unaware of their kinship and spent hours in an unfathomable complicity, building a model boat from a kit that Zelsa had sent. One day before dawn, he left his own room without reason, crossing every hallway of the orphanage, and opened the door to her room. He found her awakening in the warmth of her bed. She saw him looking at her and asked him with a feigned surprise ‘mais qu’est-ce que tu fous là?’. The same subtle forces of the will to live probably explain why, on that Wednesday when she drove ‘him’ in a car to the port where Zelsa had given ‘him’ a rendezvous, she begun telling him – probably feeling that this was the last time she would see him – the story of her shipwreck. She told him of her loss amongst the waters of the ocean, her deliverance by a dolphin, then by a passing ship, to her final landing in a foreign land where she now lived, metamorphosed.

‘He’ had never held the key to all these strange connivances. He will only learn of his filiation when, having arrived at his last rendezvous with Zelsa, he sees, coming down from the ship, not his living father but his coffin followed with a trunk of souvenirs, where a photo showed Marie-Ange – still the Savage – seated naked with her legs opened.

3D. Stunning sites

In every epic, the site is essential: Troy, Carthage, Roncevaux. And when the heroes are metamorphic – as they are today – the sites are even more important. Mallarmé’s azure. James Joyce’s Dublin. Claude Simon’s Flanders. Garcia Marquez’ Macondo. Micheline Lo’s Desk. Salman Rushdie Bombay-Mumbay…

In Zelsa, the first site encountered is the Bateau aquarium. Built on a beach of sand bordered by a road, it is a sort of Egyptian cangia, its prow turned to the sea and its stern overlapping on the road, almost forcing passing tourists to discern and visit it. Zelsa, the sailor stuck on firm land through the worries of his maternity, had furbished his ship to salvage something from his former lives. Instead of a ship on the ocean, it is the ocean in a ship. Bystanders stood facing the abysses; these initial places of inter-devouring that make up the living, for the horrible and the ecstasy. In true or imaginary : ‘les banderoles qui descendaient depuis le sommet du grand mât jusqu'à la poupe et pareillement jusqu'à la proue des drapeaux vantaient en lettres jaunes sur fond bleu le Bateau-Aquarium et ses baleines blanches et ses squales redoutables et encore ses fresque marines et ses chambres avec vue sur les paysages époustouflants des flots (...)’

For Zelsa’s plan of assimilating (for his maternities) not only cows but the Cow, the abattoir is a Mexican temple, a sacrificial place of mutational ingestions and digestions. This is where busy sacrificer priests cut up immolated divinities into parts, isolating the udders – the essence of the cow – in particular, and from which Zelsa would choose the most promising among the very altars of the cult. This is the place that those he had selected would leave, already wrought and ornated on site by the thurifiers that would transport them with great pomp to his place where the Eucharist would be consumed. There, the attentive mastication was supposed to free their proteins, reducing them to their amino acids that, their new host organism hoped, would re-sequence to give place to new proteins that could be absorbed by a masculine body that they would then transform into a Mother organism.

And to complete this physical metamorphosis into a semiotic metamorphose, adding the signs and behaviours of the Feminine to a transsexed Male body, the Caravanserai stood tall on top of the hill that overlooked the city. The brothel had always been the place of generalised Circulation (Metamorphose?), as this was the place where Money was exchanged, that neutral exchanger of goods, and the Sperm, neutral exchanger of generations. Participating to the inter-devouring of the abysses, the brothel was usually located downtowns or in the suburbs, even at the time of Classic Antiquity, which celebrated sacred Prostitution in its Dionysies. In all cases, Zelsa’s WORLD 3 proclaims the Caravanserai from the top of the hill. On the inauguration day, this is what triggers this climbing procession (like a ‘theory’ of Vestals climbing the Acropolis or the Capitol), whores, among which transvestite Zelsa, like ‘une constellation de femmes plus belles que les Pléiades et plus spectaculaires que les Céphéides aux confins de la mer et du ciel’. In such a way that it ‘brillerait comme un phare pour répondre à Hercule et au Serpentaire pour éblouir l'Aigle et le Verseau et les navires voguant au large sous les volutes de lumière déployées dans l'océan cosmique ne pourraient fuir sa gravitation ils perdraient inéluctablement à son approche leur équipage auquel ce panthéon d'un culte inédit du plaisir arracherait de larges traînées de monnaie et de semence et Zelsa écoutant sa voix intérieure ou peut-être la voix prophétesse laissa ses mains tirer sa chevelure en arrière comme la queue d'une comète et d'une démarche sûre elle pénétra dans la maison close quand elle franchit le seuil il y avait la lumière de Bételgeuse dans l'éclat de son regard’.

Finally, after these fixed sites, the Metamorphosis supposed mobile sites: boats, ships, vessels. Amongst all of Zelsa’s, the Noces d’eau, the last one, is exemplary. He had rescued that boat from a shipwreck, and completely covered it with the partition of the siren’s song that he composed day after day according to the whims of the weather, to seduce waters and winds. Governing metamorphoses that this time were not subjected, but dominated.

3E. The first Conjunction

In all the cosmogonies of WORLD 3, we find – underlying but often surfacing – the first and ultimate theme of Conjunction. Conjunction of the stars in nebulas and constellations. Conjunction of the digestive metamorphoses. Conjunction of the interfaces of organisms and of their environment through the transductions of the sensory organs. Language conjunction using metaphors, metonymies, syntax curvatures. Conjunction of the logic and grammatical copulas. Key-lock conjunction between proteins, famous since Fischer’s 1902 Nobel Prize. Key-lock conjunction of copulations orchestrated in Mammals through a male orgasm and in Homo, capable of affronted copulations by a bisexual orgasm and permanent heats and ruts. The hence reverberated, inter-cerebral orgasm had then become – in several civilizations or in every one – the most common recourse for pure presence experiences that were all more or less para-orgastic, in dance, music, and elsewhere.

To measure the revolution that WORLD 3 represents in this domain, we must remember how WORLD 2 felt – throughout its reign – theoretical difficulties with human sexuality. Firstly because the confusions of copulation gravely hurt its choice of wholes made up of integral parts; then, because the orgasm was incompatible with its demand of taking the forms on the backgrounds. This double unease is already perceptible with Aristotle - not in what he thinks, but in his responses to his objectors –, and will live on for the two and a half millennium of WORLD 2, right to the bourgeois Victorian moral, and even with Valéry. In the early twentieth century, Oscar Wilde’s and Marcel Proust’s consideration of homosexuality did little to lift this misunderstanding. Nothing will change that. Not the enthusiastic marital mystique of the Fathers of the Church of the Orient, not Saint Anthony’s ‘Omne masculinum adaperiens vulvam sacrum Domini vocabitur’, not Augustine’s definition of the love of God as a ‘étreinte que nulle satiété ne désenlace’, and not even the phrase by Bossuet evoking Lucrece’s De Natura rerum in his Médiations: ‘Dans le transport de l'amour humain, qui ne sait qu’on se mange, qu’on se dévore, qu’on voudrait s’incorporer de toutes manières, et, comme disait ce poète, enlever avec les dents ce qu’on aime pour s'en nourrir, pour s'y unir, pour en vivre’. At the end of WORLD 2, the fear of the ‘primitive scene’ persists with Freud.

As is often the case, the major revolution was cataclysmic, without transition. James Joyce’s Ulysses ends on Molly’s orgiastic, panting, pulsating ‘yes’, tightly coupled: ‘and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts, all perfume yes an his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes’. It is true that, in Homer’s Odyssey, the antique Ulysses also ends his initiatory voyage of the Mediterranean by moving towards the marital bed with wife Penelope. However, that bed is legal, whereas all legality disappears with Joyce. Finnigans Wake will prolong Molly’s accord to the over-compositions of the language: ‘Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream’. Dream without doubt, because the orgiastic coaptation is not reality and fantasy, but within one and the other. As an existential, ontological, logical and linguistic primate of Copulation over the distinct behaviourist appetencies of the conjugated Two.

A little later, around 1940, Saint-John Perse’s Amers (marine buoys) insist on the antiquity of the Conjunction: ‘Une même vague par le monde, une même vague depuis Troie, roule sa hanche jusqu'à nous. Au très grand large loin de nous fut imprimé jadis ce souffle’. In 1960, around the hundredth page, Claude Simon’s Route des Flandres explains where it emerges from, from Simon’s writing and the 1940 defeat, but in the immediate manner of Georges’ suffocation under Corinne’s body, like in this hotel room where they had decided to meet to revive their memories of the debacle. In 1988, in El Otono del patriarca, if a senile brain can enlighten a normal brain, it is because, away from the urgencies of existence, the Conjunction keeps it occupied and works it virtually undivided. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses open with the inhabitation (in the English and Latin sense) of the bodies of Gibreel and Farishta. Although the theme is not present in Micheline Lo’s Employé, it is because her text tries to go up the neuronal conjunction from its most elementary that is always more elementary in its biochemical connections, partitions and triggering.

Hence, the triptique inachevé that ‘he’ is going to discover (rediscover) when he goes down to the hold of the Bateau Aquarium is inscribed in the literary inter-text of the entire twentieth century. The captain had painted these three panels for months or years, and the pots of paint and bunches of paintbrushes were still scattered on the floor. The first panel that ‘he’ deciphered showed a small boat leaving the vessel to draw alongside an island. On the second, he noticed – among the confusion of tropical vegetation – the moving body of the Negress, her rapt, her boarding. The third panel was incomplete. Perhaps forever, and for the reason of the very mystery it represented. ‘Ce qui était arrivé cette nuit-là lorsque le quartier-maître avait pris son poste aux étoiles car dessous le pont dans la chambre du maître des lieux les prunelles de la belle brillaient déjà ferventes pendant que l'homme s'arrachait de ses vêtements elle le zoomait de la tête aux pieds comme si les digues de la passion avaient rompu avant qu'avec leurs bras ventres cuisses et mollets ils écrivent les signes de la Création (...)’

However, there was enough for ‘his’ memorization to complete the incomplete work of the painter: ‘sur la couche la cambrure de l'homme dessinait la houle et dans ses veines coulait un lait d'extase au-dessus de lui ses seins à elle battaient le ressac ses fesses clapotaient et ...MMMHHH...OOH...AHAHHH...elle épelait sa félicité une fois que le lit tanguant grinça sans retenue ensemble ils reprirent son chant montant s'enchevêtrant et quand leur peau ne fut plus que braises l'espèce de rage galvanisant leur chair précipita les fulgurations et les débordements de leurs sens jusqu'à ce que tous deux s'amollissent laissant d'abord s'écouler le temps elle regarda les festons de lumière flammècher le torse du capitaine et sur lui une médaille où elle vit le signe Z. affublé d'un point alors s'armant d'un fin coutelas qui traînait sur la table de chevet elle effaça le point et grava posément par dessus un ‘E', puis un ‘L' et un ‘ S' et conclut par un ‘A'’.

3F. The stars, background and origin

All the Metaphors of our Universe, all these Conjunctions are overhung and initiated by that of the stars. Stars borne from their own extreme gravitation and temperature, which makes them live and die, so much so that, being born, living, and dying, we are ‘star dust’. The Caravanserai stood tall on the hill so that it could indicate the inscription of the Earth, the Air and the Fire (Ether) in relation with the Cepheid. Mallarmé was almost a contemporary of Herschel, who discovered the double stars that he fixed. The stars that he searched from his boat ruined him, and he clearly realized that ‘jamais un coup de dé n’abolira le hazard’.

And Zelsa – the Mother that became a Father – would pass down to the Son (one night on the deck of the Noces d’eau) this fundamental knowledge that has been developed (since Mallarmé) by a century of astronomy and cosmology: ‘quand Zelsa l'emmène sur le pont en prétextant la clarté absolue de la nuit sa bouche s'applique à lui parler d'étoiles doubles d'amas globulaires de comètes et de galaxies elle le laisse un instant seul face à l'immensité va chercher le télescope revient l'aider à perfectionner sa visée du Bouvier du Cygne ou des Poissons l'initie à la maîtrise de ces pratiques de survie qui permettent de ne pas se noyer l'esprit dans les abysses de l'espace et d'échapper à l'emportement des tempêtes métaphysiques en arrimant son attention aux constellations ou plutôt à leurs noms familiers (...)’.

The last glance of the Captain in his cabin aboard the Noces d’eau, naturally fixed towards Altair, and even ‘Beyond Altair’, when finally, all the comtoise clocks he had placed throughout the Noces d’eau to ward off time started chiming the hours one by one, until the last hour, until midnight. ‘Zelsa assise dans son fauteuil avec un air de gravité peint sur son visage comme empreint d'une soudaine impassibilité ses bras pendent mollement depuis ses épaules ce seraient des ailes rompues aux rémiges mates usées par les vents coriaces diaboliques de l'Atlantique et du Pacifique elles auraient enchaîné les interminables traversées comme les doigts glissent d'un grain du chapelet au suivant pour une prière sans fin sa tête a basculé doucement sur le côté et son regard semble s'être perdu au-delà d'Altaïr’. 

4. PHONOSEMIES OF THE UNIVERSE IN THE BACK

Our intention of first studying the semantic, then the syntax, and then the thematic of Luc Eranvil should not have us forget that, in all extreme literature, these aspects of the text are almost ancillary and initially governed by a phonsémie. The linguistic of the Anthropogénie defines the phonosémie as the sonority of the phonemes of a dialect as such, as Rousseau had anticipated in his Essai sur l’origine des langues, and as Jakobson somewhat missed, are not only distinctive, but significant too, in the sense that the auditory and elocutory perceptive-motor fields they trigger realize, for each dialect (French, Chinese, Arab, etc.) and for each idiolect (that of Pascal, Villon, Marguerite Duras, etc), a strictly singular destiny-party of existence (in group or individual). A literary idiosyncrasy that is often very distinct from the idiosyncrasy that its author represents in everyday life.

Like all party-destinies of existence, it stems from a singular topology, cybernetic, logico-semiotic, and presentivity (the relationship to pure presence). In the everyday language of a speaker, this phonosemical party is not thematised, but remains unnoticed because of the urgency of the referents that the language assumes in everyday life: orders to give or to execute, precise knowledge to acquire or pass down, feelings to precise. On the other hand, since every language becomes rhetorical – be it the language of a political haranguer, a religious predicator, a market barker, a captivating tale-teller – oozes and even thematises a little of much phonosémie. This thematisation is at its paroxysm in extreme literature (oral or written), where phonosemie almost takes the place of the rest; hence, the punctuation as the essence of the text in Mallarmé. Every extreme man of letters – like every artist in other areas – ends up defining a work subject that is normally constant whatever themes are broached.

Let us precise the nature of phonosemie and require that it should not be mixed up with music. Phonosemie and music both use the sound and its field effects to open mental domains, unforeseeable kingdoms. Yet, in music the sound remains foremost intensive, whereas in phonosemie, whatever the extent and the suppleness of the worlds it triggers through its field effect may be, the sound remains differential, oppositive, distinctive, i.e. phonematic.

4A. Contemporary cosmogonical phonosemies before Luc Eranvil

All the writers of the behind-one and beneath-one Universe have the common factor of having phonosemies that are no longer vector or active as those found in Stendhal’s novels, but memorizing, memorative, almost ruminating, present-absent, hence very presentive, in any case slowing, insisting as befits the Story. In some sense, we could say that they are passive, as they tend to prevent the illusion of active or successful successivities. Therefore, their slow pace has the most original primary effect. On top of the structures sought by the classic world, they trigger the rise to the surface of ultra-structures.

The term is familiar to histologists to designate these formations from before the cell that they see in their micrometric sections, these cellular organelles, whose stupefying variety, defying every geometricable structure, sends back to their basis of proteins, themselves resulting from the (re)sequences of amino acids. We could then say that, if the tale is fit to structures – who give structuralists great pleasure – the tale invites to sensitivity to ultra-structures, the true hominine unconscious. Whereby, contrary to vivacity (relatively decipherable) of the tale, the depth of the Story.

Obviously, this ‘historicity’ or ‘historisation’ occurs according to the destinies-parties of existence, the work subjects, and the idiolects of each writer. The ultra-structures conveyed by the flap of the wings of Mallarmé’s verse can be summarized in fragments of ‘prisms’. Joyce’s over-compositions reveal cultural rhizomes underlining the terracing. Claude Simon’s apnea only moves forth in its clod to grasp the grain, its weft heavy. The time of events of the Otoño del patriaca gives a ‘tiempo estancado en el interior’ to breathe, which is sensitive both in its emanations and in its suffusions. Each syllable of Micheline Lo is stunned – at the instant it is uttered – by the unconscious and unpredictable connections from which it results. And with Salman Rushdie, each action vibrates with fragments of metempsychosis and metensomatosis, in this culture fluid represented by the air that we breathe from the Bombay airport.

4B. Luc Eranvil’s phonosemie. The Oratorio

Luc Eranvil’s phonosemie follows its syntax, or the opposite. In any case, its syntax overlapping imposes a general equality of tone, not only of ‘polar’ limbs, but also of anterior and ulterior limbs that they place in overlapping. Consequently, his phonosemie stays in narrow fork of the height of the vowels and the intensities of the consonants, in order to accomplish a flux that simultaneously moves forth and comes back upon itself, in a roll close to that of the waves, and as far away as the swell. Cancelling, if not all distance, at least every ontological or epistemological separation between everything and everything. And with each line, opening an almost absolute equivalence of the possible according to resonances in all directions. Something of what reveals the Evolution of species for Stephen Jay Gould and the Evolution of spirits for the anthropogenic Historian.

We have already seen that such historicity suppressed all grammatical punctuation. However, the initiatory voyage of ‘he’ follows a route whose stages are serialized. He responds to a letter of rendezvous. Hence, he managed to maintain a minimal punctuation through the page breaks. Zelsa’s author even gave these wide breadths an order number. James Joyce and Claude Simon had already maintained a numbering I, II, and III, although devoid of intrigue. Salman Rushdie proposed a numbering of 1 to 9, and though of adjoining archetypical titles: The Angel Gibreel, Mahound, Ellowen Decowen , Ayesha, A City Visible but Unseen, Return to Jahilia, The Angel Azraeel, The Parting of the Arabia Sea, A Wonderful Lamp.

In a first while, Zelsa was written without page numbers or title, with only page breaks. In the end, it is still devoid of page numbering, except in one final chart that could not pretend at being called a table of contents, as there is no ‘content’. Yet, archetypical titles were introduced, as with Salman Rushdie: LA VOIE, LE BATEAU-AQUARIUM, LA CALE, LE TRIPTYQUE, LE CHAUDRON, LA NAISSANCE, LA METAMORPHOSE, LE REPAS, LA CONSTELLATION, LE BAIN, L'AVEU, LA COMBE, LE PENSIONNAT. LA GOELETTE, LA NUIT, LE MIRACLE, L'EQUIPAGE, L'ORCHESTRE, LA PARTITION, L'ASTROLABE, LA DERNIERE LETTRE, L'HEURE,  MEDAILLE, LE CAPITAINE. The capital letters stress the fact that these are not in fact chapters, but stances, like we say the Stances of Raphael at the Vatican, from that beautiful word that, from a very rich Indian-European root, simultaneously marks the station, the site, the state, and the stage. Without mentioning the in-sistancy or the con-sistency.

But then, it would mean that Zelsa has something of an oratorio. And it is true that, for the past century we have witnessed a return of the oratorio, which was created in the eighteenth century to express the cosmogony of WORLD 2, showing a Homo that was the intelligent co-creator of an intelligent God. Handel’s thirty-five English Oratorios and Bach’s Passion according to Saint Matthew and Saint John are almost contemporaneous. The twentieth century oratorio, in which we find the declaration of WORLD 3, is either religious – like Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assisse – or secular – like Tippett’s Child of our Time or King Priam. Regarding Zelsa, the classic and contemporary oratorio has the main characteristic that, being a story, its recitatives, arias, and choirs – however distinct – make their ensemble present everywhere. This is contrary to the Opera, where the tale opposes scenes.

This structure of oratorio is so common to the works discussed here that we could adopt a kangaroos’ leap reading (not only inside each work) - but also - from one to the other. Their intertextuality is made even more basal that Luc Eranvil and Micheline Lo had very little links with Salman Rushdie and did not read Finnigans Wake, although they fed on Ulysses. Couffon had made a first translation of the Otoño del patriarca, but was not satisfied with it. After having revisited Claude Simon’s Route des Flandres, he reworked his translation, the genius work that is now published. To open our circle let us note that Saint-John Perse – who was such an inspiration to Micheline Lo the painter – was translated into English by T. Elliot, in Italian by Ungaretti, and in German by Walter Benjamin. Zelsa shows this structure so clearly that we were able to subtitle it Roman-oratorio. We could even have said Romancero-oratorio, which would have marked its epic character even more.

The artwork of WORLD 2 aimed at contemplation, which was possible because every asset and integral part of the tHeatron, since Greece, can grasp with an embracing gaze, in the manner of the antique temple (contemplare, templum, cum). Contemplation will even prove to be the supreme beatitude for Aristotle, Thomas d’Aquin, and Spinoza. The cosmogonies of WORLD 3 – non totalizing, hence nonsuit of contemplation – make place for admiration, for the admirative astonishment of the unpredictable singular in a Universe that obtains its most remarkable formations through unexpected (re)sequentiations, whether in living forms or in the technemes and signs that form its thoughts. The sparkling of the once-never-again. Where something is engendered; something other than Eternity or even Time, this deployment of the Eternal, which Liebniz ontologically and logically wanted ‘necessary’, as he was. Our physicists begin to speak of a new physic, au delà de l’espace et du temps according to the title of Lachièze Rey. Where the capitalized Sense gives way to the Lower – although more ‘intense’ – senses, said Deleuze. The sense of the prodigious potentialities of the Becoming.

4C. A popularly shared feeling

We still need to see whether the current ‘universal’ perception is reserved to the learned. Or if, when circumstances are favourable – such as in the communion of a mass in a funeral – it does not prove latent with many. For this describes the funerals of the Captain well. Everyone had come to admire his last metamorphose, when the funerary mask of ‘Zelsa’ decomposed and became ‘Z’ once again. Is this why this procession approaching the tomb was progressively lifted by a joyful ecstasy?

Indeed, ‘tandis que le vent souffle à travers les cyprès devant eux devant lui le fils impassiblement raidi par son émotion la béance crayeuse ouvre la terre en une sorte de blessure plutôt de bouche qui avale ou absorbe les gouttes qui lui coulent le long des tempes il a du mal à assurer la descente le chanvre des cordes meurtrit se paumes au bord du lâchage serrant quand même la corde peut-être seulement pour ne pas sentir la douleur les piles de cartes marines et de photos les rouges à lèvres les mascaras les blushs et le reste accompagnent la dépouille déposée enfin dans le coffre qui l'emporte ainsi entourée sur les rives de l'au-delà ce coffre est à lui seul un cargo qu'il pilote souffrant âprement pour que son dernier trajet soit pareil à une glisse sur une mer sans grain les enfants crient comme les oiseaux de Bornéo et quand eux tous lèvent les yeux au ciel s'éblouissent en voguant sur les limbes azurés de la haute atmosphère il n'y a pour les émouvoir parmi les cris des enfants comme dialoguant avec les oiseaux du ciel si bleu ni corps flottant montant miraculeusement ni mirage d'âme vibrant en fumée blanche simplement en eux quand leur regard va de la terre au ciel et vice versa une confiance de toute beauté dans les potentialités prodigieuses de leur devenir’. 

4D. Zelsa’s phonosemie according to Zelsa

It is very rare that an extreme literary work should not contain somewhere a rather decisive expression of its work subject. It is Villon’s ‘il n’est bon bec de Paris’; Rabelais’ ‘petites paroles tout endormies et qu’il faut réveiller et réchauffer’; Pascal’s ‘sauts aux deux extrèmes’; or still, Mallarmé’s ‘coups d’aile’. Hence, Luc Eranvil probably reaped the essence of his phonosemie when he tells us how Zelsa conceived the partition and the orchestra destined at controlling meek storms.

First, let us look at the partition: ‘Le Noces d'Eaux s'était laissé recouvrir par des chiffres qui n'épargnèrent ni les rouleaux de papier de ses austères commodités ni les draps défaits tirés en travers des lits ayant perdu toute blancheur en quelques nuits d'un sommeil entrecoupé par le comptage des rêves avortés et même la propre tôle du navire avait été griffée au coutelas sous prétexte d'innombrables reports mantisses et arrondis arithmétiques depuis que le départ avait fait lâcher les amarres les chiffres et leurs colifichets du genre + - / avaient pris d'assaut le bâtiment avec cette rigueur qui ne laissait nul recoin y échapper ils brillaient dans tous les yeux et fluaient débordaient des stylos au bout de doigts continuellement en mouvement ils étaient assemblés réassemblés par des agencements algorithmiques d'une complexité échevelée et par ce processus cessaient d'être chiffres et nombres devenaient la matière essentielle d'autre chose oui celle d'une musique unique pensée et construite sur mesure pour la mer pour l'apprivoiser et la séduire les chiffres construisant ces nombres étaient période amplitude pression tension vibration propagation ils étaient fréquence fondamentale ou fréquences harmoniques cosinus sinus et séries de Fourier recréant les dimensions du son réinventant un univers qui serait sonore mais d'abord était ces échelles modales calibrées à l'infini des variations soyeuses de la mer et dont les intervalles des pentes devaient s'accorder aux différents mouvements des vagues montant ardentes en pic révolus l'instant d'après s'aplatissant croulant de mille manières ils définissaient la plénitude des notes et des silences et fixaient le moelleux des appuis et lui (...)’. Was all this not the intention of extreme literatures? To jugulate, with words or algorithms, the storms in which the Universe swallows up its status-moments in great indifference?

And let us observe the instruments concretely accomplishing the abstract intentions of the partition, and let us read, with the approval of Rabelais: ‘il vit Zelsa s'asseoir au piano partout autour d'elle un amoncellement de cordes de tubes de cônes et de caisses accroché aux structures des grues et étagé jusqu'à la timonerie enveloppait les marins dont parfois seulement la tête ou les bras ou les jambes émergeaient de cette frondaison compacte de membraphones cordophones aérophones idiophones et hémi-idiophones réunis avec la majesté sereine presque hautaine d'un corps d'orchestre symphonique montant et descendant au gré du tangage forcissant tandis que lui << « il »>> avait laissé son regard se piéger au sommet d'une lyre dans une tête de taureau en feuille d'or martelée qui semblait le dévisager de ses yeux incrustés de nacre et de lazurite Zelsa plaquait ses doigt sur le clavier ses phalanges inspirées couraient volaient enfonçant l'ivoire des touches composaient accords et arpèges d'une musique d'au-delà des comètes cendrées et d'au-delà des labyrinthes de constellations des nuits radieuses d'avant les jours de grand tohu-bohu et chacun parmi les membres de l'équipage débrida pareillement ses doigts de telle sorte que grandît admirablement organisée pour le désordre une cacophonie qui avait la vigueur d'une éruption volcanique elle fustigea l'air ambiant créa un tel brassage de vibrations contradictoires que le vent aux abords du bateau en perdit son élan ne sachant plus du tout dans quelle direction conduire sa fougue il dispersa son désarroi aux quatre points cardinaux (...)’.

Read carefully – hence with a few recollections of mathematics and physics – these two texts probably distil other considerations on Zelsa’s phonosemie, in the same way as its syntax overlapping, its inverted semantic, its sites and conjunctions, right until it becomes a novel-oratorio.

4E. The final touch of chance

However, there is a condition... that of not losing sight of the fact that the orchestra’s partition of a destiny-party of existence is not all-powerful. And that, in a truly unforeseeable storm, we can only wait for this improbable moment when: ‘pendant que ses tripes lui préparaient un dégueulis exemplaire ses abducteurs et fléchisseurs digitaux qui trompaient leur malaise en jouant avec les cartes d'un jeu de Tarot dont Marie-Ange lui avait fait cadeau lâchèrent par mégarde le paquet de lames elles s'étalèrent devant ses pieds et chacun en reconnaissant l'un le Chariot et la Roue de Fortune l'autre la Papesse et la Force l'autre encore l'Ermite et l'Impératrice et devinant les arcanes suivants tout à coup un bonheur un enthousiasme traversa l'équipage’.

Yet, the happy chance had to be embraced. And: ‘les marins virent un bon présage dans un crabe rouge et rose qui trimbalait un corps de temple flamboyant sur le pont l'arthropode tira au nom de la mer les deux premières lames de ses grosses pinces pataudes puis furent apportées vingt cannes à pêche en bois des îles teinté pourpre et topaze aux hameçons desquelles on accrocha des arcanes avec un petit appât ils dansèrent dans l'air voguèrent à la surface de l'eau et la poiscaille eut le privilège de compléter le tirage ils remontaient la prise chaque fois que la tension du fil indiquait qu'une lame était sélectionnée puis ouvraient la gueule du sélacien ou téléostéen prenaient l'arcane notaient sa position enfin quand il y eut assez de lames pour que le tirage réponde à l'embrouillamini de la situation Zelsa se retira dans le silence de sa cabine (...)’.

For it is true that chance only exists if we take every party possible from it, right until the end. Hence: ‘Zelsa se retira dans le silence de sa cabine elle étendit les cartes bariolées s'ouvrit à leurs vibrations sismiques traversa la pullulation folle des symboles chevaucha les mondes s'affermit sur les relevés du ciel boréal et du ciel austral s'assura de ses antennes psychiques et de cette manière elle se forgea une divination robuste’. In such a way that all the gathered efforts finally produced ‘une musique inédite qui apaisa vents mers et océans partout où alla le Noces d'Eaux (...)’. The work subject is accomplished.

4F. The primary phrase

Every extreme literature work is usually summarised in its first sentence, a pure gushing forth of the fundamental fantasy of its author. The ‘Carles li reis, notre empereire magne’ in the Geste de Rollant. Flaubert’s ‘C'était à Mégara / faubourg de Carthage / dans les jardins d'Harmilcar’. A la recherche’s ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’. Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dé / jamais /n'abolira’. A few words are often enough. ‘C'était à Mégara’, or simply ‘C'était’. ‘Longtemps je me suis couché’ or simply ‘Longtemps’. ‘Un coup de dé’ or simply ‘Un coup’. Finally, the incomparable ‘Who's there?’ that opens Hamlet, the tragedy of the ‘Who am I?’, ‘What are we’, ‘To be or not to be’. Often still, the last phrase concordes with the first: ‘Ainsi mourut la fille d'Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit », chez Flaubert. Ou chez Proust : « à des époques, vécues par eux si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer - dans le Temps’. 

The two first words of Zelsa are also enough. ‘Se déployant’. Because they advocate what follows, with all the cosmogony of the possibilising metaphors: ‘Se déployant comme une hallucination de vapeur le geyser lui a bâti un champignon improbable s'étalant squattant l'espace il module de gros flocons qui vibrent avec l'air s'enflent jusqu'à participer d'un temps surnaturel agencement de volutes blanches glissant les unes sur les autres c'est une éruption s'entortillant en tourbillons crémeux et son corps à lui pétrifié (....)’. And already, the syntax overlapping is there too. The words ‘surnaturel’ and ‘agencement’ are polar, belonging to the anterior and ulterior verb groups. Do these ten lines not warn us as what the last will say:  ‘une confiance de toute beauté dans les potentialités prodigieuses de leur devenir’?

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Authors’ biographies are usually secondary to the comprehension of their books, often even diverting from their true sense and scope. However, we shall note that Luc Eranvil is the son of Micheline Lo and Henri Van Lier. However, in his case, there was no family literary education. As is often the case, the free mind of the child seemed to be sufficient.

We shall also remark that Luc Eranvil’s doctorate in economy, which was most econometric – hence rather mathematic – was entitled The General Equilibrium Theory and the Quality of Working Life. An article he published in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology bore the title A Simple Sufficient Condition for the Unique Representability of a Finite Qualitative Probability by a Probability Measure. Although possibilities – these abstract forces – and potentialities – these concrete faculties – are not the same thing at all, it is not prohibited that one should read into these two titles the echoes of the metamorphoses peopling Zelsa and leading to his inner trust in all beauty in the prodigious potentialities of the Becoming.