6 minute read
Overture
A dithyramb for a manifesto
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Do you hear, through the misty morning and slumbering landscape, this distant rumour, like a far-away ocean? What could it be? It is not in the country’s customs to be woken up so early, even on a weekday. We are serious people, people of the morning; but this early, and by so queer a rooster? Ridiculous! – That said, what is this noise?
...Nothing. Just a rumble. Probably a rainstorm over the neighbouring town. Nothing to see; best to go back to sleep.
No; something is different. There is tension in the air: can’t you feel it tickling your nose when you breathe; don’t you hear, in the stable, the oxen’s agitated lowing? The birds, all at once, have ceased their chirping, as if they, too, were intrigued by this shapeless and unexpected rival. Listen: is the sound not getting nearer? It looks like it comes from just beyond the horizon – says a little girl – If I stand on the tip of my toes, perhaps I will see it.
Quiet! – says someone else – I’m trying to make out what it is. I hear... drums... and horns... and voices now: human, chanting like an ample organ wail... and it is getting louder, closer, ever closer and louder, so much so that already I must shout to hear myself, and to the horns and drums have added themselves the drone of bagpipes and the pachydermic bellow of the marine trumpets.
But who could be making this ruckus, fit for an irate god or some primordial force of nature? For whom this tide, this horse’s gallop? The crescendo grows and grows and becomes deafening: no point anymore in trying to talk. My head spins. I feel like a mouse, pounced on. It is as if the sun had been blotted out by a gargantuan bird of prey. A gong explodes. The sky has become an avalanche. Thunderclaps and drum rolls and a choir, panting like a beast a language of gods. My heartbeat blends with the entranced metronome of the tympani. Nothing but music, rhythm and pulse. Where are my legs, where is my head? My senses sharpen until they dissolve. Nothing but music, rhythm and pulse have I become. Cymbals splash and crash in a monstrous cacophony. An inhuman
For whom this tide, this horse’s gallop?
orchestra has come tumbling over the world. Oh, behemoth! oh, maelstrom of sound! And these horns, with their accents of madness, colour of lightning bolt, whose every stab illuminates the sky in a blinding flash, blaring their furious drunkenness in unison like so many bottles of champagne decapitated in one fell swoop by a great, celestial hussar... Jericho? The Apocalypse? Where are we? What is happening? From the hussar’s lips, a word, a meteor, falls onto earth...
Roux! Roux! The student magazine! A delirious procession sweeps the countryside, lays siege to the cities. A festive god presides its assaults of laughter and song, inspires its priestesses, mounted on cheetahs and leading the charge, and its infantry of mellifluent poets, whose verses flicker like carbuncles with the shades of a deep and fiery wine; precious, obscure and colourful words they weave to the praise of this
rapture by which their soul became all wings, their slightest idea, a sapid fruit. Roux! Roux! Oh, sublime syllable! A merry band of satyrs and gawkers, all of them brothers in drink, follows in the cortege’s wake; women twist themselves in voluptuousness; drunken centaurs marry, between two casks which they down, swooning maenads on the banquet tables turned wedding beds while, underneath, lubricious leprechauns in rhinestone suits peek through the wood’s hollow eye sockets; bacchantes with slanted pupils and inhuman irises dilaceratethose puny troubadours who cling to their reasonable idols; unicorns and capricorns walk alongside panthers and lions; the noble peacock, like a courtesan from Shanghai, spreads its fan, upon which hang hearts and lemons; to woo the fireflies, coquettish damsels, will-o’-the-wisps quiver on a bastard air of charleston. Roux! Roux! One ought to invent the word ‘Rouxbelaisian’! But why be content with only Rabelais, when one is also fit
to invoke Aristophanes and his incendiary comedies, or Aeschylus, father of tragedy and master of ithyphallic satyr plays? The joyful crowd drags us along, oh whirlwind! back to the Athens of old, where, one night, on shoddy wooden planks, beneath a naked Acropolis, burst out a cosmic laughter, a laughter which threatened to swallow the whole universe.
Roux! Roux! Babylonian wedding! Bacchanal! Ship of fools! Vaudeville and Pandemonium! Zaporozhian Cossacks writing to the sultan of Constantinople! Orgiastic Eleusis where hierophants and mystagogues pour suave and calamitous prophecies in acousmaticians’ ears! Gather around, people, wherever you roam! Make this magazine the lever of Archimedes by which to heave this campus from its moribund axis. Ye dead, over yonder, wake up and join the fanfare! Don’t you know that all dances are featured here, from the makelote to the macabre?
And, whether organ or fife, all instruments are welcome in this gloriously shambolic symphony in which there are no wrong notes, for it contains every note! Make the stones agile, for, tonight, each one of you is Amphion! Not in order to raise the stern ramparts of seven-gated Thebes, but to erect, as a beacon for all tastes and ideas, a towering city with a hundred gates and a million windows, whose destiny shall be, like Babel, to be a hundred times rebuilt, a hundred times destroyed!
Roux! Roux! This name, fulgurant like a plane without landing gear, shall resound through the centuries as one of the great killer cries: Eleleleu! Eleleleu! Saint Georges! Banzai! Geronimo! Yee-haw! Hallali! Olé! Kiai! Hurrah! Viva! Tally-ho! Montjoie! Saint Denis! Hallelujah! Hosanna! Hosanna! Roux! ROUX! ROUX!...
Reader, we kiss thee thousandfold.
by Valère Gaube
