„We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.”
Ray Bradbury, „Introduction,”
William Butcher, ed.,
Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self,
Macmillan, 1990, p. xiii
 
„. . . . A poem
 should not mean,
 But be.”
Archibald MacLeish,
“Ars Poetica,” Poetry,
June, 1926, pp. 126-7
 
„You are on the edge of understanding.
But even if there is a mistranslation,
you are actively making meaning.”
                                                                        Artist William Kentridge,
interviewed by Peter Aspden,
The Financial Times, October 21, 2022.

All little known literatures, at some point, single out a writer meant for show;  one that encapsulates their nation’s character and soul, one earnestly expected to draw universal admiration and acceptance. National philologies, however, tend to steep their exemplar in such morasses of local knowledge they defeat non-nationals’ recognition. Romania’s Urmuz—Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău’s pen name, 1883-1923, which also stands for his oeuvre of little more than forty pages grand total—is the fortunate exception in having attracted, rather early, several translators and not a few non-Romanian admirers.¹

Urmuz’ barest biographical essentials are as follows: He was the first of seven siblings born in 1883 to the physician Dimitrie Ionescu-Buzău and pianist Eliza Ionescu-Buzău nee Pașcani. Most accounts of Urmuz’ childhood and youth stress his love of punning, public and private practical jokes, love of classical music concerts and art shows. Urmuz composed music—now lost—and attended Titus Maiorescu’s lectures on philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He used a handgun to commit suicide in a small Bucharest park in 1923.

Urmuz’s importance to world literature became apparent when Eugène Ionesco, at the height of his career, and away from his native Romania, named Urmuz, together with Ion Luca Caragiale, as his chief models and paragons. Beyond merely comparing Urmuz with the older European classics and with himself, Ionesco implied that Urmuz should be considered the precursor of all the known variants of surrealism. In one move Ionesco both turned a multitude of more probing questions away from himself and towards a writer who was about as difficult to situate as he was.² There could be, perhaps, no better way of assaying Urmuz’ existential and intellectual coordinates than starting with his native country before and after WWI.

What must it have been like for a brilliant central European man of the upper middle class during the all too short four decades of his life to be raised and educated in turn-of-the-century Romania? Romania between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, resembled a good number of other European countries.³ It had a royal court, its own Christian Orthodox autocephalous church, horse race tracks, Freemasons’ lodges, a national system of education, a robust agriculture sector, large resources in oil and gold besides busy harbors on the Danube and the Black Sea.

Audiovisual impressions of those times might cover religious icon painting that was turning from late Byzantine to the international Nazarene style. Centuries old Cyrillic script was being replaced by its Roman counterpart in the press. Art Nouveau and Art Deco eclecticism traipsed in every city. Radios, libraries, record players, cameras, and movie theaters heralded a restive middle class. The local press luxuriated on coup d’états, tyrants’ and revolutionaries’ rise and fall; advances in chemical weaponry and child prodigy performances. Urban legends multiplied with each paper’s „Extra, extra” and so did stories on parapsychology and social soirées. Home table talk was often about pregnant maids, casinos and spas native and foreign. Paris and Vienna were popular hunting grounds after affordable piano teachers and young French nannies.

And although around 1900 there were numerous minorities of German, Hungarian, Yiddish and Greek speakers in the upper hundreds of thousands inside Romania’s borders moderately educated Romanians preferred French as their second language. This choice implied interest in all developments geopolitical, scientific, and technological. French supplied cheap cosmopolitan escapism to readers of Pierre Loti and vicarious sex to readers of Pierre Louÿs. French patterns of political expression were picked up by every ideological direction with debatable consequences to put it mildly. A French speaking romanian could be assumed to be able to handle key gossip, mass persuasion, and unabashed nationalism.⁴

Not too deep below the linguistic ferment there lay the appreciation of polymathy that breathed, sang and danced to the tunes of „progress.” And this was not just modern Romania rising to its role on the map. The pan-European educational system of grands lycées, was turned out myriads of polyglot graduates trained to appreciate—if they aimed to pursue tracks to higher institutions—the contributions of all the humanities that pointed towards future, and futurist, states of being unthinkable to their parents’ generation of the late eighteen eighties.

*

Chief among the lists of unimaginables was the genre of science fiction that oscillated, in terms of subject matter, between utopias and cosmologies. In the long centuries  from Lucian’s to Rabelais’ readers in the eastern sector of middle Europecould and did have access to the dozens of 19th century Russian language fantasy writers who anticipated the speculations of E. A. Abbot’s Flatland, 1884, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (a time-travel novel, 1888), H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, 1895, and Gaston de Pawlowski’s Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, (Journey to the  Land of the Fourth Dimension, 1911).⁵  The enormous output of fantastic writing did not roll out mere improbable scenarios to dampen the ubiquitous realisms and naturalisms of post 1848 Europe. They were the literary counterpart to the new technologies that were emerging faster than they could be made sense of. Digesting the information about post-Newtonian breakthroughs, via various periodicals, journaux des savants, and public reading rooms was the most direct  way of leading educated Romanians to greet the emerging accomplishments of mankind with large doses of optimism.⁶

Urmuz’ creative floruit overlapped with the hundreds of thousands who were, singly, reading Henri Bergson on hypnosis (1886), laughter (Le rire, 1900) or cognitive evolution (Élan vital, 1907), and Sigmund Freud for dreams, jokes and the unconscious (Die Traumdeutung, 1899, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905). Collectively, on the other hand, Georges Mélies’ masterpieces of special effects editing techniques—e.g., Le voyage dans la lune, 1902; Le Voyage à travers l’impossible, 1904—was viewed by millions in thousands of darkened daydreaming projection rooms.

The wholesale adoption of cinema as unintended formative entertainment was an unforeseen development around the time of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s explosive „Manifeste du Futurisme” („Futurist manifesto,” Le Figaro,” 20 February, 1909).⁷ It incited the overturning of all traditional norms and forms as hollow, complacent and moribund. The Manifesto’s rant exhorted its readers to contemplate „danger,” „war,” „anarchy,” and „demolition.” It promoted an apparent anti-aesthetic and an anti-literary stance. It raged at standardized, conventional syntax and diction. It aimed at liberating usage („parole in libertà, „words in freedom) and, in Marinetti’s graphic sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1912-1914, concerning the Bulgarian–Turkish battle of Adrianople) Marinetti used the liberated words for all to observe on the printed page.

Urmuz’ interest in the disparate domains of music and aviation, the modernist emblem of velocity itself, is not surprising. His short life overlapped with two seminal European movements at the end of the nineteenth and two of the first decades of the twentieth. Urmuz identified neither with French Symbolism and Futurism, nor with Dada and Surrealism to which Romania had contributed so richly. The Freud, Bergson, Marinetti, and Mélies mix attracted followers from all across the range of movements, Romanian, French, Italian, German, that Urmuz was familiar with. In many ways Urmuz may have been the synthesizing alternative to all four of them.

The reception in his own country was slow to grow beyond the immediate circle of his friends and admirers.It was close to five years following his suicide that Tudor Arghezi, his first editor and mentor, remembered that Urmuz both desired and feared publication. Four times in the course of one day he rejected the „Urmuz” sobriquet that Arghezi suggested and four times he welcomed it back.⁸ A year later Stephane Roll, an important member in the Romanian avant-garde, stated that Urmuz would have been among the very best performers at the Cabaret Voltaire and that his style made him think of Valéry Larbaud and Marinetti. Roll must have been among the first readers of Urmuz who thought of calling him „a Romanian Jarry.”⁹

Precious few studies seem to have made contextual reference to Urmuz’s having lived and survived the murderous interlude of the 1914-1918 WWI years in central and eastern Europe with any attention to his writing in general. Sașa Pana’s periodical unu repeatedly hosted articles in appreciation of Urmuz during 1929 and 1930. Various other publications also featured book reviews of the 1930 Sașa Pană edition of Urmuz’ basic gathering. The literary historian George Călinescu wrote a rather sedate review notice of the unu edition in the year of its appearance.¹⁰ Several years later Ion Biberi, an avant-garde watcher and sympathizer, began expanding on the similarities between Urmuz and Kafka on one hand and Urmuz and Christian Morgenstern on the other.¹¹ Two years later, Călinescu picked up Urmuz again mostly to discuss the significant parallels between Urmuz and earlier European fiction in general and, more specifically, to Urmuz’ relation to the nonsense tradition exemplified by Charles Cros (of „Hareng saur,” Smoked herring).¹² Călinescu’s distinguished colleague Tudor Vianu, in turn, reminisced of being struck, reading him in 1943, by the similarities between Urmuz and Lewis Carroll’s poetry and prose.¹³

Among more recent Romanian specialists mention ought to be made of Nicolae Balota’s study Urmuz, 1970. Gauging the archetypal content of tales like „Faust,” „Odysseus,” „fertility,” and „temptation” Balota underscored Urmuz’ apocalypticism in combination with the Pascalian image of humanity’s entrapment between the two very large and very small „infinities,” both of them clearly alluded to in Urmuz. Balota’ idiosyncratically modernist and erotic Urmuz would be a tupe that his readers could not fail to identify within seconds.

By way of inventory,¹⁴ some of the most striking references in Urmuz’ tales as a whole occur first in the opening four-chapter novelette „The Funnel and Stamate.” The grossly anti-literary burying of a library „eternally wrapped in darkness under wet bed sheets” is a Marinettist jab at Joris-Karl Huysmans’ sumptuously color-coded book collection and bindings in his À Rebours (Contrariwise, 1884). Other items brought up are the pretentious Kantianism of the „thing in itself,” the pan-European love of Kitsch, the orientalist password „Nirvana,” and the abiding interest in a non-geocentric universe under the name of the Auto-Kosmos. „Astonishing speeds combining with a concluding note of vengeful punishment occur also in the story of „Ismail and Turnavitu.” The latter, however, also stresses the concept of iuțenie (rapid acceleration), a matter that is taken up again in the ending of „Puțină Metafizică și Astronomie” (A Little Metaphysics and Astronomy). Emil Gayk piles up more bizarre behaviors and actions à la „The Funnel and Stamate” and so does „Plecarea în Străinătate” (Going Abroad) with its scenes of jealousy and punishment in the form of sadistic bondage. „Cotadi and Dragomir” climaxes in death and posthumous pouring of oil libations. „Algazy and Grummer” is unusual in alluding to the swallowing and subsequent vomiting of literature which anticipates by several decades the French speaking American linguist Louis Wolfson’s idea of speech as vomiting.¹⁵ The two individuals in „Algazy and Grummer” play an important role in their seeding the „literature of the future.” The two devour each other and are sternly enjoined to work on becoming worthier of their names than they were.¹⁶ The story „După Furtună” (After the Storm) accordingly, has an unnamed protagonist. Its only character is just a „he” who is enamored of a hen.¹⁷ „Fuchsiada” (The Fuchsiad) on the other hand, is a four chapter novelette like „The Funnel and Stamate,” subtitled „Poem eroico-erotic și muzical, în proză” (A musical heroic and erotic Poem in prose). The „Fuchsiad” first makes use of the Rabelaisian ear as the fitting birth canal for the protagonist whose mother had no ear for music.¹⁸ The „Fuchsiad” drowns in music jargon: The title character metamorphoses into a perfect chord, while Venus¹⁹ is seduced to the tune of „cântece și flori” (songs and flowers), the Romanian equivalent of Domenico Cimarosa’s „Ci sposeremo tra fiori e canti” (We shall be married amidst flowers and songs), from the humorous and chaotic-‘til-the-last aria of the Maestro di Capella (The Choir Director). Fuchs’ activism serves the cause of a better future for humanity and the piano! The closing rounding off of the collection under the title „Puțină Metafizică și Astronomie” (A Little Metaphysics and Astronomy) takes the reader back to the initial notes on the Auto-Kosmos of „The Funnel and Stamate.;” with a new twist to it to be sure. The new element refers to a future state in which the philosophers’ search for „the singular cause” is challenged. The one and only initial cause is a predictable generator of endless multiples of itself. It is generator of additional generators of ever greater multitudes of people and objects  and of ever faster „iuțeli” (speed accelerations) and „suferințe” (sufferings) all of which will obligatorily have to make amends for having existed! An eschatological topos first  hinted at by the Pre-socratic philosopher Anaximander²⁰  under the heading of the law of universal retribution (τίσεις).

Urmuz’ exquisite command of the mellifluous Romanian idiom everywhere is dramatically at odds with the itemized banal objects, individuals and situations being foregrounded. The long descriptive shots alternating with short bursts of heterogeneous details bring to mind the dissociative musings of Dostoevsky’s „Notes from the Underground” (1864). Urmuz’ exposition unfolds along two axes that are similar to Dostoevsky’s. One of these is of an evenly lit set of dioramas passing before the reader’s eyes in discreet horizontal fields showing both animate and inanimate subjects in frenzied performances of obsessive commitments. The second of which is a vertical and supra-personal point of view of evolution, cosmological genesis and eventual annihilation.

*

Paradoxography is as old as the human brain’s ability to articulate what cannot be there. Homer itemizes Hephaistos’ self-propelling furniture and mechanical handmaidens (The Iliad, bk.18); Herodotus’ fantastic creatures live at the ends of the earth. Plato theorizes the infuriating mismatch between persons and their given names (Cratylus). Eratosthenes mythologizes the transfer of earthly beings to the heavens in his Catasterismi (The [Forming of] constellations). Ovid’s myriad transformations in his Metamorphoses come close to including even nothing metamorphosing into nothing! Lucian, in his Alethes istorie (True story) visualizes space travel, war, chatting among the dead, among marine creatures, and among prostitutes. Apuleius’ Asinus aureus (Golden ass) portrays an improbably psychotic and punitive Venus in the midst of partnerships and attachments of every kind. Extensions of Plutarch’s „Περί τοῦ προσώπου τοῦ ἐμφαινομένου τῷ κύκλῷ τῆς Σελήνης” (On the face which appears on the orb of the moon)provide materialfor Carlo Goldoni’s Il mondo della luna, and for Baltassare Galuppi’s operatic adaptations of 1750, Pedro Avondano’s of 1765, and Joseph Haydn’s of 1777.

The analogies between the Urmuz stories and the rest of the tradition of non-sense could be quite lengthy. Apart from the towering figure of the Romanian humanist Dimitrie Cantemir’s Istoria ieroglifica (Hieroglyphic history, 1704, publ. 1883),²¹ the eighteenth century was rich in Urmuzian predecessors, from Voltaire’s Zadig, and Crébillon’s Le Sopha, to Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and Blake’s Island in the Moon. The writer who evokes both Urmuz and Cantemir in his melding of the improbable with the impossible is Horace Walpole. In the „Preface” to his Hieroglyphic Tales (1785) he  contemplates an edition of „a hundred thousand copies” if his apartment could house them. He printed just six, with six tales each.²²

The nineteenth century had itself opened with conflations of the human and the mechanical in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe and ended with the topographical and technological fictions visualized by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Wells’ ironic, yet realistic cosmologies (from his earliest Time Machine, 1895, to Tono Bungay, 1909) would definitely resonate with Urmuz’ narratives. So would a clutch of other writers of the same period chief among whom Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Speed indeed, and the spread of Kitsch fed directly into Urmuz’ times of bottomless curiosity. Rapid steam engines were churning wood into affordable pulp for the torrents of leaflets, posters, cartoons and dioramas the age swam in.

*

Since the late rococo indulgent excess of ornamentation in and on everything the diableries and the bizarreries had a simple common element at their core: Well meaning—if macabre—amusement. Christian Morgenstern’s earliest „Gallow Songs” (Galgenlieder) came out in 1905. His personae—and they are of widely dissimilar kinds—resemble Urmuz’ by virtue of their insecurities and strange sense of mission. Theirs is a network of unrelated elements. One only need compare Urmuz’ „Emil Gayk’s” diplomatic letter, dry tack, and machine gun, and Christian Morgenstern’s „Die Fromme Riese” (The Pious Giant: wigs, plates, beards etc.); or Urmuz’ persona serving as somebody’s else’s salami („Ismail and Turnavitu;” or, once again, Cantemir’s hallucinatory „Despre Inorog” (About the Unicorn, in his Istoria ieroglifică) with Morgenstern’s „Unicorn” as a „bar and grill” (‘Wirtshaus‘ in the original²³).

Humdrum household objects, ordinary family activity, blissful transmogrifications combining with doggerel in „Die Mausefalle,” (The Mousetrap). „Die Korfsche Uhr,” (Korf’s clock) and „Palmströms Uhr,” (Palmstrom’s clock) deploy Urmuz’ type of scurrying in time and infinity. One might add the hybrid creations that are part-human, part-machine (as in „Cotadi and Dragomir’s” piano lid; „Algazy and Grummer’s” barbed wire, etc). Claustrophobic environments in Urmuz have a close analogue in the invention of „Die Zimmerluft” (Indoor air, i.e., Urmuz’ opening „well–aired apartment”) that is also issued an alibi (!) lead directly to such Urmuzian „philosophical” staples as ‘der Ding an sich‘(the thing in itself in „The Funnel and Stamate”).

These are framed precisely in Morgenstern’s „Theater” in which four walls contain and enclose „reality” itself („Auf vier Bühnen tief und breit / schaust du basse Wirklichkeit„). The mix of a homey setting with a larger, superhuman extension brings to mind Morgenstern’s „Alpinismus” (Alpinism); it parallels the orbit-like characters’ trajectories in Urmuz. „Die Zwei Parallelen” (The two parallels) projects souls and family into infinity, as in Urmuz. The „Funnels,” both Urmuz’ and Morgenstern’s, finally, have this feature in common: A device that allows the local and the cosmic to communicate perchance and converge with each other.

Upon closer examination Urmuz’ dates of composition echo Alfred Jarry’s Les gestes et les opinions du Docteur Faustroll (The feats and opinions of doctor Faustroll, 1911). These prose „gestes” describe Dr. Faustroll and his disciples’ rabelaisian adventures „From Paris to Paris.” They inclue visits to islands of fantastic chicken shit scratching birds, Lace islands, a Shapeless island, a Forest of Love and, finally, the Island of Ptyx, whose name pays homage to Mallarmé’s virtuoso rhymes in –x. Jarry mentions Dr. Faustroll among the mourners at Mallarmé’s funeral. The „Island Ptyx,” incidentally, „is made of a single block of priceless stone by the same name that had been seen nowhere else except on the island.” The straight-forward use of tautology is reminiscent of both Walpole’s „hieroglyphic” tales, of Cantemir’s Istoria ieroglifica, and of Urmuz.

*

Uncannily, Cantemir the ethnomusicologist—having penned at least six compositions of his own and collected hundreds of Turkish compositions during his sojourn in Constantinople—prefigures yet another peculiar facet of Urmuz’ background that coincides with Jules Verne’s life and work.   

To millions, Verne was the author who communicated the primal conviction that the era of Renaissance explorations was not over. The maps in some of his books vaguely coincided with those of the French colonies. Other books of his veered off into fantasy. To his Romanian devotees, however, one of his semi-realistic novels was so explicitly grounded on their country’s particular territory it seemed to have been heaven-sent by registered mail to all Romanians everywhere. Le château des Carpathes (The castle in the Carpathians, 1893) touched, through its very title, the heartstrings of Romanian identity. The book struck gold in sales, but it also baffled by its contents. Neither the characters’ nor the place names sounded quite Romanian. The part of the savant inventor who also had a penchant for classical music was a rewarding side of the book. Verne’s own life and style were reflected in the protagonist’s inventions. The illusion of a singing diva’s presence on demand, „Stilla,” was so convincing her description came close to foreshadowing a hologram.²⁴

Verne and Urmuz’ penchants for „strange stories” appear to contain an additional facet in common: Urmuz’ life-long immersion in music paralleling Verne’s long friendship and collaborations for the comical theater with the composer Aristide Hignard (1822–1898). Bridge-like, Urmuz’ admiration of his fellow countryman Constantin Brancusi’s innovative sculpture points to a range of issues regarding more general unconventional tendencies in the arts of his times.²⁵ It may all have started with Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829), to be picked up by Picasso’s scores of preparatory drafts for his 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and be driven home by Brancusi’s friend Eric Satie whose seriocomic song titles alone would keep the world’s avant gardes in permanent shock and wonder.²⁶

*

Raymond Roussel’s patently anti-Vernesque Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa, 1910, ch. V), is particularly relevant to Urmuz’ „Fuchsiad.”  Like Jarry and Urmuz, Roussel puns incessantly and routes his personae in, and to, perfect „loco-motion” („from point A to point A”). The force of Roussel’s imagery—perhaps we ought to be discoursing of his entire world-view—is nowhere better illustrated than in Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre.²⁷ More important even than Guillaume Apollinaire’s  introduction of Marcel Duchamp in his Les Peintres cubistes, 1912, is a note among Duchamp’s papers, and in his handwriting, literally citing „Alfred Jarry. . . Faustroll Bk 1, ch. VI.”

If we paused momentarily at the vision of  the „infinite and useless Kosmos” in Urmuz’ own words—see Duchamp’s No. 3, above—we may perceive a persisting play element behind improbabilities that even Luigi Pirandello could not resist. Pirandello branded Copernicus „a humorist” in his 1908 essay Umorismo because the astronomer’s telescope could both bring remote celestial phenomena closer to him and also shrink them—if the telescope was held in reverse—down to scales of smaller importance than himself.

The twenty years that intervened between Urmuz’ death and his country’s 1944 regime change saw a re-definition of the perspectives under which an individual’s life would be perceived. Romania’s post-1944 dystopia decreed that Romanian men and women of letters could not travel, write or think without being censored, or avoid being sentenced to hard labor when fallen in disfavor. Urmuz’ slim corpus progressively morphed into a semi-conscious password among Romania’s writers under statist tyranny. The painful new Romanian disorderliness couldn’t be better epitomized than in Urmuz’ jingle on the „Chroniclers” (Cronicari) a dark, polyethnic and polyglot—Greek, Turkish, French, English, Russian, Italian, German/Yiddish—bable in the short meters and spirit of the Romanian folklorist Anton Pann (1790-1854).28  Urmuz sounded like an example out of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 Fahrenheit 451. There were Romanian souls who kept fighting the good fight of their creative tradition and kept encouraging themselves by whispering the revered names of Eliade, Ionesco, Barbu, Blaga and Urmuz.   

In the learned tradition, behind this formidable foursome, the flamboyant neo-romantic Alexandru Macedonski (1854-1920) may have easily supplied Urmuz a complete set of paradigms to use and elaborate on. Macedonski’s two stories „Între cotețe,” (Among chicken coops, 1888), and „Oceania—Pacific—dreadnought,” (1911-13), besides anticipating George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-four (published in 1949) by several decades, are of special relevance to Urmuz. „Oceania—Pacific—dreadnought” is science fiction that foretells its realization in 1952. It could serve as a dystopian counterpart to Urmuz’ hyperbolic „Fuchsiad.”

 Prefiguring Urmuz’ obsessive chicken imagery in his „După Furtună” (After the storm) Macedonski’s „Între cotețe” (Among chicken coops), initially describes a child that builds a house-size anthill for real ants and then creates an oversize chicken farm which he can barely keep going. His identification with the chickens is so extreme he dreams he is changed into a rooster. The birds of the overcrowded farm eventually turn on him and savage him. It is the kind of sparagmos Pentheus undergoes in Euripides’ Bacchae and Ovid’s Orpheus in the hands of the maenads in the Metamorphoses. Macedonski alone may not have led necessarily to the emergence of the Arghezi and Urmuz collaboration. It is more than certain, however, that after Urmuz Macedonski’s nightmares acquire a rich symbolic complexity that they could not have had without him.

*

The notoriously „long” European 19^th century opens with a toy. It is a wooden object consisting of two cones joined at their tips which, with the help of a piece of string and two sticks attached to its ends, can do spectacular somersaults in the air, in a child’s playroom or a circus. Why was this toy called a Diaboló? Because the slightest tug of the string that rolled under the narrow point where the two cones met generated such strong rotation of the Diaboló it resembled the magician’s miracle. The Diabolus after which the toy was named was often invoked in descriptions of the way with which Nicolo Paganini had been playing impossible chords on the violin. Lay audiences—clergy included—believed he  had to have diabolical assistance. The Devil was attributed similarly impressive forms of action in the diorama sagas in F. B. Lamiche’s and A. Block’s popular Diableries (1875, and through 1900) that contained 70 photographic 3D tableaus covering everything from a cosmogony, to the Devil’s education, his castle, library, marriage, odalisques, photograph collections, stock exchange, lottery, meetings with Orpheus, journalists and the Sun, on the earth and in his underworld.²⁹ By the late decades of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Urmuz’ years of coming of age, the devil’s Dark Satanic Majesty occupied center stage in Gounod’s Faust as Mephistopheles (1901), and as Mefistofele in Arrigo Boito’s opera by the same name (1908), the legendary Feodor Chaliapin impersonating both characters in his world tours.³⁰

 As Europe was teeming with transcendentalists of every stripe the mainstream of free thinkers typically flocked around theosophy. All through the turn of the century, and starting with Hilda af Klint (1906), Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich—a Kosmist or Cosmist—Pietr Mondrian, František Kupka, Robert Delauney, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, to mention but a few, were avant garde artists who had invested in and learned from theosophy. In the field of music the consummate craftsman, composer, and multimedia performer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), was a halfway atonal  musician known for his „Black Mass” and massive dissonant chords.³¹ He insisted on matching segments of his compositions to color projections probably suggested by the 1905 book Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. These two were amοng the first to make specific correlations of the visual spectrum to human states of mind and to non-human artifacts in their use, such as concert halls in the process of radiating different auras while hosting performances of different styles of the musical canon.

Death—no small thanks to theosophy—began playing a very minor role in human affairs, the family, and world history. He was mocked more than he was feared as the supreme juggler. He was exorcised out of the theater of the imagination and the universe by the new player Urmuz calls the Auto-Kosmos in his „Pâlnia și Stamate: Roman în Patru Părți” (The funnel and Stamate: A novel in four parts). With two or three exceptions Death is deafeningly absent from Urmuz’ 8000 or so wordcount.

There are other forms of absence in Urmuz. E. g., in his smart use of ellipses.³² What facts or details are they ellipsing or eclipsing? What are they asking the reader to infer or project? Perhaps nothing besides their randomness. Could the dots be little more than a vague gesture of indistinct eventuality, like Urmuz’ smooth diction that seldom changes as it drifts from from cameo to novel, and from overdetermined structure to rambling and technical prediction?

Could the three dots at the end of unfinished phrases be the markers of all  dissociative prose or any batch of atonal music a national literature could conceive in totalitarian times? Urmuz’ expositions—legato alternating with staccato—might then compare most favorably with V. Tatlin’s unrealized Tower (1920), and K. Schwitters’ bombed out Merzbau (1923-37).

After Macedonski, Urmuz and Orwell there is little room for complacent littérateurs in lits et ratures (Beds and erasures) as Francis Picabia had once said in a 1922 sardonic sketch. Urmuz, at Picabia’s opposite pole, concludes his „Puțină Metafizică și Astronomie” (A little metaphysics and astronomy) on the manic speeds of modernism „at their own price,” a text that needs to be read to be believed:

The Romanian original first:

„La început – ziseră toţi comesenii laolaltă – nu este adevărat că: Cuvântul a fost la Dumnezeu şi că D-zeu a fost cuvântul  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

„Şi care e rostul să ţii morţiş să descoperi vreo cauză, şi că numai una singură şi cea dintâi, când toate cauzele, din nenorocire, sunt şi efecte şi dau din ele efecte îndrăcit de multiple şi de încâlcite.

„Deci la ce bun să vrei numai o singură cauză, o forţă iniţială care vrem (trebuie) să fie şi generatoare, când ea însăşi ţine cu încăpăţânare să dea din ea numai multiplicitate; are setea mulțimilor, a încâlcelei şi contradicţiei; îi trebuie multe milioane de oameni, de muşte, de bureţi, de jivine, de astre, şi aceasta încă cu preţul suferinţelor lor. Îi trebuie şi „peştele-cufăr”, şi peştele-fierăstrău” şi are setea numărului, a distanţelor şi iuțelilor mari, fără rost şi necesitate. . .”

In my paraphrase:

„In the beginning – the diners said in unison – it’s not true that the Word was with God and that G-d was the word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  „

So then, what is the benefit of dying to discover some single cause, and the first one at that, when all causes, alas, are effects too and produce, from themselves, devilishly multiple and complex new effects.

„Why, therefore, wish for a unique cause alone, an initial force we all wish (must) should be also a generating one, when the cause itself obstinately insists on giving only multiplicity from itself; it thirsts for masses, confusion and contradiction; it has to have millions of people, flies, mushrooms, animals, stars, all these together with the price of their suffering too. It has to have the trunkfish as well as the sawfish, and thirsts for numbers, distances, great speeds, with no purpose or need.”      

This last piece in the Urmuz cycle, coming right before the „Chroniclers” jingle, begins with an unqualified rejection of the beginning of the Gospel of John (1:1) by a group of free-thinking comeseni (table fellows). Unlike traditional theologians, who assume God as the principal cause of all causes—and the maddening bewilderment and ever faster rates of acceleration proceeding from this despised First and Only Cause—the symposiasts are modern metaphysicians who propose that in the beginning there was only the deaf and dumb alphabet, not God’s creative speech act.  

*

The idea of proliferations and cosmic „iuțeli” (speeds; iuțeală in the plural), Urmuz’ table theorists evoke an ancient cosmological concept that extants at some point in time, including their iuțeli to exist will be required to make amends—τίσεις, retributions—for having existed. Right there, the high point of Urmuz’ existential point comes into view. It is a triple mirroring of insanely speeding personages who reflect the collective speeding of progress which reflects the universe’s speeding self proliferation under the guise of some philosophers’ vain pursuit of the one and only causa causans.

Only after sundry objects, people, forms,  and space-time conditions have been reeled out as in a kaleidoscope, the judgment will be for them to suffer for having existed.

There could be a demur to this. Given the context of Urmuz’ personal love of music, and Stamate’s peeking into the gratuitous Auto-Kosmos, the mere mention of  Romania’s world famous composer George Enescu’s „Symphony No. 3” in the „Fuchsiad” just might  possibly permit a tangent to Plato’s music of the spheres to peek through, wouldn’t it?³³

The thought shouldn’t divert the reader from the truly dark core roiling at the center of Urmuz’ lively prose. The „Fuchsiad” of music may have led, all too lightly, to the idea that there is a „lot of goodness out there” in nature and in talented people. But it is the discussants in the „Little Metaphysics and Astronomy” who will voice Urmuz’ last word. They leave the impression that the main body of the stories up to their appearance in print may have amounted to little more than a carousel of vanities; experiential shards with scarcely any intimations of a time of reckoning or recurrent anguish for having existed. And their having existed in the blurry belt of the tableaus between „Ismail and Turnavitu” and the „Fuchsiad,” no matter how intense or well described, there was no exculpatory value to exempt them from Anaximander’s sweeping law of final annihilation.³⁴ 

---

*   A large portion of the bio-bibliographical material herein was assembled with non-Romanian readers in mind. A much shorter version of the research appeared under URMUZ, Bucharest, Cartea Românească, Micromegas series, 2001, 156 pages. The edition consisted of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău’s Romanian text, pp. 5-41; Mariana Ștefănescu’s translation of the English „Afterword” into Romanian, pp. 43-52; Stavros Deligiorgis’ translation of the original Urmuz into English, pp. 53-100; and Constantin Frosin’s translation both of Urmuz’ Romanian original and Deligiorgis’ „Afterword” into French, pp. 101-153.

1. Leopold Kosch, Ilarie Voronca, Claude Sernet, Eugen Ionescu and Miron Grindea are listed in Sașa Pana, Urmuz, 1970, pp. 67-83. Not many have emerged since. For a critical survey of local or indigenous knowledge see Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Basic Books, 1984.

2, Maurice Nadeau, dir., Les lettres nouvelles, XIII, January-February, 1965; the sentiment is repeated in Eugène Ionesco, „Présentation de Urmuz” (Presenting Urmuz), Stanford  French  Review,  III,  3, Winter 1979; the two articles are based on a single communication dating from the late nineteen-forties.

3. Eloquent generalizations concerning the onset of technological modernism on a global scale to be found in Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams (1907/1918), esp. ch. 25, „The Dynamo and the Virgin, 1900.” Adams proposes two, reductive anti-symmetries: AD 1900 America had not experienced the „Virgin” exactly as „Paris” had never truly experienced the force of the „dynamo.”

4. There were, however, vociferous reactions to modish Francophilia. To the ears of the German-trained educational visionary Titus Maiorescu bonjourisme was an undesirable affectation. He failed to rein it in. His spectacular success, on the other hand, was in establishing J. F. Herbart’s model of the „classical gymnasium” secondary schooling and its goals of encyclopedic coverage in the arts and science for the whole country.

5. Discussions among visual artists regarding the four dimensions were begun in earnes by Esprit Jouffret’s 1903 Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (An elementary treatise of fourth-dimensional geometry). The book was consequential to the entire current of pictorial modernism, starting with Picasso. It was given to him by the mathematician Maurice Princet.

6. Georges Sorel’s Illusions du progrès (1908) might have easily have detected in every European’s equal attraction to the imaginary as symptomatic of a repressed scepticism regarding science-driven „progress.” William Blake was absolutely damning of the force of industrialization in his country. He spoke of „dark satanic mills” in his „Jerusalem” (1804).

7. F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto del futurismo (Le manifeste de futurisme, Le Figaro, February 20, 1909; translations of it were published in Romanian newspapers within two years of its appearance in France. There are numerous facets of Urmuz’ fiction that evoke Marinetti’s anti-literature targets. Marinetti’s anti-traditionalism definitely touched and offended his Catholic audiences in Italy and France. „Progress” as anti-traditionalism in Europe always contained the implicit agenda of reducing Christianity to fatalist folklore.

            A generous survey in English of the Romanian background awaiting Marinetti’s manifesto see Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930, Cornell U. Press, 2000; and „Romanian Windows Toward the West: New Forms and the Poetry of True Life,” in East Central Europe, 2013, pp. 1157-1183; esp., 1158, n. 4, on Marinetti’s early appearance in the Craiova biweekly cultural journal Democrația, February 20, 1909. Urmuz receives short shrift in this article as „Kafka-like” on p. 1178, n. 74.

            The French scholarly paradigms acknowledged in Adrian Marino’s Antiliteratură (Antiliterature, 1972) appeal to readerships firmly anchored in the professed rationalism of the Enlightenment.

8. Bilete de papagal, I, no. 16, Feb. 19, 1928.

9. unu, I, no. 9, Jan. 1929.

10. Capricorn, I, no. 1, Dec. 1930.

11. Ion Biberi, Études sur la littérature roumaine contemporaine (Studies on contemporary Romanian literature), Paris: Éditions Corymbe, 1937.

12. George Călinescu, Principii de estetică (Principles of esthetics) 1939.

13. Tudor Vianu, Figure și forme literare (Literary figures and forms) 1946. Recent research is suggesting a strong possibility that Carroll knew and read the irrepressible nonsensualist Edward Lear. See Florence Becker Lennon, The Life of Lewis Carroll, 1962, pp. 171-2.

14. Storytelling in long or short arrays see I. J. F. De Jong, “Narrative Unity and Units,” in E. Bakker, I. J. F. de Jong, H. van Wees, eds., Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, 2002, p. 245-266. The approach and conclusions are perfectly applicable to several Eastern and Middle-Eastern traditions.

15. Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues (The Schizo and Languages), first partial publication in Les Temps Modernes, Gallimard, 1964; the 1970 version is introduced by Gilles Deleuze.

16. Plato’s Cratylus, opens with an upset youth running to Socrates in tears. His friend had just told him he did not look in the least like someone with his name. One wonders, did Urmuz, at any point in his life ponder whether he became worthy either ofthe odd gem in his Urmuz pseudonym or the Dumnezeu (God) anagram in his D[u]metru D[u]m. D[u]metrescu-Bu[ze]u family name.

            It was the legendary Romanian poet cum literary scout Tudor Arghezi who thought up the Urmuz pseudonym—a variant of the Romanian substantive „hurmuz,” an irregular pearl, a „barocco„—and proceeded to publish Urmuz’ „The Funnel and Stamate” and „Ismail and Turnavitu” in a 1922 issue of the journal Cugetul românesc. It was the year before Urmuz’ suicide. „Urmuz,” by that time, had become the established way to refer both to the person and the œuvre.

17. The unnamed main character is touched by a hen’s soulful gaze. As the story unfolds he roosts like a hen, defecates like a hen, and elopes with a hen. For terrifying variations of the human-animal attraction to and subsequent identification with a passerine see E. A. Poe’s „The Raven” (1845). For the looming tragedy in this relationship see segment, infra, on Alexandru Macedonski novella „Între cotețe” (Among chicken coops, 1913).

18. See precedent for Dionysus’ second birth from Zeus’ thigh in Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. III; and Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 8 and 9.

19. See „The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite” for an ambiance of paradisal greenery and intense desire.

20. HermannDiels und Walther Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 12B1: διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίαnς κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν, ποιητικωτέροις οὕτως ὀνόμασιν αὐτὰ λέγων· ([extants] will need to offer justice and retribution to each other for the[ir] injustice, in due time, to put it in more poetic words. SD paraphrase).

               Anaximander’s term ἄπειρον (apeiron) stands for the limitless and unaging primal source that generates all extants that ever existed together with the consequences (τίσις, retribution) for their having existed.

            For a superbly sensitive overview of the Anaximander’s fragment’s interpretations from Hegel to Derrida see Vassilis Lambropoulos, „Stumbling over the ‘Boundary Stone of Greek Philosophy’: Two Centuries of Translating the Anaximander Fragment,” in the Festschrift in Honour of Professor P. J. Kozyris, Ant. N. Sakkoulas, 2007. pp.193-210.

            It is conceivable that Anaximader’s fragment could be applied to all beings, sentient and otherwise, that will suffer—or are currently suffering?—a cosmic spacetime correction, for having made other extants impossible to exist. E.g., live cyanomicrobes in the hearts of stromatolite crystals; or literary originals apologizing to their translations for having prevented other originals from existing in their place. See Stavros Deligiorgis, „Τίσεις, Μεταφρασεοποιητικά,” (Restitutions, a poetics of translation) in Επίσημοι Λόγοι (Formal Speeches), Academic Years 2021-2022, The National Capodistrian University of Athens, M.-A. K. Dimopoulos, Rector, vol. 38, pt. I, in Greek. Abstract in English, University of Athens Publications, 2023, pp. 306-350. For judicious probing of a large variety of full-blooded clever literary confections coming into being via translation filters, see Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

21. Cantemir casts his Istoria as an animal roman à clef taking place among persons and states of Europe as he knew them, including his native Wallachia.

                  Birds and quadrupeds speaking for themselves and with each other are dated to the second millennium BCE in Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Twenty-seven „Firsts” in  Man’s Recorded History, 1956, pp. 127-133; see also Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica, Arno Press, 1980. Animal dream and initiatory fables occur in Plato, Apuleius’ „Socrates” and a good number of Attic art prose novellas in Herodotus. A. Gotthelf, “Historia I: plantarum et animalium,” in W. Fortenbaugh, R. Sharples, eds., Theophrastean Studies. Volume III, New Jersey, 1988. While examples also occur in the arts of the Western tradition, the reemergence of modern bestiaries is noticeable since Julio Cortázar’s, Bestiario, 1951; Jorge Luis Borges’ with Margarita Guerrero’s Manual de zoologia fantástica, 1957; and Juan José Arreola’s Confabulario total, 1962. Regarding the relationship of Cortázar’s affinities with Urmuz, consult Rodica Grigore, „Two Faces of the Literary Avant-Garde: Urmuz and Julio Cortazar: Suggestions for Possible Interpretations,” Theory in Action, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 112-129.

            The chronologically important Romanian double header of the semi folk fictions in Dimitrie Cantemir’s Istoria Ieroglifică (Hieroglyphic History) and Ion Budai-Deleanu’s Țiganiada (The Gypsiad, 1800) is only matched by the English language contributions of Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759, vol. I, with all the physical implications of a problematized narrative in a book of scrambled chapters; a precursor of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), and The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812); Horace Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales (1785); and Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833). Lear and Carroll are not alone in their anti conventionalism. See D’Arcy W. Thompson, Fun and Earnest; or, Rhymes with Reason, 1865.

            Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was among the earliest art historians to look for antecedents of modernist anti conventionalism in the visual arts, architecture, and film under the title Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 1936. The span of research from the Renaissance Arcimboldo’s natures vivantes, to Dürer’s „Man in Despair,” and the early 20^th century Antonio Gaudi’s masonry explorations, the tradition to bend and interrogate established esthetics is both rich and influential.

            Modernist anti-esthetic currents are analyzed in Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets, 1981, esp. sections „Before Dada,” „Dada as Literature” and „Dada as Psyche.” For the profoundly perceptive geo-cultural examination of Dada as it spread from Switzerland, to Germany and thence to Japan, see Ruedi Kuenzli, Dada, Phaedon Press, 2015.

            Bizarre constructions in American English may be dated terminologically to Rube Goldberg’s brainless machines (1912). J. Brooks Atkinson’s THE PLAY, „Rain or Shine,” Joe Cook, The New York Times, 10 February 1928, p. 26: „. . .  he then introduces the Fuller Construction Orchestra, which is one of those Rube Goldberg [inventions].”

22 E. g., Tale I, „A New Arabian Night’s Entertainment” opens with the sentence „At the foot of the great mountain Hirgonqúu was anciently situated the kingdom of Larbidel. Geographers, who are not apt to make such just comparisons, said it resembled a football just going to be kicked away; and so it happened; for the mountain kicked the kingdom into the ocean, and it has never been heard of since.” Walpole’s modern editor could as easily be writing about Urmuz when he comments that ” . . . a tinge of mystery or obsession hovers over the tales, if only because of their often disturbing sexual imagery . . . The tales take on the qualities of a nightmare. . . imperturbable if rather manic humor [comes close] to an occasional scatological catastrophe. . . .” Gross concludes that these accounts could be thought of as „compacted mysteries,” even as „hermetic texts.” (Horace Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales, Kenneth W. Gross, ed., The Augustan Reprint Society, UCLA, 1982).

23. W.D. Snodgrass’ and Lore Segal’s 1967 Gallows Songs translation of Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder from the German. See relevant illustrations for „Die Trichter” (the Funnel) the late fifteenth century oil painting by Hieronymus Bosch’ mad surgeon in the „Stone of Madness” and all through its variants of fools wearing conical dunce caps. William Hogarth, in the clutter of his universally derelict imagery, is one step away from Blake’s pronouncements and drawings.

24. The plot has an antagonist named, ironically, Count Franz de Telek. Verne’s fictive bio-tech female anthropoid Stilla is traceable to the 1881 first act of the inordinately popular opera Les Contes d’ Hoffmann (The tales of Hoffmann) by Jacques Offenbach. The opera’s lead singer is a mechanical doll by the name of Stella who invariably inspires intense love passions in its listeners. Film versions of the opera were made in 1916, and 1923. Verne’s extraordinarily popular literary visions are of the same class as Thomas Edison’s  (1837-1931), W.C. Röntgen’s X-rays in 1895, and Guglielmo Marconi’s (1874-1937) mind-bending surreal realizations of wireless intercontinental communications with cinematography’s documentary assistance taking its first stumbling steps.

25.1916 is the year Brâncuși, who also befriended Duchamp, finished his first „Coloana infinitului” (Infinity’s column). Duchamp had already „installed” the most Urmuzian contraption of all, the „Egouttoir,” (Bottle rack) in 1914.

26. A Satie sampler with pre-1923 dates ought to suffice: Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three pear shaped pieces, 1903); 2 Préludes pour un chien (Two preludes for a dog, 1912); Idylle cynique (Cynical idyl, 1912); Embryons desséchés (Dried embryos, 1913); Le chant guerrier du roi des haricots (War song of the king of beans, 1913), Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucratic sonatina, 1917); Musique d’ameublement (Furniture music, 1918).

            The persona of the humble melancholy idealist may be found also in Jules Laforgue’s 1886 L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune and Eugène Ionesco’s early poetry in his Elegii pentru ființe mici (1931) employ this persona as well. „The Comedian as the Letter C” by Wallace Stevens, 1922, is yet another instance of the type. The not-yet-fully atonal „Pierrot Lunaire” by Arnold Schönberg appeared in 1912. This „Pierrot” hails his ancestry from Aloysius Bertrand’s 1842 Gaspard de la nuit, Section VII, „Viole de gamba,” to mention but one important source.

27. Marcel Duchamp, Life and Work: 1887-1968, Pontus Hulten, ed.; Texts by Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, MIT Press, 1993. Duchamp’s notes, sketches, maps, and graphs referring to speed races, to wars over and „annexations” of territory also date from 1912. The following entry is written entirely in English: „3 nets through which pass the commands of the Pendu femelle . . . a sort of triple ᾽cipher᾽ through which the milky way supports the said commands.” One could easily mistake this for Urmuz in English translation. Duchamp’s use of music paper for some of his drafts, his „En haut . . . wagonnets . . .” (At the top . . . little marble shooting cannons or small wagons . . .”), the 1912 [drawing of] „Le Roi et la Reine traversés par de nus vites” (The King and the Queen Traversed by Speeding Nudes), and especially some of the 1913 notes for his „Great Glass” read like Urmuz in literal translation (1c Trap door opening to basement; 2a Priest [we are tempted to wonder ‘from Ardeal?’]; 2b Department Store [„Algazy & Grummer”?]; 3 Capillary Tubes [through which one sees the „infinite and useless Auto-Kosmos”?]; 8 Flesh colored Milky Way [‘The Fuchsiad?’]). Anti-anthropomorphic aspects of modernist figurations of fear are discussed in Michel Carrouges, Machines célibataires, Paris: Arcanes, 1954; rptd in Harald Szeemann, ed., Les Machines célibataires: Junggesellenmaschinen, Venice, Alfieri, 1975. The two articles cover the period from 1850 to 1925.

28. „Un oarecare meșteraș” (A certain apprentice craftsman), in Anton Pann, Povestea vorbii (The word’s tale), I. Fischer ed., Șerban Foarță pref., București, 1971, vol. II, pp. 159-60. Anton Pann, a talented folklorist, published church books as well as popular drolleries. The „Chroniclers'” multiethnic texture is paraded as follows: Turkish „șalvari;” German/Yiddish „Rapaport;” French+Romanian diminutive „carambolaș;” Classical Greek „Aristotel;” Hebrew/Italian „Galileu;” Anglo/French „redingota franceză;” Russian „Sarafoff.”

29. William Combe’s epically titled The Diaboliad (1777) set the pace for future elaborations of a Christian antihero if not an anti-Christian hero. For the frenzied romantics’ pursuit of suspect „brilliance” in all things Paganini’s predecessor was Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) of the famous „Devil’s Trill” which, through no fault of his, was published only in 1799. A contemporary sketch of Paganini shows him dancing in the presence of prancing skeletons. He is playing the violin in a magical circle strewn with Rosicrucian, alchemical and other signs of esotericism. The chronological closeness of Tartini’s „Trill” to Paganini spilled into enlisted it among the anticipators of the fast–forward speeding of the sciences and industries of the 19^th century; progress and modernism were but devilries in thin disguise.

30.In the West, one of the earliest representations of dancing skeletons as a reminder of the viewers’ mortality was drawn around 1425 and circulated as a woodcut in La Danse Macabre by the typographer Guyot Marchant in 1485.

            In an interesting coincidence of dates the Japanese monk Ikkyü  (1394-1481) composed a Buddhist prosimetrum titled „Skeletons” to expose the vanity of human aspirations.  An illustrated edition, complete with worldly busy skeletons, appeared as Gaikotsu, 1693. See John Stephens, transl., Wild Ways: Zen poems of Ikkyü, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 97-127. In the European Middle Ages a specific dissonant, tritone cacophony was called the diabolus in musica.

31. Besides building pianos from scratch Scriabin invented a Clavier à Lumières (A keyboard with lights. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London, 1905; previously published, in part, in Lucifer, subseq. the Theosophy Review). Thought- Forms has seldom been acknowledged as a key source of most pre-WWI interarts esthetics curricula the world over and to this day. 

32. The mysterious ellipses provide wordless transitions to the view of the Auto-Kosmos in all its unspecified infiniteness. Besides they do make for speedier reading if they prevent expatiating elaborations.

                  Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du Texte, 1973, bears down on the distinction between readerly and writerly texts. The latter insist on the unceasing edging of the conventions of narrative forms. They tend to remind the reader of them and to disabuse all hopes of predictable resolution between data both essential to the narrative and non-essential. Barthes, pp. 13 and 76-79, acknowledges a neurotic tone, overall, and a projection of an apprehension against a background of impossibility (la névrose est l’appréhension timorée d’un fond d’impossible). The alternating mix of jouissance and fear results in „perverse texts.” Barthes reads no drama in this. Only a sense of the tragic. His proposition focuses on statements that are almost never completed in accordance with the rule of the langage they came from. [Une] parole à la fois très culturelle et très sauvage était surtout lexicale, sporadique; elle constituait, à travers son flux apparent, un discontinu définitif. (A usage simultaneously very cultured and very primitive, word-centered and intermittent; creating, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity. SD paraphrase).

                On ellipses and other related questions of textuality see the syllabus for the graduate course taught by Karen Van Dyck, Kimon A. Doukas professor, with Karen Emmerich and James Nikopoulos, under the auspices of the Program in Hellenic Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, under the title C.P. Cavafy: The Typography of Desire, Spring 2008. Lytton Jackson Smith’s paper, by the same title (umich, p. 12, PDF), is germane to Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes.

33. In Plato’s Timaeus and the Republic the relationship between ideal forms and mathematics is an expression of the harmonious attributes of the Godhead.

34. Urmuz’ eschatology of time-bound, lawful retributions for all extants, their erstwhile tribulations notwithstanding, is but an abjuring of the Judeo-Christian book of Revelation also known as the Apocalypse in the Eastern Orthodox biblical canon. The ancient Near Eastern religions, incidentally, did not have a corner on the visions of post mortem judgement days in which the righteous are rewarded and the sinners damned. Consult Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives, C. A. S. Williams, Dover Publications, 1976, s.v. „Yama: The Prince of Hell,” pp.1082-1091.

                  The Anaximandrian (Note 20, above; „τίσις,” retribution), and Platonic (Timaeus, 33c, sustaining itself from its φθίσις, waste) variants of an autophagus and self-inculpatory universe („prețul,” the price) are part of the unconscious Urmuzian legacy in Eugen Ionescu’s „Obositul ins” (Tired individual), Elegii pentru ființe mici, Ed. Cercul Analelor Române, Atelierele Scrisul Românesc, Craiova, România, 1931, p.10; and Magda Cârneci’s two poems „Totul” (The All) and „Un creier apocaliptic” (An apocalyptic brain), in Viață: Poeme ocazionale 1995-2015 (Life: Occasional poems, 1995-2015), Ed. Paralela 45, Pitești, Romania, 2016, pp., 45-47 and pp. 50-51 respectively. For detailed discussions of these poems, via Baudelaire and Van Gennep, see Stavros Deligiorgis, „Inter-Arts and Poetics of Intermittency: Two Romanian Verse Masterpieces by Magda Cârneci, in digital journal Fitralit, Writers Union of Romania, Filiala de Traduceri Literare, October, 2025.