The rooted

The rooted

Han Ryner

Extracts of Psychodore travel

Psychodore, cynical philosopher, having lost someone he loved, resolved to live wandering, alien to any and all. No other luggage than an old cloak on his shoulders and hand a rough stick, he left. All day, he worked at random. When he was hungry, he ate what was within his reach. Often someone protested, which had no need of this food, but has argued owner. Psychodore did not hear the screams. Sometimes the master of food pushed the cynic who, awakened from his dream, hit with his stick. But slaves flocked. They seized the bold who regarded hunger as a reason to eat. We'd hang out in courts. Yet he knew that the ears of the judges, blocked by the tow of the laws, can no longer hear and it did not meet the questions that were put to him. Ordinarily, we let him go, the believer crazy. Other times, they lock him in for a few days in prison. In the evening, Psychodore went down at the same time as the Sun. When he was free, his bed was the side of the road or the bottom of a torrent without water.

Psychodore walked three years without stopping voluntarily during the day and without uttering a single word. It is likely that he didn't see external objects as the most extraordinary and his mind translated into symbols of eternity. However, once things had given him a more beautiful than themselves thought, he kept looking at things.

When Psychodore had walked three years, he found himself at the top of a large mountain, and he looked down and around him. As screams rose, strange, cris quarrel who were thinking, although articulated in the branches of a forest wrinkled by a storm.

The place where Psychodore was singular. The mountain formed a nearly perfect circle and its equal Crest was cut to no throat. In the deep circular plain, big men and the Oaks swayed madly, among the clamor.

The cynic went down to these giants, and he saw with amazement that their feet dug into the Earth. As some were on the edge of a precipice, he knew that each foot went long and winding roots. Seeing that here he was really something new, something to understand, Psychodore stopped in this country.

Despite their gigantic size and their unchangeable underground extensions, the inhabitants of this plain were men, not trees. They did not have leaves, flowers or branches. Their nakedness, you could see that they were point covered bark, but thin white skin like that of the barbarians from the North. They had a head and two arms. Their body, in its enormity, was harmonious proportions and their poses varied, flexible and wavy, like the attitudes of the wrestlers. Sometimes, they would sit. At night, their only legs remained straight as two twin trunks, while the wind of sleep bending their knees and lie them on the back. But also the power to change of place, another property lacked them which once seemed valuable to Psychodore: the roots had no sex.

Nature had denied these men the power to procreate, because she had made them immortal. The cynic soon guessed that privilege, and he was jealous. But he stayed, observing and studying their language. Because a doubt made him eager to know their thoughts:

-Maybe they are scholars of them as gods, and they will teach me what happened to my beloved and where I can find her.

When he realized some of their lyrics, Psychodore realized that the forest was ignorant and coarse like all peoples. He attended preferably the rooted that fate had isolated, but he saw that those error was strange, absurd like madness and not as foolishness. and they will impart their thoughts ingenious and fragile.

However, Psychodore not yet walked. But he said:

-I have anxiety of life; they have the anguish of space. Nonsense and crazy things they say on the extended world no doubt match our mistakes on the world that persists. Time and space are all similar twin brothers to the other. "Their father's name is the huge and their mother said: I am forever."

And the smile with which he listened motionless giants also blamed thoughts of men who walk.

*

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As those of the giants who called themselves the sages, multiplied the negations bold or timid, saying:

-Is there anything beyond the horizon.

... or:

 Let us affirm or deny that our senses cannot grasp. The plain we live is the universe and the wall of the mountains stands between the being and nothingness? We have no way of knowing. We are not hidden and methodically do the science of the visible world.

However, the people believed:

-The sun rises in a vacuum, but it sets in full from another world. He first enlightens us. He then illuminates other beings. The East is deserted; the East side of the mountain is a void. The West contains two worlds: a wet delights country where the land is generous; a country of torments and drought. In one, best men we are happy rooted. In the other, bad people suffer because the Earth burning and provides little food.

And the people believed:

-It's the same Sun that comes every day. After enlightening heaven and hell, he jumps, abrupt, through the void at the top of the Eastern Mountain.

Some even suspected:

-Maybe nothingness through the morning sun is not nothing, but is it a chaos, a mass where things are indistinguishable, none of the shape, either, but, where the matter becomes agitated, inharmonieuse and infinite.

But the Hardy sages retorted:

-Is there anything outside of what we know. And the sages whose thinking is loose:

-We don't know what we know. Then each resumed:

-It is certain that...

... other:

-It is unlikely that...

... and all the wise men continued, agree:

-Which has no roots cannot continue. The Sun, which moves, born and die as the running dog or bird that flies. And the Sun of today is not the rot of the Sun of yesterday.

But the crowd was irritated against such words. She felt well, despite his ignorance, that the Sun does not die every night.

And Psychodore was thinking:

-Your soul, liked missing, is a Sun has set for me, but through other parts. And the Western times aren't elyos or infernal, but they differ little from the time East and North, and the time of the noon time.

And the sage Psychodore had a madness. He wanted to say to these beings troubled the anguish of space, the liberating truth. He placed himself, ridiculously small campaigner, the crowd of Giants and he cried out:

-Listen to my word. Just the other side of the mountain and I know.

All listened, panting. He resumed:

-The limits are appearances. Around the mountain, life goes on, not very different from what it is here.

Psychodore did not understand what was going on. But instinct, safer and quicker than thought, pushed him in a frantic escape. When he turned, trembling, he lives the whole forest laid down by an angry wind. The arms were seeking to enter. Curses devoted to torture the Prophet who announced too simple truths. And these furious claimed that the unknown could be nil or wonders of dread and joy.

*

*    *

Continued by shouts and stones, Psychodore ran up the mountain. Then we cross it, returned to the country where men walked like him and knew the truth on near space. He met two dwarves like him. He listened to their words because they Grise in a Greek dialect that moved her delicious memories. But he soon had a laugh of scorn and intellectual pain. Because one of the two men said:

-Death, everything is well finished.

And the other responded:

-After death, we receive for our good deeds of the wonderful rewards, or else frightening punishments await us for our crimes.

But Psychodore, back to the wisdom of silence passed without trying to teach these men the hurtful simplicity of truth.

Translated by Bayron Pascal