The shame of Sophrotatos

Alfred Jarry claimed to inherit the study of pataphysics from a certain Sophrotatos the Armenian. Only one piece of writing by this first earthly pataphysician has ever been documented. It was first translated by Jarry into French but not published until after his death, in a collection called The Revenge of the Night (La Revanche de la Nuit), compiled by Maurice Saillet.

Here, translated for the first time into English, is the full text from Sophrotatos:

That day, I saw three images: the three Scourges of the Apocalypse upon their warhorses, and Saint John bathed in oil at the Latin Gate, and Hercules slaying the lion.
And I came above Ganymede riding the eagle, myself led by an owl,
And I discovered a woman between two dark satellites, opening her thighs like a lambda or the figure of an inverted pall;
And I came also above this woman, and her scent was that of Greek ivory dampened in temples;
But because she received me in a very ample chasm, and I could not find its bottom,
Like the promontory that thrusts forth a lighthouse, like a candlestick at arm’s length, toward the impenetrable zenith,
She gave me no pleasure, and the wind did not sweep leaves toward the others.

It is a very dry kind of humor from Jarry to present us with this somewhat unfortunate artifact from Sophrotatos. Though no less significant, according to the eternal caveat, than a lost treatise on imaginary solutions, it does little to convey any real sense of his ancient pataphysics, or even to mirror Jarry at his best in draping cruelty with glittering prose. And yet it is that exact disappointment which is also the most eternal and enduring quality of the work. A search for meaning in all possible directions will yield how many successful results? Whence does meaning come? Would a collector of Americana want to own George Washington’s slaver’s whip? Pataphysics does not exclude or prevent, nor rule out or discourage meaning from any aspect.

Hence the shame belongs to us all.