Where Igniatius, under the astonished gaze of the parrots, travelling between the words and images of a book he does not know, draws while being carried away by his memories. In doing so, he slowly loses touch with himself...
Igniatius’s Notebook
I still remember the moment when the light began to fade between the trees. I would be unable to say whether that was where everything began. It seems to me now that something was enclosing me long before I could have said what it was. I felt it from the first slope, at the first sound of water heard beneath the ferns, even before the forest, during those hours when I was still walking in broad daylight. I had that ordinary certainty that my body belonged to me. My steps went where I led them. Things waited before me for a gaze to come and recognise them. Then there came a moment when the path began descending faster than I myself was descending. The damp, slippery stones imposed upon my feet an unfamiliar way of walking. A stick was suddenly in my hand without my having retained any memory of picking it up. That slight advance of the gesture over the person performing it should have warned me. It resembled so profoundly what had always happened to me when I drew.
I had never known exactly what others meant when they spoke of first having an idea in their mind and then carrying it out. As though the image were waiting somewhere for a sufficiently obedient hand to come and transport it onto the paper. With me, the line set off, that was all, it set off and I came afterwards. I followed it and sometimes I lost it. A second line came to meet it. Their collision brought forth a form I did not yet know. If anyone had asked me what I had intended to draw, I would have had to answer, if I had been able to answer then, that I did not know, since the drawing itself had been the very means of finding out.
The forest knew this...
No, it did not know it, of course, but it too grew without knowing... and still does...
The roots now emerge from the slope with their large pale knuckles washed by the rain. They run above the earth, plunge beneath the rocks at the risk of their lives. They do not die there. Their movement reappears farther on, crossing a low branch that descends towards the ground. The branch finds its other, inverted half in the water. The water seizes it and gives it back to the sky. An immense fern takes up the same division in its veins, begins it again a hundred times, a thousand times, with that senseless prodigality of living matter. Without economy, it casts its forms everywhere as though it had eternity at its disposal in which to begin them again.
The eyes follow... without waiting any longer.
A line passes from a root to a shadow, from the shadow to a crack in the stone, from the crack to the surface of the stream. And already the gaze has moved on before the name of each thing has had time to close the door behind it. The world runs faster than the names that pursue it.
The stream is narrow, two steps are enough to cross it, but the sky has fallen into it and that changes the measure. Above, the branches crowd together until almost no opening remains. Below, beneath my feet, a blinding depth stretches between the stones. The eyes descend into it as one falls, drawn in by that thing situated below and yet coming from above. A few drowned leaves remain visible on the bottom; a stone sleeps beneath ten centimetres of water. Behind it, the sky continues. Behind the sky, another depth again, so that the hand could reach the bottom while the gaze never will.
