“I cannot hold my subject steady: it moves, blurred and faltering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it as it is, at the very moment I attend to it. I do not paint being, I paint passage: not a passage from one age to another, or, as people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My account must adapt itself to the hour.”
Michel de Montaigne, Essays,
Book III, Chapter II, “Of Repentance”, 1595 edition.
Wherein Lucian cautiously attempts to shed light on what appears within him.
Letter to Félix (continued)
Before me, as I write to you, lies a long stretch of water enclosed by rocks. Their contours are reflected quite precisely when the wind drops, then dissolve almost immediately as soon as a ripple crosses the surface. In the fleeting reflections of that ripple, I barely have time to recognise Pinocchio the Other. Completely disjointed before his own eyes. I could naturally see this as an image of what I am trying to tell you. I realise I have already done so. This is probably a fairly fitting example of the activity I am describing to you. A form need only appear in the world for my mind to begin incorporating it into whatever occupies it. I ought to distrust this and dismiss the comparison as a projection. But this very precaution resembles an old habit. I think it is better to watch what happens when the image I project encounters something that does not quite obey it. The water keeps moving, the reflection breaks apart, then returns. Slightly or entirely different. If I want to preserve the image I had formed, I must take part in its alteration.
Here I discover what I now expect of writing these letters to you. Forgive me. They open a door for me towards some outside miraculously freed of myself, certainly, but above all they make momentarily visible the movements through which I turn what happens to me into what I can recognise. You will understand. If this prison exists, its walls may not be those that separate me from the world. They are made of the ease with which I turn the world into something I already know how to inhabit.
That liner comes back to mind. That immense organisation of metal, rooms and passageways that allowed me to live in the middle of the sea. I almost continually forgot it was there. If that ship did indeed sink… You see that I still cannot get beyond that “if”. Somewhere, there is a moment when what had been an entire world for us ceased to be habitable. It had become simply a thing at the mercy of the water. This transformation haunts me because I have long regarded my mind as the stable place from which I observed everything that might happen. I am only beginning to consider that it is also one of the things to which something happens.
So I no longer quite know whether I write to you to escape myself. I would rather say that I write to catch the moment when what I call myself begins to rebuild around what has just taken place. To construct the continuity it needs in order to continue. When I have enough luck, or enough patience, to delay this reconstruction a little, I might glimpse what remains visible before everything is put back in its place. It may amount to very little. But it may also be precisely through this small opening that something can pass.
Lucian
