Where Félix, relying on no one but himself and trusting the clues scattered through the notebooks and drawings, courageously follows the invisible traces of those who came before him. Who would believe, he wonders, that certain words, heard even imperfectly amid the din of ideas, can become more fertile than their verified meaning? A mishearing does not reveal some hidden truth… it shifts the word just far enough to open a passage towards what had not yet been thought.
Félix’s Notebook
There are words that I read and others that I hear, and I am beginning to wonder whether those I hear are not sometimes… more fertile than those whose meaning I can verify… because, starting from a resemblance, a mistaken division, a connection that etymology would doubtless refuse to confirm, they carry me towards a region where the word ceases for a moment to be what I knew of it and becomes instead the place of a passage. I know perfectly well, as I write this, that I ought immediately to correct whatever here risks resembling a method, for it is not a matter of claiming that words conceal within their syllables truths that a sufficiently attentive ear might discover, but only of acknowledging that sometimes a mishearing, rather than closing down meaning, shifts it just far enough for something to appear that was not contained in the definition and that nevertheless, once it has appeared, begins to work upon what I thought I understood.
So it was with the word becoming, which did not first arrest me because of what it means, but because of what it began, almost despite me, to make me hear when, pronounced a little more slowly, it came apart just enough to let something else pass through: be-coming, and almost immediately, with that liberty the ear sometimes takes with grammar, coming from, so that the word, which until then had seemed oriented towards what comes afterwards, towards what something is in the process of becoming, turned slightly back upon itself, not enough to abandon its forward movement, but enough for that movement suddenly to acquire a behind, a provenance, a place or rather a state from which it might be coming, and instead of asking only what a thing is becoming, I found myself hearing at the same time the question of what it comes from.
But that question, barely having appeared, did not lead me towards a clearer beginning… on the contrary, it complicated the movement I thought I had grasped, for asking where that which becomes comes from still too easily assumes that somewhere upstream there exists a thing stable enough for one to say: it was there, it was like this, then it came here, and it was only during that coming, or at its end, that it was transformed, whereas what holds me precisely in this coming from heard at the heart of becoming is the possibility that the coming itself may have taken part in forming what comes, that the passage may not have been some neutral interval between a point of departure and a point of arrival, but that during which what enters upon the journey gradually, or suddenly, ceases to be exactly what had begun it, without our ever being able to determine with certainty the moment at which this transformation took place, since it may be nothing other than the journey itself.
Then “coming from where?” is already no longer enough, for one must almost immediately add “coming how?”, and I can see that this second question profoundly changes the first, since it compels us to consider not only provenance but the paths of provenance, that through which something has passed, what it encountered, what held it back, bent its course, stripped something from it or burdened it along the way, and as I try to distinguish what would still belong to that which was coming from what might have been added to it by its coming, the distinction becomes less certain, as though what I first called the thing and what I later called its journey were beginning to merge to such an extent that I no longer quite know whether I should say that a thing is transformed while it passes, or that it is precisely this particular thing because it passed in this particular way.
Here I encounter again, with an insistence that is beginning to trouble me a little because it keeps returning in different forms, the difficulty I have felt for some time in placing the origin anywhere without its immediately beginning to move again, for if what becomes comes from something, I naturally want to work my way back towards that something, recover its previous state, consider it before the passage transformed it, and yet, as soon as I think I am drawing close to it, I am forced to acknowledge that this earlier state must itself have come from elsewhere, that it had already been worked upon by other passages, other encounters, other losses, other resumptions, and that what I had taken for the place of departure may have been nothing more than a place of arrival that had temporarily become, in its turn, a point of departure.
It may be this that holds me in this mishearing of the word, far more than the play itself between becoming and coming from, for it compels me to consider that what we call an origin may not always be that untouched place where something existed before being transformed, but rather a point of passage that we choose, because we must after all begin somewhere, within a larger continuity much of which remains beyond our sight, so that the from I hear so strongly within becoming does not necessarily lead me back to a source, but opens instead onto a succession of upstreams, each of which, as soon as one reaches it, reveals that it too has already been traversed.
Le point délicat est évidemment be-coming. Ce n’est pas une étymologie anglaise au sens strict, pas plus que de-venant ne l’est dans votre texte français : c’est précisément une écoute fautive, productive, que Félix sait fautive et qu’il laisse pourtant travailler.
