Notes by Lucian, handwritten on the back of the image:
“Behind the rope with its thousand branches, like an impassable wall, water was everywhere. As I looked at those ropes and those furious waters, suddenly, with a new terror, I saw the puppet. It was not merely stretched above the void: it did not merely come from the very past of creatures… it was entering back into it. One could sense that once, those ropes upon which, in unstable balance, it now held itself, had formerly served to pull it, to restrain it, to make it move according to foreign wills. Yesterday: puppet strings. Today: line of flight and line of constraint. Servitude suspended high within the circus.
And now, having become Pinocchio the Other, he advanced upon them.
What once manipulated him had become a path.
What enslaved him had become passage.
Then I understood that he was not merely attempting to cross an abyss. He was trying to leave behind an ancient condition of himself. The entire big top, though invisible to me myself, groaned around him. Beyond the great waters, the vast red canvases pulsed like gigantic organs. The beams cracked with that solemn slowness of immense things beginning to yield beneath their own weight. Nothing had yet been destroyed. But everything was already disappearing.”
Where Félix, after reading Lucian’s words hastily scribbled on the reverse side of the drawing, writes in his own notebooks how he begins the analysis of the image reaching him.
Félix’s Notebook
This image seems to speak of a passage through entanglement rather than of a free movement through space. Everything in it is crossed by ropes, ties, knots, tensions. Even the sea in the background does not seem to be merely a sea. It resembles an immense, shifting, almost primordial force, while the vertical poles erect a kind of dry architecture amid the tumult. The whole gives the impression of a world in which every trajectory requires negotiation with attachments. The figure suspended among the ropes does not move forward like a conquering navigator. He seems caught within a system already there before him. The ropes can be understood in two ways simultaneously: they support and they hinder. Without them, immediate fall; with them, impossibility of simple movement. It is very close to certain existential or narrative situations in which what allows one to live is also what imprisons. The book, language, figures, memory, inherited stories: all function in this way.
There is also something initiatory in the scene. The figure does not walk upon stable ground. He crosses a suspended network above an agitated depth. This evokes less a geographical voyage than an apprenticeship in passage itself. One could almost say that the true subject of the image is not the man, but the difficulty of crossing.
The vertical poles play an important role here. They divide the space like markers or thresholds. They almost resemble the columns of a temple, but a precarious temple, battered by winds and waves. Every interval between them becomes a zone of risk. The figure passes from one “between” into another “between.” He never inhabits a stable place. He remains within transition.
And then there is that raging sea… far from decorative. It seems to want to reclaim the entire scene. The waves rise like living forms, almost animal. The ropes then appear as a human attempt to draw lines above a fundamentally shifting world.
