Where we begin to glimpse possibilities that unsettle us as much as they illuminate us.
Excerpt from Igniatius's Notebook
Just before dusk, and before we had yet been able to recognize the places from our previous journey, the forest rose before us with that same ancient majesty whose presence Don Carotte's and Sang Chaud's words had already attempted to approach. At first, I believed I was rediscovering what they had seen. The impression did not last long. A place never repeats the gaze that preceded it; it merely gives it the opportunity to continue in another way.
I walked for a long time without thinking about the drawings, and that surprised me. For some time now, they had occupied my thoughts with an insistence I could not explain. I continued to maintain that I had found them in a gallery, and that answer almost always satisfied me. It was not a lie. Yet, on that day, it suddenly seemed to leave something untouched, as though it answered correctly a question that was no longer quite the right one.
The trees climbed into an ever rarer light. The mosses, by absorbing sound, thickened the silence. Beneath our feet, the roots pursued a labor that no one seemed to have taught them. I was observing all this with quiet attention when a thought crossed my mind with the gentleness of a breath.
What if I had mistaken the gallery?
I had always spoken of that place as an art gallery where drawings were displayed. Today, I wonder whether, without knowing it, I was referring to something altogether different. A passageway, like a gallery, was making its way... not merely showing...
It leads...
It crosses...
It connects two spaces that, without it, would have remained strangers to one another.
I raised my eyes.
Was not the forest itself a gallery?
Did not the roots dig their own galleries beneath the earth?
And did memory, in its own way, not do the same?
Then I thought of Lucian.
Did that gallery lead to him?
Or was Lucian himself nothing more than a passage along a path that had begun long before us?
I did not seek an answer.
Answers sometimes have the unfortunate habit of closing the very paths they claim to illuminate.
So I went on walking.
It seemed to me that something was continuing its work without requiring my consent. It was not yet a drawing. It was not even an image. I would rather have spoken of a very ancient possibility that refused to remain entirely contained within what it already was.
Not because it wished to become something else.
Perhaps it wished only to continue.
And sometimes that continuation takes the form of drawing, just as water follows the bed of a river without ever becoming identical with it.
Then I understood why it had become so difficult for me to say that I had found those drawings.
I could certainly claim to have discovered them.
I could even maintain that I had drawn them.
But the more I reflected on it, the more I wondered which of us had truly opened the passage.
Had the drawings found their way to me?
Or had they, long before, already begun to trace, in silence, their own gallery through my memory?
I had no way of deciding.
And that ignorance no longer weighed upon me.
When at last I took out my notebook, I did not have the feeling that I was beginning a drawing.
I had merely rejoined a path whose beginning I could no longer say where it lay.
Perhaps in this forest.
Perhaps with Lucian.
Perhaps in a gallery whose location I still cannot tell—whether it stood inside a house, beneath a mountain... or somewhere between the two, where the outer paths sometimes meet those we carry within us without yet knowing them.
