“The world, for its part, was quite prepared to go towards them. It still regarded them as people whom no one in society visited, but who felt no regret on that account.”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time,
Sodom and Gomorrah, nrf, 1919 edition, vol. 10
Where Félix, continuing his journey through the notebooks, comes to understand that thoughts resemble the river that disappears beneath the mountain only to reappear elsewhere, enriched and transformed by what it has passed through. He thus begins to suspect that an idea never entirely belongs to the person through whom it passes: it develops through him, but also transforms him, so that each is neither its absolute author nor merely its custodian.
Félix’s Notebook
I understand now why the parrot’s remark about thoughts makes me smile each time I read it again:
— It is probably a risk they are obliged to take…
The reversal is almost insolent. We have become so accustomed to considering risk from our own shore. We are afraid of being mistaken, of misunderstanding, of betraying an idea, of missing what someone meant to say. But if, for a moment, I reverse the perspective, like those old maps on which south was sometimes placed at the top without the world itself suffering in the least, then it is the idea that takes a risk by entering us.
It takes the risk of confronting me… or Lucian… or Igniatius… the Moon Child, Don Carotte and, why not, the parrots themselves.
It confronts our unreliable memory, our need to reach conclusions, our simplifications, our metaphors, our misreadings, the words we possess and those we lack. It even confronts our desire to appropriate it by immediately declaring: “I have an idea,” as though the mere fact of its appearing in our mind were enough to establish a title of ownership.
That expression troubles me more and more: “My thought” or “His idea.”
We use these possessives with such ease that they almost inevitably end up producing an origin. Since the idea is mine, I must have created it; since it appears in him, it must begin in him. Our grammar slips gently from presence to possession, then from possession to authorship, and soon we no longer even ask ourselves whether the three are truly identical.
And yet to say “I have an idea” might be as ambiguous as saying “I have had a visitor.” In the first case, we instinctively hear possession; in the second, an event. Perhaps we ought to preserve both. Something happens to me, and what happens to me does not remain external to me, since in receiving it I transform it, and it transforms me in turn.
Then I think again of the parrots. Where do they come from?
I could go back through every notebook, search for the first appearance, establish a chronology, try to discover which one of us… through our notebooks, letters, journals or drawings… might have passed the bird on to the other three, but that method still assumes that transmission must necessarily have followed a visible route, as though every river had to have its course marked in blue on a map before it could reach the sea.
And what if their appearance had been almost simultaneous?
I do not mean miraculous. I distrust miracles enough when they serve merely to give a name to what we have failed to understand. But would it be entirely inconceivable that the same form might appear at almost the same moment in several minds because something, without fully belonging to any one of them, found in each a place in which to take form?
The parrots would then be less transmitted characters than a convergence. They would be like an idea that had found several branches on which to alight. Or perhaps a cast shadow. But the shadow of what?
I search for the presence that might stand outside the drawing and of which the birds would be only the projection, and then immediately wonder whether I could reverse the proposition yet again: no longer a shadow, but a light cast by some invisible presence, if indeed light can be cast as a shadow is cast, and I smile at the contradiction before realising that, among the pages lying before me, it no longer seems entirely contradictory.
There are things whose source we do not see, but only what they make visible. Perhaps the parrots belong to that category. I do not know. And it is important that I do not know. For then I come back to the last sentence of their conversation:
— According to our own master, ideas would make no distinction between him and us…
