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Where one sees that it is sometimes necessary to lose one’s footing in order to learn what walking means… and… that certain lessons begin precisely when the teacher is absent… and… that Lucian, being far too busy saving his own skin, was about to discover that a body can understand long before the one who inhabits it does.
Lucian’s Journal
At first I struggled against that absence as though the violence of my movements could force the sea to give me back a ground beneath my feet, but the more I swam with the determination to choose my direction entirely for myself, the more each wave revealed the disproportion between the strength I opposed to it and the strength it possessed without even having to exert it against me; I gained a few yards when its movement followed mine, lost them when the undertow took me back, believed myself to be moving forward while a greater mass of water carried me sideways, and it was only as fatigue began to dissolve that obstinacy that I was finally able to feel what, until then, had merely tossed me about.
There was a moment in the wave when it arrived before it became visible, a pressure beneath my body, a rising to which I could yield rather than resist, followed by that almost imperceptible instant when, having reached the crest of its movement, I could take a few strokes in the direction it itself lent me, before the water withdrew and I had to stop trying to overcome it in order to preserve enough strength for the next one; and so, without ever having chosen to learn it, I began to work with what exceeded me, to enter into the unknown measure of that dance begun on deck, no longer trying to correct every movement but discovering that some of my gestures became possible only on condition that they were performed within a movement larger than themselves.
What a strange dancing master that would have made, I may have thought, without managing to give the idea more than the briefest flash of existence, since it was no longer a matter of showing me a step but of taking away even the ground upon which I might have repeated it, of making me understand through my legs, my arms, my breathing, what no discourse could have taught me so surely: that there are movements in which we take part only after relinquishing the claim to be their origin; and if something of Igniatius was present there, I could not yet know it, any more than I could understand how singular it was that I, who had come seeking in images the trace of a voice, should be compelled, before reaching it, to follow this reverse path in which the body speaks first and words, breathless, arrive only afterwards.
A dark mass would sometimes appear between the crests, disappear as I sank again into the trough of the swell, then return broader than before, and it took me some time to understand that what I had first taken for some drifting object was the land itself, perhaps one of the islands, not yet in the reassuring form of a shore but as a mass of rocks between which the water leapt in great white bursts; yet that land, which I had longed for while my feet searched vainly for the bottom, became another threat as I drew closer to it, for the sea, finally meeting what stopped it, turned back upon itself, broke, rushed between the rocks, then surged away again with renewed violence, so that the very place where I had hoped to regain my footing was precisely where water and stone seemed to make every foothold more dangerous.
At first I tried to move away, then a wave drove me towards the rocks; I made use of its movement, then its retreat took me back, and for a length of time I would be unable to measure I was carried towards the land and returned to the sea, advancing and retreating along that boundary where neither one nor the other possessed me entirely, until at last my foot struck a stone and the almost brutal joy of finding resistance again made me put all my weight upon it—an immediate mistake for which the water-slick rock punished me with no more intention than the sea had shown, for my foot slipped, my knee struck an edge and I was thrown backwards before I had time to understand that regaining my footing would require a different patience from the one with which I had learned to stop searching for the bottom.
Yet I returned, because now I knew there was something beneath the water, and when my hand in turn found the rock I no longer tried to haul myself onto it in a single effort, but let the wave lift me towards it, searching during that brief ascent for a fissure in which my fingers might hold, then waiting for the next surge to gain a few more inches, as though the sea itself, after having so long deprived me of every support, must now temporarily lend me its strength so that I might escape it; and when at last my forearm passed over an edge, one knee found a hollow and my belly rolled onto the rock, I remained stretched out there without knowing whether I was truly out of the water, since the foam continued to wash around my legs and every new wave came to remind me that the land upon which I had just arrived was not the clean separation I had imagined from the ship.
I rose slowly, and it was then that I understood—or rather that my body once again compelled me to understand after it—that regaining one’s footing does not mean immediately regaining one’s balance, for the rock beneath me was motionless while I continued to sway, my knees correcting inclinations that no longer existed, my torso leaning against an absent swell, my arms spreading each time my body anticipated a roll of which the land knew nothing; the movement that had belonged first to the liner, then to the sea around me, had settled into my muscles, and I walked upon that island as though something within me had retained the immediate memory of the water, not that memory by which one recalls a past event, but the deeper one by which the body continues, for a few moments, to inhabit the world that has just disappeared.
