Could a will belong to something that had none? Perhaps it was enough for it to be inscribed everywhere in its form for one eventually to have no further need of the person who had willed it. The bow wanted to move forward because it had been designed for that… the engines wanted to continue their rotation because their entire arrangement transformed steam into motion; the needle of an instrument seemed to want to preserve its reading, and together they thus composed a faceless intention that no longer clearly belonged to anyone, as though decisions made long ago had withdrawn from those who had made them in order to continue their journey alone within the steel.
Perhaps something comparable existed in the brain, where decisions whose origin often remained inaccessible began to become gestures before an inner voice had claimed them as its own, where attention turned towards a sound before one knew what it was seeking, where the eyes came to rest on a detail without yet being able to explain what had held them there. The one who would later say I looked sometimes arrived after the look, just as the one who would say I decidedperhaps discovered a decision part of whose movement had already begun.
And then something very discreet could occur: not yet the presence of someone, but the possibility that a gaze might gradually detach itself from everything around it that seemed to belong to no one.
As the liner moved forward, something else did indeed seem to be spreading across the decks, a kind of space made larger by the absence of any voice capable of interrupting its continuity. The passageways stretched away beneath a changing light, the doors remained closed, the windows caught the brightness of the sky for an instant before darkening again, and sometimes the wind, finding the opening of a passage, rushed into it, set some metal fitting trembling or lifted the edge of a tarpaulin, then moved away, leaving behind the same silence as before.
Absence itself then began to become perceptible, which is a rather singular thing, since, in order to recognise that a voice is missing, one must already have expected one; in order to find a passageway deserted, something within us must already have silently anticipated that a figure might appear there, and perhaps emptiness is never entirely empty once an expectation gives it the shape of what might fill it. Thus those closed doors, those motionless chairs, those passageways without footsteps did not merely bear witness to absence. They traced around it the contours of possible presences, just as certain regions of the brain continue for a moment to await the signal that no longer comes and, through that very waiting, give an almost tangible form to what is missing.
Perhaps it was also for this reason that things gradually acquired an unusual precision. When no face came to claim attention, attention could fall elsewhere, linger over what the passing of a body would immediately have relegated to the background, and the world then seemed to draw nearer in details: the curve of a rope darkened by rain, the whiteness of a lifebuoy against the rail, the slightly different shadow beneath the fold of a tarpaulin, the foam running for a few seconds level with the gaze before being drawn away astern.
None of these objects was important.
Perhaps it was precisely for that reason that they could become so.
For attention does not always merely go where something has already been given meaning. It can precede meaning, hold on to something without knowing why, give a fragment of the world a disproportionate sharpness, then leave that fragment unexplained for a long time until another one comes, one day, to join it. The brain possesses this immense reserve of possible correspondences in which something seen without importance may remain silent for hours, sometimes for years, before suddenly becoming the piece an unknown figure needed in order to appear; and the gaze, when it rested in this way upon the objects of the liner, seemed less to inventory them than to gather them in.
It was not yet drawing… But perhaps something was already beginning to do what a drawing does before even the first line: to choose, from the inexhaustible continuity of the visible, what, for some reason not yet known, must not quite disappear with the rest.
Very freely inspired… by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. 1898
