“Our opinions are grafted one upon another. The first serves as the stock for the second, the second for the third.”
Montaigne, Essays, Book III, Chapter 13, “Of Experience”
Where Félix, a traveller despite himself, comes to understand that searching for the origin of an idea may matter less than following what it becomes as it passes from one mind to another. Repetition itself then ceases to be mere copying: taken up again, displaced, or even misunderstood, a thought is transformed and continues on its way, until it may eventually carry on without the person who first gave it form. Before the open notebooks, Félix, copying them in his own way, soon no longer knows whether he is travelling, whether he is still speaking only about ideas… or already about the characters themselves.
Carnet de Félix
I continue, moreover, to hold the pages, note references, compare the different hands and the drawings, but something in me is still travelling down the river, entering the caves, following the walls of the canyons, crossing the forests that lean out over the water, and now reaching that vast, almost horizontal region where so many currents meet that their origin becomes less important than what, together, they make possible.
Perhaps that is what I should be asking of these notebooks. What use is it to know who had this idea first? It would be better to ask what became of that idea as it passed through him… And then: what did it make possible? The difference is considerable.
It compels me to look differently at Don Carotte, Lucian, Igniatius, the Moon Child, and no doubt at myself as well, since I cannot claim to examine their circulation while placing myself, by some miracle, outside the watershed.
If an idea develops as it passes from one mind to another, repetition itself becomes far less simple than I had thought. The parrot, precisely, is supposed to repeat. That is almost the entire condemnation contained in the word when it is applied to a man: he repeats another person’s words without thinking.
But does absolutely pure repetition truly exist?
A sentence repeated twenty years later, in another circumstance, by another voice, before someone who hears it differently, certainly remains recognisable, and yet it is no longer entirely the same, because what can now arise from it is no longer what could once have arisen from it. The context has shifted, the world around it has changed, those who hear it carry other memories. Even error can become productive. A sentence misunderstood sometimes opens a path that did not exist in the intention of the person who first spoke it.
That does not make every error right. It means only that errors, too, have consequences. And so I return to the risk that ideas would be obliged to take.
In order to remain alive, a thought must be taken up again, discussed, displaced, perhaps even, at times, misunderstood. An idea perfectly preserved, protected from every transformation so that it might remain eternally identical to itself, would perhaps end by becoming nothing more than a dead formula, preserved as one preserves in a jar an animal whose form remains intact while everything that once made it alive has disappeared. Its imperfection in transmission would therefore be at once its danger and the condition of its continuation.
I understand then that the question of ownership becomes more troubling still. If the person in whom a thought appears is not its absolute creator, what exactly does he possess? He can certainly work on it. He can give it a language, a form, a precision it had never possessed before. He can lead it into regions where no one before him had taken it. He may even devote his life to it. But does any of this give him a right over what it will become after him? I am no longer so sure. Or, at least, I no longer know how to believe it with the same simplicity.
To have thought something would confer no particular right over all the future transformations of that thought. The person in whom it appears may accompany it for a time, lend it his voice, his intelligence, even his errors, and then it enters other circuits, encounters other languages, other memories, other resistances. It continues. Perhaps this is even how certain important ideas can be recognised: not because they remain eternally faithful to the person who formulated them, but because they become capable of continuing without him.
And suddenly that sentence troubles me more than everything else. Because I no longer know whether I am still speaking only about ideas.
Before me, the notebooks remain open. The Moon Child, Lucian, Igniatius, Don Carotte seem each to have written from a different bank, and yet their rivers meet here, on this table where I thought I could separate them neatly, recover their sources, determine their lines of descent, decide who had received what from whom.
Between two pages, a parrot is looking at me. Were it not for its status as an image, I could almost ask it where it comes from. But I can already imagine its answer, or perhaps I have read it somewhere and forgotten that I did, and I would then no longer know whether that answer was its own or mine. The river, for its part, never asked the water from which mountain it had come before carrying it away towards the sea.
