“For, within the daylight, can something appear to us that would not be day, something that, in an atmosphere of light and clarity, would represent the shudder of dread from which day emerged?”
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
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Where it is said that a passage also transforms the one who follows it… To read, to look, to understand is already to become otherwise… Thus the word “becoming” finally comes to designate as much the movement of things as that other, more discreet movement by which the traveller himself is displaced.
Félix’s Notebook
I wanted to understand how something becomes by passing, and I am beginning to see that this question probably cannot remain external to the one who asks it, for if passage transforms what passes through it, why should it spare the one who follows, the one who reads, the one who looks, the one who returns to his own certainties with eyes already altered by what he has just encountered?
Perhaps that is why I return so often to this word without ever managing to exhaust it, because each time I think I can make it the object of my reflection, it turns slightly and forces me to consider the position from which I am looking at it, as though becoming, mistakenly heard as coming from, no longer referred only to the movement of the things I am trying to follow, but also to that more discreet transformation taking place within me as I follow them, and which now makes me incapable of finding again, exactly, the place from which I set out.
I could certainly go back to the first pages of my notes, recover my formulations, recognise my reasoning, and yet the person who would read them now would already no longer be quite the person who wrote them, not because some considerable event had separated him from himself, but because each of these minute passages, each of these juxtapositions, each of these almost imperceptible shifts in the question would have done its work, until what once seemed self-evident had become strange.
And I wonder whether this is not precisely how something becomes: not in the crash of a change that would allow us to say clearly that there was a before and then an after, but in this continuous coming in which what comes never ceases to carry with it that from which it comes, while being imperceptibly transformed by the paths it takes, until the moment when, looking back, it discovers that the place it came from is no longer quite the same, not because that place itself has changed, but because it is no longer standing in the same place from which to see it.
And so I keep the word together with its error, perhaps even because of it, and I let it resonate without trying, for the moment, to decide exactly what it means: becoming, coming from, coming from a place that itself came from elsewhere, passing through what transforms it, arriving somewhere without ever entirely ceasing to come, then turning back towards that from which it came and discovering that this return, too, is part of becoming.
And if, despite everything, I wished to retain something from this long detour, it would perhaps not be a definition, but a question which I am no longer certain is addressed only to the things I examine: when something comes to us, what does the passage do to what is coming, and what does this coming, when it reaches us, begin to make of us?
Félix
