Where one hears Igniatius's voice, lost among the islands and one of his drawings, growing steadier as the islands themselves become ever less so...
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Igniatius's Notebook
I could not say at what moment the fire had left the island to enter into me. I am not speaking of its heat, which could never have crossed such an expanse of sea, but of another way of burning, slower, perhaps older, which seemed to have been waiting for a very long time for something, in that smoke rising tirelessly toward a sky whose very breathing it was beginning to alter, finally to consent to give it a face—as though the flames had never aspired to consume the trees, but only to teach the eye to recognize what it had more or less ceased to see.
The words I had encountered a few days earlier in some misplaced notebook then returned to me with the peculiar persistence of certain travelers who, after disappearing from our memory, nevertheless find without difficulty the way back to their own voice... or to ours.
Convective column... pyroconvection...
I scarcely knew these words and simply let them pass. I made no effort to retain what they had meant when I first read their definitions. Those definitions, like what lay before my eyes, were already fading. The words, however, continued on their way. They rose as the smoke itself was rising, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps there exist words—or even languages—that were never invented to explain the world, but to accompany certain of its movements until they find within us a chamber spacious enough to continue their ascent.
It was then that the drawings, with no presence other than my memory, began to breathe.
For a long time I had believed them filed away among those finished things whose very place in a cupboard one eventually forgets, though they continue, in our absence, a life of which we know nothing, like closed books that go on reading themselves without the aid of any reader, waiting only for an event to grant them, if not permission, then at least the opportunity to open their pages once more.
In one of those drawings in particular, I no longer saw the characters first. I saw the book.
Almost at the center of the image—which I had, or perhaps I myself had, drawn—that book lay open. I do not know why this obvious fact, this open book, which I had drawn so many times without ever pausing over it, moved me more deeply than anything else.
An open book, whether true or not, promises more than a reading.
It already accepts—perhaps against its will—that a part of itself escapes it... or has already escaped. It renounces—or must renounce—the attempt to hold on to its own pages.
It offers itself to the wind with the unreasonable trust of things that know their loss still belongs to their faithfulness.
Only then did I notice that it—or rather its pages—sheltered a hearth whose growing flame was exploring the entire image.
How could I have overlooked it for so long?
The flames were not falling upon the book.
They were being born from it.
Just as, upon the ocean at that same moment, the waves and the flames rose toward one another in a dance so ancient and so gentle that it became impossible to tell whether the fire was imitating the sea or whether the sea was silently continuing a conflagration that had begun long before water itself was born.
I wanted to choose between the two elements.
Unable to distinguish the dancers, my gaze refused.
The intertwined waves continued their slow turning.
The flames answered them without ever seeking to overcome them.
They seemed to belong to that same breath from which the Archipelago had perhaps received—or laid down, on some very ancient day—its first stone.
Entwined myself with my own dancing memory, I remained for a long while before that hesitation.
Or perhaps it was the hesitation that remained before me.
I was no longer looking only at the island.
My gaze had already moved away from myself.
Something was passing from the smoke into the drawings with a naturalness that troubled me more deeply than all their resemblances.
I had never drawn that fire.
Of that I was certain.
And yet it became increasingly difficult to believe that the flames rising today above the sea were foreign to those which, for so many years, had continued to rise between the pages of that book I had stubbornly believed belonged to me.
Upon the book—as here—the characters in turn finally appeared, not as memories appear when they return from the past, but like those islands which, on certain mornings, seem to emerge from the mist although they have never ceased to be there.
I saw the child advancing.
I scarcely looked at the two beings waiting for him.
My attention remained held by that simple movement carrying his whole body toward the little world suspended before him, with the silent confidence of those who do not yet know that one may lose one's direction without ever leaving the path one follows.
I thought the other two were about to stop him...
But they did nothing except dance.
They had no need to do otherwise.
As I continued to watch them, unable to tear my eyes away from their smiles, radiant with I knew not what enchantment—still unable to tell whether they announced a joy to be shared or merely preserved the memory of some ancient wound—it seemed to me that certain detours never truly divert the one who walks...
They merely shift, almost imperceptibly, the world toward which he believed he was walking.
The thought passed through me as a breath passes between two flames.
Then it vanished.
Meanwhile the fire—the real fire—continued to rise.
The waves continued to rise as well.
And I remained there for a long time, suspended between water and fire, unable to decide whether I was watching an island burn, or whether the drawings, to which I had once believed I had given birth, had at last discovered the landscape they had always been waiting for in order to begin recognizing me.
It already accepts—perhaps against its will—that a part of itself escapes it... or has already escaped. It renounces—or must renounce—the attempt to hold on to its own pages.
It offers itself to the wind with the unreasonable trust of things that know their loss still belongs to their faithfulness.
Only then did I notice that it—or rather its pages—sheltered a hearth whose growing flame was exploring the entire image.
How could I have overlooked it for so long?
The flames were not falling upon the book.
They were being born from it.
Just as, upon the ocean at that same moment, the waves and the flames rose toward one another in a dance so ancient and so gentle that it became impossible to tell whether the fire was imitating the sea or whether the sea was silently continuing a conflagration that had begun long before water itself was born.
I wanted to choose between the two elements.
Unable to distinguish the dancers, my gaze refused.
The intertwined waves continued their slow turning.
The flames answered them without ever seeking to overcome them.
They seemed to belong to that same breath from which the Archipelago had perhaps received—or laid down, on some very ancient day—its first stone.
Entwined myself with my own dancing memory, I remained for a long while before that hesitation.
Or perhaps it was the hesitation that remained before me.
I was no longer looking only at the island.
My gaze had already moved away from myself.
Something was passing from the smoke into the drawings with a naturalness that troubled me more deeply than all their resemblances.
I had never drawn that fire.
Of that I was certain.
And yet it became increasingly difficult to believe that the flames rising today above the sea were foreign to those which, for so many years, had continued to rise between the pages of that book I had stubbornly believed belonged to me.
Upon the book—as here—the characters in turn finally appeared, not as memories appear when they return from the past, but like those islands which, on certain mornings, seem to emerge from the mist although they have never ceased to be there.
I saw the child advancing.
I scarcely looked at the two beings waiting for him.
My attention remained held by that simple movement carrying his whole body toward the little world suspended before him, with the silent confidence of those who do not yet know that one may lose one's direction without ever leaving the path one follows.
I thought the other two were about to stop him...
But they did nothing except dance.
They had no need to do otherwise.
As I continued to watch them, unable to tear my eyes away from their smiles, radiant with I knew not what enchantment—still unable to tell whether they announced a joy to be shared or merely preserved the memory of some ancient wound—it seemed to me that certain detours never truly divert the one who walks...
They merely shift, almost imperceptibly, the world toward which he believed he was walking.
The thought passed through me as a breath passes between two flames.
Then it vanished.
Meanwhile the fire—the real fire—continued to rise.
The waves continued to rise as well.
And I remained there for a long time, suspended between water and fire, unable to decide whether I was watching an island burn, or whether the drawings, to which I had once believed I had given birth, had at last discovered the landscape they had always been waiting for in order to begin recognizing me.
