I had always believed that expression came afterward. After thought, after emotion, after perception. I am beginning to discover that it starts much earlier, in that invisible layer where the world first begins to take hold of us. Painters call it a ground, or a priming coat. It reveals nothing yet... and yet it prepares everything. Perhaps my body is nothing other than this silent preparation. I am not an image. I am, before all else, that upon which images first learn to hold.
Excerpt from Igniatius' Notebooks
Where we discover that, while Lucian, at his own peril, explores the astonishing places that appear in Igniatius' drawings and notebooks, Félix is not trying to prove anything. He discovers by writing. His many slow detours do not delay thought; they become its very rhythm... where the sentence circles its object only so that it may appear more fully. Here, Félix does not set forth a theory of expression... he himself undergoes the experience of what it means to express.
Félix's Notebook
At times I find myself thinking that certain words have waited for centuries before meeting someone who might finally allow them to say what they had always known. They remain there among the most ordinary of words, worn smooth by everyday conversation, polished like pebbles gathered so often that no one any longer looks at them, until one day one of them, almost despite us, ceases merely to speak about things and begins instead to let them appear. It seems to me today that the word expression belongs to this strange family. I had always understood it as nothing more than the act of saying what one thinks; yet, after these past hours spent before these drawings, I have the feeling that I had never truly come close to its meaning, as though the word itself had long been watching me before I finally began to return its gaze.
I found myself tracing its origin, not out of any taste for erudition, but because the word still seemed to resist me, as though it guarded within itself a memory that ordinary usage had almost entirely covered over. Exprimere: to press out. The image is so concrete that it borders on the crude—the olive slowly yielding its oil, the grape giving birth to wine—and yet it has not ceased accompanying me ever since. For it is not simply a matter of bringing forth something that was already there, as though one were taking a hidden object from a box... something changes at the very moment it appears. Wine is no longer the grape. Oil is no longer the olive. What is expressed does not merely leave its envelope; it becomes other by becoming visible.
I begin to wonder whether we are mistaken whenever we believe we are expressing a thought that has already been formed. Perhaps the thought does not yet exist. Perhaps it is waiting precisely for expression before it can begin to become what it will be. Merleau-Ponty's intuition returns to me, though I no longer know whether I am reading him or pursuing him beyond himself: expression does not translate thought; it brings thought into being. As I write these lines, I understand less clearly what I meant than when I first sat down before this page... and yet I understand more deeply what is coming into existence beneath my hand. A strange paradox: it is not because I know that I write; it is because I write that a still unformed knowledge begins to make its way, searching for a gaze.
The drawings spread out before me leave me with the same impression. For a long time I looked at them as the consequences of an intention, as though a pre-existing thought had simply settled onto the paper. Today I find myself almost suspecting the opposite. What if these drawings expressed their author before their author himself knew who he was? I do not merely mean that they represent him... they bring him into being. They do not recount what he thought; they gradually become the place where his thought learns to recognize itself. Perhaps this is why it has become so difficult for me to distinguish the one who draws from the one who looks, the one who tells the story from the one who is being told. As the images multiply, each seems to emerge from himself like a still unfinished form seeking its own light.
I then notice that this movement belongs not only to the drawings. It belongs first of all to the body itself. We constantly speak of the body as that which expresses, yet perhaps we ought to reverse the order of things. The body is not merely that which expresses; it is that which is continually being expressed. It never exists wholly within a motionless present. Every encounter imperceptibly alters a way of walking; every expectation changes the manner in which one's eyes are raised. We believe we recognize a face because its features remain relatively unchanged... yet what we recognize is never a fixed form, but the continuity of a metamorphosis.
It begins to seem to me that the human body may be nothing other than an image that never ceases becoming an image of itself. Not an image viewed from without, like a portrait hanging upon a wall, but an image that continues to produce itself while it is being seen. Perhaps this is what has moved me for so long without my ever being able to name it whenever I contemplate certain drawings: they do not show a character... they continue his appearance. They do not describe Don Carotte; they continue bringing him into being. They do not represent the Moon Child; they silently prolong the dream through which he gradually becomes the Moon Child. Even the parrots, to whom I had naively assigned the role of narrators, now seem to me to be themselves expressed by the very story they believe they are merely commenting upon... or telling. They become as they speak. As though the story were not their work, but their origin.
This thought has led me toward another that surprises me even more. I had always regarded an image as something that preserves a moment; I am beginning to believe that what it preserves instead is a becoming. A true image does not retain time: it retains time's capacity to continue. That is why certain works seem to breathe more deeply today than when they were first created. They never wholly belong to their own age because they never cease expressing that which, within them, had not yet finished appearing. They remain open like a spring whose waters are renewed each time a gaze returns to it.
Then I understand—or at least it seems to me that I do—why I have always distrusted definitive explanations. To explain often means to assume that expression has reached its conclusion. Yet nothing seems more foreign to what these drawings accomplish before me. They do not say, "This is what you must understand." They exert upon the gaze a slow, almost imperceptible pressure that compels something within me to search for a form it did not yet possess. It is not I who interpret them... they gradually express a region of myself that had until then remained silent. Perhaps this is what it truly means to look: to allow the image to continue its work within us long after our eyes have turned away from it.
At last I realize that there exists a hidden kinship between two words I had always thought unrelated: impression and expression. Perhaps an entire life unfolds between these two opposite pressures. The world impresses itself upon us with a patience whose depth we scarcely ever measure; then, sometimes years later, without our knowing what event has finally loosened the grip, something at last begins to express itself. We believe we are creating... perhaps we are merely responding to a very ancient impression that has long been waiting for the right moment to find its passage.
Then a thought crosses my mind, so quietly that I scarcely dare grant it full assent: it may well be that the true opposite of expression is not silence. Silence, on the contrary, often prepares it. Its true opposite would rather be compression—that way in which habits, certainties, and definitions sometimes keep things imprisoned within a form that still prevents them from being born. Expression slowly loosens that embrace. It adds nothing to the world; it simply restores to it the possibility of continuing to appear. And perhaps that is why a true image always remains younger than its age... it does not preserve the past; it stubbornly continues that work of birth through which the present itself learns, once again, how to become present.
