By earth we perceive earth,
by water, water,
by air, the divine air,
by fire, destructive fire;
by Love, Love,
and by Strife, baneful Strife.
Empedocles (Fragment B109, Diels–Kranz numbering)
Where what is being spoken of is probably not limited to human feelings. What is said here may suggest that we recognize certain forces in the world because they are already at work within us.
— I no longer see the Moon Child wandering through his ruined theatre... and where have Pinocchio the Other, Daemon, Don Carrot, and all the others disappeared to?
— Our master says that they too are somewhere in the Archipelago...
— Could you tell me something about it that he has not already told me?
— Terra Archipelagos... upon which, incidentally, the theatre—or perhaps the circus—takes place, is a shifting archipelago, as though torn from the foundation of the world by some subterranean wrath.
— You are frightening me...
— A constellation of black, grey, ochre, and pallid islands, scattered across the ocean like the slag of a geological dream. As one approaches, their shapes reveal themselves to be unstable: jagged ridges, swollen domes, ruptured plateaus. Each island seems at once ancient and in the act of being born, frozen and yet throbbing beneath the rough crust of its surface.
— None of this sounds particularly cheerful. In fact, it makes me tremble...
— Indeed. The principal island, if such a thing can be said to exist—for they are forever changing—stands apart in its austerity. It possesses none of those verdant landscapes where life flows abundantly. It is a mass of dark basaltic rock, sometimes vitrified by fire. Its ground is uneven, often sharp, bristling with scoria in which one can still discern the traces of the eruption that shaped it. The rocks, dull black or iron-grey, are cracked and striated with fissures exhaling warm vapours, sometimes sulphurous. They carry that smell of eggs, rusted iron, and wet ash that one breathes in the volcanic crevices of the Andes.
— And the sea?
— The surrounding sea is a mineral blue, often stained by black streaks: recent flows of ash, or currents carrying organic debris. In some places the water literally boils, stirred by submarine geothermal activity. Abnormally high temperatures are measured there, and sometimes there appear sudden bubbles, smoking islets, or strange schools of fish hanging perfectly motionless.
— Without wishing to insist, all this seems exceedingly gloomy!
— And yet... at the heart of this chaos, on certain islands, life insinuates itself. Seabirds nest there: blue-footed boobies, frigatebirds, gulls whose wings are dusted with salt. Some cry out, others glide in silence, but all participate in the same organic choreography. They deposit seeds brought from elsewhere into the fissures, enrich the soil with their guano, and trace furrows through the air like suspended prayers. Yet most of these islands, in all their austerity, become something other than relics...
— Go on! What would they be if not relics?
— A beginning. These islands are not places of forgetting but of awakening. A raw laboratory where matter organizes itself, struggles, fails, and begins again.
They throb within a geological silence...
— A silence deeper than the night.
— Listen to that breathing silence!
— Exactly! There are words that do not describe the world but summon it anew. Words in which language no longer merely designates but awakens the sleeping forces of matter. This landscape—dense, mineral, uncompromisingly free of the picturesque—belongs to that writing of beginnings, that geopoetics of origins touching upon what Rimbaud once called, in a strange flash of insight...
— I know it: “eternity, the sea gone with the sun.”
— We are not visiting an island. We are visiting a heartbeat. A primitive pulse torn from the bowels of the globe, still warm from creation. Our master does not hand us a map; he plunges us into an epicentre. Here the ground is not scenery. It is an organism. It cracks, it breathes, it exhales vapours...
— ...as though the world had never fully cooled, as though the earth's crust were only a thin skin stretched over a creature still alive.
— Precisely.
— And what does one see?
— An archipelago adrift from reality, a constellation of ashes, blackened islands that are not refuges but laboratories. Life does not flow there as it does in easy tales of exotic wonder. It hesitates. It stammers. Like matter itself, it attempts to take shape. The text captures that rare moment when the living and the mineral, fire and salt, silence and cry still coexist in an unstable equation.
Hence that strange tension: each island, we are told, seems “ancient and in the process of being born.” There lies the beating heart of the passage, suspended between ruin and genesis. One might mistake it for a post-apocalyptic landscape were it not for those characters who appear and disappear along with the circus that shelters them, a discreet wellspring of hope. Nothing is finished. Nothing is hopeless. Nature, in its roughest form, is practising itself anew. It fails. It begins again. It persists. It is not an Eden, but it is a promise.
— And the sea?
— The sea is not a surface. It is a womb.
— It boils, it smokes, it gives birth. And it is there, precisely, that our master says Rimbaud's line finds its echoing chamber: “eternity is the sea gone with the sun.” For that Rimbaldian eternity is neither peace nor stillness, he says. It is the perpetual movement of elements, the collision of stars and waters, light fertilizing the abyss. Our master understood this: the sea is not merely blue—it is incandescent; it is not smooth...
— ...it is in struggle.
— The island then becomes the first word of a language not yet articulated.
— A geological syllable of a poem larger than humanity. It is not a place of forgetting but of awakening, not because one finds answers there, but because everything there remains to be invented.
— We are not standing before a landscape but before a beginning that never ends...
— The silence one breathes there is not empty...
— It is full of the future.
— It throbs...
— ...and it dreams... through those who, like us, journey there.
