“…he had to admit that his lucidity, his stubborn attachment to ‘rational judgment,’ no longer led anywhere, for although until now this town and, by extension, the world had lost none of their cruel reality, from now on that cruel, down-to-earth reality seemed to have evaporated, apparently beyond recall.
There was no point in trying otherwise, he had to admit it: he would no longer be able to get by with the subtle cleverness of his ‘Eszter-like’ formulas, the rhetoric he had begun to elaborate, and, more generally, the superiority of reason had here lost all meaning. Likewise, the meaning of words (like the light of a flashlight whose batteries had run down) had faded away, while the object to which that meaning had been attached had collapsed under the burden of the past fifty years, yielding instead to the implausible scenery of a Grand Guignol in which every sensible word and every rational thought had, in a bewildering fashion, lost their validity.”
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
Each character acts like a mast supporting a canvas larger than himself… then the whole structure is dismantled… and travels on… and then…
…everything reappears elsewhere… under another form… with the same figures… with other names. As though the story remained identical while constantly changing its location.
Perhaps that is also why Pinocchio the Other so often returns to my mind suspended from a detached trapeze. The trapeze belongs to the world of the circus… yet it has itself become detached from the big top.
It floats between two supports. Between two worlds.
Like a character who has left the story that sustained him while continuing to live according to its laws and contingencies.
I also notice that the circus maintains a singular relationship with falling. It shows it… but proves nothing. It challenges it and transforms it. The acrobat seems to conquer gravity… the tightrope walker appears to suspend it, while the trapeze artist gives the impression of flying. Yet each one works with the fall… never against it.
The whole art consists in giving it a form.
Here I rediscover the same intuition as in running. The man who runs never ceases to fall… He merely learns how to fall differently.
And suddenly I understand why the clown belongs to this family as well. We imagine that he merely brings about laughter… or provokes it. Yet laughter is often born from a collapse or a fall resulting from the awkwardness of a world that has lost its balance. The clown staggers and stumbles where others wish to walk straight. He reveals the fragility of supports and the fleeting stability of movement. He reminds us that all dignity remains close to disaster. The expression says it plainly: one can die of laughter. A strange formula. As though laughter already carried within it the trace of what it exorcises.
The circus then seems far less distant from death than people believe. It advances alongside it, as caravans advance alongside their shadows. Death accompanies every act… every leap… every aerial movement… every burst of laughter.
It remains invisible and yet present. The spectator feels it… the acrobat feels it too. It is precisely this proximity that makes the miracle visible.
The circus transforms risk into an apparition… when it is not the reverse. And precisely because I have this inversion in mind, I wonder whether stories proceed in a similar way. They erect their tents upon temporary lands and stretch a few ropes between the visible and the invisible. They set figures in motion who fall, rise again, reveal themselves… a little… reappear… then, mysteriously, take to the road once more.
I then return to a question that has accompanied me from the beginning.
Where does this story wish to go?
Today the question seems poorly framed. I should rather ask:
Where does this story wish… where can it… find support?
For it seems less oriented toward a destination than toward a place of incarnation. A place where it might take place.
And yet, as soon as I write these words, a reservation appears. For a story that had entirely found its place would perhaps become motionless.
Would it become a monument?
This idea too crosses my mind. Yet everything I receive from Lucian resists monumentality. Everything remains in motion… remains within passage… like an archipelago… a circus tent… a trapeze suspended between two grips… a foot… a step seeking its ground.
As though the being who falls were suddenly discovering its form within a fleeting body.
I close this notebook here with a strange impression. I still do not understand the deep meaning of this story… at least not sufficiently. I am only beginning to grasp a few fragments of it… and perhaps, above all, to understand what happens to me when I read it.
I gradually stop looking at the road.
I learn to look at where I place my feet.
