“The visible around us seems to rest in itself. It is as if it had a kind of depth, a background that is nothing other than itself. But at the same time, it is not closed in upon itself. It is open, it calls, it refers beyond itself.
What we see is never given in its fullness. There is always a hidden side, a withdrawal, an absence at the very heart of presence.
The visible is thus both what shows itself and what withdraws. It is not a thing, but a modulation of being, a way for being to give itself without ever fully delivering itself.
Thus, to see is not to grasp an object, but to enter into a field where the visible and the invisible intersect.
What is given never exhausts what is.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Lucian tries to bring some order into his thoughts.
Lucian’s Notebook
The whale, constantly changing form, has become Leviathan. It is no longer merely a presence in the world. It precedes the world as we perceive it. It is like its obscure precondition, the still indistinct matter in which forms, boundaries, and laws are not yet fixed. To say that it is a pre-world is to say that it does not belong to the stabilized order of things, but to that moment when the world is not yet separated from what, strictly speaking, exceeds it… what undoes its limits.
In ancient traditions, Leviathan is not simply one creature among others. It is often linked to primordial waters, to what precedes the distinction between land and sea, between form and chaos. But here, this chaos, the one brought by Igniatius and his images, is not pure disorder. It is already, like the whale, structured by memory, striated, crossed by lines. It is not formless: it is in the process of forming.
Thus, the whale that appears here is not only archaic. It is generative. It contains within itself the conditions for the emergence of the world, but in a form not yet distributed, not yet stabilized. It is a world that has not yet chosen its contours. A world that has not yet separated the inside from the outside.
That is why its scars are so important. They do not merely recount what has happened to it. They are the first differentiations, the first lines that cut, that trace, that open paths within indistinction. Before being memory, they are already geography in the making.
Leviathan thus becomes a pre-landscape.
In this context, the red walkway takes on a radically different dimension. It is no longer simply a bridge over a body. It is a human attempt to trace a line within what is not yet a stabilized world. It is a line of orientation within the pre-world.
But this line does not lead toward a peaceful place. It leads toward a fire beneath the water.
This fire is paradoxical only if one remains within the ordinary order of the elements. For in the depths of the sea there exist phenomena that defy such oppositions: hydrothermal vents, volcanic fissures, submarine lava. There, fire does not oppose water. It works within it. It does not only destroy: it engenders, it transforms, it brings forth new forms of life. The fire beneath the water is thus a very precise image: that of an active principle of transformation within what seems to extinguish it.
In this image, the fire may not be directly visible, but everything leads toward it. The pale fumes that descend, or rise… everything indicates a hidden activity, an intensity that is not at the surface. This fire is in the depths, as if the truth of the world were not given in what is visible, but in what silently works beneath.
The walkway is therefore not a simple path. It is an approach toward the place where the elements cease to be opposed. A place where water burns and where fire does not consume but transforms.
As for the wreck of the ship, it introduces another temporality: that of the already constituted human world, already navigated, already organized, but which has failed. The ship is the instrument of the ordered world: navigation, orientation, commerce, exploration. It presupposes that the sea is a measurable, traversable space, something that can be mapped. And yet here, the ship is broken. Its mast still stands, but as a remnant. Its planks are undone. It is no longer a means of passage. It has become the trace of a failure.
And this failure has a precise meaning: the human world, with its instruments, does not hold within the pre-world. It cannot remain intact there. It is disarticulated.
Leviathan, as pre-world, disorganizes established forms. But it does not annihilate them entirely. It transforms them into vestiges, into remnants, into materials. The ship has not disappeared. It persists, but in the form of debris. It too becomes a scar of the human world upon the body of the more ancient world.
Thus, three regimes coexist within these images:
Leviathan as pre-world, living and memorial mass.
The fire beneath the water as active principle, silent transformation.
The wreck of the ship as the trace of an already constituted world, but undone.
And between them, the walkway.
This walkway may be the only thing that does not fully belong to any of these regimes. It is neither purely archaic, nor purely human, nor purely elemental. It acts as an attempt. It is the fragile gesture by which something seeks to hold itself between these levels.
It guarantees nothing and promises no salvation. It connects… provisionally.
And the one who stands upon it… or has passed across it… is not simply in balance. He is in a far more radical situation: he advances within a world not yet fixed, above a memory that might reopen, toward a fire that transforms whatever approaches it.
One might say, in order to tighten without enclosing, that this image does not represent a landscape, but a moment in which the world is still in the process of being made, and in which the human appears not as a master, but as a mere passer-by…
