1. What rises again (English version)

 

I expected nothing.
It was a prestigious gallery—like so many others—with white walls, polished words, and carefully measured silences. Between a mute neon light and an abstract video, there was, almost by mistake, an image.
A large, colorful drawing: a sea, an enormous monster, violet tentacles, and, tiny, a lone figure standing on a red boat.
I stopped.
No mention of an artist or origin was written on the small label beside it.
This image—seemingly naive—held me there. I didn’t yet know it was going to swallow me whole.
The next day, I went back.
I looked at it again, took a photo, and a few days later returned once more to see it—and to buy a limited print, signed in a completely illegible hand.
It was as if the image wanted to continue some kind of conversation.
Maybe I’m exaggerating—surely I am—but it seemed to have chosen me.
Looking back, I think I stood before it as the figure stood before the monster.

I showed the reproduction to a friend of mine, a psychiatrist.
I wanted his help understanding why this “childlike” image had taken hold of me—almost haunted me.
He took it, studied it in silence for a long while, then said calmly:
— You said there’s a boat. Are you sure it is one?
— What else could it be?
— Rocks, perhaps. And if it is a boat, it’s sinking. Which means the scene is a shipwreck.
That one sentence shifted everything.
It was no longer the story of a struggle, as I had first imagined, but of an after.
An after that was speaking—or trying to speak.
The figure wasn’t a hero facing a monster, but a castaway.
Otherwise, how had he ended up there, alone, in that vastness?
An after that was speaking—or trying to speak.
The figure wasn’t a hero facing a monster, but a castaway.
Otherwise, how had he ended up there, alone, in that vastness?
My friend went on, half to himself:
— Look at the monster’s tongue. It may not be a weapon… no… yes… it’s a flame. A tongue of fire. This Leviathan—because I think that’s what it is—doesn’t roar. It speaks.
My friend—perfectly nonbelieving, as I am—and yet a keen student of art history, mentioned the Acts of the Apostles: tongues of fire, the descent of speech, the communication of chaos.*
— The monster, here, might be trying to say something. That fire could be the primitive logos—the word before words.
As he spoke, the image suddenly became a scene of revelation.
It wasn’t showing—it was speaking.
And I understood that it spoke all the more clearly because I could not yet hear it.
And I understood that it spoke all the more clearly because I could not yet hear it.

To be continued…

* In the Eastern tradition, Pentecost is a major theme in iconography.
Byzantine icons show the apostles seated in a semicircle, often arranged like on a throne or a raised platform—symbols of unity and the fullness of the Church.
At the center, an empty space or a veiled figure represents the world—often an old man crowned and called Cosmos, holding a cloth filled with scrolls symbolizing the nations yet to be evangelized.
And above each apostle, a small flame:
a stylized “tongue of fire,” slender, golden or red, descending from the upper part of the icon—where a celestial half-circle represents the heavens, the manifestation of God.
This fire does not burn—it illuminates.
It is the uncreated light, the radiance of the Holy Spirit.
In Orthodox tradition, it is called the Taboric Light, the same light that transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor.
Byzantine artists seek less to depict a realistic scene than to make the invisible visible:
the fire is not a physical flame, but the spiritual clarity that surrounds the apostles.