Two men in the tent

At first glance

At first glance, the image seemed nothing more than a play of shapes: a red canvas theater, ropes, two figures caught in the swirling motion of long green roots—or tentacles, depending on one’s mood.
A naïve, almost childlike scene of adventure, something I might have passed over with no more attention than one gives to an illustration in a children’s tale. The vivid colors, the bold lines, the contrast between the red background and the green organic forms—all seemed to argue for a simple visual pleasure, blunt and almost decorative.
And yet, there was this detail: the two men wore the same flowing garments.
A navy-blue frock coat, its sleeves and long skirts turned back to reveal a pink lining.
One had a brown beard, the other white.
And—something I hadn’t noticed at first—it seemed they were looking at each other, though their heads were not quite turned toward one another.
That reciprocity of gaze changed everything.
The image opened like a book.
I was no longer facing a scene of shipwreck or some maritime circus, but an enigma of time itself.
First reading: confusion
I wanted first to understand the space.
Those masts, those ropes, the red draperies: a tent, perhaps a circus tent.
The roots—since one had to choose between sea and land—seemed to invade the enclosed space, winding around the poles as if to choke them. Everything pointed to a struggle: the human against the vegetal, form against flux.
I told myself the scene was about chaos, about the loss of control, about a world where nature reclaims its rights. Man, fragile, caught in forces beyond him. A classic, reasonable reading.
Yet it left me unsatisfied—like an explanation too short for a dream too long.
Something was missing: a link between the two men. Why two? Why identical, yet apart?
I noted, without yet understanding, that the green of the roots was not menacing—it had the gentle hue of aquatic plants, not that of a monster.

The fracture: the gaze

That’s when everything shifted.
Observing the position of their faces, I couldn’t make sense of it… until I imagined myself in their place. Then I realized that, just like me, though they seemed to look elsewhere, they truly saw each other.
One, cast upward toward the infinity of time, seemed to recognize below what he was to become—or perhaps the reverse.
The other, walking within the arms of the roots, lifted his eyes toward him, as one looks at a living memory.
That exchange of gazes—or rather, those exchanges, since mine had entered among them—fractured my interpretation.
The image did not depict a struggle, but a meeting.
Not two individuals, but the same man at two ages, caught within the living matter of his own time.
At that moment, my critic’s gaze turned upon itself: I felt that it was not only those two men who were looking at each other. I, too, was caught in their loop.
At that moment, my critic’s gaze turned upon itself: I felt that it was not only those two men who were looking at each other. I, too, was caught in their loop.
The young man, perhaps, was my own earlier gaze—the one that seeks to understand, to explain, to impose meaning.
The old man, the one I might become someday, accepting that meaning is never complete.

The roots: pathways of memory

The roots were no longer traps.
They stretched fluidly, guiding the eye toward the background and beyond the frame—outside the walls.
They seemed to lead somewhere, not downward, but toward a kind of receding center.
I remembered that the roots of a tree always spread away from the trunk; they never return to their point of origin. Paradoxically, it is by moving outward that they nourish the place from which they came.
I remembered that the roots of a tree always spread away from the trunk; they never return to their point of origin. Paradoxically, it is by moving outward that they nourish the place from which they came.
There was a subtle truth there: to seek one’s roots is to accept that they never lead back to the origin, but toward dispersion, divergence.
The young man, suspended in air, is still searching for a center.
The older one, floating above the roots, seems to understand: the origin is not a point, but a network, a shifting geography.
I felt this idea spreading within me like those green lines through the drawing.
I was no longer analyzing the image—it was exploring me, enveloping me.
Perhaps this is what it means to interpret: to be traversed by what one contemplates, as those roots traverse the tent.

The circus: the space of the world

It remained to understand the setting: that circus, or ship, built of ropes and red canvas.
At first I took it for a backdrop, a visual accident. But in truth, it was the key to the image.
The circus is never fixed—neither in place nor in time. It is built, dismantled, moved elsewhere.
At each performance it is reborn, identical and yet different.
It is the very image of existence: ex-sistere, to stand outside oneself, to be always displaced.
The two men live inside this tent like actors aware of their scene.
Their lives are but a succession of assemblies and disassemblies: mental structures, certainties, faces raised up to keep from dissolving.
This shifting space is a metaphor for the self—constantly rebuilt, constantly precarious.
The circus changes towns as consciousness changes states.
With each dismantling, one believes everything lost, and yet everything begins again—elsewhere, almost the same.
The two men live inside this tent like actors aware of their scene.
Their lives are but a succession of assemblies and disassemblies: mental structures, certainties, faces raised up to keep from dissolving.
This shifting space is a metaphor for the self—constantly rebuilt, constantly precarious.
The circus changes towns as consciousness changes states.
With each dismantling, one believes everything lost, and yet everything begins again—elsewhere, almost the same.
Then I understood: the critic I was, the one who thought he “knew,” was only a temporary big top, a provisional version of myself—raised for the duration of a single gaze.

The double and the observer

I couldn’t help thinking of Borges—not only the erudite, ironic Borges of infinite libraries, but the rarer one who writes of the encounter with oneself: that instant when an old man crosses paths with his younger double in a Buenos Aires alley and realizes their whole life is contained in that silent exchange.
The painting before me seemed to prolong that moment:
the two men sense each other’s presence, see and recognize one another, but cannot reach.
Their distance is not spatial, it is temporal.
Between them flows the green matter of time—fluid and alive, not linear but rhizomatic.
They can meet only in the gaze of the one who observes them: the invisible third, the spectator, or the reader.
Thus, in contemplating them, I united them against their will. Their eyes met through mine.

And in a way, I became the true 

Thus, in contemplating them, I united them against their will. Their eyes met through mine.
And in a way, I became the true big top of their scene—the mental tent where their exchange could take place.

The Inner change of the gaze

As I write these lines, I realize how much my reading has changed.
I entered the image as one enters a story thought to be simple: a shipwreck, a struggle, chaos.
And I emerged from it in another state: that of a man aware that chaos is his own vital motion.
The roots are no longer threatening.
They are what connect us—to others, to the past, to the future, to the ground we never truly inhabit.
The circus is no longer a backdrop: it is the world itself, erected and dismantled at every instant of consciousness.
And these two men are no longer figures of adventure—they are the two poles of a single gaze, the before and after of a single illumination.
Had I seen this image years ago, I would have read it as a scene of catastrophe.
Today I see in it a respiratory system, a symbolic organism, a breath through which everything circulates: memory, time, fear, tenderness.

The gaze as root

Now I understand that the image was not naïvely simple—it was merely too direct to be seen at once.
It shows nothing other than what happens when a man discovers his double—when he observes himself becoming what he already is.
The roots, the waves, the ropes, the red canvases: all are but the texture of time.
And the two men, caught within that web, no longer seek to escape.
They know the only path that leads to the origin is the one that 
It shows nothing other than what happens when a man discovers his double—when he observes himself becoming what he already is.
The roots, the waves, the ropes, the red canvases: all are but the texture of time.
And the two men, caught within that web, no longer seek to escape.
They know the only path that leads to the origin is the one that moves away from it.
To exist is to keep raising and dismantling the same circus, across ages, places, and faces.
Their mutual gaze is not one of sentimental recognition, but of silent understanding:
Their mutual gaze is not one of sentimental recognition, but of silent understanding:
“You are me, in another tent, beneath another sky.”
And I, the observer, slowly close the book—aware that I, too, have been traversed by what they say without words.
I leave the image as one leaves a mirror, carrying with me the feeling that something, behind me, continues to look.