Irruption /english version

 

“Some sentences, certain passages written just after adolescence, seem to me now to be the product of the person I am today, formed by years and circumstances. I must admit that I am indeed the same as I was then. And yet, sensing that I have progressed greatly since what I once was, I ask myself: where is the progress, if I was already the same as I am today?

There is in all this a mystery that diminishes and oppresses me. A few days ago, a very short text from that distant past caused me a disconcerting impression. I remember clearly that my concern, even a relative one, for fine language does not go back beyond a few years. I found at the bottom of a drawer a much older text where that same concern appears in a very marked way. Clearly, I did not understand myself in the unfolding of my past: how could I have advanced toward what I already was?

How have I seen myself today when I did not know how to see myself then? And everything merges in a labyrinth where I lose myself, wandering on my own paths.

My thought slips into reverie, and I am certain that I have already written what I am writing at this moment. I remember. And I ask that which in me imagines itself to exist whether, in this Platonism of impressions, there is not another anamnesis, more oriented — another remembrance of a former life which would be only the remembrance of this one…

Of whom then, my God, am I thus the spectator? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between myself and myself?”

 

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, §213

 

 There are moments in analysis when the subject, without even being aware of it, lets fall from himself, like a garment too heavy or too old, one of the names that sustain him.

And the analysis that follows, if guided with enough tact, resembles the sensation one has when walking through a house in which a door, usually locked, has just opened by itself.

Today, Don Carotte… or rather Igniatius, for I can no longer call him otherwise in these notes, let that name slip with the frightened, almost vertiginous modesty of someone who says something without fully recognising it.
That name, which seems older than his own memory, returned to his lips with the kind of uncontrolled naturalness Lacan would have called “the irruption of the Other in the subject’s discourse.”

What struck me, what I try to fix here, in these pages which, once written, cannot lie, is the way this name, barely uttered, reactivated in him the scene of the storm.
Not the meteorological storm, but a primitive scene in which lightning and thunder are only the imaginary translation of another storm, more intimate, more human: that of a couple whose conjugal life, made of clashes and releases, must have echoed in his childhood as the human version of the sky’s convulsions.

As I listened to Igniatius speak of the light withdrawing from the world as if it feared disappointing the objects it abandoned, I could not help but think that this wavering, timid, almost polite light was perhaps the first voice he ever heard saying: “Something serious is coming.”

And the storm, with its swelling rumble and its flashes that suddenly expose what usually remains hidden, seemed to me nothing but the repetition, transposed into nature, of parental disputes in which voices rise, cut each other off, collide, search, lose themselves, cry out and moan like fractured fragments of broken storms.
The child, unable to make sense of adult words, had only the sounds of the sky to interpret the violence of the home.
And no doubt this is why nature, for him, put on so early the garments of the parental theatre.

But what touched me most, and what I believe forms one of the centres of his psychic economy, is this gesture, so simple and yet so abyssal, of curling up against the donkey.
This silent animal, this third without speech, this presence of another order, held for him the role of a mediator: a mediator of warmth, rhythm, continuity.
I almost reproached myself for seeing so clearly what he himself does not yet see, but it is difficult not to imagine what this animal represented: the living stuffed toy, the comfort-object enlarged to the scale of an entire body, the warm and reassuring mass that receives fear and prevents it from dissolving into a turmoil that does not concern him.

When he says that the donkey “heard for him,” I sense a fundamental gesture of the child: delegating to another, a neutral other, a non-judging other, the task of listening to what is too dangerous or too forbidden to be heard directly.
Here again, Lacan would see the function of the Thing (das Ding), around which the subject builds himself like around a core of silence. The donkey becomes the instance that, without symbolising, welcomes.

I tried, gently, to make him hear the slippages that memory performs and that he himself pronounces with such suppleness that they blur: earth/sea/sky — père/mère/celle.*
Not to impose an explanation, but to invite him to feel how memory, when protecting itself, moves words toward neighbouring signifiers — appearing like playful language games, yet in truth guiding the subject back toward his origins.

When he admitted that the voices he thought came from the sky sometimes calmed after violent detonations, I sensed something like a crack opening in his narrative: a breach in which could slip the fragile possibility of a primitive scene that his psyche had transposed into the storm so as not to see it directly.
A scene where the union and rupture of the parents — their struggle and their reconciliation — were perceived as the manifestations of a world breaking apart and coming together again.

What is remarkable, and I write it here so as not to forget, is that in this memory, the child Igniatius is at once too near and too far:
too near not to hear it, too far to understand it.
Thus he remains the powerless witness, curled up in the straw, in that smell of warmth and coolness mixed, in that refuge where the animal, perhaps less an animal than an absolute third, supports the child through an experience that exceeds his capacity for meaning.

I feel that we are at a turning point.
The name Igniatius has emerged; the animal has been recognised; the storm-scene is clarifying.
Now we must let this signifier, this magma of memories, sensations, pain and gentleness, untie itself.
I will not go faster than he does, but at the next session, I will dare to return to the edge of that warm straw, where the child listened through another what he could not yet hear from himself.

There, I am almost certain, lies the first volcano.

 

* In French, the words terre / mer / ciel (“earth / sea / sky”) sound strikingly close to père / mère / celle (“father / mother / the one [feminine]”).
Because of their similar pronunciation and rhythmic structure, they can easily be heard or felt as echoes of one another, allowing the child’s memory or the unconscious to slide from the elements of nature to parental figures without realizing it.