Link

 

“Even if, more gently than Orpheus, you touched the lyre enough to move the trees, the blood would not return to that empty shade [...] Harsh fate, which grows lighter when one accepts what it is impossible to bring back.”

 

Odes, Horace

 

 

 

Ignatius wonders whether Mr. Lucian’s question, as he calls him, not without a hint of irony, is truly meant for his memory, for he remembers nothing of what is being discussed. What little he knows comes from the questions themselves and from the images in which he appears. He is almost certain that Mr. Lucian is the author of the drawings he brings him. Slowly, a faint suspicion had begun to take shape in his mind, like a worm burrowing through the fruit of imagination. He begins to sense something, far beyond words, in those images. A distant voice speaks to him, urging him, almost forcing him, to understand the thread that binds him to them. A voice that, he knows well, is nonetheless Mr. Lucian’s…

And so, almost against his own will, he breaks the silence he had imposed on himself and resumes the conversation, not without a certain wariness.

— According to you, who seem to know everything… what link could there be between those images and myself?

— You see, Ignatius, in every human language there exists a word that beats like a hidden heart. A discreet word, yet stubborn. A word that binds things together, refusing the world’s solitude. That word is le lien, the link, a ligação.
In French, lien comes from the Latin ligare: to tie, to bind, to hold together. It carries the gravity of loyalty, the weight of an oath. It evokes the rope, the pact, the promise. To speak of lien is to feel the tension of the thread, the resistance of what holds. It is the world’s memory, unwilling to unravel.

— Do you believe our world… well… my world, which is also yours… is coming undone?

— In English, link descends from a Germanic root, hlankijaz, meaning to bend, to fold, to join. Here, the bond becomes movement. Our world is in motion. It does not bind, nor allow itself to be bound…

— What does it do, then?

— It passes.
A link is not a rope but a loop, a metal ring, a chain’s segment, a small bridge, if you will. Like the roots on which you once moved. It is a bond that dances, as you do, and shifts from form to form. It speaks less of attachment than of living connection, of flow. Think of it as an opening.
In the language of the network, a link binds not bodies, but worlds: it invents continuity within dispersion.

— Do you think that we, you, I, and the Leviathan, dwell in different worlds… scattered, as you say?

— You know, Ignatius, worlds that seem so different often meet in unexpected ways. In Portuguese, the ancient ligação, born as well from ligare, now lives beside the borrowed term link. Two words in the same language, two ages of the same breath.
Ligar means to connect, to call, to turn on. The gesture becomes luminous: ligar a luz, to bring forth light. And clicar num link, to join consciousnesses across the web, is a modern echo of the ancestral gesture of extending a hand.

— So Portuguese carries both memories?

— Yes: the depth of the Latin bond, rooted and faithful; and the fluidity of the Germanic bond, shifting and digital. It embodies the synthesis.
The ligação that becomes link is the human thread turning into light.

— Is that the great secret of language?

— Every word that binds tells the same truth in different forms.
In lien, there is the hand that holds, here, now.
In link, there is the path that leads.
In ligação, there is the voice that calls.

And in these three gestures breathes a single impulse: that of the world continuously reconnecting with itself. That is what you are trying to do, Ignatius. Everything that lives is bond. Roots intertwine beneath the earth, stars draw one another in the sky, words converge in the mouths of those who speak… of you… of these images… of Don Carrot… of Warm Blood…