Lucian’s Notebook No. 7

 

Lucian’s Notebook No. 7, nocturnal pages

There is in Don Carotte—and I catch myself calling him thus, as if his name were not, from the outset, a conscious fiction—a way of speaking about volcanic islands that always brings me back, irresistibly, to childhood.
Not his childhood as he told it to me (he never said anything), but childhood as it seeps, exhales, settles into the interstices of his stories, the way the vapor of a crater hints at the chamber of fire it conceals.

Today, for the first time, something vibrated in me—an intuition so fleeting it could have passed for a whim of thought—when his gaze darkened as he pronounced that name: “Sang Chaud.”
I did not know why, but an image imposed itself: not an island, not a volcano, but a circus.

A circus: an ephemeral structure, pitched on bare ground like a nomadic camp, raising a circle of canvas, ropes, and tightened beams, then disappearing as quickly as it came, leaving behind a sense of emptiness, of an abandoned place.
Yes… the circus has something of the crater; not only in its shape, that precise circle, that geometry of enclosed light, but in its very vocation: to concentrate attention, to gather within a single ring a tumult of gestures, risks, improbable balances.

The ring… that circular stage where anything can happen, where every fall is an event, every ascent a promise.
It seems to me that Don Carotte must have been born—psychically at least—on such a ring.
A place where the child learns too early that the world is not stable: it is built, dismantled; the masts are raised, stakes hammered to hold everything in place in the morning, and pulled up again in the evening.
A world where things have only provisional duration, and where one can rely only on their metamorphosis.
Hence, perhaps, this suspicion toward words: they resemble circus acts too much—carefully choreographed appearances, swift disappearances. One believes one holds them; they are already gone.

And then there is that half-breathed story of a donkey that had been “almost his nurse.”
I did not insist; yet the image lodged itself in me like an archaic evidence.
The donkey: humble, patient, often approached with negligence, yet bearing, in the oldest traditions, a dark knowledge of time, effort, silence.
Nurse—almost: that “almost” says more than the word.

One entrusts to a donkey what one would not entrust to a mother.
Or else the mother was not there, and the child found warmth in another form—more solid, slower, less changeable, a body that does not speak, does not slip away, does not dismantle itself like the tents of the circus.
Perhaps the enigma of Don Carotte lies here, in this double birth—of canvas and of skin: a first world made of ceaseless change, a second made of mute, almost mineral presence, from which would spring his strange relationship to speech.

One could say that something is at play in this “between-two places,” between the ring where light erupts and the stable shadow of the animal.
Some would speak of “the point where the subject emerges from the lack that constitutes him,” that place where the child, seeing a circus unfold before his eyes, dimly understands that nothing is given once and for all—not the big tops, nor the bonds of love.

And I, modest Lucian, simple custodian of his stories, note that the archipelago he speaks of—always shifting, costumed, displaced—resembles to the point of confusion that primordial circus: it settles, it dissolves, it lights up, it threatens, it throws jets of fire into the air like a furious juggler.

It is from there, perhaps, that Sang Chaud emerges.
Not a real companion, but a figure of childhood—perhaps an artist, perhaps a tamer, perhaps a child like him, or a condensation of several silhouettes between which the child Don Carotte never managed to choose.

I write all this knowing that truth, if it exists, will not arise from deduction but from a slip of the tongue.
From a “mis-said” through which what has been silent too long will reveal itself.
The circus is waiting for its hour.
The ring, I feel, already shines with an imperceptible light.
And he, Don Carotte, circles around it, still not daring to enter.

When he speaks of the circus, I will know that we are nearing the incandescent core of his story.
And then perhaps, in this circle of signifiers that assemble and dismantle themselves, the child he once was will finally appear:
the one who looked at the world from under the tent, mouth open, with a donkey for a nurse and a volcano for a horizon.