The open notebook

"In the struggle against the wounds of the soul, we have today, it seems, a highly effective means: to discover, on an emotional level, the truth about the unique and singular story of our childhood.
Can we free ourselves from all illusion? Every life is full of illusions, no doubt because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet we cannot live without it — so much so that we pay for its absence with serious illness.
This is why we try to uncover, through therapy, our personal truth which — before opening for us this new space of freedom — is always painful, unless we content ourselves with a merely intellectual understanding. But then we remain in the realm of illusion.
We cannot change our past, nor undo the damage inflicted upon us in childhood.
But we can change ourselves, we can ‘repair’ ourselves, recover the integrity we lost.
For this, we must decide to look more closely at the knowledge our body has stored about past events, and allow it to rise to consciousness."

Alice Miller, The Future of the Drama of the Gifted Child, PUF

Igniatius was already seated, his back straight, head held high, hands resting loosely on his knees, his eyes lost in the distance, like a man training himself not to betray his own fault.

He immediately sensed in the air a kind of almost musical tension, the kind that floats like an invisible thread between two instruments ready either to harmonize or to clash.

Slowly, very slowly, he slid notebook no. 7 across the desk toward Lucian, placing it between them.

“Ah,” Lucian said simply.
Then, after a rather long silence:
“I see… or rather… I have the impression that you read something in it,” said Lucian without faltering, as if he were merely observing that the sky was cloudy and that it was raining.

Lucian had entered the room with a slight delay—five minutes at most—but enough for something to have occurred.

He had sat down.

“You look… preoccupied this morning, Igniatius,” he had said softly.

Igniatius did not respond immediately.

“You left it open.”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” Igniatius repeated, in almost the same tone Lucian had used, but with a slightly sharper politeness. He added, murmuring:
“Only a few lines. Not everything. I didn’t have time. I didn’t want to… rummage. I was only looking for a sheet where—I thought that…”

He did not finish his sentence.

“How can I help clarify things for you?” asked Lucian.

Igniatius inhaled deeply, like a man about to enter a room he is not sure he has been invited into.

“Read to me what I read,” he said. “Read it aloud. If you wrote it, you can very well speak it.”

Lucian took the notebook, leafed through it until he found the page that seemed still trembling, still warm from a recent disturbance.

And in a calm, slightly musical voice, he read everything he had written:
“Igniatius’s name returning, the storm-scene as a possible primal scene, the function of the donkey, the shifts between earth/sea/sky, the refuge in the straw, the silent third, the memory that displaces to protect.”
When he finished, he closed the notebook slowly.

Igniatius’s eyes were bright. But he was not crying; their brightness came as much from anger as from gratitude, and perhaps also from the beginnings of an inner unveiling he did not yet know where to place.

“So that is… what you think of me,” he said at last.

Lucian did not answer directly. He tilted his head slightly, as if making room for Igniatius to reach the end of his thought. Then Igniatius burst out—but in a way so complex, so mixed, that he seemed to rise and sink at the same time:

“You speak of me as if I were a book opened… as if I were an object to be analyzed, or—worse—as a corpse being dissected… Lucian! I had the impression of being a volcano measured with a ruler! As a child trapped inside a hypothesis!
I don’t say that all of it is false… but you tell it as if I were a… a phenomenon, a thing you observe from a mountain you never descend.”

He took a long breath that trembled slightly.

“And at the same time… I admit it… I am shaken. Because… because perhaps you are right… perhaps. Or not right, but perhaps you are touching something. And I don’t know where it hurts.”

He stood up. Took a few steps. Then sat back down abruptly.

“But tell me, Lucian: how do you know all this?”

“I know nothing,” Lucian replied softly. “I formulate… I suppose… Only you know, only you can confirm or deny. I listen to you… I look at the drawings you bring me… your drawings!”

Igniatius smiled—a sad smile, falsely mocking in appearance:

“Ah! Now you speak like me. You propose, I dispose. It’s strange… really… maybe a bit funny… or touching. As if you had become my mirror.
A mirror I’m afraid to look into, because it might reflect something too intimate.”

He leaned forward:

“And you, Lucian? Who analyzes you… you? Who listens to you when you write those long sentences in which one feels you are searching, through me, for something that isn’t entirely about me?”

Lucian remained calm.
But his fingers tightened—imperceptibly—on the spine of the notebook… and Igniatius saw it instantly, with almost animal vigilance.

“Ah! You see?” he said. “There—a sign! You clutch your notebook as one holds a hand one refuses to let go of.
Maybe you too have a beast inside, a silent donkey or little blue dogs like the ones I saw drawn in your notebook.
Maybe your notes are your straw, your refuge.
Maybe you need to write about me… more than I need to speak to you.”

He let out a faint, nervous laugh, both excessive and moving.

“Look at us, Lucian. It’s as if the roles were reversed. You write about me and draw me… and now I am the one interpreting…
As if our places were like a circus tent dismantled and rebuilt by time and wind.”

He added, in a graver tone:

“You suggest that I displace scenes… but you, Lucian—what do you displace in your notes and drawings?
What are you hoping to find there?
Why does the name Igniatius touch you as much as it touches me?
Why, when I speak of the donkey, do I see in your eye a glimmer—almost of jealousy? Am I mistaken, or is it nostalgia?”

Lucian opened his mouth, uncertainly, to answer perhaps, but Igniatius raised his hand.

“No. Not now. I don’t want your answer.
I want you to hear that I, too, see… that I, too, feel… that I, too, perceive the shadow you cast upon my story.
And perhaps your shadow… fits a little too well with mine.”

He lowered his eyes, as if exhausted by his own intensity.

“I do not blame you, Lucian. Perhaps I even admire you.
But I want you to know that I am not just a shifting island.
You too are moving, difficult to grasp.
Perhaps you are a kind of archipelago.
And perhaps… perhaps deep down… we are both afraid of the same storm.”