Tongue of fire (english)

 

Night falls. A crimson reflection spreads across the parlor.
Upon the incandescent throne, no one may sit.
The flame, at every step, licks shadow and ash,
And the red book sleeps — impossible to hear.

Lucian wishes to speak, but his voice consumes itself;
From his words rises a fire — tongue, shimmer, mist.
Each sentence that forms gives birth to a whirlwind,
And his embered lips write upon the lead.

Ignatius, trembling, catches a word in flight:
– Is it your fire, sir, or my own speech?
This red book is mine — I feel it in my hands.
It burns, and its glow names me more than good faith.

But Lucian, in the flame where their beings mingle,
Sees the other becoming what he himself might have been.
– You’ve stolen my fire, my word, my reason!
He cries to the reddened wind that twists the horizon.

And the other, laughing — a laugh that bends the universe:
– No one steals fire; the flame unfolds itself!
It passes, it bites, it shines, it flees,
And no one possesses that tongue which destroys us.

 

 

 

The dialogue that had taken shape between Doctor Lucian and his patient Ignatius had become — to say the least — fiery... True tongues of flame that the good manners of both protagonists tempered only slightly.

– Like Don Quixote, Ignatius, you act in the world according to the logic of your own narratives. In both Don Quixote and yourself, narration is not a passive dream; it becomes action.

– If the knight acts according to the story he has chosen — sometimes at the cost of ridicule, Mr. Lucian — as in the episode of the windmills, where he sees giants where the real world offers only vulgar winds and wooden blades draped in weary cloth, that is not the case with the images you attribute to me... Reality does not triumph over narrative; it is narrative that shapes the perception of reality.

– Your heroic imagination transforms roots into a monster undulating over the surface of the waves it enters, before raising up islands from which volcanoes and circuses erupt, their uncertain lights merging with the brighter ones born from craters. Fiction becomes a poetics of the world, revealing human creativity. Of course, such a vision creates comic, even tragic dissonances: society, which refuses to join the game, punishes him physically and socially. Yet Cervantes — and you yourself — nuance this: Don Quixote and Don Carrot, each in his own way, inspire through their faith in the story. Your respective madnesses reveal the portion of fiction necessary to human life: who could live without an ideal, without a founding narrative? You see, when I reflect upon what constitutes human identity, I cannot bring myself to think of it as a fixed substance or immutable core.

To me, man is not a being who is once and for all; he is a being who tells himself. That is why I speak to you of the notion of narrative identity: the idea that we understand ourselves only by narrating ourselves.

– Our identity is not reduced to the biological continuity of the body, nor to the raw memory of lived events.
– It lies in the configuration — the weaving — through which we give coherence, meaning, and direction to our existence.
I would therefore say: man is a story being told.

From this perspective, the character of Don Quixote, created by Miguel de Cervantes, and Don Carrot, created by you, both offer a striking illustration of the human condition as Sapiens narrans.

Alonso Quijano, the passionate reader of chivalric romances — and you, Ignatius, lover of images — do not become wandering heroes through mere madness, but through narrative appropriation.

You integrate into your life a ready-made story — that of the books and images you have read and interpreted — and you reinterpret them in the first person.
By adopting the role of Don Carrot, you reconfigure your existence according to a heroic model.
I would say that you perform upon yourself what I call a narrative emplotment of life: you link the scattered events of your existence into a meaningful story.
Thus, your identity no longer belongs to the realm of what is given, but to that of what is told.