Displacement

Lucian’s notebook

I do not know what Félix writes in his notebook.
I have never asked him. I do not need to. There are things one can guess from the way someone falls silent, or raises their eyes, or chooses one word rather than another… and in any case, he cannot help but speak of it.
For some time now, when I speak, he listens differently. It is not a withdrawal. It is a displacement. As if what I say were settling onto something he has already begun to write elsewhere, for himself. I believe he thinks in depth. In layers. He does not say so, but I feel it. His way of commenting without seeming to, of returning me to the text, is not a simple reminder of the frame. It is as if he refused to descend to my place. As if he knew that certain cavities cannot bear two bodies at once.
I am closer.
I know it now. Too close, at times.
When I speak of Igniatius, I am still speaking with him. When I speak of Don Carotte, I speak from him. And Sang Chaud… Sang Chaud is already something else. I do not yet know what, but I know he left me before I accepted it.
Not long ago, during the session, Félix said: I see.
He added nothing. But I understood that he saw something I could not allow myself to see… not yet. I did not try to ask him what. It would have been useless. When someone sees, one knows it by the way they fall silent afterward.
I sometimes wonder whether what I am doing with Igniatius—his analysis—is not already too rapid a descent. I listen, I take notes, I draw. I think I am holding the lamp, but there are moments when the light is too strong. The images burn. They settle onto the paper before I can hold them back.
Félix, he looks from farther away. He can still distinguish the overall forms. I am in the detail. In the wall itself. In the roughness, with few handholds. I touch more than I see.
Don Carotte, Sang Chaud… I let them act. I believed that this was listening: allowing them to speak, to transform themselves, to oppose one another. But I am beginning to wonder whether I have not confused hospitality with abdication.
There is something strange in seeing a character rebel against his author, then against the one who listens to him. In seeing a figure gain thickness, then power. In sensing that it could continue without you.
I do not write this to worry myself. I write to situate myself. If Félix thinks in caverns, then perhaps I am already in one of them without having known it. An intermediate cavity, hollowed out by repetition, by fidelity to the other’s speech. A cave where images become solid.
I do not know whether I want to climb back up… I do not know whether I can… But I know one thing: if I continue to write, to draw, to listen, it will not be to produce a narrative that is sufficient unto itself. It will be so as not to forget that, even in depth, someone is still looking from farther away.
I close the notebook.
Not to conclude.
So as not to write in someone else’s place.