Notch

 “Does it not also happen among human beings that, when one truly looks at another, as he is in the movement of his form in becoming, in a strange and delicate way he helps him to come into himself, so that the power of imagination acting along the paths of nature literally collaborates in engendering the image of the human being?”

Theodor Spoerri, Über Einbildung, p. 25.

Lucian, increasingly unsure of himself, is going to see Félix. He prepares for it as he often does, by walking in the mountains. Like a musician, he gathers his words and rehearses his scales…
Lucian’s notebook
I imagine myself in Félix’s place, before the session, with everything that has been elaborated up to now. I look at the image I am going to bring him. It is not a simple landscape; it is like a condensed psychic scene, drawn in my notebook. A simple memory of the mountain and of certain vertigos that seize me when I think again about Igniatius’s story.

What is this mountain the blind façade of?
What one sees… what I see first, and this is never neutral, is again a mountain, but it is no longer the same.
It is no longer only vertical and vertiginous: it is cut into, as if opened by a central passage, a sort of corridor of scree, of unstable trace, descending or rising, I do not yet know in which direction. Two human figures appear, and this is decisive. Below, on the right, a man walks, coat in the wind, barefoot, holding a staff. He advances cautiously, but he advances.
Above, lost in the distance of the image, tiny: another figure appears, standing on a ridge. It seems exposed to me, and fragile.
I cannot help thinking of a double scene.
Hastily, perhaps too hastily, I see someone below, someone above.
One in movement, the other in suspension… in the distance.
With everything that precedes, it has become impossible for me to see “innocently”. I can no longer read this image as a simple exploration scene. It is already stratified, like the mountain itself.
This image seems to show me the exact moment when two worlds coexist, without merging. There is the world of the ground, of return, of gravity. I hope it is that of the analyst returned to earth… And there is the world of height and vertigo. That of exposure to the raw real.
A mad idea crosses my mind. I cannot push it away. The walker below… barefoot, without protection… in contact with the rock… could be Igniatius… so far nothing mad… but it could also be me… the analyst who, with his staff, has brought down his dragon…
The staff could be, in turn: support, limit, measure, and weapon.
His coat still flies: something of the experience above is still active, not closed. Whatever the case, he is neither a hero nor a conqueror. He is someone with resolve, but without triumph.
Now I must attend to the figure above. The distant one. Its silhouette in height is almost disturbing in its smallness. It could be the memory of the previous state. A part left exposed, a remainder of vertigo. It is not hostile.
But it remains far away, and the path leading to it has been violently cut by an avalanche. I have the feeling that this figure must not be brought down.
It must remain there.
Could it be the same person in two different temporalities?
Like certain experiences, certain fossil images, certain moments of the real that must not be “resolved”, but only acknowledged as having taken place.
Perhaps this is true grounding: not making everything come down.
The rock corridor at the center, this lighter, smoother zone, seems essential to me. It is neither the summit nor the base. It is a trace. One might say it is the place through which something has passed. It looks like an avoided fall, a slow descent. It could be a transformation. I am thinking here of analytic work itself. But this intermediate time, often invisible, where something shifts without yet taking form, this is where it works. This is where it wears. This is where it inscribes.