In memory

Each day Lucian rereads his notebook. That day, he is struck and lingers over one of his sentences. He rereads it several times and, in turn, feels its strangeness and its plurality of meanings. But also, a loss of mastery. He knows that the story moves forward through reprises, shifts, with no conclusion other than a provisional one.

Lucian’s notebook

I had kept it in memory… Wherever I go… Whatever the hour… it runs through my head… Thinking about it, and especially rereading myself, I no longer know what I meant to say. The sentence is there, nevertheless. I recognize it. I even recognize the handwriting and I literally relive the moment when I set it down on the paper. And yet, it no longer obeys me. It has detached itself from the intention that produced it. It has become something else… or several things at once.
I close the notebook. Not to conclude.
So as not to write in someone else’s place.
On first reading, just yesterday, it seemed clear to me. It was meant to be obvious. More than a precaution, an ethical reminder. Not to speak in the patient’s place. To relate without forcing meaning. Not to substitute oneself.
But this morning, my mind resists… and the sentence resists. It cannot be reduced to that single reading.
I first ask myself: in whose place?
Immediately the thought comes to me: in Igniatius’s place, of course. That is the most immediate answer. Not to write what he cannot yet write himself. Not to give form too early to what, in him, is still searching. That, I am certain of… I know it. It is the very heart of my work. But rereading, another possibility appears.
Could it be in Don Carotte’s place?
I catch myself thinking that, lately, perhaps through Igniatius’s magic, I have understood his phrases too well. I had also followed the movements in the drawings too closely and, letting myself be carried along, I had anticipated his reversals too well. As if I could speak in his place. As if the character had lent me his voice, or the other way around.
And then there is Sang Chaud. Or the one he becomes when he literally steps out of the story and, in stepping out, changes his name. There, the sentence becomes troubled… troubles me even more. For writing in someone else’s place is not only speaking for them. It is sometimes preventing them from leaving the narrative by keeping them inside it, in a form that reassures us.
I stop. I reread again.
So as not to write in someone else’s place.
And suddenly, an uncomfortable thought arises:
what if that other were Félix?
Not that I want to speak for him. But because, for some time now, I feel that our writings—how to put it—brush against each other. As if what I note sometimes came to fill in what he leaves suspended. As if, by writing too much, I risked occupying the very space he is trying to keep open.
The sentence then takes on another meaning.
Closing the notebook would not only be an act of clinical restraint. It would be an act of separation. A way of saying:
What must be thought elsewhere must not be written here.
I realize that this sentence may not be a decision. It is a resistance. A resistance to the temptation to totalize and to connect too quickly.
In rereading it, I also understand something else:
writing in someone else’s place does not only mean speaking in their stead. It can also mean taking charge of what does not yet belong to me. Rushing an exit. Naming too soon. I should not give a definitive meaning to what only asks to remain unstable.
I am going to close the notebook.
I understand now that this gesture will not be an ending, but only a suspension.
No, it will not be to conclude, but to leave intact the possibility that someone else—whether patient, character, colleague, or even myself, later—might write otherwise.
I will leave the sentence as it is. I will not correct it, because it says more than I knew when I wrote it.