In the mountains

 
“To orient himself, he walked around the hut, using his staff for support, and realized that he had once again reached it from behind and that, consequently, for a good hour, by his own estimate, he had devoted himself to the purest and most useless foolishness. But that is how it went, that is how one could read it in books. One went round in circles, toiled away, imagining that one was advancing, while in reality one was describing a few vast and stupid detours that brought one back to the given point, like the deceptive orbit of the year. That is how one went astray, that is how one did not find oneself again.”

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Lucian’s notebook

I continue, like Félix, and this time I truly allow myself to let go, not abandonment, but that very particular point where one stops holding on in order to let things be, while remaining responsible for what comes. Yes. The staff speaks. I had not paid enough attention to it before, but it is now obvious: the staff is not only a crutch, nor even a simple support. It is a displaced organ of perception. Like the blind person’s cane, it extends the body, it touches before the eye sees, it informs before thought formulates. It senses the ground. It grasps its roughness, warns of breaks. One could say that it translates the world differently. The one who walks with a staff does not see less. He sees differently.

Félix’s notebook

And then I understand why Lucian walks. Why he leaves the seated, immobile position, that of the consulting room, that of listening without moving. Walking, for him, is not fleeing thought; it is changing perceptual apparatus. Thinking with the feet. Thinking with imbalance. Thinking with a body exposed to relief.
I let this idea come without forcing it:
the staff is what allows one to think when sight is no longer sufficient. And now I venture further.
If Lucian goes into the mountains thinking about this patient, if he draws while walking, or afterward, a character whom he knows, confusedly but surely, resembles him, then this drawing is not an illustration. It is a trace in wandering. A thought that has not yet found its discursive form.
And if he represents himself this way, walking, staff in hand, it may be because he already knows that he cannot reach this patient from his usual position. Then, in the distance, the horizon opens.
Very far away. Almost out of frame.
And there, yes, I allow myself this hypothesis, because I have no contradictor: what he sees, there, could be Ignatius.
Not as he is in the consulting room. But as he is present in the psychic landscape: tiny and distant, almost unreal.
And suddenly everything falls clearly into place. Lucian’s path toward Ignatius is broken. Ignatius’s path toward Lucian is broken as well. It is not a unilateral impediment. It is a shared avalanche. This avalanche, now I understand it differently. It is not an external event. It is not “something that happened” to one or the other. It is a shared mass of words, affects, images, projections, accumulated silences, which finally gave way. And when it gave way, it cut the path that linked them.
They can no longer meet as before.
They are each on one side of the same collapse. And here, I should fall silent. Because I sense the danger of wanting to repair the path too quickly. It would be dangerous to throw an imaginary bridge by forcing the encounter. But the drawing does not show a bridge. It shows a man who walks despite the break. And another who remains visible, but inaccessible. I then tell myself, and this thought is almost a consolation, that the work may not be to restore continuity, but to recognize the symmetry of the rupture.
They are both stopped by the same avalanche. And that, paradoxically, still connects them.
I return once more to the staff. If it speaks, it is not to indicate the lost path. It is to say: the ground is here. This is where you can place your foot. Even if you do not see what comes next.
And I make this silent promise to myself, before the next session:
not to push Lucian to see further. Not to ask him to reach Ignatius. Only to accompany him in recognizing the break, as the condition of another mode of encounter, still unimaginable. Sometimes, the only possible movement is to remain walking without a path.

When Lucian leaves his consulting room to go and roam the mountain, it is not in a spirit of flight, but out of necessity. For several weeks, a case has occupied him with unusual insistence, to the point that thought, too close to its object, seems to lose its mobility. Words return, hypotheses turn in circles, and silence, though familiar to his practice, becomes charged with a dull anxiety. He then understands that he must step away, not to abandon reflection, but to displace it and gain distance. The mountain imposes itself as a space of active withdrawal. It is not a refuge, but a distancing. Where the consulting room encloses speech in constant proximity, the relief and the open air promise something else: a thought that moves. A thought that walks and collides with stone. A thought that breathes, he told me, and he added:
“I do not carry with me the intention of resolving anything. I leave with the opposite project: to be more silent. By letting the world speak in my place, I observe without immediately interpreting. I do not see this departure as a parenthesis. I see it as a change of regime. By exposing myself to durations broader than those of psychic life, those of rocks, I hope to loosen the grip of intellectual urgency. I observe with great attention the strata and the slow upheavals…
Perhaps time must work differently, depositing, as it does in matter, new layers whose meaning only appears afterward.”

I conceive this walk as an experience of decantation. Standing before the mountain, I seek neither immediate symbol nor forced analogy. It is rather a matter of looking from afar at what, too close, becomes opaque. I observe while trying not to conclude. I note without fixing. Accepting that something remains suspended. One leaves space for what may arrive. Our ideas are like these unfinished summits that erosion continues to shape without ever completing them.
These pages come from this attempt. They are neither a scientific report nor an assumed intimate journal. They bear the trace of a gaze that shifts. The mountain appears first as an object of study, then, almost, as an inner figure. Between these two notes, something has moved. It is not necessarily a solution, but an opening. And perhaps that is precisely what I came there to seek.