Recap

 

In the evening, alone in my office, I open my notebook and try to take stock.
I tell myself it’s a session like any other. An ordinary supervision. Nothing that should justify this urge to write.
Yet I note down, almost in spite of myself:
I am not Lucian’s patient.
I stop immediately.
Why this sentence? What does this assertion respond to?
No one has ever assigned me such a place. And yet I wrote it, as one draws a line to prevent an overflow. I could cross it out. I don’t.
I tell myself it is merely a clarification. A way of recalling the frame.
Lucian is my colleague. He speaks to me about his patient, Igniatius.
I listen. I supervise. That is all.
I continue.
Igniatius tells a story he struggles to recognize as his own. He speaks of Sang Chaud, a recurring character, always the same and always other, companion of a certain Don Carotte, grotesque and obstinate figure who fights against the power of words.
He also takes himself for Sang Chaud and others still. Already, the two are ghosts…
And not just any ghosts: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves. No less.
From what I know, the narrative repeats itself, folds back onto itself.
There is no event.
Nothing happens, except the repetition itself.
I write:
Assignment to continuity.
I could have stopped there. Perhaps I should have… this material is familiar. Too familiar.
Here before me I have a fiction that speaks in place of the subject, maintaining a distance from what might otherwise be said.
But Igniatius does not merely tell a story.
One day, he discovers — in a gallery at the foot of Lucian’s building — a series of surprising drawings in which he literally discovers, in images, what he cannot express in words.
His confusion grows when he realizes that these drawings, which in a certain way tell his story, strongly resemble the sketches Lucian writes and draws in his notebook while Igniatius speaks…
All these images, including Lucian’s, persist in taking place in his mind.
All seem strangely close to his story.
Not illustrations, rather displaced symbolic equivalents.
Figures that say something other than what he says, yet seem to concern him deeply — even intimately.
The drawings do not represent exactly what Igniatius says, at least not as far as I know. They are like riddles that can be read in many ways.
Yet Igniatius, while sensing that the drawings speak to him, does not truly understand them.
And above all, he insists he does not know them.
He struggles to decipher them in Lucian’s presence — who, for his part, could speak about them for hours…
This awakens more than suspicion in Igniatius’s mind.
I notice I am detailing this episode.
I tell myself it is necessary.
Yet I can feel that I could summarize it.
I don’t.
Igniatius is troubled.
Even more when he recognizes, in the drawings, the figure of Don Carotte — and when he notices that this character looks exactly like Lucian.
As if the images told more, and better, than his own words.
That is when everything shifts.
I cannot ignore that Igniatius clearly possesses a double personality — if not more…
But Lucian’s concerns me as well.
There would therefore be a resemblance between the two gestures:
the gesture of telling one’s story through fictional characters,
and the gesture of drawing that story without illustrating it.
Igniatius is convinced that Lucian is the author of the images.
He believes it outright.
For him, the drawings are no coincidence.
They sometimes precede his own words.
They seem to know what he has not yet said.
This anteriority gives them, in his eyes, a troubling authority.
Lucian, for his part, does not doubt.
For him, Igniatius draws.
He does so secretly, perhaps without knowing it.
He tells himself through images as he tells himself through fiction, without recognizing his own gesture.
An author who ignores that he is one.
I realize I wrote: does not doubt.
This annoys me.
Such certainty.
For what troubles me is not their respective theses,
but their symmetry.
Each attributes the origin of the images to the other.
Each refuses to assume authorship.
And each, by doing so, grants the images an authority greater than speech.
I note this, then stop.
Authority of images.
I don’t like the phrase.
Too heavy. Too theoretical.
I leave it anyway.
Igniatius claims not to know the drawings, yet admits they speak to him.
He struggles to decipher them, especially in Lucian’s presence — who, again, could talk for hours.
This asymmetry fuels Igniatius’s suspicion:
How could Lucian speak so well of images he did not make?
Lucian told me of a specific moment.
He had stepped out for a few minutes.
His notebook had been left open on the desk.
Igniatius saw sketches similar to those from the gallery.
I write: Absence.
I could analyse this word. I refrain.
Lucian explains he practices reproducing the drawings brought by his patient, to better understand why they arise.
It is a reasonable explanation.
I repeat this to myself.
Yet some annotations resemble Lucian’s handwriting.
He told me so himself.
As a detail. Almost casually.
I feel myself resisting here.
Preferring not to linger.
Sliding quickly toward a reassuring hypothesis:
Igniatius might create these images in a secondary state, then forget them.
It happens. Nothing extraordinary.
I write it.
But writing does not ease me.
For I saw the images.
I recognized Igniatius.
But I also recognized Lucian.
And I recognized something else:
their perfect resemblance.
Lucian should have seen it.
He said nothing.
And how is it that, by curious coincidence, a gallery sits at the foot of his building…
and that Igniatius should have found there drawings on which they both appear?
This silence troubles me more than anything else.
I return, once more, to the opening sentence:
I am not Lucian’s patient.
I now understand why I wrote it.
Because ever since I began listening to this story,
I no longer know very well what place is being required of me.
And because I sense, despite myself, that the authority of the images does not stop at the door of my office.
I tell myself I am overthinking and that I will resist better next time.
Beneath our respective meanderings, I can hardly discern what “is happening in him.”
For now, I supervise.
I should say: that is all…
but I am no longer so sure.
I close the notebook.