Remnants of another age

Here is where, long ago, Igniatius the Wanderer
Brought forth his errant steps, his breath, his unclear fears.
Here where the Listener, in an empty box,
Heard the timid spectres whisper.
Here where the Shadow-Maker, sheltered by the curtains,
Invented a thousand lives, a thousand faces, a thousand echoes.
Here where three destinies, under the fire of the stars,
Tried to understand each other through a thousand veils.
Now the circus, deserted, still offers itself
As a living tomb that keeps and devours.
But the soul of this place, beneath the burning dust,
Beats like a great heart forgotten by the gods.

 

 

Far from there and outside of time, staring straight into Lucian’s bewildered eyes, Igniatius addresses him in roughly these terms:

– We have the fortune and misfortune of living in a parallel universe from which we cannot escape without the help of a scribbling thinker who holds us in his hands. We live and die according to his good or ill will…

 

 Lucian, caught off guard, did not know what to answer in the face of this discourse, filled with a dark, energetic lucidity that was surprising to say the least, and tinged with a faint aggressiveness, an aggressiveness whose origin he struggled to discern.

 

– What goes on in the head of our author? We can only know it through the texts in which he stages us… and even then… only in a form distorted by words and their arrangements, their rules, a syntax more or less harmonious that trie, sometimes in vain, to reflect what long ago escaped the mind that believes it is creating us.

 

Igniatius, folded back into himself, falls silent; and in that silence he hears the voice that once was his own:

“Then, in the black night where space falls asleep,
A shiver rose from the sand up to the footprints.
On the bleachers one saw pale shadows dance,
Remnants of another age when the circus was a world.

The child of the dark islet, in this endless night,
Seemed to live again, pale, within this fate.
He laughs, he runs, his voice cleaves the void,
Like a lost ray in a sky too limpid.

The Listener slowly steps from the cold shadow,
His gaze aflame like the shade of a prey.
The voices of old, which he believed vanished,
Reweave their chords upon his tightened lips.

And from the back of the wings, the Chalk-Fingered Shadow,
The reborn Maker sweeps away regret.
He raised a mirror: a nameless face
Merged the different brows into a single horizon.”