Lucian, staff in hand, walking in the mountains, tries to analyze the image forming in his mind. A sensitive, symbolic, and analytic reading. For him, it is a matter of looking before interpreting... but it seems that, perhaps without realizing it, he has been caught in a trap...
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Lucian’s notebook
The image shows a solitary man. He is standing, facing us. At first, I thought it was probably Igniatius... or else Don Carotte representing him... and resembling him like two drops of water. He holds a staff, not only to lean on, but also as an extension of the body. He is dressed like a walker, in a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. He has a white beard. Clearly he is neither running nor climbing. I can imagine him walking slowly, thinking.
But the most striking element of this image is not the man who walks: it is the roots. They rise up behind him, around him, almost through him, invading the whole space. Strangely, they are not underground. They are aerial and proliferating. They look like veins or neural branching. In the background I recognize the mountain setting that appeared in the previous image. The rock is dark. The sky suggests night. The drawn ridges give an impression of verticality. Through this arrangement, one can feel the space of the story invaded by the living. Where the previous image showed mineral and emptiness, this one introduces entanglement and density.
If the first image belonged to vertigo, this one belongs to rooting. But this rooting is paradoxical: the roots are above ground. Not only are they visible, they are almost threatening. Symbolically, we have moved from the edge of the abyss to the inside of what supports. Roots are supposed to nourish, but here they obstruct passage. I believe this shift is decisive. It suggests that I am no longer facing the real as a void... or a gaping lack, but facing an archaic entanglement. I see it as a proliferation prior to any ordering. The man—whether Igniatius or Don Carotte... or myself... in front of this image—is not in a posture of mastery. I cannot manage to analyze from a distance. I am caught in the landscape.
I sense his coat floating, as if there were still movement, wind. But his feet are firmly anchored to the ground. He moves slowly, even out of time. He does not cut the roots and makes no gesture to push them aside. Looking more closely, he does not even seem to know they exist. After all, that is normal: they are behind him. His gaze is lowered... like mine, which looks down at this image from above. It is focused, almost grave, without being anxious... less anxious than I am... I notice that, imperceptibly, I have begun to recognize myself in this image...
In other circumstances, I would say it is a powerful image of the analyst outside the usual frame, no consulting room anymore. Where have the clear symbolic apparatus gone... the sharp separation between subject and environment. Here, in this mountain so similar to the one in the image, I am confronted with the real not as lack, but as excess.
If I relate this image to what I wrote about vertigo, I could say that if vertigo was the encounter with the real as emptiness, the roots figure the real as overflow. An overflow rising from the earth the way water spills out of a river. The roots evoke the archaic, what nourishes. But they also represent what suffocates, what connects everything without clear distinction. This real is not spectacular like the abyss; it is invasive. If it does not produce vertigo, it prevents walking straight. The image would be like an analytic scene displaced. And this scene could be the allegory of an unusual clinical situation. An analysand overflowing the frame. A situation where transference takes root too deeply... or else a confrontation with very ancient psychic strata... undifferentiated and difficult to perceive. The analyst that I am does not dominate the scene. I will have to tell this to Félix. Everything seems very dark to me. Nothing lights my way anymore. I cling to my staff. Smiling, I tell myself my position is an image... an image within the image... an ethical position more than knowledge. Holding on, not cutting, not interpreting too quickly, accepting being surrounded by what cannot yet be said.
I am no longer facing it... nor even at the edge, I am inside, and that is probably what the “unusual circumstances” are. The real no longer presents itself as a limit not to be crossed, but as a milieu to be traversed. Still, one must not get lost there.
I continue writing this notebook, trying to let emerge this experience of a double presence of worlds, with a writing that accepts a certain uncanny strangeness. I should accept that thought is no longer only conceptual, but topological, almost hallucinatory in the noble sense.
At this very moment, I understand that I am no longer part of the world as I was taught it. Not that the physical world has disappeared: the rock is still there, the cold, the fatigue of the body, the weight of the staff in the hand. But something has been superimposed on it. As if another plane of reality had begun to coincide with the first, without abolishing it.
I am here, and at the same time elsewhere. Two worlds at once, and perhaps more, because this duality will not stabilize.
The roots I see are not of this geological world—at least not as I know it. They belong to no identifiable stratigraphy, no tectonic chronology. They are not sediments. They are not folds, nor faults. And yet, they are there. Present with an obviousness that asks for no justification. I could simply say they are imaginary, but that word is too poor. They might have a logic or a necessity of their own.
I then surprise myself by thinking that the mountain itself has roots. Not in a botanical sense, but in a memorial one. The deep structures of the rock are temporal roots. They plunge into ages when human life had not yet language. Some are readable, others opaque. The mountain is a mineral brain, loaded with memories that do not think, but persist.
My mind races a little. What if certain images were “like” fossils? The idea crosses me without warning. Images that would have been deposited in the psyche like ancient organisms in rock. Not narrative memories, but fixed forms, archaic impressions, preserved intact in deep layers. One does not fabricate them; one exhumes them. They do not speak. And yet, perhaps they can bear witness.
The roots I see could be that: fossils of thought. Or rather, visualizations of what ordinarily remains buried. I then wonder whether I am still looking at the mountain, or contemplating a projection of my own brain. I do not mean my anatomical brain, but a symbolic brain, exceeding any simple organization. A brain without center, without clear hierarchy, where everything communicates by proximity and entanglement.
But immediately the hypothesis flips: what if it was not my brain I was seeing, but the mountain’s? As if the landscape had agreed, for an instant, to represent itself. To show its circuits with invisible connections. A thought without subject, stretched across millions of years, slow, but infinitely larger than mine.
I then take the measure of what is happening to me: I am no longer merely an observer. I participate. I am included in this superposition of worlds. The physical world, the psychic world, and the imaginary world blur together. And far from producing sterile confusion, this double-presence creates a strange clarity: an intuition of continuity where I believed in breaks.
Perhaps that is, finally, the real when it manifests otherwise than through vertigo: when emptiness becomes matter. A thickness where rocks, images, memories, and thoughts mingle indistinctly. A place where inside and outside cease to be stable opposites. Where the analyst is no longer only the one who listens. He will accept being crossed by forms that do not belong to him entirely.
I note this with caution. I know how tempting it is, in such moments, to yield to a mystical fusion or an illusion of total knowledge. But that is not what I feel. What I feel is more fragile, more uncertain: a coexistence without synthesis. Two worlds at once, and the need not to reduce them to one.
I close the page. The roots remain. They demand neither immediate interpretation nor translation. They require only that I endure their presence, the way one endures an insistent image. Like a dream that does not dissolve upon waking. Perhaps later they will find their place. Or perhaps they must remain so: visible and enigmatic, like certain deep structures one crosses only by accepting not to understand them entirely.
I will have to speak of this with Félix... and with Igniatius...
I sense his coat floating, as if there were still movement, wind. But his feet are firmly anchored to the ground. He moves slowly, even out of time. He does not cut the roots and makes no gesture to push them aside. Looking more closely, he does not even seem to know they exist. After all, that is normal: they are behind him. His gaze is lowered... like mine, which looks down at this image from above. It is focused, almost grave, without being anxious... less anxious than I am... I notice that, imperceptibly, I have begun to recognize myself in this image...
In other circumstances, I would say it is a powerful image of the analyst outside the usual frame, no consulting room anymore. Where have the clear symbolic apparatus gone... the sharp separation between subject and environment. Here, in this mountain so similar to the one in the image, I am confronted with the real not as lack, but as excess.
If I relate this image to what I wrote about vertigo, I could say that if vertigo was the encounter with the real as emptiness, the roots figure the real as overflow. An overflow rising from the earth the way water spills out of a river. The roots evoke the archaic, what nourishes. But they also represent what suffocates, what connects everything without clear distinction. This real is not spectacular like the abyss; it is invasive. If it does not produce vertigo, it prevents walking straight. The image would be like an analytic scene displaced. And this scene could be the allegory of an unusual clinical situation. An analysand overflowing the frame. A situation where transference takes root too deeply... or else a confrontation with very ancient psychic strata... undifferentiated and difficult to perceive. The analyst that I am does not dominate the scene. I will have to tell this to Félix. Everything seems very dark to me. Nothing lights my way anymore. I cling to my staff. Smiling, I tell myself my position is an image... an image within the image... an ethical position more than knowledge. Holding on, not cutting, not interpreting too quickly, accepting being surrounded by what cannot yet be said.
I am no longer facing it... nor even at the edge, I am inside, and that is probably what the “unusual circumstances” are. The real no longer presents itself as a limit not to be crossed, but as a milieu to be traversed. Still, one must not get lost there.
I continue writing this notebook, trying to let emerge this experience of a double presence of worlds, with a writing that accepts a certain uncanny strangeness. I should accept that thought is no longer only conceptual, but topological, almost hallucinatory in the noble sense.
At this very moment, I understand that I am no longer part of the world as I was taught it. Not that the physical world has disappeared: the rock is still there, the cold, the fatigue of the body, the weight of the staff in the hand. But something has been superimposed on it. As if another plane of reality had begun to coincide with the first, without abolishing it.
I am here, and at the same time elsewhere. Two worlds at once, and perhaps more, because this duality will not stabilize.
The roots I see are not of this geological world—at least not as I know it. They belong to no identifiable stratigraphy, no tectonic chronology. They are not sediments. They are not folds, nor faults. And yet, they are there. Present with an obviousness that asks for no justification. I could simply say they are imaginary, but that word is too poor. They might have a logic or a necessity of their own.
I then surprise myself by thinking that the mountain itself has roots. Not in a botanical sense, but in a memorial one. The deep structures of the rock are temporal roots. They plunge into ages when human life had not yet language. Some are readable, others opaque. The mountain is a mineral brain, loaded with memories that do not think, but persist.
My mind races a little. What if certain images were “like” fossils? The idea crosses me without warning. Images that would have been deposited in the psyche like ancient organisms in rock. Not narrative memories, but fixed forms, archaic impressions, preserved intact in deep layers. One does not fabricate them; one exhumes them. They do not speak. And yet, perhaps they can bear witness.
The roots I see could be that: fossils of thought. Or rather, visualizations of what ordinarily remains buried. I then wonder whether I am still looking at the mountain, or contemplating a projection of my own brain. I do not mean my anatomical brain, but a symbolic brain, exceeding any simple organization. A brain without center, without clear hierarchy, where everything communicates by proximity and entanglement.
But immediately the hypothesis flips: what if it was not my brain I was seeing, but the mountain’s? As if the landscape had agreed, for an instant, to represent itself. To show its circuits with invisible connections. A thought without subject, stretched across millions of years, slow, but infinitely larger than mine.
I then take the measure of what is happening to me: I am no longer merely an observer. I participate. I am included in this superposition of worlds. The physical world, the psychic world, and the imaginary world blur together. And far from producing sterile confusion, this double-presence creates a strange clarity: an intuition of continuity where I believed in breaks.
Perhaps that is, finally, the real when it manifests otherwise than through vertigo: when emptiness becomes matter. A thickness where rocks, images, memories, and thoughts mingle indistinctly. A place where inside and outside cease to be stable opposites. Where the analyst is no longer only the one who listens. He will accept being crossed by forms that do not belong to him entirely.
I note this with caution. I know how tempting it is, in such moments, to yield to a mystical fusion or an illusion of total knowledge. But that is not what I feel. What I feel is more fragile, more uncertain: a coexistence without synthesis. Two worlds at once, and the need not to reduce them to one.
I close the page. The roots remain. They demand neither immediate interpretation nor translation. They require only that I endure their presence, the way one endures an insistent image. Like a dream that does not dissolve upon waking. Perhaps later they will find their place. Or perhaps they must remain so: visible and enigmatic, like certain deep structures one crosses only by accepting not to understand them entirely.
I will have to speak of this with Félix... and with Igniatius...
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