Stratification (english translation)

 

 

One might believe that a cave is an enclosed place, a pocket of night hollowed out once and for all in the rock. But that would be projecting our impatience onto the earth. Caves, if one agrees to think of them across spans of time that exceed any biography, are never simple. They overlap.

There are mountains whose entire mass is riddled with cavities, opened at different epochs, by different waters, under climates that no longer have anything in common. A first cave forms when the rock is still young. It is wide, almost hospitable. Millennia later, the water changes course, the pressure shifts, and lower down another cave begins to be carved. It does not communicate with the first. It ignores it. It obeys another logic, another regime of forces. Then, still later, much later, a third cavity appears, tortuous and narrow. It is almost invisible from the surface. It is not the continuation of the previous ones, but their indirect descendant. It does not know them, yet it would not exist without them.

That is what a stratification of caves is. None contains the truth of the whole. Each is complete from within its own night. And yet they are all part of the same mountain.

The human observer always arrives too late. He descends with instruments designed for the surface—among them, lamps and maps. He lights up a wall and believes he understands its form. But that wall is already the result of thousands of prior pressures. What he sees is an accidental cross-section in a history that refuses to be told.

The deeper he goes, the more vision falters.

From a distance, the mountain is legible. One can make out its general lines, observe folds and visible strata; but from too close, it becomes opaque. The rock is nothing more than a mass without contour. Light reflects poorly. Instruments saturate. Proximity destroys sight.

The same applies here.

Igniatius might be the first cave. Broad, originary, opened by an ancient fire. A cave where one tells stories in order to survive, where figures are born because one must give form to what burns. One can still move about there. There is air. One can see more or less clearly.

Lucian would enter a second cavity. Deeper. Narrower. It does not repeat the first, but it gathers its waters. Here, stories become drawings or notebooks. It is no longer the heat of fire, but the persistence of form that works the rock. Here, one no longer merely creates: one reproduces, one notes. The light is weaker, but more precise.

Then comes a third cave, even deeper. The one where Félix stands. It was not hollowed by fire, nor by water alone, but by the gaze itself. A gaze that observes the other caves, that tries to understand their arrangement, while knowing it will never see them together.

From there, Félix sees from afar—and that is when he understands best. He distinguishes the general lines. He observes relationships and influences. Then he comes closer. He sees details more clearly. He recognizes faces, listens to words. Then he is too close. And then he no longer sees. Proximity blinds. The face merges with the wall. The image burns.

Don Carotte and Sang Chaud are like internal formations within the mountain. Concretions that have detached themselves from the wall. They have taken form and move about. The two companions do not know at what depth they stand. They revolt, replace one another, save and destroy themselves, without ever seeing the entire mountain from which they come.

And yet, despite this constitutive ignorance, something insists.

The human being, even condemned never to grasp the totality, does not renounce projection. He descends. He notes. He compares. He imagines continuities where he can establish only analogies. He accepts the discomfort of not understanding, while refusing immobility.

Perhaps that, in the end, is the common gesture of Félix, Lucian, Don Carotte, and Sang Chaud: to move within a mountain whose map they will never see, knowing that each step alters the next cave.

Stratification is not only in the rock.
It is in the gaze.