The little donkey-headed man

 

While Lucian, very surprised and full of doubt at the fact that Félix has brought a drawing he says he went to get from the gallery where Igniatius is supposed to have found the ones he brings to Lucian, stares at it, he doesn’t quite know what to say or think.
At first glance, according to Lucian, this drawing has nothing to do with Igniatius.
He listens as Félix repeats that “what they exchanged during their last session” had deeply… how to put it… disturbed him, and how he had tried, just like Lucian and Igniatius, to represent the situation they were… and still are… in, in a way other than just with words.

— You’ll see… Of course, it’s only an experiment… not very orthodox, I admit, but sometimes it works, Lucian. Would you like to hear the rest of my analysis? You’ll see, it is deeply connected with your… well… with our problem. Forgive me, once again, for calling it that.

Lucian does not answer, but he seems to consent, and Félix does not wait. He puts the drawing back under Lucian’s eyes; Lucian looks away, convinced he already knows it.

— Look, Lucian, the little dancing donkey-headed man and his writing-shadow!

Lucian turns his head slightly, hesitates for a long moment, then decides:
— I don’t see it…
— Focus.
— Now I see it… but he isn’t dancing.
— Look again, Lucian.
— Ah! There it is, I see two donkey-headed figures!
— For the moment, forget the background and focus your gaze on the one who’s dancing…

— I see him, but I don’t see any shadow of writing.
— Wait for the wave to pass.

The supervisor lingers, and points with his finger, almost tenderly, to the detail at the bottom right.
— Here, on the edge of the book, a tiny figure waving… the one you saw first… and there, his double, who seems minuscule, with his donkey’s head and human body. But look how he dances, and how that dance casts a black shadow on the white page, like a writing in perpetual movement, unreadable outside the present moment.

— What would this donkey-headed man represent, in your view?
— You see, Lucian… the donkey, symbolically, is many things… At a first level, it can be the symbol of the one who does not know, but wants to learn. But in other aspects, it is the one who can feed on very little, even on hard, thorny things… It is the one that carries heavy loads without its “brain” interfering too much. It is present, a witness at the Nativity. It is also, forgive the incongruity, through its long tail, linked to primitive sexuality, to the beginning of life, to a raw fecundity… and finally, it is the one who, with its long ears, knows how to listen.

— But why this flame?
— We already talked about it yesterday, remember? The flame is also a path. Notice how this little being dances to the rhythm of the flame, on the edge of the burning book. The donkey-headed man follows, dancing, the path that the flame symbolises. The dancer’s movements act on the flame. Thus this unpredictable path, far from being fixed, is modified by his action. It becomes his own. And above all, his shadow is cast onto the page. His shadow does not draw a clear silhouette, it produces black marks, like a writing that is constantly changing. It is an unreadable, unstable, trembling writing.

— One might see in it a kind of proto-writing… like Igniatius’s…
— That is exactly it, Lucian. Something is being imprinted, leaving a trace, but it is not yet in the register of a shared language.

— Go on, Félix, please.
— And here, the logic of the double becomes very interesting. Have you noticed how the notion of the double has settled into this image? We have, on the one hand, the dancing donkey: pure drive, pure motricity, pure resistance; and on the other, his double-shadow, who is writing a text that no one can yet decipher.

— We might say: the id is inscription. The body, the trace and the muteness are already a form of writing.
— That’s very beautiful, Lucian, very powerful. But look—we are still far from having exhausted this image.