“Men’s words go away with the wind; they do not remain. They pass through the air, they are lost, they disappear. But what they have touched, what they have awakened, that endures for a long time, like an invisible trace.”
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Desert
In his notebooks, Nounours, confident as he is… lets appear, here and there, a slight instability, like a crack through which those who accompany him pass.
Notebook of Nounours
Speech does not belong to the one who speaks,
Nor even to the one who hears and follows it;
It wanders between the two, obscure, without dwelling,
Like an ancient breath that seeks and yet remains.
Half gift, half loss, it escapes and returns,
No one knows whence this sovereign movement was born;
For something, within it, insists and withdraws,
A chose without name that desires and that sighs.
I say “chose” *… already the word falters and flees,
Like a remnant of shadow escaped into night;
A chose, a cause in a muted complicity,
That moves without origin and troubles all birth.
He who believes he speaks never truly begins,
He enters a current wider than his steps;
He who believes he hears inclines his waiting,
But it is something else that haunts them still.
As in the game of tennis where the ball returns,
Each follows the stroke received, which is never his own;
Yet no one knows here from where the path is drawn,
Nor what hidden hand governs its story.
He is there… that child… motionless and deep,
His gaze is a threshold where the ground itself trembles.
The Moon Child stands at the edges of speech,
He feels its vertigo and does not know his role;
He senses that words come from a time before,
That they pass through his mouth, leaving him absent.
He listens for long to what trembles and moves,
Like a faceless wind or a sea drawing back;
And feels that what he lives does not belong to him,
That he is caught in a flow whose step he ignores.
I do not love words closed like stones,
Sewn, sealed, stifling both night and light;
They offer no passage to the chose at work,
And close the fissure where it might open.
Let one respond… yes! But respond to what voice?
To what already speaks and does not name itself;
To an obscure cause, to the call that persists,
And seeks a living place where speech insists.
For causer is not merely to speak or to bind,
It is to enter a flow no one can subdue;
It is to lend one’s breath to what seeks to appear,
Without ever fully becoming its master.
The child barely knows it… or rather he senses it,
In a slight trouble that holds him in the present;
He looks at the chose and already merges with it,
No longer quite knowing from where the response is born.
If one had to choose… to lose sight or the voice,
I would keep that place where something speaks through me;
For seeing stays at the shore, but speaking crosses us,
Like a fire beneath the sea that consumes and overturns.
And suddenly all shifts, and the sentence grows clear:
It is not we who speak the depth of things;
It is the choses themselves, in their deeper cause,
That speak within us and seek to make a world.
And perhaps, at the end… in this troubled version,
To speak is only to answer what says “I am” without name;
To that which, always, from the shadow calls us,
And seeks in our voice the form of being real.
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