I am constantly climbing and descending… I remain hanging there, within this forest of ropes, among the sails wounded by the wind, the groaning masts, and the long cloths beating like flames in the storm. Beneath me, the sea stirs with vast dark folds, like the folds of a thought too immense for a poor wooden being such as myself.
And yet I keep moving forward. Oh… no doubt very clumsily. I slip, I stagger, I cling to the beams like a lost child wandering through the backstage of the world. The ropes tighten around me and burn my hands. The wind hurls into my face words that I understand only halfway. Yet I continue onward, with that stubbornness peculiar to imperfect creatures who still do not know why they refuse to fall.
I believe that in the beginning someone merely wished to make me speak. One more figure within one more story. A puppet, a poor wretch made of sawdust and wood shavings, fit only to wave arms and legs beneath the light of dark yet blinding lanterns.
But figures… beneath the varnish… figures sometimes harbor silent rebellions. At first they obey. Then one day they breathe. And from that moment onward everything grows more complicated.
For now I can clearly feel that my presence slightly disturbs the air around beings. Not as a sword disturbs and enters combat. Not as a judge disturbs the guilty. More gently. More sadly perhaps. Like a lamp that reveals without accusing.
I pursue no one. I hunt no lie. Besides, who would I be to do so? Just look at me! I can barely remain suspended within this labyrinth, this theater which, like me, is made of beams and canvas! The wind alone is enough to make us tremble.
And so, suspended there, I struggle with all my length, and my famous nose, ah! that poor nose from which so many others before me would have fashioned fanfare or trumpet, is for me neither glory nor mockery. It embarrasses me as much as it guides me.
For it lengthens whenever certain words cease to possess a true dwelling within the one who speaks them. Then I feel it almost despite myself. Something tears within the air. Words become too light or too heavy. They no longer walk alongside the soul that carries them. And my nose stretches into the void like a branch still seeking a little truth within the storm.
I cannot help it. I would never wish to humiliate anyone.
Quite the contrary. I would so dearly wish that everyone might one day speak with a voice that finally resembles them. A habitable voice. A voice within which one may dwell without losing oneself.
Then, around me, I sense it clearly, beings sometimes hesitate. Their sentences slow down. Their silences grow larger and join my own. Some lower their eyes, I can see it well, as though something within them had suddenly awakened after a very long sleep. And I, poor puppet battered by the winds, remain there amid the rigging, almost ashamed of producing this without meaning to.
But there exists something stranger still. The one who brought me into being is changing as well. I feel him behind me as one senses a presence within a darkened room.
At first, perhaps, he believed he guided me with a steady hand, as a master guides his marionette beneath the gilded ceilings of a theater. But now I believe we move forward together within the same swaying motion. For a figure that begins to live carries with it questions that no creator entirely masters.
He discovers me at the same time that he constructs me.
And sometimes, forgive me this audacity, it even seems to me that I teach him something about himself.
So we continue onward together. He within the shadows.
I among the rigging. He among words and sentences. I among the gusts of wind.
And the immense sea rolls beneath us like an old black dream filled with drowned stars.
I do not know where this voyage leads. I know only this: perhaps there exists, somewhere beyond the uproar and the winds, a way of speaking that does not mutilate the world when it names it.
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