(89) Félix tries to summarize the story.

“Midway upon the journey of our life,
I found myself within a dark forest,
for the straight way had been lost.
Ah! how hard a thing it is to tell
what this wild, rough, and stubborn forest was,
which in thought renews my fear!
So bitter is it that death is scarcely more so;
but to speak of the good that I found there,
I will tell of the other things I saw therein.
I cannot rightly say how I entered it,
so full of sleep was I
at the moment when I abandoned the true way.
But when I had reached the foot of a hill,
where that valley ended
which had pierced my heart with terror…”

Dante, Inferno, Canto I

Félix’s Notebook

I am beginning, with some difficulty, to understand why this story sometimes exhausts me as much as it holds me. I thought I was following a narrative. I gradually discover that I am crossing a territory for which no one, perhaps, possesses a complete map. Lucian writes to me. Igniatius speaks to Lucian. The drawings speak to Igniatius… as much as they speak of him… or of others. The Moon Child seems to pass through the drawings… Don Carotte passes through the Moon Child… and Pinocchio the Other appears in regions where, if one trusts common sense, he should not yet be found. And I, from my desk, try to understand where I am placing my feet.
I could say that this story moves forward. That would be true. I could also say that it goes in circles. That would be true as well. At times I come to think that it resembles an archipelago more than a road… An island appears… I settle upon it… and build a hypothesis there… then another island emerges from the mist and the entire landscape reorganizes itself. The phenomenon repeats with an almost troubling regularity.
For a long time, I believed this story was searching for its form. Today, I doubt it. I suspect that, even though its form still escapes me… it already exists.
The problem lies elsewhere. What is missing may not be the form. It may be the place. I do not mean a geographical location. I mean a place capable of receiving the weight of what occurs.
The distinction seems important to me. A foot does not seek the idea of the ground. It seeks the ground itself. It seeks the precise place where it may come to rest.
This story often gives me the impression of being that foot suspended above the void. The previous step still exists. The next remains invisible. Yet the movement continues.
I often think about walking. Every step is an accepted imbalance. The body leaves one support before it has entirely found the next.
There exists an instant in which one belongs simultaneously to what one is leaving and to what one is approaching. That moment is the moment of passage. Perhaps that is what I have been reading for months without managing to name it… an immense region of passage.
A story that lives in the in-between.
Running carries this logic even further. Both feet sometimes leave the ground. For an instant the body seems to fly… Yet it is falling. It has never ceased to fall. The next foothold does not abolish the fall. It gives it form.
This image often returns when I think of Lucian. It returns even more strongly when I think of Igniatius. Both sometimes seem to float above their own hypotheses. Then gravity returns. A word. A drawing. A letter. An almost insignificant detail. Something calls them back toward the earth.
I then wonder whether truth functions in this way. We often imagine that it elevates us. It may instead attract us. Not downward, but toward a place. Toward a ground sufficiently real to bear our weight.
As I write this, I immediately think of the Archipelago. That impossible country which returns again and again in the drawings. Those volcanic islands where almost nothing grows. Those austere lands and their cliffs. Those ancient lava flows. Those swirling winds and that constant impression that everything might disappear tomorrow.
Today I understand better why this setting feels so right to me. The story is not seeking a fertile plain.
It is seeking a rare patch of earth, like a fissure in basalt or a pocket of soil capable of receiving a root. Sometimes a single one is enough.