(113) Lucian's letter to Felix

 

"The deepest aim of the noetic quest may be this: to recover the lost territories of the psyche that have been conquered by the enemy. It is a matter of gaining post-language over pre-language and over the human interdependence of which it is the vehicle. Thesis. The definition of mythical thought is simple: if myth is the narrative that founds the group, then within that narrative (the transmitted language), the narrator is the group itself, deploying its five hunting strategies upon the environment it gradually discerns within the surrounding grip. The pack remains the master, however imperfectly synchronized it may be with new times. If thinking depends upon the collective language acquired through the ancestral tongue of the group, can thought expend or escape that dependence? No. No group has 'invented' the language it speaks. No individual has experienced the past that he relays. The beating of each person's heart is not initiated by his own heart—but by the pulse of his mother's heart. Language itself is not invented by the groups that speak it.
(...)
The first world can still thrust its muzzle into the second world. The first kingdom still reigns over the last kingdom. The long ago still emerges. The sun still shines. What is older in time is linked to what is more spontaneous in form. Scholium. This is why nature is the greatest of visible things. Its outpouring still wells up from behind primordial visibility. It remains a strange backward glance."

Pascal Quignard, The Name on the Tip of the Tongue
Paris, Gallimard, Folio

Second letter from Lucian to Félix

Between the days of storm—which are the most frequent upon these islands—there are calmer days, when the only danger would seem to be losing one's hat... not counting, of course, the danger of losing oneself... which, as you know perfectly well, is not linked solely to the wind or to the other elements.
At the heart of this chaos, during the days of respite, life sometimes insinuates itself.
Seabirds nest here: blue-footed boobies, frigatebirds, gulls whose wings are speckled with salt. Some cry out, others glide in silence, yet all participate in this organic choreography. They deposit seeds from elsewhere within the fissures, enrich the soil with their guano, and trace furrows through the air like suspended prayers which, I know, like my own, will be nothing by tomorrow.
What is true of the body is equally true of language and of thought.
We... and when I say we, Félix... it is because, to my great surprise, I discovered, while reading his notebooks, that my thoughts are not so distant from, nor so different from, those of the Moon Child... or from yours.
Thus I found myself, first without noticing it... then quite consciously... making use of that we.
We speak from within a dependence older than ourselves.
There is therefore, within our lives, a kind of original debt.
Not a fault, but a form of anteriority that it is impossible ever to erase completely.
When Quignard, whom the Moon Child quotes abundantly, says that language is "neither divine nor human," he means that it exceeds that opposition.
It is not simply manufactured like a tool.
Nor has it fallen from the heavens like a sacred law.
It precedes us.
It circulates and is transmitted, yet it also transforms itself, and no one can truly say: here is the one who founded it.
It is there before us, and we receive it.
This is why the Moon Child, after Pinocchio the Other, rightly corrects in advance the dream of absolute freedom.
They say, in substance: one may free oneself as much as possible, but one can never be absolutely free.
The phrase may seem pessimistic.
In reality, it is chiefly lucid.
It reminds us that none of us, whoever we may be, is a pure beginning.
We are always already caught within bonds.
But the words of the notebook are one thing... and the life of the Moon Child is another.
And the Moon Child does not stop at this dependence.
He seeks an opening.
That opening is the possibility of thinking our dependence.
We cannot entirely step outside language, nor outside the group, nor outside origin.
What we can do, however, is draw nearer to that which precedes us.
We can attempt to feel what, within us, comes from before us.
It is here that the idea of pre-language and post-language appears.
Pre-language is what exists before words: primary sensations, raw emotions, the rhythms of the body, archaic fears, the bond with the mother, the cry, the night, terror, hunger, presence, absence.
All of this exists before discourse.
I do not know whether the Moon Child knows such things...
But I do know—though I know not how—that he reads... or at least quotes... Pascal Quignard.