“The pages of a book define an enclosed space, withdrawn from the immediate world. This withdrawal acts as a concentration. An inner light begins to appear, not upon the paper itself, but within the act of reading. And this light illuminates less the objects than the very conditions of perception. It illuminates the senses before illuminating... meaning itself.”
With all the freedom allowed by the meanderings of memory, and where the signature thus becomes a form of writing without any identifiable author, Lucian, a curious and diligent wanderer, perhaps even an involved one, observes with an attention that is almost animal in its intensity...
Lucian’s notebook
At first glance, the islands scarcely move at all, yet something circulates between them. A murmur, a breath, an expectation. They are like guardians of an enigma. Their mere presence lends this archipelago the appearance of a sanctuary, a place where the imagination has run aground and begun to breathe.
In the surrounding distance, when one's gaze sharpens, other islands seem to change shape with the passing days and tides. Some slowly sink beneath the waters, revealing the drowned fronds of a fossil forest; others emerge in great sections—a plume of smoke, a spray of ash, then the sudden appearance of a new cone, smoking and charcoal-black. These islands are born, collapse, and transform themselves on a scale that no human calendar can truly contain. Some of them, however, possess a kind of signature... illegible to the hurried traveller.
In a profound sense, almost an alchemical one, a “signature” designates that through which a thing manifests what it is without stating it explicitly. One is reminded here of the tradition of the signatura rerum: the idea that things bear within themselves signs of their own nature. A plant, through its form, “signs” its use; a stone, through its texture, “indicates” its power. The signature is no longer a human act, but rather a way for the world itself to mark itself, to render itself legible.
As has already been said... the human path is never inscribed upon untouched ground. It is always traced across a substance already opened, already marked, already exposed. Now I know this. Others, before me, have travelled this path and have left their traces upon it... traces of which some remain invisible to me still... and most of which are, for now, indecipherable...
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