“It is not the world that I describe. It is not the truth. It is an image, a vision, a composition. Hardly have I begun to name a thing when I already disfigure it. For words are not things; they are the shadows of gestures, the remnants of light. And yet that is all I possess: this fragile, deceptive, dazzling network. What I make visible is not what is, but what words bring into being. While others believe they fall silent in order to listen to reality, I speak in order to say that we do nothing but invent. The world never gives itself; it tells itself.”
Claude Simon, The Georgics
If one is to believe the accounts recorded in his innumerable notebooks, Igniatius’s world is inhabited by creatures he calls emergent beings, beings who, according to him, constantly address him. Not only do they question him, they demand answers. Such is the case with Pinocchio the Other, speaking to Igniatius...
— What remains of a world when one is afraid to dream within it?
— Why that question?
— Someone has signed a rigorous and well-informed article, yet one whose severity is so methodical that it seems to forget what words...
— Which words?
— Mine... yours... ours... can touch—not beyond reality, but at the burning heart of its perception.
— What is the author of this article talking about?
— He accuses us of a kind of “aestheticization of chaos”!
— That leaves me perplexed. Must every impulse that might be called poetic always be reduced to an ideological manoeuvre? Is it a betrayal of human history to linger, for a few moments, upon a naked island, untouched by discourse, where rock speaks to flesh?
— The text he accuses of erasing human presences does nothing more than probe what comes before.
— Before what?
— Before civilization, before the word, before judgment.
— Is it a crime to imagine a world without us, not in order to exclude us, but in order to better understand what our arrival changes?
— The rock is not here a utopia; it is a hypothesis of listening... and as for his reading of it, I find it... cold. Terribly cold. Eternity is not a fantasy of forgetting: it is a tension. A wound held open between the mineral and the luminous. It is not the forgetting of the human; it is the possibility of the human.
— Certainly, vigilance is admirable, but it dries the soil before anything can flower. He reproaches the text for its silence? Perhaps he has not inhabited it deeply enough.
— Who is that?
— I see nothing...
— I think that... there, at the back of that strange cave, is the one who wrote the text we were discussing a moment ago... Igniatius, I believe, is his name...
— And the other?
— Look and listen to how well he answers...
— Do you not recognize him?
— Could it be Pinocchio the Other?
— Perhaps... but the other of whom?
— I do not know... I have no idea...
— To whom is he speaking?
— To the one who criticized him...
— Be silent... Pinocchio the Other is speaking!
— You speak with passion, and I recognize in your style the charm of those geographers of the soul who wish to listen to rock as one would read a poem. Very well. But allow me to answer with a frankness that I intend to remain courteous: you romanticize erosion. When you speak of a “hypothesis of listening,” I hear only a lyrical sigh—charming, certainly, but blinding. What you call “the before,” this island without name or memory, is not a neutral place: it is a constructed fiction, an artifice in which reality has been carefully erased so that a supposed essence of the world may be contemplated. In claiming to step outside language in order to “hear the rock,” you forget that the rock has already been narrated, framed, stylized. It is not the world that you describe: it is a mineral theatre.
As for Rimbaud, whom you brandish like a talisman, I do not find him cold but tragic. “The sea gone with the sun,” you say? Very well. But look more closely: it lasts only an instant, a collision, an illumination. You see genesis there; I hear disappearance. Eternity, in that phrase, is as fleeting as a geological dream.
I am not saying that one must not dream. I am saying that one must know from where one dreams—and at what cost. Your words sometimes fill me with wonder, yet I persist: one must learn to recognize the myths one repeats. Otherwise, one ends by confusing lava with the milk... of a nurse I never had...
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