(93) Lucian is travelling

“The spectator, in search of subjective construction through the commerce of gazes—which can never be identical to the commerce of things—is reduced to the status of a consumer of knowledge and objects that are not offered under the sign that defines them: the desire to see, closely associated with the desire to make and the desire to show. Culture is charged with filling a void instead of creating the hunger and thirst known to the desert travellers who are artists. Culture should be defined as the gathering of all signs and all forms that contribute to the birth of a spectator at the crossroads of the countless gazes that share a world at once detestable and delightful. The spectator cannot be the subject of consecration. It is within this circulation, which belongs to the economy of desire, that image-making operations can accompany and sustain a subject in his or her relation to others.”

Marie-José Mondzain, Homo spectator, Bayard

Where Lucian, in the midst of his journey through the Archipelago, enters the reddish draperies of a circus identical in every respect to the one he had seen in the drawings. From a highly uncertain perspective, he attempts in vain to explain that which endlessly folds and refolds upon itself. Nevertheless, with surprising vitality, he recounts these events and the thoughts they occasion in a letter to Félix.

My dear, highly esteemed, and now so distant colleague,

I was alone beneath the big top. Alone… at least according to that poor human measure which still believes it can distinguish its own presence from that of the things that gaze back at it. For scarcely had I passed through the dark curtains than I felt another world beginning—a world inwardly vaster than all visible landscapes, a world in which space itself seemed to breathe like a shadowy chest.
The circus rested upon no true ground.
Or rather: the ground itself seemed to float.
Beneath the beams, beneath the ropes, beneath the great red draperies descending from above like torn fragments of twilight, I perceived the Archipelago. Not the diminished island that an ordinary eye might have glimpsed among the shadows of the scenery, but the volcanic immensity from which it had arisen. Then, within my mind, the rocks began to rise. They grew beyond measure. They became basaltic cliffs, storm-eaten walls, masses thrust up from the primordial depths of the globe, still traversed by the subterranean breaths of creation.
I saw headlands hollowed out by centuries. I saw cooled lava flows suspended above the oceans. I saw red mountains standing like the columns of a world before mankind.
And the circus itself now seemed erected upon their summits, as though forgotten peoples had wished to suspend a fragile theatre above the abyss…
It was then that the flames appeared to me.
They rose slowly among the structures of the big top with a terrible majesty. Long, pale, almost white at their birth, they twisted upward like souls seeking an escape through the darkness of the world. Reaching the upper sails, they dissolved into smoke. Not ordinary smoke, but a vast vapour, like those clouds that rise from volcanoes when mountain rain seems to meditate within the depths of fire.
And below, the sea was fighting.
For the sea was there.
I heard it more than I saw it.
A heavy, subterranean, ancient sea, rolling its spiral waves against the bases of the flames. They surged upward against the fire as though the ocean itself refused this luminous ascent. Each wave seemed intent on reclaiming for the abyss what was striving to escape from it.