"History expects only one thing from us: to be lifted up—that is to say, suspended—in order to be set in motion again, replayed. To begin anew. History never ceases—as if by its very structure—to desire precisely where it turns back upon itself and remembers. Constantly it seeks or rediscovers new rhythms. It longs to branch off, to separate things that have become too familiar and to bring others into unexpected contact: ways of imagining. It wants to bring to an end what seemed established, to begin what seemed impossible. It wants to vary the song of existence without forgetting anything that has already been attempted."
Georges Didi-Huberman,
Imagining Beginning Again
What Lifts Us Up (2), p. 37
Les Éditions de Minuit
Where Félix, still facing the unfathomable mass of documents that had accumulated before him—and within him—had fallen asleep. During his sleep he hears a voice he does not recognize, and upon waking hastens to write down what he understands only halfway, and what never ceases to slip away from him.
From the Journal of the Archipelago
Just before dusk, and before they had been able to recognize the places of their previous journey, we felt them returning… those beings with fertile and agile speech, clumsy feet, and hands armed with walking sticks.
No doubt they believed they were approaching a forest. We had already recognized the way their footsteps hesitated long before their eyes recovered the slightest landmark. We do not recognize paths as men do. We recognize, rather, that which—or those who—pass through them.
Long before their arrival, the conquering mosses had continued their work; the roots, their patient commerce with the stone; the lianas, in a suspended silence, their slow conversation with the light. Nothing had waited for their return. Places never suspend their existence. They simply continue to be until a gaze, once again, encounters them.
We cherish those rare moments. They are the moments when the one who believes he is returning discovers that no one ever enters the same landscape twice. Not only because the place has changed, but because the one who returns is no longer quite the one who departed.
We watched them slow their pace. They may say they chose to walk more slowly. It seems to us, rather, that their own measure of time, without their knowing it, gradually consents to accord itself with another. The trees impose nothing upon them. They merely remind them of a duration they have always carried within themselves without knowing it.
We know little of names. They pass more quickly than the seasons. We recognize, however, certain ways of looking. Some gazes seek to possess… others to understand. Others still gradually forget that they are looking at all. It is often at that very moment that something begins.
We have witnessed this many times. Stone teaches nothing… it receives. The sea explains nothing… it connects. The wind preserves nothing… it distributes. And yet, from their silent accord, there sometimes arise beings who imagine they have discovered what had been waiting for them all along.
When the moon crosses the vaulted canopy of the trees, we do not see night succeeding day. We simply feel that an ancient equilibrium has recovered a way of breathing. Shadows change their place without ever abandoning the things that bear them.
And so they continue their journey…
Others will follow them…
Still others will read their journals, look upon their drawings, retrace their paths, believing they are searching for the very same places.
We never know what they come seeking.
We know only that they seldom depart carrying what they had come to find.
Perhaps that is our own way of inhabiting the world.
We are neither the islands, nor the forests, nor the cliffs, nor the volcanoes, nor even the sea that separates them.
We are that which, between them, never ceases to draw them toward one another.
And when, long afterwards, their names have themselves entered into silence, their passages will nevertheless continue to inhabit our thousand places.
Thus is born the ambiguous journal that Félix, for lack of a better name, calls The Journal of the Archipelago.
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