(148) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“But then again I do not know what form to give to what happened to me. And without a form being given, nothing exists for me. And—and what if, in reality, nothing had existed?! Who knows whether anything at all had happened to me? I can understand only what happens to me, but only what I understand happens to me—what do I know of the rest? The rest did not exist.”

 

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Translated into French by Didier Lamaison and Paulina Roitman
Le Livre de Poche, p. 21

 

 

 Where we see Igniatius observing how his words become images.

Igniatius’ Journal

For a long time I had believed that the drawings were awaiting a caption, some counterfeit that would claim to explain what was taking place within them. Today I understand that they were awaiting a body, filled with a comparable energy, capable of carrying their movement forward. They were certainly not silent images. It was very probably I who did not yet know how to hear the manner in which they spoke.

The forms existed before me and... in front of me. Nothing yet existed within me that was capable of answering them. And yet I had been looking at them for a long time. I could even say and describe what they showed. A tree, the sea, a rock... a rope, a door too low, a child lying upon a rope as though the sky were beneath him, a man whose night-coloured coat seemed to have been cut for someone larger than himself. I could count the characters and recognize the places. But that was not enough. I saw what had been drawn. I did not yet see what was continuing to take place there.

There was something in these images that would not remain still, although nothing within them moved. It was not a movement the eye could have followed. It was rather a pressure, an insistence, like that of a branch trapped beneath a stone which, unable to lift it, slowly conforms to its shape before finding a passage elsewhere. The drawings remained before me, motionless and patient, but that which had brought them into being had not stopped with them.

I believe that this is what I began to hear. It was not truly a voice... and I could not have said to whom it belonged. Of course, there was no one behind the images whispering or dictating anything to me. No one was asking me to explain them. They demanded neither commentary nor story. They contained only a force that could not remain entirely within the lines, the shadows, the bodies held motionless at the vertiginous edge of the slightest gesture. It was there, at the edge of that vertigo, that I began to speak... Or perhaps I merely allowed that force to pass through some invisible and mysterious opening.

I did not yet know how to write. I know scarcely more about it today. When, facing Lucian, I placed words beside one another, one after the next... as I had done with the drawings... and then set those sentences beside the drawings as one might lay down a few stones here and there in order to find one’s way again, I thought they would help me not to become lost. But before long, the words were no longer following the images. They began to take directions of their own, directions I had not foreseen.

Thus a drawn door ceased to be a door as soon as I wrote that a child bent down to pass through it. It became the place where high and low exchanged their names for an instant. A rope no longer remained motionless, stretched between two columns and the alternation of above and below. No sooner had I written that it bore the weight of a body than it seemed also to bear the weight of the sky. The same oversized, night-coloured coat no longer covered only a man or a child. It preserved around him the measure of another body, absent or still to come. I had decided none of this. I merely observed that the words, in their turn, did not remain where I had placed them. I believed I was using them to approach the drawings. But they began to show something else. Not something that had been hidden inside the image like an object inside a box, but something that could appear only by leaving the image without ever abandoning it.

Perhaps this is how the characters and the Archipelago came to me. I did not see them emerge from the drawings. They did not fall into them... although I might just as well say that they did not fall out of them. I cannot point to the moment when one of them began to exist as something more than a vague silhouette. I know only that, by dint of thinking... of writing that a man was looking at the sea, he eventually began to look at it without me. By dint of noting that a child was sleeping upon a rope, I began to wonder what he saw with his eyes closed. By dint of describing a parrot turning its head, I thought I heard what it might have repeated. The drawing did not come alive. That would be too simple. It did not become living in the manner of images made to pass rapidly enough to deceive the eye. Rather, the world around it began to shift. What had at first been a form bounded by its contour gradually reached the margins, then the page, then the space in which I stood.

I do not know whether I was using the energy contained within the images or whether that energy was using me so as not to exhaust itself within them. I know only that it changed substance. In the drawing, it was held by a line, a fold, a hesitation, or the distance between two bodies. In words, it became something like an expectation. A memory manifesting itself as fear. At times that expectation became something resembling a desire, although I could not say whose desire it was... or what it desired. It did not leave the visible in order to become an idea. Today I know that this expectation... like me, was simply continuing its journey by other means.

It was then that I began to think that writing would add time to images. But they already contained their own time. They contained what had preceded the represented instant, what might perhaps follow it, and even what would never occur but nevertheless remained possible around it. My words did not give them this duration. They opened it. I became the passage through which an image could continue without having to move.

Once, this idea would have seemed too great to me. Even today it still seems somewhat excessive, and although it is true that I distrust ideas which suddenly take up all the available space, I can find no other way of saying what occurred. Before me were forms I had believed complete, and I discovered that they had not finished being capable of transformation. Perhaps... no form ever quite finishes. Perhaps what we call an image is merely the place where something stops for long enough to be seen... Then... it sets off again. A gaze takes possession of that place. A memory displaces it... A voice lends it another duration. And when a word arrives, it does not necessarily translate what the eye has received. It may become, in its turn, a form that can be seen.

This happened to me without my noticing.

 

 

If I said... or wrote: the sea was dark, I said those words... but they told me almost nothing. Then I wrote that the sea lay at the foot of the rocks like a beast that had forgotten how to breathe. I stopped. I had not intended to make an image. I wanted only to make more precise what I saw. And yet the beast was there. It was neither in the drawing nor in the sea. It had appeared within the words. I understood then, or believed I understood, that words too could begin to show.

They did not show in the manner of drawings. They possessed neither lines nor colours. They held nothing before the eyes. But they compelled the gaze to form elsewhere. A written branch could bend without being drawn. A room could darken within a sentence. Under certain circumstances, an absent face could leave upon the page a place more visible than if it had been represented.

My words... little by little, and sometimes suddenly, were perhaps becoming images. I say perhaps because, even today, long afterward, I still do not know what an image is. I had believed I knew when I drew. Then I believed it was what remained after the gesture. Now it seems to me that it is rather that which, having once appeared, still finds the strength to appear otherwise.

Thus the drawings made me speak. And speech, in its turn, began to draw without my hand.

I do not know where this movement will stop, or even whether it is for me to stop it. Sometimes I write a sentence in order to preserve what I have seen, and discover that it opens a place to which I have never been. Yet I recognize there a stone, a light, the manner in which a character stands facing us or with his back turned. I might believe that I am inventing. But the word does not entirely suit me. I do not create these places out of nothing. I encounter them as I move forward. They enter the words as they once entered the drawings, though I cannot say through which door.

And when I return to the first image, it seems to me to have changed. Not because its lines are different, but because something of what I have written has settled within it. Thus the words return to the images. They give back what they received from them, but transformed by the journey.

Then I no longer know what began.

I can affirm that I traced certain lines. I can say that I wrote certain sentences. I can no longer say that I began them. The forms existed before me. Perhaps they existed even before they had a form. They were merely waiting for the place where their movement might begin again.