“There are moments when vision precedes all recognition. The world no longer presents itself as something seen, but as an emergence. What one sees is as yet nothing, and yet it reaches us, like a nameless call.”
Taken from Sang Chaud’s journal¹
Taken from Sang Chaud’s journal¹
Where Don Carotte takes some time to see… or to understand, not what he was seeing, but simply… that he was seeing.
Don Carotte’s Journal
– It was a strange sensation; it seemed to me that I was truly seeing for the first time… and yet what I saw, the image forming in my mind, was utterly unrecognizable… to such a degree that, at that moment, I might have said there was no image at all! Certainly, I had seen before then, but without knowing that I was seeing… It was strange. I saw without needing to see. Then, slowly, the image took shape; I knew it was taking shape, but I could not see what it meant… for, at that instant, it was neither a known animal, nor an insect, nor even an object. What I saw, or thought I saw, was a being, but one whose form could not be defined.
It was utterly unknown to me.
He would write later in the same journal…
Tiny, barely visible, even when gazed at with the utmost intensity of attention. It was there, resting upon the giant tree, yet it seemed neither to inhabit it nor to cling to it. Rather, it was as though it formed part of the tree without quite being part of it.
It moved. In sudden starts, with gestures that called to mind nothing known. Neither the movement of an articulated body, nor the contraction of an animal, nor even a light. Rather, it was like a slipping between dimensions, a folding of matter back upon itself, which at times gave the impression of an arm, then a wing, then an eye, without ever settling into any form. And that movement, that rhythm, obeyed no earthly breath.
It was utterly unknown to me.
He would write later in the same journal…
Tiny, barely visible, even when gazed at with the utmost intensity of attention. It was there, resting upon the giant tree, yet it seemed neither to inhabit it nor to cling to it. Rather, it was as though it formed part of the tree without quite being part of it.
It moved. In sudden starts, with gestures that called to mind nothing known. Neither the movement of an articulated body, nor the contraction of an animal, nor even a light. Rather, it was like a slipping between dimensions, a folding of matter back upon itself, which at times gave the impression of an arm, then a wing, then an eye, without ever settling into any form. And that movement, that rhythm, obeyed no earthly breath.
Where Don Carotte, without the slightest doubt, knew himself to be watched by this being. By this tiny moving thing, resting upon the bark of the giant which, for its part, never ceased to grow.
A gaze without a pupil, without any apparent direction. Yet a gaze nonetheless. He felt it in every one of his bones. A gaze that passed through him, that weighed not upon the flesh, but upon thought. As though whatever was there understood, even anticipated, everything he was about to feel.
And the longer he stared at it, the more his perception of the being altered. It was tiny, certainly, but the more one tried to grasp its contours, the larger it grew within the mind. It took up space not in the world, but in attention. It became central, absorbing every notion of distance or scale… Nothing resembling any kind of logic… whatsoever.
It was that which must not be named. For to give it a name would have been to make it exist otherwise. And this, instinctively, Don Carotte dreaded.
— It has been there from the beginning, Sang Chaud said, almost under his breath, as though addressing the tree rather than his master.
— Who?
— Him.
He said no more. There was no need. The moment thickened. Silence itself became matter.
Something was there.
That something was watching… watching them.
And now, this indefinable thing was waiting.
¹ Inspired by the existential phenomenology of Henri Maldiney.
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