Once fallen… night confesses…
— What are you waiting for?
— If I answered that I have no idea, it would not be entirely untrue, but it would be far too convenient a way of leaving the question behind us, when it seems to me precisely one of those questions that ask not so much for an answer as for a little time in which to discover what they have already set in motion…
— Allow me to smile…
— I quite understand… let me begin again… in order to discover what these questions have already set in motion in us at the very moment they are asked, for after all we have spent a great deal of time waiting without always knowing that we were waiting, and repeating a great deal…
— You said it, not I…
— …without always knowing what repetition was doing to what had been entrusted to us, so that today, when you ask me what I am waiting for…
— Politely… I should point out… that I am not asking any question at all…
— I would be tempted to answer that perhaps I am waiting to discover what, in everything we have received from others, heard from others, learned from others, repeated after them…
— That much is certain… you are repeating yourself…
— And sometimes on their behalf, has ended by becoming close enough to us that we can still carry it without disappearing...
— For someone who claims not to know, that is already an alarmingly long answer.
— You can see, notwithstanding the possibly enormous… or infinitesimal contribution of even the humblest reader, that we have changed...
— ...Or that we have spent too much time in the company of our master.
— Which perhaps amounts to the same thing, although I do not know whether he would appreciate our making him responsible for our sentences, especially since he might answer that they belong no more to him than to us, that they merely passed through him before passing through us, which would be yet another way of pushing a little farther away the question of who owns what is said when several voices have successively carried it.
— And there you are already talking about ownership.
— Because it is difficult to speak of the voice without that old question returning, as though a sentence had to belong to the person who uttered it, then cease to belong to him as soon as another takes it up, whereas it may be that it has never belonged wholly to anyone and can live only on condition that it passes, receives something from each person, loses something as well, sometimes returns so transformed that its first author would no longer recognize it and yet the last person to speak it would still be wrong to imagine himself its origin.
— I had turned slightly towards the Archipelago, not to interrupt our conversation, but because what lay before us had that peculiar way of seeming to add nothing to what had just been said while silently displacing it, and they remained for some time before the bare islands, the rocky slopes, the cliffs almost entirely devoid of vegetation, the sea separating the dark masses and, in the distance, above a crater they perhaps knew or believed they knew, a thin plume of smoke rising with enough regularity to appear peaceful to anyone who had forgotten what it announced.
— It is curious, one of them finally resumed, that we should call this a desert, as though the scarcity of visible things entitled us to conclude that almost nothing happens here, when stability itself may be the most fragile illusion of all, since the volcanoes are at work both when we are looking at them and when they are out of sight, since some eruptions never enter the story directly and leave behind only a consequence, a broken coastline, a vanished passage, a new mass in the middle of the sea, while an island we remember may no longer be there when we return, without anyone ever having told us of its disappearance.
— And you find that reassuring?
— I do not believe I said that; I am merely saying that the Archipelago teaches us to distrust what appears motionless, and perhaps also what appears to belong to us permanently, for a form may endure for a long time, long enough to be given a name and for us to grow accustomed to it, then break apart, sink or re-form elsewhere, while another appears without our being able to determine precisely at what moment it began to be what we now see.
— Are you talking about the islands?
— For the moment… There was very little vegetation, so little that a tuft of grass or a flower appearing between two stones could hold the gaze with a force it would probably not have possessed in a landscape covered with leaves, and when certain parts of the Archipelago suddenly began to flower, a rare event to which the story sometimes seemed to grant the brevity of a “visitation” rather than the duration of a new state of the world, nothing made it possible to say that this flowering would still be there later, that it would survive the drought, the wind, the lava or simply the shift of attention towards another island, another character, another story... and yet, at the moment when it appeared, it would have been difficult to reduce it to scenery or to pretend that it did no more than fill an emptiness.
— The danger perhaps begins when we rush to say what it means.
— What are you thinking of?
— That gigantic tree, the coat, the hat, the rope, the blue dogs, the roots, all those things that return in another form when we thought we had committed them to memory, and that each time seem to bring with them what has happened to them since the last occasion, so that the old explanation is not necessarily false but has simply become too narrow.
— Like a garment?
— See how you arrive there... you too.
— At what?
— At letting things answer without first asking their permission.
There was something in this that the parrots knew better than they might have wished, they whose first function had been so close to that of an echo that one might have thought they existed only when another voice supplied them with something to say, as though their very being depended upon that debt and the silence of others ought therefore to have entailed their own; but through repeatedly taking up what had been said, they had discovered that exact repetition perhaps did not exist, that a sentence changed simply because it passed through another throat, that an accent was enough to displace an intention, that a hesitation sometimes opened within an utterance a space that had not previously been there, and that the second voice, however faithfully it wished to remain attached to the first, could not prevent the passage itself from producing something.
Their function as a chorus had perhaps arisen from this, less from any knowledge they possessed about others than from the singular position in which, standing at the edge of what was being done and what was being told, they could take up the event again without claiming to master it, let it resonate after it had taken place, sometimes even while it was taking place, bring together two moments still unaware of one another, hear in a spoken word a consequence that the person who had uttered it had not necessarily foreseen, then return that word to the story slightly altered, not in order to impose a lesson upon it but to restore to it what it had perhaps failed to hear in itself.
— Does that never worry you?
— What?
— Receiving so much from others that you no longer know what would remain of you if you suddenly stopped repeating them.
This time the first parrot did not answer immediately, not because silence had recently become a virtue between them — they would certainly not have boasted of it — but because the question had just touched a place they had until then managed to skirt with a certain skill, as though the ceaseless passage of words from one voice to another had long been enough for them without their having to wonder what became of the one who carried them.
— There may be two ways of disappearing, he finally said, one of which would consist in withdrawing so completely from everything that binds us to others that, through trying to preserve what is supposedly our own, we would end up as nothing more than guardians of a territory no one enters, while the other would consist, on the contrary, in surrendering ourselves so completely to what comes from them, to their words, their expectations, their roles, their demands, that we would no longer know how to return to the place from which we answer them; I am not certain that between these two disappearances there exists some peaceful position in which we might finally settle, but perhaps it is precisely in the movement from one to the other, in the effort not to break the bond while at the same time not dissolving into it, that something resembling a voice begins to form.
— A voice of one’s own?
— I am already wary of the phrase.
— Naturally.
— Not because it is false, but because it would too quickly lead us to believe that this voice exists somewhere within us, intact, waiting for us to silence all the others so that we may finally hear it, whereas it may be that it can only appear in their midst, through repetitions, deviations, resistances, even misunderstandings, like a line we do not possess before we have travelled it.
— So you are saying that one becomes oneself by imitating others?
— That is above all not what I said.
— I knew you would answer that way.
— But neither would I say that we become ourselves by ceasing to imitate them, because I do not quite see how we could subtract from what we are everything that has come to us from them without at the same time subtracting a large part of what enables us to speak, to think, to recognize ourselves or even to oppose them; perhaps the question, then, is not how to escape imitation, but what imitation becomes when it ceases to be mere reproduction, when it begins to introduce that slight gap through which something passes without remaining identical.
— Play.
— Yes, play, and the word suits us all the better because it preserves both its movements without forcing us to choose too quickly between them: the play in which one participates, with its rules, roles, conventions and expectations, and the play that appears between two parts when they are not fitted quite tightly against one another, that narrow space which might be taken for a defect but without which nothing would move any longer.
The life of the Archipelago could be looked at in this way, not as the proliferation of a world endlessly multiplying its forms, but as the almost invisible work of this gap within provisional forms themselves: an island remained long enough to receive a name, then disappeared… another emerged… a plain of lava seemed sterile until the moment a shoot ventured into it… a character bore a name until that name became too narrow, or too ancient, or simply incapable of accompanying what was happening to him… the objects themselves returned without being quite what they had been, and what had first appeared to function as repetition gradually revealed itself as transformation.
This is perhaps why it is dangerous to explain too quickly, not because explanation is the enemy of what shows itself, still less because we ought to maintain an artificial obscurity around things in order to make them appear more profound, but because to explain carries within it the gesture of unfolding, and in trying to spread out too perfectly what was folded we risk losing not a secret but the very possibility of a change of face, that shifting relation between the visible and what reveals itself only when the thing is turned slightly, when we return to it, when we discover that the fold which seemed to conceal something was also holding together two surfaces which, once separated, would no longer touch.
— So you want to leave things folded?
— No more than that… I would merely like to avoid that strange mania by which we imagine we have finished with things as soon as we are able to give them a name.
— And yet… of necessity… we give a great many names.
— Which is why we must be wary of ourselves.
— This is becoming very tiring.
— Nothing obliges you to be yourself continuously.
The second parrot looked at him with sudden attention, as though he were not certain whether he had heard a joke, then, perhaps understanding that the uncertainty was part of the joke, he too turned his eyes towards the sea, where the smoke from the volcano had bent beneath the wind and seemed to join another island, although of course nothing actually passed from one to the other except what the gaze consented to carry there.
— Do you remember my question?
— Which one?
— What we are waiting for.
— I remember it better now than I did when you asked it, which is not very reassuring for memory, but perhaps quite faithful to what we have been doing for a long time… a question arrives, we think it is asking us to answer, then it makes its way, encounters something else, changes form, and when we return to it we discover that perhaps it was asking us less what we were waiting for than from what place we were capable of waiting.
— From what place?
— The place where we are neither entirely withdrawn from others nor entirely lost in them, I suppose, although putting it that way still gives the place a stability it probably does not possess, for we should perhaps speak instead of a passage, of a return that must constantly be undertaken anew, of a way of moving away without breaking and returning without dissolving, something that would allow us to hear the voices of others without being merely their echo and perhaps to hear our own without believing that it made itself alone.
— Perhaps?
— I am very attached to that adverb.
— Because you doubt that you have a voice?
— Because I am beginning to doubt whether I would know how to recognize the one that was mine.
It was at that moment, or perhaps only afterwards did it seem to them that it had been at that moment, that above a very distant island a new column of smoke appeared, still so thin that the chorus of parrots could not say whether they had seen it begin or had merely just noticed something that had long been there, and this uncertainty, instead of troubling our two birds as it once would have done, seemed to them to belong to what had just been said, for it was becoming decidedly difficult to distinguish what was appearing from what one was only beginning to see.
— So… what are you waiting for now?
— Perhaps to discover what speaks when I am no longer quite repeating… and I confess that the prospect worries me more than everything we have just said.
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