Where Igniatius’s drift becomes unmistakable. It leads him towards a perception in which everything begins to exceed him. Caught in the vapours of an imaginary marsh, wandering from drawing to drawing, Igniatius no longer really knows where he is, nor that he is hallucinating.
Igniatius’s Notebook
The sky is above, I know that, and yet... I see it below. The water is hardly a surface at all, as thin as it is infinite... A branch from the tree plunges into the abyss, and the mind, which ordinarily rushes in at full speed to put everything back in its proper place, is slow this time. When it finally arrives, out of breath, I discover that reason no longer has any foundations. It remains there, useless, while the water begins to tremble.
Then the stars are born. Not in the sky. Hundreds, thousands of them, on the surface of the water. Solar dust lifted by every ripple, by every movement. None remains. Each shines just long enough to summon the eyes, then goes out at the very moment the gaze reaches it. Another appears elsewhere, two draw closer, four answer one another. A figure takes shape and immediately falls apart. The stream becomes a firmament gone mad, making constellations faster than night itself could understand them. The gaze runs after them.
The body remains somewhere at the edge and the light begins to enter it. It enters the water too, the eyes, the wet leaves, the skin of the stones. It leaps from one surface to another with a kind of shamelessness. The shamelessness of things that have never learned they were supposed to remain in their proper place. Soon the green no longer stays within the ferns; it radiates around them. It spreads into the air itself, fills the intervals, while the damp is no longer merely on the skin but in the light itself. The sound of the water no longer comes from any place the ear could reach. It passes through the back, through the chest, beneath the feet, through the branches.
The forest expands without a single tree growing. A leaf comes closer without moving. Every vein is in motion. Every tiny tooth along its edge acquires monstrous importance. A minute hole left by an insect opens into a black mouth. A tiny drop contains the trees and the sky. And in that sky, the absent face of the one looking at it. The entire leaf, on which I am drawing, can no longer contain this unleashed infinity of details. Whatever once made it possible simply to say fern has ceased to do its work, and the fern bursts into thousands of things, all equally present.
The forest releases everything it had been holding back. The mosses reveal their miniature forests. The stones open their craters. The bark draws continents. Everything opens onto another scale where the same prodigality begins again. There is no longer any large or small, since a drop contains enough light to contain a sky. A patch of moss holds enough relief to have its own mountains, and a leaf vein enough branching paths to lead beyond every map.
The feet begin walking again. They flee. They know something the rest does not yet know, they search for solid ground within this overflow, strike a stone, slip, recover, accelerate, but the slope determines their pace, the roots lift them, the branches force the head down, a vine catches the shoulder, a stone shifts the hips, and soon the body is no longer a traveller in the gorge but a moving piece of this immense mechanism in which everything pushes what comes next and receives in return whatever is pushing it.
The hand finds a tree trunk. The bark enters it. It truly enters it, because roughness is no longer on this side or that side; it exists within the contact itself. A contact swollen until it occupies all the space. The palm presses the wood, the wood presses the palm. Who began? On the slope, did the body incline itself, or did the slope incline the body? The body stretched out its arm. The trunk stopped the fall. The skin received the bark. The bark received the warmth. Within this chain, it becomes impossible to find the hidden sovereign who might have decided the whole.
The fingers leave the trunk. A hand floats for a moment before the eyes. Whom does it belong to?
Someone. That must be true. But now it has to be remembered. Fear arrives. The fear of no longer remembering. It arrives very late. By the time it comes, the body has already begun to run.
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