Where Igniatius, without yet knowing it, discovers his limits. In doing so, he draws closer to the speech that eludes him.
Igniatius’s Notebook
A drop falls. Time dissolves. The drop is still beneath the leaf when already it strikes the water.
The circle, multiplying into infinite replicas, forms a moving target while the splash, a derisory crown, remains for an instant. The beginning, infinitely repeated, remains.
Another drop falls and everything begins again. With it, old memories return. A smell imprisoned for years in a collapsing wall is released. An almost effaced image appears. Before my feet, a flooded stone suddenly bears the light of another time. A branch touches the shoulder with a hand. The past does not return. Voices follow it. They do not speak to the one who is there. They merely take back the space in which they had not been heard. Old sentences flow into the stream. Some are familiar. They caress and wound before they are recognised. Others have been distorted by time.
I have been receiving this speech for years without its ever finding a way out. It weighs no longer in memory but in the flesh. Hollows out the sternum. Swirls beneath the tongue. The throat, the final dam, still does not break.
The earth suddenly rises towards the head. No. The legs have buckled. But the movement is lost in time. No one will be able to recount it. A stone receives the hips. The back meets a cold wall. The hands come to rest somewhere. The body finds itself sitting in the midst of this abundance. Like a fallen animal, it waits without knowing what is coming. Its eyelids close. A heaviness takes hold of them and draws them down. Then the outer forest disappears. Something more terrible begins. The lines on the paper continue their journey. They no longer need the trees. They grow in the dark.
Networks open, divide. Become networks of networks. Rosettes begin to turn behind the eyelids. Lines fold back into their own lines. They burst into geometries that no one is drawing. And yet every detail possesses the exactness of something necessary. The drawing has rid itself of the paper... then of the hand... then of the world... and continues... Itdraws itself with no one there to draw. The one who, only a few moments earlier, was Igniatius is no longer present enough to claim the movement as his own.
His eyes open with animal violence. A surge against which no act of will could have opposed its poor decisions. The disarming green of the forest explodes once more. Magnificent and terrible, the trunks spring up. The stones roll. The water is there, really there, when a deep cracking sound resounds through the gorge. A tree has fallen somewhere.
The crack passes through the chest. Something breaks. A hand rises to the throat. The throat contracts. A pressure rushes into it. A human sound bursts out. The ear receives it. The head moves. It searches for the one who has just made it. No one. Only an open mouth. Then another surge, older than the first cry, lifts the chest and passes through the throat. It strikes the tongue against the teeth and throws a syllable into the air. The dam has just understood that it can give way. And so it gives way. Clumsily, abruptly, it bursts.
Everything that had accumulated behind it arrives at once: words heard, words held back, answers never given, childhood voices, the intonations of others, sentences understood without ever having been returned, sounds whose secret shape the mouth had always possessed. Everything rolls forward. Everything rushes into the breach. After the dam has broken, a black river carries away trees, houses, animals, roofs, the dead, earth, and the debris of a world no one had imagined lay behind the water. Everything pours into the drawing.
The mouth speaks without asking. It addresses no one. The water passes the wood. Beneath the wood. Outside, the sentence exists. It is there where everything will pass. It has just been born into the air before me. The one from whom it emerges tries in vain to catch up with it. The stream passes beneath a dead branch and the sentence returns, changed by what it sees:
The wood remains and the water passes.
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