Where Igniatius, now far adrift, discovers his own limits and in doing so draws closer to the speech that eludes him. His sensations intensify and become confused. Old memories and voices rise to the surface. Meanwhile, the drawings seem to pursue movements of their own, almost without him. Little by little, the body gives way. Then something breaks. The speech long held back finally finds a passage. Accumulated words, answers never given, ancient voices all rush through together. The mouth speaks before Igniatius can catch up with what it is saying.
Igniatius’s Notebook
Moss covers the wood. Insects burrow into it. Dampness undoes it fibre by fibre. One new growth carries away the one before... and laughter comes. It bursts out almost violently, mingles with the stream. It becomes contagious. Everything passes. Earth passes into the tree. The tree passes into the earth. Water rises into the leaves. The sky passes into the water. Day passes beneath the feet. Below passes above. Above falls. Stone flows. Water holds its place. On its surface, verbs free themselves from things. They too begin to run and join themselves to those things. Language, barely born, becomes wild. It has not yet learned politeness. Words mate with whatever comes their way. They separate. They return or exchange places. Soon it is no longer possible to know whether the forest has begun to speak or whether speech, released, is spreading across the forest like a new species of vegetation.
Then, alone, the word “I” falls.
It makes almost more noise than the cracking of the tree. But nothing appears. The hand is there, as are the mouth, the cold, the pain, the legs, the colour, the voices, the memories, the sound, the stone beneath the body, yet nothing arrives to take possession of all this. Nothing but a chatter.
I, the word, calls. No one answers.
Then the throat swallows the name. The forest can finally live without it. The roots carry the legs away as they crawl. In the mirror of the water, they descend. The blood outruns the stream. It finds another slope inside the chest. The wind passes through the open mouth. The leaves tremble beneath the fingers. Green leaves the leaves. Shadow leaves the earth. Light leaves the sky. All these qualities now wander without their owners. As though creation had suddenly been returned to the instant just before, when nothing had yet signed its name in the shadow of its drawing.
No one is looking anymore. It sees. It hears. It breathes. It falls. It remembers... with no past left.
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