“It is wasted effort to try to hold on to what is coming undone: everything conspires towards effacement. Not that one should resign oneself to it out of spite, but rather understand that this is a way of being in the world, perhaps the only one, that relieves us of the weight of attachments and allows us to glimpse, in withdrawal, a nameless clarity. What you give up trying to grasp immediately ceases to tighten around you. Thus, little by little, you learn that loss is the true form of salvation.”
Louis-René des Forêts, Ostinato
While Don Carotte and Sang Chaud are trying to understand their situation, including that of the arboreal donkeys... at the same moment... Félix, through a letter from Lucian, discovers almost incidentally that the ocean liner and the shipwreck are now returning as memories that gradually contaminate the reasoning of one and another. Thought can thus move elsewhere without Lucian ever ceasing to feel beneath it the real movement of the ship.
Letter from Lucian to Félix
Félix,
For some time now a sentence has been troubling me and feeding many pages of my notebooks. I would be quite unable to say when it first entered my mind. I do not even know whether it was already there before the journey... before the ocean liner... or before that moment which I am still unable to decide truly deserves the name of shipwreck. The word is far too definite for what it covers. It is simply the word my mind chose afterwards in order to gather together several events whose very sequence still escapes me.
“... and why do we write, if not to escape the prison of the self and its banalities?”
Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak, Les Nomades–Quidam éditeur, p. 20
It seems curious to me that this sentence should return here. I have been walking for many days through this Archipelago, of which I possess only a partial representation. It is rather as though each turn revealed a fragment that joins the preceding ones without allowing the final order to be guessed. And so I do not know whether the whole thus formed corresponds to anything other than my own way of assembling its parts. Stranger still, the sentence brings me almost immediately back to the ship, to that enormous construction inside which we lived with the perfectly natural assurance of people who know they are floating without having to remind themselves of it at every moment.
I often think, strange thought, that an ocean liner of this kind is one of the most sophisticated machines man has ever devised to enable him to forget the sea. We walked there, by day and by night, as though upon a piece of land travelling with us. The architecture of the ship, the cabins, corridors, passageways, staircases, lounges, mealtimes, all those small domestic continuities kept one obvious fact carefully at a distance: the immense mass of water surrounding the hull, separated from us by only a few centimetres of metal.
Something had to happen. I prefer to write that rather than pretend I know exactly what. Something had to happen for that fact, which until then the ship had so efficiently rendered unnecessary, suddenly to become present again in every one of our gestures. I do not remember everything. Or rather, I remember too many things and no longer know which of them belong to what actually took place, and which were manufactured afterwards so that what took place could enter into a story capable of being told. But I retain, with embarrassing clarity, the sensation of a floor that no longer confirmed what my body expected of it. I remember a horizon that no longer performed its function correctly. Objects taking an unexpected direction. And all the while, something within me working with extraordinary speed to make practicable again a space that no longer was.
It is probably this experience that makes me hear the sentence differently today. I am beginning to wonder whether the self from which it claims writing allows us to escape resembles that ocean liner more closely than I would once have thought. Not, of course, because it would be destined to shipwreck. That would make the metaphor a rather poor prophecy. But because it too constitutes an organisation within which we move so easily that we eventually forget it is an organisation at all.
We have our corridors, our compartments, our habits of thought, our ways of recognising things before we have even truly examined them. So long as nothing disturbs this economy, we readily call it seeing, understanding, remembering, being ourselves, without asking how much silent work was required to produce this continuity, so completely does it seem to go without saying.
[…] To be continued
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