“But, opposed to death no less than to life, a complete system of psychological substitutions, the more conscious it becomes and the more it replaces itself with itself, the further it detaches itself from any origin, and the more it strips itself, in a sense, of every possibility of rupture. Like a ring of smoke, this system composed entirely of inner energies lays a remarkable claim to perfect independence and indivisibility. Within a consciousness of great clarity, memory and phenomena are so closely connected, anticipated, and answered; the past so fully brought to bear; the new so promptly counterbalanced; the state of total interrelation so completely restored, that nothing seems capable of beginning, nothing of coming to an end, within this almost pure activity.”
Paul Valéry, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci).
Where Igniatius, standing before a stream whose forms and lights are constantly changing, gradually loses his footing and discovers that every change also affects the one who watches. The man he glimpses in the moving water, none other than himself, is no longer quite the same as the one who entered the gorge. Little by little, the landscape reveals his own presence to him. He is no longer merely a spectator, but one of the forms that compose it. The air he breathes, the invisible currents within his body, the branching networks of roots and stream all participate in the same movement. What he contemplates transforms him as he contemplates it.
Igniatius’s Notebook
It would have been all too easy to turn this into an image and say that my veins were rivers, that my nerves were roots, or that the branching of a tree reproduced some secret architecture of my brain. Such resemblances might perhaps have lent the experience an immediate beauty. They would also have risked bringing it to a close too quickly. What I was experiencing was more elementary, and more unsettling. My body and this gorge did not need to resemble one another in order to belong to the same world. The water flowing before my eyes is the very water on which my own organism depends. The same is true of the matter of the trees and that of which my limbs are made. The invisible exchanges that sustain the foliage and those that allow my cells to remain alive are part of a shared material history. The distinction I had instinctively drawn between “myself” and “what surrounds me” had suddenly become less certain. I could almost feel myself smiling inwardly at the thought that I had come here with the habits of an explorer, as though I could enter an unknown region while carrying with me some observation post that did not itself belong to that region. It had taken only a few hours of walking for the gorge to remind me of this simple truth: I possess no instrument with which to encounter the world other than a living fragment of that very world.
My eyes themselves, to which I had until then assigned the almost innocent function of windows opening onto what lay before me, belonged to this same matter. The light falling from the sky, dividing among the leaves, striking the water, the stones, the glossy surfaces of the foliage and then returning towards me, did more than inform me about an external spectacle. It actually entered my body. It reached the back of my eyes, where it brought about physical transformations of which I was entirely unaware. It became transmission. Somewhere within that moist, folded matter which my skull carried through the forest, differences became movements. Movements and variations in brightness became actual volumes, while the slightly different images received by my two eyes helped bring into being around me that depth which I had always regarded as a simple property of things. I knew all this in the way one knows something one has read.
I was discovering that knowing the processes by which vision constructs depth, and catching that construction in the very moment of its occurrence, were two experiences almost entirely foreign to one another.
All I had to do was move my head slightly for a twig that had until then been indistinguishable from another to separate from it. A patch of sky slips out of the mirror of the water. A new gleam appears a few inches farther away. The whole of space, without anything having physically moved, rearranges itself around me. The stream, which only a moment before seemed to open beneath my feet onto an almost celestial depth, becomes once again a thin transparent layer above a few stones.
I was then watching my brain at work, if such an expression could still have any meaning. I was not, of course, watching it as I might have watched a hand or a stone. I could see nothing of what was taking place within its depths, but I could catch its effects at the very moment when they became the world I had believed I was simply finding before me. The constellations I had followed for so long upon the surface of the water did indeed exist through the light that reached me. And yet the lines by which I connected them were inscribed nowhere. A few points shimmered, one ripple brought them closer together, another drew them apart, and already something within me was isolating a pattern. It almost seemed to wait for the figure to continue, so that I could no longer look at those moving stars without sensing, behind their appearance, another activity, just as incessant: that by which my own brain connected, separated, compared, completed, and brought forth, from everything that reached it, a space in which one could dwell.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire