“[…] my indolence bristled against the idea of dispiriting readings, endless reviews, scrupulous methods that protect one from certainty. I told my friend that learned men run far greater risks than others, since they make wagers while we remain outside the game, and that they have two ways of being mistaken: ours, which is easy, and theirs, which is laborious. And if they are fortunate enough to restore a few events to us, the very number of material truths thus re-established puts in danger the reality we are seeking. Truth in its raw state is falser than falsehood.
Documents inform us at random about the rule and the exception. A chronicler, too, prefers to preserve for us the singularities of his age. But not everything that is true of an age or of a person always helps us to know them better. No one is identical with the exact total of his appearances; and which of us has not said, or done, something that was not truly his own? At one moment imitation, at another a slip, or circumstance, or merely the accumulated weariness of being precisely who one is, alters that very person for a while; someone sketches us during a dinner, that sheet passes on to posterity, all inhabited by scholars, and there we are, made pretty for all literary eternity.”
Paul Valéry, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci.
Where Igniatius tries to catch the instant in which an image is born. He cannot decide what, in the constellations of the stream, belongs to the water, to the light, to his eyes, or to that imagination which makes a star emerge from a mere glimmer. And while he thus seeks the origin of what he sees, an inversion takes place. He discovers with growing astonishment that the landscape has no need to possess eyes in order to look at him, nor even to have an intention in order to elicit a response from him.
Igniatius’s Notebook
As I became aware of it, I saw less a brain hidden inside my head, secretly manufacturing a landscape, than a single operation whose limits I no longer knew exactly where to place, since light without water would not have produced these figures. Water without light would not have produced them either. Nor would either of them have become, for me, these depths, these constellations, and this inverted sky without this body placed here, at this precise height, with these moving eyes, this bending neck. This memory was recognizing a star where there had been nothing but a glimmer, and this imagination was already beginning to move through the spaces it had helped to bring forth.
I was still looking at the stream, and yet I was also beginning, through it, to see myself looking at it. Not because I had split myself in two, into an observer capable of stepping outside his own body, but because the gorge was giving me back my place within it. The stone on which my feet found support received my weight. My silhouette intercepted part of the light and sometimes itself entered into the reflection I was watching. So that what I saw already bore the trace of the one who saw, and the one who saw was already being transformed by what he saw.
It was then that the strange sensation which had appeared a few moments earlier took on a magnitude to which I had not at first dared consent: the landscape was looking at me.
I knew perfectly well that the trees possessed no gaze, that the stones had no awareness of my presence, and that the stream expected nothing from my passing. But the longer I remained there, the less that absence of intention was enough to make the phrase false. Everything around me was acting upon me with a precision from which my own will was often absent. The fading of the light opened my pupils, an unevenness in the ground altered my balance before I had even noticed it, the coldness of the air changed my breathing, the continuous murmur of the current erased certain sounds and made others more perceptible, the inclination of a branch obliged my body to bend, a slippery root commanded a correction from my muscles that I had not decided upon. And while I believed I was moving through the gorge with my senses open toward it, the gorge was entering into me through all these openings. It was, in a way, attuning me to its own presence and making of my body the ceaselessly modified response to what it presented to it.
I then experienced myself, with increasing strangeness, as that man whom the landscape might have seen if it had possessed eyes; but this imagined vision gradually ceased to require the landscape’s eyes. It was enough for me to recognize myself among what was there: a vertical form among other forms. Mobile among what seemed motionless, and yet I myself was moving without cease, breathing the air that the leaves had transformed. Carrying within him the same water that was flowing before him. Looking, with living matter born of the same earthly history, at everything he had until then called the outside.
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