“For the moment, we have, on one side, the cliff of the physical sciences, upon which we can read everything concerning the formation of the world and the biological development of humankind, and, on the other, the cliff of the human sciences and the disciplines concerned with prehistoric and historical times, which tell us how human beings lived once the critical threshold of hominization had been crossed. But we possess no familiar representation of the moment when, for the first time, a prehuman female held in her arms the human infant to whom she had just given birth, nor of the way in which that infant’s human capacities first manifested themselves, from the moment when its mother urged it, as she inevitably had to, towards the world of adults.
In order to feel that our existence is legitimate, we human beings need an account of our origins, a historical representation of the world, and therefore a genealogy (even an imaginary or mythical one) that places us within the continuity of things. Thus, the Book of Genesis, for example, traces the descendants of Adam, beginning with Seth (whom Adam is said to have fathered at the age of one hundred and thirty) and continuing down to Abraham.”
Michael Francis Gibson, Ces lois inconnues, Métailié, p. 33.
Where Igniatius, travelling through the lands of his own characters, finds himself questioning, among many other things, a word as simple and familiar as “in”. He discovers that this tiny word opens up an unsuspected abyss. How could he simply be “in the gorge”, when the gorge itself participates in everything he experiences? A still stranger vertigo takes hold of him when he realizes that his brain brings into appearance the very world in which he believes himself to be. He is no longer trying to determine whether he belongs to the landscape or whether the landscape belongs to him, but discovers, within this circulation to which no origin can be assigned, that he is made of the very same things that make the gorge, without their differences having to disappear.
Igniatius’s Notebook
The gorge, which I had initially described as a place I was entering, was now becoming strangely impossible to distinguish from what I was actually experiencing. I could no longer reduce it to an arrangement of stones, trees and water surrounding me. It was also the coolness I felt upon my skin, the difficulty of my steps, the damp smell that lingered in my breathing, the images forming in my head, the change in my body's rhythm whenever I stopped beside the stream. It was there, too, in the memories that certain forms awaken. As in the very thought through which I was now trying to understand what was happening to me. Yet to say that the landscape was within me would still have been too simple. It would have required imagining a self that already existed, into which the landscape could then have entered. But what I was beginning to sense was precisely that this self did not emerge from such an encounter unchanged. I felt that it could never have come into being independently of everything that reached it.
And so I no longer knew exactly what it meant to say that I was "in" the gorge.
Certainly, I was there through my body, which occupied a measurable position between two rocks. But the gorge was also within that body, through every possible sensation. Through the forces to which my muscles responded. It was present in yet another way within that cerebral activity which, receiving all these differences, constructed around me the expanse within which I subsequently believed my own body to be situated. I thus found myself in a space that my brain helped to produce from the very world to which that brain itself belonged. And this movement turned back upon itself with such perfect gentleness that it became impossible to say where it began. The world produced an organism capable of perceiving the world. That organism brought a perceived world into appearance. And that perceived world, in turn, modified the organism perceiving it.
It was at that moment that the expression "the landscape is looking at me" itself began to trouble me. It still preserved two terms placed opposite one another. As though the landscape were here and I were there, each facing the other, whereas everything I was experiencing made such an arrangement increasingly difficult to sustain. Nor was it a matter of saying that I was the landscape, if by that I meant dissolving the trees, the water and the rocks into some immeasurable extension of myself. The gorge had no need of me in order to exist. It had existed before me and would outlast me. At every moment it contained an immensity of phenomena to which I would never have access. Yet the one I called "myself" was no more some foreign substance that had come to place itself before it.
I found myself made of everything that made the gorge.
The matter of my body had no origin other than that of the world of which this gorge was a momentary form. The water I carried within me had belonged, before me, to countless cycles of circulation. The air entering my lungs had only just passed between the leaves. Even the very atoms through which my eyes received the light had known, long before my birth, histories I could never hope to trace. My brain, with its extraordinary capacity to open up distances where it initially received nothing but differences in light, had not fallen into the world from somewhere outside it. It was one of the things that the world had eventually brought into being.
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