Where it is discovered that history, without necessarily repeating itself, places mirrors along its path. Pinocchio the Other, before or after all the others, more or less dismembered in an unknown landscape, gradually finds himself there.
Pinocchio the Other’s Notebook
Might I be the one who, without any aesthetic ideal, imagines himself walking through what is too vast for him? I cannot tell, by listening, whether this might be belongs to the conditional or the future tense. I shall be the one who wears his hat low, his gaze remaining partly concealed. I feel impulses that touch me, and I tremble before taking the slightest step. I do not know what carries me. Something, which might be I, resists. I cannot say what it is within me that is being moved. I am, like the parrots, one of those who repeat. And so it goes on until a new voice, the one now speaking to you, attempts to emerge from that repetition. This voice belongs to the one whose face bears a familiar expression that has come from elsewhere and exceeds me. I make my way in silence, far beyond what you cannot hear and beyond this pantomime offered to your gaze.
Meanwhile, those poor things that are my arms, my legs, and all the parts of what resembles a body remain stranded on the shores of consciousness, miserable pieces of bleached wood, shivering survivors of a flood, while something invisible slowly draws itself taut. This ingenious and deceitful assemblage regains an uncertain uprightness. The water recedes to its place, distances return, and someone discovers himself standing.
The hand becomes a hand again when the mouth, mute until then, softly pronounces the word hand. Then the word tree… and the tree no longer falls apart. Water, like all the other words, like time, flows.
At last, the word “I” returns. It still trembles and finds its bearings, more or less… But this time it no longer immediately seeks a monarch, mocked by the words themselves, to enthrone behind the eyes. It is enough that this I should be able to accompany what happens. “I” think… I walk… and my feet begin to move, ever so slightly before the sentence, but the delay is no longer an abyss that I can now cross with ease.
I walk, and words come and go. Steps follow one another as lines once did, drawn by the movements of the hand, without my quite knowing which are leading the others. Behind me, the landscape resumes its patient work. Stars form upon the water and die before receiving a name. The leaves begin trembling again. The stone awaits the foot or the palm of the man who has already come or who is yet to come. The few shapes left behind by the receding flood pretend to advance, attached to nothing, like words that do not yet belong to anyone.
I do not know whether these shapes will one day have names. Whether someone will one day ask where they come from. Nor do I know whether a man called Lucian, or someone else, might pass through this gorge before or after me. Perhaps he will place his hand upon the same stone, look at the same sky reflected in the water, and follow, as far as another boundary, that same movement to which I have just surrendered myself entirely. I know only that something happened before I could name it.
A drawing took shape, preceding the hand. Someone walked before my footsteps. He saw before I could wish to see. He spoke before I knew how to speak. Now, in this light that is gradually returning to its ordinary poverty, I walk behind all of this, with that slight delay which may be the only place where I can still say that I am… but behind me the water is roaring once more.
It already knows what I have not yet begun to say.
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