Where Félix feels compelled to return to a certain drawing, and where one may note that the message contained in this particular drawing, or in drawings more generally... if there is a message at all... differs somewhat... depending on the point of view...

Félix’s Notebook

The play between the two words, drawing and design, almost irritates me because it is so convenient, yet I can find no better way of naming this movement in which what I direct begins to carry me along from the moment I start doing it through drawing... even when they are only simple copies... This, ultimately, is what makes the old word inspiration, so close to aspiration, at once so persistent and so troublesome. It gives a face too quickly to what we do not understand: a Muse, a genius, the unconscious, a voice coming from elsewhere... As though giving a name to what escapes us were enough to explain it, when there is no need at all to imagine some elsewhere. What escapes me may lie exactly within my own gesture... which, in being carried out, becomes larger than what I had foreseen.

There is something ordinary in this idea, and that is precisely why it is difficult to look at. I do something, and what I do teaches me what I am in the process of doing... then that discovery alters the next gesture. Which in turn will bring something else into appearance, so that creation no longer resembles the more or less faithful execution of an already formed project. It becomes a kind of advance during which the one who acts continually receives, from his own act, information that the original intention could not contain... This insufficiency, or this confusion, arises simply because... logically... what does not yet exist cannot be fully known before it has begun to exist.

This changes many things, for example, when I return to the hat. I would like to know whether it was deliberately drawn too large... even though the question now seems almost naïve to me... It may have been drawn exactly that way without its author ever telling himself that almost the entire face had to be covered in order to signify this or that. And yet, once it is there, too large, descending too low, removing the gaze or making the face almost impossible to understand, it begins to act upon everything around it. It leads to other decisions that might never have been made without it. It contributes to turning the face from a simple lack into a particular kind of absence, and that absence, in turn, calls for something else, transforms the character, alters the way in which he will henceforth be able to appear. The disproportion is no longer necessarily corrected, because it has ceased to be a disproportion in the sense first given to the word. Little by little, it becomes a distinctive mark.

So where should the origin be placed? In the first line? In the accident, if there was an accident? In the moment when someone noticed what that accident made possible? In the moment when one decided not to correct it? Or later still, when other drawings, other texts, other ways of looking come to give that first gesture a significance it may not have possessed when it was made?

I think I am only now beginning to understand what Blanchot calls the “uncertainty of origin.” Until now, I thought an origin became uncertain because we moved away from it... when documents were missing... when memories became blurred... Time destroys the evidence, certainly... which still amounts to assuming that somewhere there does indeed exist a perfectly certain beginning that we are simply no longer able to reach.

But it may be something far more troubling. Namely, that the origin itself may never have possessed the unity we attribute to it afterwards. There may never have been a single moment in which everything was already gathered together in someone’s mind before passing obediently into the hand. There may instead have been a hand, a memory, a half-glimpsed form, perhaps an awkwardness, or another drawing seen the day before, a forgotten story, a physical necessity of the gesture, and then something arising in the midst of all this which, the moment it appears, begins to redistribute what came before it as well as what will follow. The more I search for a source, the less I encounter a source than a current... And this image of the current decidedly returns beneath my pen too often for me to go on pretending not to notice it.