“The text, too, is Heraclitus’s ever-changing river.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Poetry”
Wherein Félix discovers that a reader does not simply move through a book. He can move with it.
Letter from Lucian to Félix
As you know, Félix, there are letters that do not exhaust their subject. Despite the disagreement that arose between us, and as far as I am concerned… writing seems to me less an escape than a way of catching any reconstruction before it is quite complete. You will forgive, I hope, the confusion this letter reflects. It is indeed reconstruction that is at issue here. I am speaking less of Igniatius than of his characters. I am speaking more generally… and more precisely of the passage from one character to another… and a little of myself… I admit this with a certain sadness that I do not wish to conceal. A sentence may begin in a familiar place, then encounter along the way an unforeseen consequence, an objection that changes what one meant to say. A single word comes along whose meaning slightly shifts the preceding sentence. If we do not stop it too soon to bring it back to its original intention, it sometimes leads us towards a recognisable thought… Yet we cannot claim to have possessed that thought before writing it. It is an exceedingly modest phenomenon, I know. Far less alluring than a revelation or an inspiration arriving from some elsewhere. But it is precisely this modesty that interests me more, because it obliges me neither to claim sovereignty over what appears nor to invent an outside power that might have placed it within me.
I produce a sentence. At the same time, it slightly alters the place from which I produce it. You will surely understand this. Is this where I locate the only true similarity with what happened to me aboard the liner? Not in the din or the disorder that my memory now adds to the event. In a far more discreet sensation. An entire organisation can continue to function even when its former coordinates no longer suffice. When the ship’s deck had ceased to confirm what my body knew of the ground. I had not ceased to be who I was. Only, what I was had to learn quite quickly to come to terms with a world that no longer responded exactly to its habits. I understand that today. And when my hand drew differently from what I had intended. When the sentence I am writing now begins to take a direction I had not chosen. A disturbance of the same order occurs. Unsettling. This disturbance is infinitely less violent, of course. But it is real enough that I can no longer simply reproduce the way my mind works without noticing what it does.
I wonder whether writing to escape the prison of the self ultimately means anything more than creating the conditions in which the person I am is no longer sufficient for what is taking place. It is not that I become someone else. That idea interests me less and less. Rather, the relationship between what happens to me and the way I organise it would need to remain uncertain long enough for me to be unable immediately to turn the unknown into a new room in my old dwelling. Travel can do this. But nothing guarantees that it will. One can cross an ocean quite peacefully. One can lose a ship and encounter islands without ever encountering anything other than oneself. Just as one can fill thousands of pages merely by circulating the same old certainties through new sentences.
I still do not know whether the liner sank, Félix. This uncertainty, which ought to seem unbearable to me, is strangely beginning to interest me. I could dispel it almost effortlessly, choose the most plausible hypothesis. All it would take would be to reinforce a few memories, let the others fade, and soon I would be recounting the shipwreck with a conviction that my memory itself might eventually come to share. But something holds me back. It is not a mystery. I know myself well enough to know that this temptation exists too. The gap between “the ship has disappeared” and “I am no longer with it” now seems more fruitful to me than the certainty that would abolish that gap. It is precisely in this small distance that I glimpse my mind at work, trying to connect what is not yet connected. For once, I feel like letting it happen.
Lucian
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