From Point to Step (2017)

From Point to Step

Carnets de l’EpSF, no. 105, 2017, pp. 29-30.

The recent work of the College of the Pass has, since its first session, singularly engaged me through the questioning it provoked. I recall that a metaphor of crossing took shape on that occasion, under the sturdy features of a giant river ferryman. I still feel my prodigious irritation at the time, upon hearing this reference and proposition. It took me some time to decode a few fragments of it. First point. In the heat of the moment, I left that session thinking that the ferryman could much better be a dwarf, and not a giant, to vainly consider my reaction to this perspective that made the ferryman such a large surface to carry high enough, and strong enough, the testimony of the passer-by from one bank to the other. A giant makes for a very large surface, I suggested to myself, to laugh a little without being able to cheer up. I rather saw the ferryman as a dwarf whom the passer-by would see as a giant, so much would they invest him with their entrusted testimony. This is because I had agreed to be the one who collects the testimony of a passer-by. This experience, continued, then finished, was not so much finished after all.

Refusing the gigantism of the matter, which, less than grandeur, accurately conveys its consequent consistency and consistent consequences, I preferred reduction. But no Alice on my path with her size-reducing biscuits. No White Rabbit to guide me. The fall, nothing but the adventurous fall, in dilated time, from the entrance of the burrow to the small room and its small door. No, and no! The ferryman could not be such a big deal, although a pretext for many institutional affairs in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. No Queen of Hearts either, but the analyst and nothing else, then the analysis and a few others. I began to know what it was like for me to have been the ferryman, and I tried to add a “…but still,” to distance the ordeal of getting out of it, through the small or the large door, of knowing or not knowing some things about it. Organizing denial requires energy and strength. Bearing the cost, and recovering from it, invites the use of colossal strength experienced minutely, from the miniature of the ferryman eclipsed by the pass and its strange consistency, invited to experience the matter of absence, that of the passers-by’s narratives, then his own brought to light in the aftermath of procedures brought to their conclusion.

It took me to know that to pull myself out of the hat, leaving the door ajar. Its impossible closure prevents or renders null and void any theatrical slamming of the heavy door. No boulevard on that stage, but the slight flutter of eyelashes of a new gaze cast shortly after, where the hinge of the pass shares the steps of whoever advances on the small path. A step that makes a point of what insists. A bank that is indistinguishable from the one that would look at it from across. First step. The crossing does not merely trace the fleeting path from the breach where the expanse of a space is illuminated in an instant. The crossing simultaneously foments the re-stitching of the point that makes a step, doubling the stitch so that nothing unravels. That the stitch does not unravel at this point ensures the step in whose imprint a punch will be seen, read by others. This seems so certain that it is almost foolish to write it. Will I venture further into it? That remains to be seen. I have never liked fairground rides, never. Too many reversals and dizzying sensations… if only I had known. With a roller coaster, you know when it stops, even if you think you won’t see the end. The pass, by whatever edges and ends it is approached, reveals itself to be rather 1 — a reversal: to see, to perceive that it stops, one thinks of one’s own end; 2 — a displacement: to no longer see anything, one ends up stopping to locate this new place. Is it opposite? Not at all. The crossing does not imply straightness, but begs that one lead steps askew into this new space. Crossing requires that a going towards becomes visible for the traverse to appear, which will have been, provided it offers itself to observation, necessary for the fall to be experienced. The vertigo indicates that the perspective has changed, that a dimension filled with emptiness and a few trifles presents itself to be tasted for each “grain” that forms it, through each “pore,” until the appeasement of body and soul, to escape the clamorous beating of the oscillation arising between death and madness.

Vincent Bourseul

Paris, February 7, 2017.