Slowly Abandon Yourself to Rosa Barba’s Sensation

I made a circuit, then a second circuit, I tried to imagine myself as a time traveler, to the time and place of my distant ancestors. I made a circuit, then a second circuit, then a third, and found myself in a loop. I let out a yell. At a point which had to be that very point – in the place of my sign – there was a shapeless scratch, a bruised, chipped, abrasion in space, I had lost everything: the sign, the point, the thing that caused me to be me. Space, without a sign. A void, without existence or end, nauseating, in which everything – including me – was lost. I let myself be dragged along as if unconscious. When I finally raised my eyes, I saw what I never could have expected. Faces, animals, maps, lines, inscribed on a subterranean wall. They seemed to be expressing some unknown mythology, or written code. Looking closer at the drawings, I found that abstract symbols were being used as parts of a larger form. Was this the very beginning of an attempt to communicate through writing? A linguistic map? Or an attempt to give speech to something that seemed to be without language? A story that is completed only over many years being passed on visually from one abstract sign to another? Ideas can evolve over time, and how we perceive earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards in the nonchronological timeline. These are somehow simple cellular structures. It was like opening a diary for the first time and walking into a room full of strangers; a need to consider how to use abstract symbols rather than figurative images. There was no longer a container and a thing contained, only a dense diffusion of signs, occupying the whole volume of space, a network of lines, scratches, reliefs and engravings. This universe had been scrawled upon across every surface, in its every dimension. As a side effect, and by necessity, these measurements had been made over decades. Some drawings represent subjects in constant flux: volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes. Down there, little would change. Space was unlimited, the temperature would always be stable. Life would continue as it always had done. I had left the sign in that place, a sign which seemed inappropriate, in all its pretension. It could continue on through the centuries, making a ridiculous spectacle of itself, and of me, and that transient way we sometimes have of perceiving things. What kind of drawings to choose for committing to memory? Why is it that some images are so strong and sharp, so fit for awakening memory, while others are so weak, hardly stimulating our recollection at all? We must enquire deeper into this, to know which images to avoid, and which to seek.