Angelus suspensus. Essays on the patience of angels (4)

I and You
Miller’s cow
You’re the donkey, that’s true.
But not yet, not even close.
Tell me first when you’ll be me.
One and two, it’s through—
I becomes a place,
And You slips away.

Counting rhyme from The School of Narcissism

You stepped from my dream,
I emerged from yours.
We die when one
Is fully lost in the other.

Johann Peter Hebel, I and You

You write: “Our gaze said ‘You,’ but to whom, and where? We stood before the lost ‘You,’ yet saw nothing but its disappearance. No clear form, no certainty. Yet even in its vanishing, the ‘You’ remained—like an echo that never fully parted. A fragment that held us—slipping away, yet reappearing in the silent traces of the unsaid. It wasn’t gone, just shifted. Our speech clung to it, even as it reached out into emptiness.”

You speak of a ‘We’ that formed when the ‘You’—as something clear, as something approachable—was lost. You speak of those in ‘We,’ who could see nothing of the ‘You’ but its disappearance. And what remains of the ‘You’ for the ‘We’ in your story is an echo. It seems that those bound in ‘We’ had called out ‘You’—perhaps even shouted—into something that could give resonance, an echo in response. And you tell us it had only just happened, for the echo was still audible, though what had caused it had already vanished. What stirred the echo hadn’t fully disappeared, hanging still in the air, while the space of resonance dissolved.

You call that echo a fragment, something that held those bound in ‘We,’ as if it were what kept them connected, what made them a ‘We’—the fragment of an echo, a remnant of the call, a summoning of the other as ‘You.’ This echo becomes, as you describe, a sign—flickering at times, withdrawing at others. As if the echo of ‘You’ were something in a movement of appearing and retreating, not unraveling, but surfacing and slipping away. You say this happened in the “silent traces of the unsaid.”

You write that the unsaid gave this echo of the ‘You’ call a new space for resonance, transforming it. And you write that this kept alive the speech of those bound in ‘We,’ even though they had lost the ‘You.’ But the ‘We’ you describe—it’s not us.

I want to explain why, as I read your account of this ‘We,’ which lost its ‘You,’ I sensed that at least one of the ‘Yous’ within your ‘We’ had, by shrinking into its own ‘I,’ caused the resonance between I and You—and between You and You within the ‘We’—to collapse, reducing it to a trace of the echo of calling ‘You.’ When a ‘You’ is only called upon by an ‘I’ to reflect the ‘I,’ to become a mere surface for its needs—when the call is made only so that the mirror aligns to reveal the ‘I,’ making it visible, audible, tangible, even danceable—then the ‘We’ becomes, at least for one participant, a connection between ‘I’ and ‘I.’ Then it is the ‘I’ that takes the place of the ‘You,’ using the reflection of the ‘You’ as a space to affirm its reality. Because that ‘You’ must, for the ‘I,’ also be an ‘I,’ for its recognition to hold any worth. Solus ipse—only ‘I’ alone.

You continue: “It wasn’t a secure hold, no firm grasp, but a game of language that pulled us in, only to slip away—a thing that flowed through our fingers when we tried to seize it. This ‘You’ was an attempt to grasp the ungraspable, always retreating. It couldn’t be bound, disappearing into the depths of its own meaning. A name, always just a reaching. And yet, when ‘You’ was spoken, it seemed to merge with what we sought—a moment that pointed beyond mere words. A sign never fully within reach.”

Narcissism, solipsism, egoism, vanity—so many terms try to explain the transformation of ‘You’ into the mirror of ‘I.’ But what happens is the exclusion of the You, the exclusion of the stranger within us, as well as the other as stranger. You speak of the ungraspable slipping away, of the failure to name it—and how the ‘You’ remained a faint echo of a resonance that once gave the ‘We’ something beyond language, beyond words. You try to grasp this relationship in the ‘We,’ describing it through the figure of the ellipse, as we once discussed—explaining why the concentration of ‘I’ on itself is something altogether different from the focusing of ‘We’ on the other as ‘You.’

You write: “The relationship between us wasn’t a center, no static force, but a movement between the foci of the ellipse. ‘You’ and ‘I’ stood in relation to one another, not through central attraction, but as two poles, constantly renegotiating closeness and distance in a dynamic constellation. The connection wasn’t in the center but through the open ellipse, passing from one point to the other.”

Had the relationship in the ‘We’ you describe been like that between ‘You’ and ‘You,’ each in the foci of an ellipse, its center left empty—no place for ‘I,’ only a threshold between ‘You’ and ‘You’—then perhaps the ‘You’ wouldn’t have had to shrink to the mere echo of a call. The connection held by the space between the ‘Yous,’ exploring the possibilities of nearness and distance, would have been a mediation between You and You, not a merging of You with I. The intensifying effect of such movement in a ‘We’ that allowed for ‘You’ through elliptical alteration to maintain a space of openness might have dissolved the self-centered collapse of resonance between I and You, You and You, within the ‘We.’ The fading echo of the call ‘You!’ might not have been the only lingering sound in that unfolding. Perhaps, after such an embrace between You and You, a sound would remain at the threshold of their encounter, holding the ‘We’ in the balance of You and You.

You write: “We carried ‘You’ in our language like a scar that didn’t fade. But the wound wasn’t the ‘You’ itself—it was what ‘You’ stirred in us: the encounter with the lost. A wound held in ‘We.’ It was the intertwining of word and presence, revealing that ‘You’ was always just an attempt at contact—a gesture of touch that always missed. The ‘You’ formed nothing graspable. It wasn’t a vessel that held securely, but something that slipped from our hands, forcing us to reach, to fail again and again. A sign that challenged us. In our encounter, we left traces on one another, but never fully—a mark, an echo that never became a complete form.”

Yes. You speak of that attempt, from the echo of calling ‘You,’ to draw forth a sound that might reveal that something more could be found in the resonance between You and You, within the ‘We,’ than the hollow space where an ‘I’ had settled.

You write: “The ‘You’ could be suffocating, too close, an overwhelming presence. Yet it remained a word, a sign cast into the world, with no certainty it would land. It was spoken—we wanted it whole, but knew it could only be an approximation, an attempt at something that forever withdrew. And still, the ‘You’ was irreversible. It remained—not the word itself, but what it meant: the trace of the other, living on in us. But that irreversibility was laced with doubt. Had the intended person truly been reached? Was justice done to them? The ‘You’ carried this ambivalence—the question of whether the sign could ever fully encompass what it signified.”

Did those bound in ‘We,’ as you describe, truly know this? If it unfolded as you narrate, then those bound as ‘I’ and ‘I’ in the end could no longer maintain the suspension between You and You. That’s why you capture it so precisely—this configuration of a ‘We’ made from ‘I’ and ‘I’.

“‘You’ couldn’t be contained in words, yet it was only through words that we existed. Always, it was a gesture of language pointing toward truth, toward a silence no language could break. Perhaps it was in this very failure of words that ‘You’ lived. It was the ‘not-enough’ of language that reminded us that the sign could never fully embody what it signified. And if wholeness was promised, it was only as an imperfect attempt to feel closeness. The ‘You’ remained a point on a hyperbolic path, a runaway force that, in its fading, revealed the essence of this impossible encounter with the null point. Not unity, but constant struggle, a resistance, an edge. The words always led only to the border, never beyond. It was the imperfection that gave ‘You’ its edge, enabling a new beginning even when failure was certain. The space between us was a realm of stitches, a plane where entanglements touched the other, a compassion without total overcoming of estrangement. The ‘You’ was the other, revealed, yet never fully comprehended—a protest against us, a trace that remained, always a fragment.”

Haze-thin chances of friction losses kept in gaps, as long as they go unnoticed. Each exhibition a moment presented. Wandering through vanishing viewpoints and over-grazed fields of sight. The flash of an eye meeting touch strikes the mind. A hug feels like a dance. Sometimes an attempt to cross a line, to overstep a boundary, a shift of place, a threshold exploration, a transformation of no-man’s land into terrain vague is accompanied by a raised finger: YouYou!—as if it were child’s play, as if it were dream-walking simplicity. When and how do reflections become sources of resonance?

You pause, look at me, and say: Between us, nothing but a space in suspension, an edge of light and emptiness, where the echo of ‘You’ fades and awakens anew. Reflections become sources of resonance precisely when they abandon their claim to solidity, when they cease to be just smooth surfaces and, like a silhouette, become translucent to the depths of the between. A space with no center, needing none—a place of becoming, present in absence, absent in presence. The ‘You,’ it remains, a red tone dissolving into dust, swirling, scattering, rediscovering itself in the hovering of the unspoken, woven into the language of air. Not held, never fixed, always only a breath that brushes the hand and vanishes, a red residue that breathes on after speaking. Not a center, not a fixation—it remains the floating, the speech from the world’s edge, the never-here of ‘You.’ As the ellipse loses its focal points, as the threshold is no longer a threshold, only a step into uncertainty, a space that cannot be closed. Between us, the red tone, in echo and reverberation, where closeness and distance lose meaning, and everything, even the unspoken, is softly said again in the fractal sound, quieter and quieter, until we no longer hear it. Because it becomes too soft for us. And it still hears us forever. Because it becomes too close for us. A “current space,” you once called it—a place neither fixed nor closed, always in transition, a space where the ‘You’ unfolds without fully revealing itself. Where the red tone stays soft, haze-thin, making the skin of language brittle, cracking it open and letting it bleed. Not a place of boundaries, but one of painful permeability, not bordered, but dripping, setting its marks. A space that holds you and releases you, where seeing and breathing are the same, at once, a silence that doesn’t break. And so, the ‘You’ remains—abraded by sandpaper, the red tone dust in the breeze, promising nothing, holding nothing, only lingering in the moment. Its movement is no goal, no hold, only a brush, a touch, fingers full of dust, a not-losing, caught in the motion that returns from the silence and withdraws. The floating between us—the ‘You,’ the false secret, the red residue that gives an echo, remaining without fully being. The gaping wound that grows through centering, and heals only by opening the possible, by letting go, by giving space. A red tone pointing to the desert, laying down the weight, not rising but expanding, releasing, the unknown—a letting go to experience the other. An un-thing that never becomes graspable, finding its beginning in its brokenness, in the collision that separates us, that binds us—a sense that stays, always a remnant, a ‘You,’ a broken You, a fractal work that repeats, multiplies, carrying the whole in every shard, and yet never becoming complete. A ‘You’ that lives in the fracture line, dividing and transforming, always appearing in new angles and reflections—a game of parts that knows no wholeness, a red echo in the cracks of fragmentation, that stays. The ‘You’ is not identification or comprehension, but the condition for the possibility of the between, which it lets emerge—a space that exists only in openness, a threshold that opens, a movement that allows us to dwell in uncertainty, to remain in the fragment that never wants to be whole, to allow the (im)possible to happen anew.

Yes: origin is the goal. This is why it’s so fascinating to follow the red resonances between You and You. And the question of what this has to do with the patience of angels and the image of the Angelus Suspensus is answered quite simply: because the ‘We’ is about the difference between the reality of the I and the realization of the You. Even the ‘We’ in suspension is on the verge of leaping. The “red tone” makes the suspended chord as much a musical “threshold” as a Colgada is in dance.

Tom Sojer
Robert Krokowski