(59) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

 

“If the signs anger you, oh how much more will the things signified anger you!”

 

François Rabelais, The Fourth Book

 

 When the cliffs plunge sheer into the water, horizontally striated with superimposed magmatic layers — glossy black, reddish brown, or slate gray, like a mille-feuille of solidified lava — natural arches have been carved by the sea into the softer cliffs, and beneath the incessant assault of the waves some collapse, revealing new cavities, new chasms, at times hidden hot springs, under the benevolent gaze and listening of a donkey from another age, one may begin to wonder… whether reading possesses something of a passage… or of an entrance beneath a vault. One leaves the extensive light of the outside world, that light which displays things already distributed within the common space, in order to enter a particular darkness where another form of visibility becomes possible. Not a visibility that would dispel shadows, but one born from them.

The book and the story it contains then perform a gesture very close to that of the cave. They contain, in the double sense of the verb “to contain”: they enclose and they carry within themselves.

 

 

 

Safely hidden from sight… when did the Moon Child become Don Carotte… neither of them knows… no more than Pinocchio the Other knows when he became the Moon Child… while Nounours still dreams of such a transformation and consoles himself whenever he can console the child… while the child, little by little, remembered as he grew, and made Pinocchio the Other grow… with the customary strings… Then the puppet’s movements began more and more often to occur without the slightest assistance arriving from outside…

Don Carotte, somewhat lost, never ceases to revolt against: “All these meanders of mind and time forged, from the depths, by the destructive fire of words and stories which endlessly form… deform… and reform falsehood and illusion.”

… and suddenly filiations become less genealogical than combustible. They are no longer merely successions of beings, but transmissions of fire.

The staff accompanies the Moon Child long before he knows how to walk toward himself. At first it resembles almost a dead branch, a remnant of the vegetal world, something the child drags more than carries. Then it becomes a cane, a pole, a relay, an instrument for sensing the irregularities of the ground like the blind man reading the invisible reliefs of the world. Later still, it may become a weapon, not to conquer but to survive the invasion of forms, stories, and gazes.

Yet all this already prepares Prometheus.

For Prometheus does not merely bring fire to humankind; he introduces a mutation in the relationship to the world. Fire transforms. It cooks, forges, illuminates, destroys, deforms old matter in order to make another emerge. And this fire passes precisely through wood. Don Carotte’s staff already contains this latent possibility. It bears within itself a virtual ember.

From then on, Pinocchio the Other ceases to be a simple wooden puppet. The wood becomes memory of future fire. Every puppet secretly contains its possible conflagration. That is why his transformation is never entirely completed. There is no precise instant when Pinocchio becomes a child, no more than there is a precise instant when the Moon Child becomes Don Carotte. True metamorphosis escapes clocks. It acts like a slow combustion.

Under the very ancient gaze of the donkey — come from another age, almost from another regime of time — something silently watches over these indistinct passages. Perhaps the donkey knows what the others ignore: profound transformations are never accomplished all at once. They advance with the slowness of embers beneath ash.

Nounours, meanwhile, still remains within the desire to become. That is why he consoles. To console, here, is not a secondary function. It is to keep alive a possibility of transformation when that possibility seems impossible. While the Moon Child grows, Nounours continues to believe in passage. He accompanies this growth as old stuffed animals accompany children at the threshold of sleep: ridiculous and yet essential guardians of inner metamorphosis.

And the strings… yes… the customary strings. At first, Pinocchio the Other moves thanks to them. This seems to confirm that he still depends entirely upon an external will: the puppeteer, the narrative, the author, the reader, Lucian, Igniatius, Félix, it matters little. But gradually the movements continue even when the strings cease to act. It is a vertiginous moment. The puppet begins to carry within itself its own principle of movement.

 

 

 

— If the image already troubles you, what will become of you before what it opens?

At that instant, something profoundly unsettling appears: if the strings no longer entirely command the gestures, then who truly moves them?

That is why Don Carotte revolts against “the meanders of mind and time.” He obscurely senses that stories are not harmless narratives. They produce the beings they recount. Words become Promethean fire: they shape as much as they destroy. Tirelessly they form, deform, and reform. Every narration acts like an invisible forge.

But Don Carotte’s revolt possesses a profound ambiguity. He denounces falsehood and illusion while himself having been born from them. Not from a vulgar lie, but from that ancient power of stories capable of bringing living forms into appearance. He wishes to escape the narrative labyrinth, even while that labyrinth constitutes his inner flesh.

Perhaps it is here that Prometheus truly joins our constellation of figures. The Titan does not merely bring technique; he also gives humans the dangerous possibility of continuing creation. From then on, human beings no longer live only within a given world: they become producers of worlds, images, narratives, interpretations.

And that consumes.

The fire of stories illuminates as much as it burns.

Don Carotte understands this more and more painfully. He who was once traversed by the visions of the Moon Child and the mechanism of Pinocchio the Other now begins to feel the terrible weight of interpretation. For to interpret always means, at least a little, to stir the fire.