(135) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

– Where the characters do not succeed one another... they gradually become capable of inhabiting the same place...

– Where Lucian is no longer merely a traveler...
– What is he, then?
– He is something like a reader traveling within a reading. If Don Carrot discovered the forest, and Warmblood discovered that a transformation was already underway, Lucian discovers a place that is itself already inhabited by texts. The forest is no longer merely a forest...
– What has it become?
– It has become a memory.

From Lucian's Notebook

Just before twilight, while I had not yet recognized any of the places described in the notebooks, the forest rose before me with a familiarity whose origin I could not determine. And yet nothing there was truly known to me. I had never been there before. But there are times when our readings precede the landscapes themselves, to such an extent that, upon first encounter, they already wear the face of a memory.
I stopped for a few moments before passing beneath the trees.
Ever since my departure, I had often thought of Igniatius. He continued to insist that the drawings were not his. Stranger still, he sometimes seemed to be waiting for a confession that I was incapable of giving him. However often I repeated that I had never drawn those images, I sensed that no denial could truly answer what he expected of me. It was as though the question no longer concerned the one who had drawn them, but the one who would one day consent to recognize what, through those drawings, had long been searching for its author.
That thought accompanied me as I entered the forest.
Almost immediately I rediscovered what Don Carrot had called its ancient architecture, and then what Warmblood had recognized as a slow intelligence of relationships. Both descriptions returned effortlessly to my mind—not as memorized sentences, but as two different ways of inhabiting the same place. I then understood that a landscape never remains identical; it is the succession of gazes cast upon it that gradually gives it depth.
Yet I walked with a certain distrust of my own impressions. I feared less that I might fail to recognize anything than that I might recognize only what I had merely read. I therefore tried to forget the notebooks. I wanted to see the trees before the words that had already named them.
The task proved more difficult than I had imagined.
The great trunks rose into a light that grew ever rarer. The roots disappeared beneath thick carpets of moss. Every branch seemed to answer another; every silence found its place among the calls of birds and the invisible rustlings. Was I truly observing the forest, or were the pages continuing to work within me? I could no longer tell where the memory of the texts ended and where the memory of things began. Yet that hesitation gradually dissolved.
As I moved forward, I ceased comparing. The notebooks did not disappear; they simply changed their function. They no longer taught me what I was supposed to see. They taught me how to look.
I then found myself reflecting upon an idea that had often crossed my mind without ever finding a clear formulation: perhaps there are works that have no desire whatsoever to be understood. They seek only to produce new ways of seeing. Their true author may not be the one who writes or draws them, but the one who, one day, consents to see differently through them.
When the moon finally appeared above the vault of trees, I continued my journey in a silence that no longer resembled the one with which I had set out. I had left the notebooks without abandoning them. They no longer walked ahead of me; they now walked beside me. And I suddenly understood why it was becoming so difficult to know which of us—Igniatius or myself—was truly following the other's footsteps.