Child Moon’s Notebook
The colours of the past slowly withdraw. The dead return to their own time. The voices recede. Breath returns to the heart of silence. The world recovers that strange mercy which consists in concealing what it is. Washed and diminished by the receding waters, forms return without the wild proliferation of before. The Archipelago becomes what it is again. Rocky and untamed. Something remains after almost everything has been carried away.
Between the scattered ferns, the tiny one is still standing. It does not disappear. Feet of flesh or wood are bare upon the earth. The earth receives them without intermediary. An oversized garment falls around my small body with all the gravity of a territory built for someone else. Above, an immense hat descends over the faces. Within its shadow, it keeps the map of the face secret. An invisible mouth trembles somewhere. Too timid. The word shuts itself inside its form. It is within. The body too walks within. Then the shadow of the hat descends farther still and a sentence forms almost by itself... He sees everything without seeing anything.
Farther on, the stick appears before the one who holds it. It touches the ground ahead of the feet. Questions the stones. Searches among the grasses. Removes something from the path and gives it to the body before the body itself arrives. As though this stick had been entrusted in advance with knowing an instant of the world... or of the world before.
Another figure rises with an arm whose movement seems to come from elsewhere. This dependence precedes everything that composes it: wood, clothing, thread, story. To be moved before knowing whether one is moving. Beneath an immense tree, a dark mass returns. This time it preserves its innocent uprightness. Hesitant, it knows nothing of the sky. Perhaps for that reason it knows the earth better than all those who, like me, walk upright.
Two birds chatter... and are heard speaking. The second repeats the first, but renders it differently. The first answers, and repetition begins to engender a world.
Elsewhere, a face receives a smile. The smile remains even though the face has already changed. That small survival is enough to produce pain, as though someone had fixed upon the flesh an expression from which it could no longer free itself.
Other presences are still breathing nearby, too slight to receive an entire form, yet tenacious enough not to be returned to the forest. The world has broken apart and something has resisted. We are not speaking of characters... but of their necessities.
