“It took me a long time to understand where he came from. […] At once I caught a glimmer of light in the mystery of his presence.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Chapter III, 1943.
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Where one may observe that the person who knows the way will not necessarily be the best guide. The better guide might instead be the one who understands that a passage is beginning to open, who accepts being displaced by the signs encountered along the way, who knows when to call upon another when he is no longer enough, who does not hold on to what has been entrusted to him, and who, once the passage has taken place, knows not to settle into the opening he has helped to keep open.
Felix’s Notebook
What could I say about the little blue dog Damon, who so often appears beside Child Moon… but also beside the other characters in these drawings? Is he some kind of guide… I am not sure I properly understand the role he might have to play there… if there is a role at all… It took me a long time to understand that his presence is connected chiefly with moments of crisis or hesitation… but perhaps I am venturing a little too far… because to say even that… would already be to assign him a function that is too visible. He accompanies more broadly than that, and above all his help is almost never announced as help… it may become apparent only afterwards, and may sometimes even remain undecidable. I should therefore revise my thought… and make this retrospective discretion one of its central elements.
I must begin again from a little further back, because for some time now I have been writing as though a potential reader already knew whom I was talking about, whereas the names themselves, through circulating so often between the notebooks, the drawings and the stories, have become far more familiar to me than they can possibly be to someone encountering them for the first time.
Damon is a little blue dog who accompanies one character or another, and above all, at least until now, Child Moon, although no one seems to know where he comes from, as though his presence had preceded the question of his origin and everyone had grown accustomed to seeing him come and go before it had even occurred to them that, one day, he must surely have appeared somewhere. In the documents I have found no true arrival, no account that brings him into the story, no house from which he might have emerged, no master he might have left behind, no scene in which anyone could claim to have seen him for the first time… he is simply there, beside one and then another, with that peculiar way some beings have of making their presence seem so natural that only afterwards do we realise we know nothing at all about what brought them to us.
Indeed, he accompanies far more than he guides, if at least I still give that latter word the rather conspicuous meaning I once attributed to it, because nothing in his presence announces that help is being given. He walks ahead or behind, strays away, comes back, sometimes disappears from the frame before returning as though nothing had happened, remains beside Child Moon when no particular danger seems to threaten him, and I would be hard put, if someone asked me, to point to the precise moments when he becomes useful, so closely does his effectiveness, whenever it exists, seem to merge with the simple continuity of his presence. It is often only much later, when I go back over a sequence of events, that some detail makes me hesitate: would such a detour have taken place without him, would such a pause have lasted long enough for something to be noticed, would such a character have begun walking again had he not found the little dog a few steps farther on? Yet no sooner is the question asked than it slips away, because there is nothing to prove that Damon knew what he was doing, or even that he was doing what I retrospectively attribute to him.
It may therefore be that his help belongs to that peculiar kind whose form becomes recognisable only once it has ceased to act, although even recognisable is no doubt too confident a word, since one might just as easily return to the same events and see in them nothing more than a succession of gestures without any particular intention.
