(19) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“I remember that I suddenly awoke, sitting upright in my bed. I was as before, in the same room, and yet everything had changed. I remembered everything, everything down to the smallest detail, and at the same time I felt that it was not an ordinary dream. I knew, I knew with absolute certainty that I had been there, that I had lived there, that I had seen and known what I could never have invented here. And this conviction never left me; it was stronger than anything.
It was not a dream — or else, if it was one, then our whole life may be nothing but an even more absurd dream.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Lucian feels profoundly alone before the images he is trying to understand, images he discovers in the various notebooks and journals that keep adding to those he used to write his report.
“What is one to say of this vision… On this basalt island, where silence is broken only by the cry of invisible seagulls and the relentless surge of the sea, in the midst of this mineral sterility that, before my eyes, seems to defy all forms of life… and yet they bear witness to this strange procession.
A child, a fragile being, wearing an improbable blue hat, clinging to a simple pole, his face… so serene in the midst of this strange journey. Where is he going? Where does he come from?
And this landscape… these jagged peaks, torn with shades of violet and grey, rising like the remnants of a forgotten cataclysm. And these clouds… these shreds of sky, drifting sadly, clinging to an intangible memory… Emblems of a vanished glory? Remains of a civilization swallowed by lava and time?
My mind, trained to decipher the meanderings of the human soul, begins to race. Is this a hallucination, the fruit of solitude and the harshness of this environment? Or am I witnessing a manifestation… of what, exactly? A symbol? An allegory projected by my own unconscious onto the raw canvas of this desolate island?
This child… does he represent innocence, hope persisting even in the most barren places? His hat, incongruous and clearly too large, like his clothes, might it be a desperate attempt to preserve some form of normality, of civilization, within this strange journey? And this mount… this hybrid creature, between the terrestrial and the aerial…
These torn clouds… do they speak of defeats, of broken dreams, of battles lost against the implacable forces of nature or of our own demons? Are they the remnants of our faded ideals, floating like ghosts in the sky of our psyche? This grey-green hue, these troubled clouds… do they reflect my own inner state?
This dull anxiety that grips me in the face of this isolation, in the face of the enigma of this vision?
I ask myself so many questions. This journey… is it an escape? A quest? A wandering without purpose in a desolate inner world? Is the child myself, lost in the meanders of my own solitude? The creature, a metaphor for my own strengths and weaknesses, carrying me toward an uncertain destiny?
This island… is it not the mirror of my own inner landscape? A place sterile in appearance, yet perhaps fertile in symbols, in repressed emotions seeking to express themselves through this strange scene.
I must understand. I must decipher this visual language. Each element seems laden with meaning, each detail resonates with troubling intensity. This vision… it confronts me with something deep, essential. Perhaps it is the key to unlocking a part of myself I had until now ignored.
I am alone here, facing this enigma. My mind is at once rational and overwhelmed by emotion. Logic attempts to dissect, to analyze, to find a plausible explanation. But my heart… my heart feels a strange melancholy, a fascination mingled with unease before this image.
This island… it is no longer merely a place of exile. It has become the stage of a forced introspection, a laboratory of my own unconscious. And this vision… it is the starting point of a new journey, an inner journey whose outcome remains unknown to me.