– The first shall be last...
– After the whole work has been thought, written, revised. The incipit is the last-born that presents itself as the eldest.
– Would the incipit be a false beginning?
– It simulates a spontaneous birth while being the result of an elaboration.
– I understand that it announces without revealing and promises without unveiling. And if the reader, while reading it, is already awaiting the end… well… we… long before that end, we would like a more substantial beginning!
– The incipit is thus much more than an introduction. It is the founding gesture by which a work posits itself in the world. This gesture is at once a threshold and a promise. It gathers, in its first words, all that a work dares to be. This story begins with Igniatius. This incipit is composed of the first words he noted in a notebook that Lucian read when Igniatius, who until then did not yet speak... well... very little... was only just beginning to speak to him...
I have just read seven words. And I remain there, the notebook that Igniatius has just entrusted to me open on my knees, unable to turn the page... and for good reason... All the other pages seem to have been torn out...
In a beginning, he calls himself the Child Moon.
I reread. I put the notebook down. I read again.
There are sentences that read you back. This is one of them.
The first thing that struck me, even before understanding why, is this dans(in). Not at the beginning, as in the Bible. Not once upon a time, as in fairy tales. Dans(in) un(a) commencement(beginning). As if the beginning were not a point on a line, but a clearing one enters. A space surrounded by trees, air, a particular light. I entered this beginning as one enters a forest, without yet seeing where it leads, but immediately sensing that the air there is different.
And un(a) commencement(beginning), not le(the) commencement. Someone chose the humility of the indefinite article. What begins here might not have begun. Or might have begun otherwise... or at another time. There are other possible beginnings, elsewhere, in other books, in other lives. This one is one among others, and that is precisely what makes it precious. Not simply the only one. The chosen one, among possibilities.
Then: he calls himself.
I thought of all the children I have seen before they speak. That way they have of simply being there, entirely, without yet being able to say I. Before language, there is something purer than language, a presence without name, a consciousness without boundaries. And then this is named. A voice — that of the narrator, that of the world, perhaps his own seen from the outside — places a name upon this boundless presence.
He calls himself. Not he is called. Not his name is. He calls himself, as if, even without speech, something in him participated in this baptism. As if, in his silence, he saw himself from the outside and recognized himself in this name that he does not yet have the means or the words to pronounce. I found this very beautiful and very true, this idea that identity begins before we can claim it. That we are named in our silence, and that this silence is not an absence, but a form of assent.
L'Enfant(the child / infans). His given name.
I smiled. Then I felt something gently shift within me.
Enfant(child) as a given name is the most common word given as the most intimate sharing. Every human being has been a child. This name does not distinguish; it gathers. It says: what makes you unique is what you share with all who have ever lived. Your singularity is your belonging.
I had never thought that the universal could be a given name. That one could be named in what is most common. That a mother, or a father, or the world, could look at this singular and irreplaceable being and say: I call you Enfant(child), because you are that before being anything else.
Lune(Moon). His family name.
And there, something opened that I did not expect to find in the first lines of a book.
The family name speaks of lineage. Of where one comes from. Of the shoulders upon which one is carried. And this child comes from the Moon, from the reflection of the sun, that is to say from the cosmos, from the silence of the stars, from the tides and cycles, from all that has regulated life for billions of years without ever pronouncing a single word.
His family is the night sky.
And I thought — because great incipits(it begins) make one think things one had not planned to think — that we all come from there, in truth. That our cells carry a history that goes back far beyond our grandparents, far beyond the species, perhaps even beyond the Earth. That we are all, in a sense, children of the Moon — temporary beings, made of ancient matter, who pass through the world reflecting a light that comes from elsewhere.
The moon has no light of its own. It receives, and gives what it has received, transformed, softened, made habitable for those who cannot look at the sun directly.
I wondered whether this child, as he grows, would be one of those.
I do not yet know who this child is. I do not know what will happen to him. I have read only one sentence.
But I already know — and this is the mark of great beginnings — that I have entered into something that exceeds me, and that I will not come out of it quite the same.
He calls himself the Enfant(child) Lune(Moon).
And I will never know whether it is he who bears this name, or this name that bears him.
Tradução em português
