(228) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Where Félix comes to understand that Damon and Daemon cannot be distinguished... Their resemblance unsettles even the way in which help itself is recognised... What seems insignificant in an image may then, when seen again, return differently. He thus begins to suspect that a presence may have accompanied a passage without ever revealing itself as such..

Félix’s Notebook

I can no longer say that Damon is the model and Daemon the copy, any more than I could maintain the reverse, since Daemon, by taking on Damon’s appearance, reveals something that was already present in Damon without anyone ever having thought to name it, while Damon, by his very existence, deprives Daemon of the privilege of being the sole bearer of that function. Each unsettles the other, and their resemblance eventually reaches even the gaze of the person trying to determine what actually took place, for he might very well recognise help where there was none or, conversely, have crossed a passage thanks to it while continuing for a long time to believe that he crossed it alone.

At certain moments, then, they are genuinely indistinguishable... not because they constitute an enigma demanding a solution, but because the distinction itself no longer has any place there.

A small blue dog was there. For a while he walked beside Child Moon and Pinocchio the Other, then elsewhere... The pages are turned. One drawing gives way to another, and something happens.

And only much later, for a reason one could never quite explain, one returns to that image in which the small dog stood almost to one side, and wonders whether what one has just seen would have happened in quite the same way without him.

Damon or Daemon? I no longer know whether the question concerns the one who was there or the person I have become by returning to look again. Perhaps this, in the end, is what their presence forces me to recognise: help does not necessarily need to show itself in order to have taken place. Its discretion may even be such that the one it accompanied retains the possibility of never knowing that he was not walking alone.

Félix