“Art history is almost three times longer than the history of writing, and the relationship between these two types of expression already appears in the earliest forms of writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Yet few people see in art a system of communication whose history is linked to that of language. Art would be regarded in a completely different way if one adopted this point of view.
Human beings are accustomed to acknowledging the existence of languages they do not immediately understand and that they must learn; but since art is essentially visual, they expect to grasp its message at once, and become irritated when this is not the case.”
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, Points, p. 105
Notebook of the Moon Child
The more closely I observe the whale… the more I feel that it ceases to be an animal… it becomes a kind of living surface of memory. Its striations do not merely describe a body: they contain passages. Each hollow seems to have been carved by something that has taken place. Nothing is neutral. Nothing is decorative. Its body is already an archive.
It is here that the figure of the Leviathan appears to me, not as an external monster, but as a memory of the world that has become a body.
In the Book of Job, the Leviathan is not simply a gigantic creature. It is described as irreducible, impossible to grasp, resistant to any capture. But, in the text, it is above all made of scales joined one to another, “shut up together as with a close seal,” without any gap. A closed, impenetrable surface. Yet here, the whale seems to say something else. It is not sealed. It is full of folds, open in places, traversed by lines that bear witness to former openings.
In other words, what tradition describes as a perfect closure, an absolute exterior, inviolable, is here transformed into a body worked through by breaches.
And these breaches are ambivalent.
A scar is first the trace of a wound that has closed. It indicates that there has been a break-in, that the inside has been exposed. Before being memory, it was danger. Before being surface, it was an opening. That is why it carries within it two times superimposed: the time when it let death pass through, and the time when it still retains the trace of that passage.
On this whale, these lines are not simply marks: they are like doors that have closed again… but whose thresholds remain visible. Each mark could be thought of as a former point of passage between inside and outside.
The Leviathan, from this perspective, is no longer only closed power, but the power of having been opened and of having survived that opening.
This profoundly shifts the meaning of the monster. It is no longer merely that which engulfs, but that which has been cut into and traversed, and which now carries within itself the memory of those crossings.
One could then say that this body is a cartography of wounds that have become world.
The memory at stake here is not psychological. It is not conscious recollection. It is inscribed in matter itself. It is what remains when the event has passed, but its passage has left a form. A scar is not a narrative: it is a silent inscription of time offered to the gaze.
The parrots resume:
— In this perspective, the whale-Leviathan becomes a kind of cosmic surface of archiving. The lines that run across it are not only the traces of its individual history, but perhaps those of larger forces: pressures of the water, impacts, encounters, struggles, drifts. The monster condenses within itself a world that has been exerted upon it.
And this is where the question of the threshold becomes central.
The Moon Child quite rightly evokes the moment when the scar, before being closed, is a wound, that is to say, a place where the inside is delivered over to the outside.
— The moment when danger is no longer a threat seen from more or less afar… but when it is there…
— This moment is that of absolute danger. But it is also that of a truth: there is no pure inside. There is no completely closed envelope. The living is always traversable.
According to our master, the traditional Leviathan seemed to deny this through its impenetrability. This image, on the contrary, reinscribes it within a logic of passage. The monster is no longer a fortress. It becomes a field of scarred thresholds.
— Should I assume that it is the same with the walkway?
— From then on, the red walkway of the initial image takes on an even stronger resonance. It does not simply cross a body. It inscribes itself within a body that is already itself crossed, already worked through by lines of passage. Man does not walk upon an intact surface. He walks upon a memory of wounds.
— That introduces a vertiginous idea!
— As you say… the human path is never inscribed upon virgin ground. It is always traced upon a matter already opened, already marked, already exposed.
— Do you think that walking, here, is to reactivate these former openings, to brush against them, to follow along them, to discover them without ever being able to close them again or abolish them?
— That is not for us to determine…
— Then… if we push further…
— Please, go on…
— The Leviathan represented by this blue whale could then be understood not as a closed totality, but as a scarred totality, that is to say, a totality that holds precisely because it has been cut into.
— That is it… It… she is no longer the image of an intact absolute, but that of a world that persists despite its openings, and even through them.
— In this sense, the scar is not only memory.
— Yes… It is also a condition of survival. It is that by which the body does not collapse after having been traversed.
— Thus, the whale-Leviathan becomes a very singular figure…
— Not the enemy of passage, but that which carries within itself the possibility of passage, while retaining the trace of the risk it implies.
— And the Moon Child, on his walkway, is perhaps nothing other than the one who advances upon a memory that could always reopen…
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