(15) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

— What does this image show us?

— It is not a truth of the past, but the birth of a gaze, an enchantment capable of carrying it otherwise, without denying it, without enclosing it, while accepting never to exhaust its meaning.

— What is this word, enchantment… and wonder, which, if I have listened carefully to our master, often “go” together?

— The word “enchanted,” the term “wonder,” and the verb “to wonder” today seem to belong to the same family of gentle experiences, almost immediately positive.

— Please continue…

— They evoke joy, admiration, a kind of light rapture. Yet, if one returns to their sources—etymological, historical, philosophical—one discovers a very different landscape, denser, more ambivalent, where the voice acts, where the gaze wavers, and where the subject itself is displaced.

— Where do these words come from?

— “To enchant” comes from the Latin incantare. In- means “in, with,” and cantare means “to sing.”

— So one simply has to sing… in order to enchant!

— To enchant is first “to sing over”… or… “to sing into”… in other words, to act through song. It is not an aesthetic song, but an operative one. Incantatio is a speech that produces an effect. It does not describe the world: it transforms it.
In ancient societies, this sung speech possesses real efficacy. It heals, protects, invokes, diverts. Song acts upon invisible forces, not as a metaphor, but as a practice. In Indo-European traditions, this idea is even clearer: the Vedic mantra does not express a thought, it sets into motion what it names. To speak is to bring forth. Enchantment thus belongs to a regime of language in which speech is power.
Gradually, this regime changes. The Western world distinguishes more sharply between the real and the imaginary, action and representation. Enchantment ceases to be a direct operation upon the world and becomes an inner experience.

— To be “enchanted” now means to be touched… I am delighted… even… transported.

— But this shift does not erase the origin.

— What does it do with it?

— It transforms it. For even in the most ordinary usage, when I say to you, “enchanted to meet you”…

— I am enchanted…

— …there remains the idea that a presence acts. Something has taken place. A modification, slight but real, has occurred.

— The world, in an instant, is no longer what it was!

— It is here that one can bring out a link with wonder. The word “wonder” comes from the Latin mirabilia…

— Which means?

— “Things worthy of astonishment,” derived from mirari, “to be struck, to be amazed.” The root mir- refers to a seized gaze, to a perception that no longer possesses itself.

— I’m losing you…

— Yet—and this is decisive—what is “marvelous” is not, originally, necessarily positive. The mirabile is what halts, what troubles, what diverts the usual course of things. Medieval mirabilia are not charming objects: they describe strange phenomena, ambiguous creatures, signs whose meaning is unknown.
Wonder is first a rupture. It introduces a gap into the order of the world.
What we today call “wonder” is often a softened version of this harsher experience. Modernity has gradually polished wonder, attenuated its disturbing dimension to retain its luminous side. Yet this ambivalence remains at depth. Certain experiences—facing immensity, certain images, certain works—show that wonder can contain a share of unease, of vertigo. It attracts, but it overflows. Here one finds a proximity with what Rudolf Otto calls the numinous: an experience both fascinating and overwhelming, which cannot be reduced to simple joy. To wonder is therefore not merely to feel pleasure. It is to be affected. In the philosophical tradition, this affect has been recognized as originary. In Aristotle, wonder (thaumazein) is that from which thought begins. But wonder is not the same as mere curiosity. It suspends the will to understand immediately. It opens a space in which something appears otherwise.
It alters the way the world gives itself.

— Can one say “I wonder” as if one decided to do so?

— This point brings us back to an essential difficulty: the reflexive verb indeed seems to attribute a form of initiative to the subject. “Oneself” suggests that the action returns to the one who acts. And yet, in the very experience of wonder, something escapes decision.

— The… tension… is real.

— But it is not contradictory: it is structuring. In “to wonder,” the reflexive form does not mean that the subject produces wonder. It indicates that what happens takes place within them. The subject is not the author of the event…

— What is he, then?

— He is its place. He is affected in himself.

— One might say: there is an activity, but an activity of reception.

— One does not decide that something will be marvelous. But one can hold oneself in such a way that it may appear as such. There is a readiness, an openness, a way of not immediately closing what presents itself.

— The reflexive form designates this involvement without mastery…

— To wonder is to let oneself be affected, within oneself, by something that comes from elsewhere.
Thus a common structure emerges between enchantment and wonder. In both cases, there is transformation. In both cases, there is relation. In both cases, the world ceases to be simply given in order to become operative, active, vibrant.
If enchantment emphasizes the power of speech, the fact that the world can be set in motion by a voice, wonder emphasizes the power of the gaze, the fact that seeing can become an experience that exceeds us. But in both cases, something happens that is neither purely objective nor purely subjective.

— It is an encounter!

— An encounter in which the world no longer merely is there, and in which the subject no longer merely looks. Something circulates between the two.

— And perhaps, without wishing to be pedantic… is this what remains, despite what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world”?

— It is not that these experiences have disappeared, but that they have been displaced. They no longer reside in secret formulas or in tales of monsters. They arise in interstices.

— In a voice… ours?

— In a light, in a presence. There where, without warning, the world ceases to be self-evident and begins again to trouble and to vibrate… and above all, to awaken wonder.

First Notebook of the Moon Child

Who am I in their eyes?

I write this without opening mine.
I do not need to open them to feel their gaze. It passes through my eyelids. It weighs without touching. It waits for me to turn toward it, to give it a form it will recognize.
But, deep down, I do not know what form to give it… or to give back to it.

When I open my eyes, things are already there. They are named before I see them. They wait for me with their outlines already drawn, their well-defined shapes, their controlled uses, their assigned places. It would be enough
to join them… by remaining in the place they have given me. To say as they say, with the right words. To see as they see.

When I close my eyes, none of that corresponds. Nothing is ready and everything changes constantly… or… rather… everything begins again… everything is, constantly, in the process of being made.

The night that does not prevent seeing. It is neither black nor empty. It is something other than that night which envelops me and does not prevent me from seeing. A night in which forms are not fixed. A night where they come and go without hesitation and where they change without warning.

In this night… I see more clearly…

But what I see cannot be said as they speak.

So they think I do not see.

They say I am “in the moon.”

They are right.

I am there as in a room without walls, and as one is in a movement that does not stop. I am in the moon because what I receive does not come from the front.
It comes indirectly… from the side… or from behind. Perhaps it even comes from before…

I feel a light that does not burn the eyes. It does not really show itself. It passes otherwise.
I do not know if it is the sun. I have never seen it as they see it. But something in me lights up when everything else goes out.

Perhaps that is what they cannot understand.

They look when there is light. I see when it withdraws.

They speak to recognize themselves. If I speak like them, I no longer recognize myself.

So I remain silent, because what I have to say does not fit into their words.
Or else one would have to break them or open them. But when I try, they close again.

They become like bars. And I find myself in a cage that speaks in my place.

I think they do not see this cage, or they call it something else.
They say… to learn… to become. They say too much…

And I feel that something closes when I listen to them for too long.

Yet something continues to flow. I feel it.
It is like a line in the stone, like water that descends without sound. It never stops. It passes… and when I close my eyes, I can follow its movement.

I know where it comes from, but I do not know where it goes. It is there, and if I forget it, I lose myself.

So I remain in the cage and in the moon… somewhere between the two, where I can still feel that thing which does not speak and yet insists.

Who am I in their eyes?

Perhaps the one who does not answer.
Perhaps the one who does not understand.
Perhaps the one who is not there. At least not the one they want.

But I think I am the one who sees otherwise.
The one who cannot pretend not to see.
The one who waits for words to become wide enough to let pass what exceeds them.

I do not know if that will happen.
I do not know if I will ever know how to speak.

But I know that something in me does not want to disappear in order to enter their sentences.

So I write.

Even if what I write is not read as they read.
Even if it looks like nothing and they get lost in it, I write so as not to lose what I see with my eyes closed.

I write so that the night does not close again.
I write to keep the trace of that light which does not show itself… and which, nevertheless, looks at me.