(16) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

 

 

 

Lucian’s note

 

I read these notebooks as one enters a house. Nothing in them is neutral. The words still carry the warmth of the one who wrote them. And the images that Igniatius brought me do not illustrate the text; they unsettle it, as if they preceded it… and preceded me as well… at times. I must be careful not to go too fast. Not to try to understand before having been affected.

From the very first pages, there is this insistent figure: the Moon Child. I might be tempted to reduce it to an imaginary construction, to a classical symbolic formation, a way of speaking of wounded childhood. But something stops me. It is a figure… a point of view. A mode of access to the world.

What troubles me most is that this child does not present himself as one who lacks language, but as one for whom the available language is not sufficient. A decisive nuance. I must keep repeating it to myself. This is not a deficiency. It is a shift.

While I read, he sees with his eyes closed. I could take this as a poetic motif. It could be a banal inversion of perceptual regimes. But that would miss the essential. What is at stake here is another way of relating to what is not yet formed. A perception that does not merely recognize, but welcomes what has not yet stabilized.

And it is precisely this that seems to make speech difficult.

I note: “normal” language functions as a system of covering over.

I am forced to stop at this sentence. It disturbs me. It implicitly calls my own practice into question. For what do I do, if not help to put things into words? And what if those words, in certain cases, contribute to masking what asks to be approached otherwise?

I must be careful not to become a parrot.

This idea, coming from the images, imposes itself on me with unexpected force. The parrot repeats. It maintains the continuity of language. It gives the impression that everything circulates. But it does not guarantee that what circulates is right for the one who speaks.

The notebooks seem to say: there are experiences that common language cannot receive without distorting them.

So what is to be done? I cannot renounce speech… but I cannot impose it either. I must perhaps learn to hear it otherwise. To recognize what, in silence, is already working as a speech in waiting.

I return to the images, and more particularly to the cage.

At first, I understood it as an obvious metaphor of confinement. Too obvious, no doubt. What I have read in the notebooks, and more particularly in the Moon Child’s notebook, forces me to shift this reading. The cage is not only an external constraint. It is also a form into which the world waits for the child to enter. A structure that precedes and orients.

I note: violence without spectacle.

This expression lingers in my mind insistently. And I gradually understand that what is at stake here does not belong to the traumatic scene in the classical sense. There is not necessarily an identifiable, localizable event. There is a regime. A will to normalize. And this child, this Moon Child, does not adapt to it…

He perceives what others no longer perceive.

I must be careful not to turn this into a romantic privilege.

It is not a gift. It is a difficulty. For perceiving what is not said makes any inscription within what is said difficult.

In his notebook, I read his sentences. I read them slowly. He writes as if he were walking in the night, touching things to know they are there. Nothing is asserted with certainty. Everything is tested.

“I see better here.” Which he rewrites later with a nuance: “I see better from here.”

This sentence stays with me. It overturns everything.

To see better with eyes closed. This means that what is seen does not depend solely on external light. Immediately I think of the moon. Not as a vague symbol, but as a structure. It receives light. It does not produce it. It transforms it. It makes it visible otherwise.

The notebooks add something decisive: a relation to the sun that does not pass through the day. I note: nocturnal access to the source. It is a strange idea. But it seems right to me to describe what is happening here. The child does not connect to common clarity. He maintains a link with an origin that does not show itself directly. And this sheds light, if I may say so, on the question of speech.

What he receives cannot be immediately formulated.

There is a time. That of transformation and maturation.

These are cycles that I must integrate into this temporality without expecting continuity where there are phases.

I move to the second image, in which something has changed. The parrots have disappeared… or become invisible.

I note it immediately. Repeated speech has withdrawn. In place of this repetition, a human figure. The notebooks suggest—and I find this hypothesis difficult to dismiss—that it is the same child, at another moment, or under another form. A doubling.

I must be cautious with this term. But here it seems less pathological than structural.

As if the subject could only reach itself by splitting.

I note: mediated relation to oneself.

The stick strikes him… or tries to capture his attention.

Why not extend the hand?
Why this detour?

I believe I begin to understand: direct contact is probably impossible. Too immediate. Too charged. An intermediary is needed. A tool. In any case, a distance.

I recognize something of my own practice here. I cannot enter directly into the other’s experience. I work with mediations.
Speech, the frame, time, benevolence.

The stick becomes an image of this.

But here, the subject himself uses this device.

He tries to touch himself without colliding.

I note: putting the past into motion.

The cage tilts like a pendulum. This detail is crucial. The past is no longer fixed.

It enters into movement.

Not an erasure.
A reconfiguration.

I think of what I know—or believe I know—about afterwardsness.

The past does not change.
But its meaning does.

And this change is not secondary.
It acts upon the present.

Here, the image shows this process.

Almost too clearly.

I must be wary of this clarity.

It could be deceptive… like the moon. I note the small play on words: to grow, to wane, to believe… the visible would lie… I would rather say it simplifies. It gives forms that do not correspond to the events we call real.

This child… these two figures of the child, seem sensitive to this discordance. They do not fully trust what appears.

I return to the left of the image, to the cave.

Inside this cave, there is a candle whose flame is shaped like a crescent moon. I dwell on this point for a long time.

It is perhaps the most fragile element, and perhaps the most important.

One could say that it is an inner light that is intentionally produced and maintained. In this staging, it is exposed.

I note an important point: truth does not impose itself and, in this case, depending on conditions, it flickers and constantly threatens to go out.

This changes my position.

I am not here to illuminate brutally.

I must pay attention to the breath.
To the slightest movement.

I must learn to approach without extinguishing.

I note: to transform without destroying.

How could I know? How could I measure the rightness of the gesture?

The stick, again. It can touch or wound. It could awaken or cause a fall.

I do not know. And perhaps this ignorance is constitutive.

I master nothing and must accept, without abandoning responsibility, not knowing exactly what I am doing. This obliges me to a different vigilance.

I return to this idea: who looks at whom? Who addresses whom? The hat, which seems too large, hides the face.

I do not see his eyes. I have no means of reading his intention.

And yet, without really knowing why, this includes me. I could be in his place.

I could be the one who acts without fully seeing.

I note: the work is not done in full light. There is a share of shadow in the very act of understanding.

I close the notebook for a moment.

I feel… not lost, but displaced. My bearings still hold, but they are no longer sufficient. I must add others, or rather: accept that there is no complete map. Only lines.

The cage. The moon. The source. The flame. The stick. The cave. The post and the rope.

Two figures of the child. And between them, a passage, a gesture.

I think my work—if, faced with this mystery, I can still use that word—consists in not closing this passage too quickly. In keeping it open. In bearing that it does not immediately lead somewhere.

It takes on its full meaning in accompanying this movement without fixing it.

I note this as a direction… without concluding.

I am not sure I understand, but I am beginning to see otherwise. And that, for now, must suffice.