(3) The Abracadabrant Story of the Moon Child

 

One might almost say: in the beginning there was Igniatius…

And yet this beginning takes on a paradoxical form. For Igniatius is a long-standing patient who cannot manage to speak. For a long time he remained almost mute. Not entirely silent, but as if held back by a deep difficulty with speech, with the very act of speaking or expressing what was happening within him. The sessions often seemed to sink into silences or into a few isolated sentences that led nowhere. Later Lucian would say of him that he had “some problems with language.”

Then comes the day when Igniatius arrives with a notebook and drawings.

From that moment on, almost imperceptibly, something begins to move. Speech gradually frees itself. Not because Igniatius describes the images he shows. On the contrary, he almost never speaks about them directly. Yet their presence acts as a trigger. As if there existed between words and images a secret connection that was not a simple repetition of one by the other. The image does not serve to illustrate the narrative, and the narrative does not serve to explain the image. Yet something circulates between the two.

Whenever Igniatius opens a notebook or takes out a drawing, he begins to speak, sometimes at length, but about things that at first seem unrelated to what one sees: an anecdote that extends into a reflection, which in turn merges with a fragment of a story. At first sight—or at first hearing—there is no connection. Then, at a distance, an echo, however faint, can be heard or even… appear. Everything happens as if the image and the narrative belonged to the same network of meaning, but at different degrees.

The drawings themselves display a striking coherence. The subjects change abruptly: volcanic landscapes, silhouettes, fragments of figures, isolated objects. At times the whole gives the impression of “jumping from one thing to another.”

But the expression deserves here to be understood differently from its ordinary meaning. One finds in fact an older form attested as early as the fourteenth century: saillir du coq en l’asne, which later became sauter du coq à l’âne. In this primitive version the image is even stranger: it evokes the improbable attempt of a rooster trying to fertilize a donkey. The passage “from rooster to donkey” therefore does not merely describe a rupture of discourse. It suggests the improbable and incomprehensible encounter of two orders of meaning that should not meet and yet come into contact through an unexpected detour.

As for the images, they occupy a singular place in this book. They may have been conceived—this at least is the hypothesis one may formulate—at the end of a long process that was both intellectual and manual, in order to remain simple and accessible, almost in the manner of the old popular prints of Épinal. Their apparent clarity may give the impression that they reveal themselves immediately. Yet experience suggests something else. Many people look at them, sometimes finding them pleasant, sometimes curious, without truly understanding them. This apparent failure is not concealed. It is even acknowledged, for it reveals something that touches directly upon the quest of the Moon Child.

The reader may then, perhaps, as the author of these lines once did, begin to understand that the images, the fragments of narrative, and the voices of the characters are not separate elements but different ways of circling around the same silent question pursued by the Moon Child. The reader may also discover that what he spontaneously calls “simplicity” may be nothing more than an idea inherited from society—an idea that confuses complexity with complication. Yet these two words do not mean the same thing. Complication often arises from our own mental constructions, from the detours the mind invents when it seeks to master what it does not immediately understand. Complexity, on the other hand, belongs to the world itself. It is the living fabric of what exists. The images discussed here attempt to remain at that fragile point where form stays simple while allowing a depth to appear that cannot be reduced. They are simple and complex at once.