– What is this doubt that, it seems to me, also springs forth... like a beginning?
– Precisely... it is a surgissement(surge / emergence)... almost anonymous... where nothing yet happens...
– And what would you want instead?
– That it begin, a consistent apparition... a subject! That is to say, an event that begins to take place!
– This way of suspending... that is precisely the function of the incipit(it begins)...
– To suspend what?
– Events... so that the book... or the story to come may, in its uniqueness, take its place within the great chain of events...
– What do you mean by uniqueness?
– I mean the fact that the event... or the events that our master tells us... and that we are tasked to tell in turn, are not those you expect... those you desire.
– You see... I believe you are a prisoner of your desire!
– I do not quite know what you mean by desire...
First notebook of the Child Moon
I was born of an absence. In an unknown place, before even having a name, without even knowing how to speak, I was already that gaze lifted toward the sky, at the precise moment when a star goes out or disappears behind a cloud, and when the eye still searches, astonished not to find what had been shining. The Latins had a word for this — desiderare: to cease seeing the star, to register the absence of what was shining. That is where I come from. I am that vertigo.
And I know it better than anyone, because from then on, my family name is Moon. My lineage is the night sky. My ancestors are in the tides, in the cycles, in that regular silence that has governed the living for billions of years without ever pronouncing a single word. I come from there. I am a creature of desiderare by birth.
A voice — that of the world, perhaps mine seen from the outside — placed these words upon my still boundless presence: the Child Moon. And in my silence, something assented. I recognized myself in this name that I did not yet have the means to pronounce. Perhaps that is desire in its purest form: to recognize oneself in what one cannot yet say.
I was long thought poor. They said I was the son of lack — to lack bread and to lack words is perhaps to lack the same thing: a presence that gives itself — and that I lived from what I did not have. But the Moon has no light of its own either... and no one says that it lacks anything. It receives. It transforms. It softens what would burn if one looked at it directly, and makes it habitable. This is not a lack: it is a particular gift. Perhaps I am like it: I do not generate, I reflect, and in that reflection, something changes its nature.
With a single gaze, I can make of it an entire life. I take a light that comes from elsewhere and render it gentle, inclined, suited to confidences. I am the most sincere forger in the world, and the oldest: my matter goes back to before the Earth, to before the species, to silent explosions that no one remembers but that each of my cells still knows.
My given name is Child. The most common word given as the most intimate sharing. This name does not distinguish me; it gathers me with all those who have ever lived. It says: your singularity is your belonging. What makes you unique is precisely what you share. I had not understood, at first, that the universal could be a given name. That one could be named in what is most common. But that may be the very definition of desire: that force which passes through everyone, and which, in each person, resembles no one else.
And yet, I slip. This is my deepest nature, and the most misunderstood: I never remain where one thinks to hold me. The object that is offered to me makes me polite, grateful, sometimes happy for a moment — but I am already elsewhere, leaning toward the window, distracted by something I cannot yet name. This is not ingratitude. It is fidelity — fidelity to myself, who am movement, who am the in-between, who am the phase and not the disk.
The star I have been seeking since the beginning — I begin to suspect that it has never existed anywhere other than in my seeking. That the sky was empty, and that I am the one who populated it. But perhaps that is my lunar nature: I do not invent light, I reveal the light that was there, invisible, waiting for a surface upon which to rest.
I am the Child Moon. I am desire.
And I will never know whether it is I who bear this name, or this name that bears me... and precedes me, wherever I go, in all the beginnings to come.
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