(9) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

 

"Each time I find myself growing morose; each time I feel a damp, cold heaviness descending into my soul; each time I involuntarily pause before the windows of funeral parlors, and linger behind every funeral I encounter; especially each time my mood becomes so dark that it takes a strong moral principle to prevent me from stepping into the street and methodically knocking off the hats of passersby, then I consider it certain that the time has come to go to sea as quickly as possible. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a grand philosophical gesture, Cato throws himself upon his sword; I, quietly, take to the ship.
There is nothing surprising in this. If men knew it, almost all of them, at one time or another, feel toward the ocean nearly the same feelings that I do."

 

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

 

"Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man while massacring him everywhere it encounters him, at every corner of its own streets, at every corner of the world."

 

Frantz Fanon, from the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth

 

 

 

 

 

– The universal... I hardly dare to pronounce it... the universal might be a pathology...

– You go rather far!
– Do you think I am wrong?
– That is not what surprises me...
– Then... what surprises you?
– I am surprised that, frontally and without precaution, you go a little too forcefully "on the attack"!
– Why so?
– I honestly believe it is necessary.
– But... and you know it... it goes against what our master taught us!
– I know that very well...
– And why would the universal be a pathology? But before that... would it be our master who taught you this... without telling me?
– No... and that is where the problem appears...
– What do you mean?
– I mean that I heard it...
– Everything we say, we have heard...
– Not that!
– What did you hear?
– What I have just told you...
– That I understood, there is no problem...
– What I am trying to tell you... is that there is the content, the words, and the container, the voice...
– Yes, the voice of our master or that of someone else!
– That is where the problem lies...
– I do not see it!
– That is normal...
– You do not seem to be in your normal state!
– The voice that carried what I reported to you was not that of someone else...
– Where did it come from?
– It came from within myself...

...It is quite possible that I am only repeating what I have heard... mixed with what I have heard from the very mouths of those who had also heard it, but not in the same way...
– Who else but our master?
– I do not always know... and... when I do, I cite them out of honesty...
You know... it is difficult for me to repeat what I have only heard from very far away. I will try nonetheless. If my memory is good, as good as that of my master... I mean my true master and not the one I long believed in, who existed only through the omnipotence of the imagination of his creator, who claimed to have placed it at the service of mine... then if my memory allows it… and if I do not lose myself along the way… I will go back to the moment when... I will no longer remember. There is a boundary, even if it is blurred, where everything stops, and beyond which memory, if it exists, is nothing more than nothingness or imagination.

Let us begin again. At the beginning there is a child. Where does he come from? No one knows. He is one of those children whose full origin is difficult to grasp... and even whether there are origins at all, so little do they resemble their parents... if indeed there are parents.
– Why do you say that?
– This dissimilarity is not so much a matter of appearance; one might indeed recognize certain physical details that could establish resemblance, but that is not the point.
– You are speaking of the Child Moon?
– He is different because, in a certain way, by refusing to speak, and more generally, he refuses to submit to history... and in another beginning...

 

 

– How so?
– The story of the Child Moon would have several beginnings... Some say... a child, probably drawn by music, arrived…
– Who says that?
– No one knows.
– He is called… or he calls himself… the Enfant(child) Lune(Moon)… probably because he often seems to be “in the moon”… well… that is vaguely what is said.
– Where does he come from?
– Our master says he comes from a rupture(break / rupture)…
– What kind of rupture?
– A rupture in the real…
– I do not understand.
– If you like, one could speak of a rupture in the chain of causes…
– You mean chance?
– No, rather a fissure in causal necessity…
– That is perfectly irrational!
– Think again. It is only the irruption of the new…
– In the end, beyond the jargon you repeat, do you not think this is banal?
– Banal! Perhaps... but to what extent?
– In sum... it would only be a matter of measure...
– That everything is a matter of measure... perhaps. But precisely, this measure depends on the instrument that measures. And the very principle of the instrument depends on the measure that will be inscribed upon it. It can only measure what relates to it. If, by misfortune, the object to be measured exceeds the measure, then the instrument becomes useless...
– Then... let us replace this measure with the word augure(augury)...
– Is that a good augure(omen)?
– You will see that the word resists less than it appears. Augure(augury), at its core, is nothing other than a way of cutting out the sky before anything appears there, and of saying: what will happen here, within this frame that I myself have drawn, will have meaning. What happens elsewhere will not, or at least not for me, not now.
– And the Enfant(child) Lune(Moon)...
– The Enfant(child) Lune(Moon) passes elsewhere. That is all. He does not pass through the templum(sacred frame of observation).
– The templum...?
– The frame from earlier, to which he does not submit and within which a sign from him was expected. One watches the direction of his flight and his gaze, the meaning of his silence, and none of this settles where a place had been prepared to receive it. The instrument is ready, the sky is open, and he... he moves otherwise.
– Then it is he who is at fault.
– That is the trap. One believes it is him. But augure(augury), and this is its most difficult lesson, has never guaranteed that the sign would come. It has only guaranteed that if the sign came, one would know how to read it. These are two entirely different things. One is a promise about the world. The other is only a promise about oneself.
– It is a subtle distinction.
– It is decisive. He who confuses the two ends up believing that the absence of a sign is a sign. That silence speaks. And sometimes it is true — the Romans knew it — a mute sky could be favorable. But for the Enfant(child) Lune(Moon), the silence attributed to him is not a message he sends. It is a void that we fill with our own expectation. We have become, without knowing it, the authors of the augure(augury) we claimed only to read.
– So... the fault would not be in the sign. It would be in the one who awaits the sign.
– In the one who drew the frame, yes. Who decided, before anything happened, what could count as favorable and what would be cast into darkness. He believes himself a reader. He is an author. And he does not know it, which is the worst.
– It would therefore be less a matter of signs than of those who claim to read them. The sky itself says nothing. It has never said anything. It is a surface we have learned to fill.
– ...You have just said something I could not have said better myself. And yet I may have heard it somewhere. From very far away, as I told you.
– And our master, what did he think?
– He thought, I believe, that the question was not whether signs existed, but who had drawn the frame in which they were to appear. Because the one who draws the frame decides, even before anything happens, what may count as a sign and what will be dismissed as insignificant. He has already decided. He has already judged. Augure(augury) comes afterward — in appearance — to confirm. But the confirmation was inscribed in the drawing itself.
– Like a sentence disguised as a question.
– Exactly. And the Enfant(child) Lune(Moon) — whether he knows it or not, I would lean toward not — refuses that frame. Not out of revolt, that would grant him too much calculation. By nature, simply. He is of too great a span for the templum(frame) that has been drawn for him. And a being whose span exceeds the frame within which one attempts to augure(interpret) him... that being will never be a good augure(omen) for those who observe. Not because he brings misfortune. But because he overflows. And what overflows, by definition, cannot be read.
– He renders augures useless.
– He renders them honest. Which is not the same thing... and... less convenient.