(23) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“There was a forest… an immense forest, an inextricable tangle of trunks, vines, shadows, and silence… It seemed motionless and filled with a hostile gaze. Impossible to cross it without losing one’s mind, so much did it swallow everything into its green and humid darkness.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

There are stories which, at first glance, seem simple. The reader, without being brave, lets himself be led by the hand and thus, trusting, like a child, steps into the footprints of those who came before him. This is how the countless traps function, sometimes so subtle that they would remain invisible… and now the illusion of a possible understanding, until the unwary reader, having, more or less, lost his head or his mind, finds himself prisoner of what he believed he could keep at a distance.
Because this labyrinth is not entirely closed. It is not absolutely impenetrable. One may enter it, one may even grasp its principle, but one can never go around it, nor leave it with a total vision. There is always another bifurcation. And, as for the path not taken, a version of the world that escapes. The reader, like the characters he follows… or who guide him, believes he can disentangle, order, reconstruct. But this belief is precisely what carries him further into the labyrinth.

Notebook of Don Carotte

The forest stood before us like an ancient architecture, indecipherable and sovereign. Nothing was left to chance in this entanglement: each layer of vegetation, each vine falling like a suspended thread, each moss covering stones or branches had its logic, its place, its role within the dense harmony of the living.
Observation gradually revealed the structure: the age-old trees, straight as columns, stretched their trunks to vertiginous heights, their crowns joining to form a nearly hermetic vault. The light, rare and precious, barely pierced through, filtered by myriads of overlapping leaves into a dust of green gold suspended in the humid air. At our feet, the roots traced labyrinths, some as thick as human arms, others as fine as nervous filaments, revealing the forest as a single vast underground organism.