(30) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“The ground of the noetic quest is perhaps this: it is a matter of recovering the lost domains of the psyche that have been conquered by the enemy. It is a matter of gaining post-language over pre-language and over human interdependence of which it is the vector. Thesis. The definition of mythical thought is simple: if myth is the narrative that founds the group, then within this narrative (the transmitted language) the narrator is the group that deploys its five hunting strategies upon the environment it gradually discerns within the surrounding hold. The pack remains the master, however little it may be synchronized with new times.

If thinking depends on the collective language acquired in the ancestral tongue of the group, can thinking expend that dependence? No. No group has ‘invented’ the language it speaks.

No subject has experienced the past that it relays. The beating of each person’s heart is not triggered by their own heart—but by the pulse of their mother’s heart. Language is not invented by the groups that speak it. Curiously, its nature is in no way artificial or technical. (It is neither divine nor human, but it is without a nomothete and it is non-thetic.) The magnificent theoretical possibility uncovered by Étienne de La Boétie is impossible. One can free oneself as much as possible, but one cannot be free. If thinking depends on the collective language acquired in the natural language, can thinking think as much as possible its dependence on what precedes the group that language has bound together? Perhaps, a little, yes.

One can even die for thinking.

That is why one must contemplate the void upstream of all things. One can be reborn from dying. (One can be unseated.) One can die from thinking. (Thought has a content.) Birth can be pursued in its strange wandering dread. (One can be reborn. One can begin one’s life again.) The first world may advance its snout into the second world. The first kingdom still reigns over the last kingdom.
The once-before still arises. The sun still shines.
What is more ancient in time is linked to what is more spontaneous in its form.

Scholium. This is why nature is the best of the visibles.
Its upsurge still springs from behind the first visibility. It is still a strange backward glance.”

 

Pascal Quignard, To Die of Thinking

 

 

 Notebook of the Moon Child

 

These notebooks speak of things and others difficult to say, yet that almost everyone has already felt without always being able to name them. I wrote them long before speaking, even before knowing who I was… or who we are… In those times, something in us already existed. There is a life older than our ideas, and than our will, older even than our way of saying “I.”

To speak of a “noetic quest” is to speak of the search for thought. But it is not a matter here of learning things as at school. It is a matter of knowing what thinking means at its deepest level. Where do our thoughts come from?

 

Lucian’s Notebook

 

Where do the Moon Child’s thoughts come from? Are they truly his… or ours? Or do they come to us from a world older than we are?

I can only be astonished that the Moon Child could have had such a reading… and this leads me to reconsider the fact that it is Igniatius who reports it. He speaks little but brings much…

When he says, echoing what he has read, that one must “recover the lost domains of the psyche conquered by the enemy,” it may seem very abstract. In reality, the idea is quite simple. He means that a part of our inner life has been taken from us… perhaps covered over… even occupied. By what? By the group, by habit, by common language, by what everyone says… thinks… transmits… or repeats. The “enemy” is not only someone from outside. It is also everything in us that endlessly repeats what comes from others.

In other words: we believe we think freely, but a very large part of what we think has already been given to us. The language we speak… we did not invent it. The stories, the images, the fears, the ways of seeing the world were already there before our birth. We enter a house already built.

This is why, like Quignard, the Moon Child, through the voice of Igniatius, speaks of myth. Here, myth does not mean only an old legend with gods and monsters. More broadly, myth is the great narrative in which a human group recognizes itself. It is, before being told to me, the story it tells itself in order to know who it is, what it must fear or what it must love. Myth gives form to the world. In this case, a world within which another world has taken place…

And within this story, within his world… inside that of Igniatius… the Moon Child perceives… and says… following Quignard, that it is not really an individual who speaks. It would be the group. The narrator, at bottom, would be a pack. This means that human speech is not originally solitary. It already bears the trace of others, of ancestors, of the collective. “Even when I speak alone, something of the group still speaks in me.”

These words resonate deeply. They pose an almost painful question: if thinking depends on the language received from the group, can one ever free oneself from this dependence?

Is Igniatius independent of the Moon Child… or of Don Carotte… or the reverse? The answer is severe: no… not completely. One can detach oneself a little, one can gain some distance, one can see a little more clearly. But to become absolutely free—no. Why? Because the very means with which we think, language, does not come from us.

The example of the heart and the mother is crucial. It says that the beating of each person’s heart is not first triggered by their own heart, but by that of the mother. This image expresses something very simple and very profound: our life begins in dependence. Before being separated… if we ever are… we have lived within another rhythm than our own. We are first bound. We do not begin as independent beings. We begin as beings carried.

And what is true of the body is also true of language and thought… and it is also true of Igniatius… of the Moon Child, of Don Carotte, of Sang Chaud, of Pinocchio the Other… and of me… and of all of us…