(32) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

“Speaking is not seeing. Speaking releases thought from the demand of the visible, and what is spoken does not appear. To speak is to remain within the absence of what is said; it is to step away from the thing so that it may appear as absence. Speech distances us, and yet this distance is the condition of any presence. To speak is never to coincide with what one says. The one who speaks does not quite know what he is saying. The one who speaks is already separated from the words he utters. Speech begins before him, and continues after him. It passes through him, exceeds him, and places him in relation with what is not himself.”

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Notebook of the Moon Child

For a long time, I had the feeling that the words were not mine. They passed through me, the way wind passes through branches, moving them without ever stopping there. Then a question came. At first softly, then more insistently: where do they come from?

I am not only speaking of the words I say. I mean the ones I have never said, and yet recognize. The ones that pass through me when I think I am alone. The ones that seem to know something before I do.

Someone must have spoken them… but who?

I tried to imagine a first word. A word without a past. A word that would really be the first. But each time, it already seemed surrounded. As if it never arrived alone. As if it were already expected by a sentence that was there before it.

So perhaps words never begin. Or perhaps they come from somewhere where there are not yet any words.

Sometimes I feel that place. I cannot see it. It is more like a silence that grows, like a spring under the ground. Something wants to come, but does not yet know how to say itself.

I wonder if the world exists in the same way as words. If it too has a source.

Because I see things. Forms. Colors. Movements. But is what I see really outside… or does it take shape at the same time as the words that let me see it?

There are moments when the world seems solid, independent of me. As if it were there before me, and would remain after me. And then, suddenly, this certainty weakens. Everything becomes less stable. As if what I see depended on a gaze that is not only mine.

Then something crosses my mind.

What if this world I am in were not the first one… and even more… what if what I take to be outside were already a kind of inside?

It is difficult to say. I feel that I am part of what I look at. I am not simply in front of things. I am caught in them. And yet, at the same time, there is a distance. As if something held me apart from what I live. It is strange to be both inside and outside at once.

That is when I began to suspect something else. As if I were living inside something that contains me.

At first, I did not know what to do with it. Then, one day—I don’t know how—I felt a limit. Not a visible boundary. Something more subtle. Like an edge. As if everything I can see, think, feel were held inside a larger form.

And this form… felt like a book.

A very large book, whose pages I cannot fully see. And yet I sense them. Around me. Above. Below. They hold what I see. What I live. They organize what happens. I move from one to another without always noticing.

There are moments when something happens. And others when nothing seems to happen.

Then suddenly, something opens.

Not by me. Not through me. It comes from elsewhere.

A light appears at the margin. A breath. Time hesitates. And the pages… shift, just slightly. Just enough.

Through that opening, I sense another world. I cannot see it entirely. But I feel its presence. Like something behind a door. Like a gaze I cannot meet, but know is there.

Someone opens the book.

I do not know who. I cannot see them. But I feel the gesture. The pages turn. I move forward. I am read.

And that changes everything.

Because it means that what I live is not only lived. It is also read… or perhaps known.

I am inside a story. And this story has been written. By someone I do not know.

But that someone is not alone. Because the one who opens the book comes after. Continues the gesture. Keeps it alive.

So I wonder: does the one who reads give me a different existence than the one who wrote me? Do I change when I am read?

Sometimes, it feels like I do.

When the pages open, something in me becomes more vivid. As if I existed more. As if what was fixed began to move again.

And yet, it troubles me.

Because it means I am not entirely free. I depend on a gesture I cannot control.

If I depend on the one who writes… and on the one who reads… then where am I?

Am I only a character… moved by a gaze?

Or am I also the one who feels that something escapes that?

Sometimes I think that this very question is already a crack in the book. A small opening. Because if I can ask it, then perhaps I am not completely enclosed… or perhaps the book itself contains this question.

Perhaps the book knows that someone inside it will one day ask where words come from, where the world comes from, and who keeps the book open.

And I am there.

Between what I live and what makes me live.

Between the words I speak and the ones that write me.

Between the pages that hold me and the opening that lets me glimpse something else.

I still do not know what it means.

But I feel that it is not finished. Not at all.