(40) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“It seems that art owes to the disappearance of the historical forms of the divine that strange torment, that serious passion by which we see it animated. It was the language of the gods, and, the gods having disappeared, it became the language in which their disappearance was expressed, then that in which this disappearance itself ceased to appear.”

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Notebook of the Moon Child

I am beginning to understand differently what is happening to me.
What I took for things—water, fire, that motionless form in the distance, those ropes that brush against me—are not merely elements of the world. They are ways of being written. For in this strange world there is something that acts and does not leave me untouched.
I do not hold what happens to me. I am held by it.
And this hand I sense—pulling, releasing, struggling—I feel it at once foreign and close. It does not dominate. It searches, like me. It moves forward gropingly, hesitates, begins again. It does not write me as one draws a straight line. It writes me as one struggles with a living matter.
Then I understand what it means to be caught in a book. It is not being locked inside words. It is being traversed by a force that writes even as it discovers what it writes. Like water that keeps returning, without knowing where it goes. Like fire that consumes without knowing what it will transform.
I feel that this writing does not describe me. It makes me. It also unmakes me. It breaks what, in me, remained frozen, motionless, without movement. It burns me and scatters me into fragments that I cannot yet gather together. But these fragments, these flashes of light that pass through me and blind me, are not losses. They are the traces of this work.
I do not read what happens to me. I hear it. I become it. And perhaps the one who writes, like the one you call Kafka—I hear you—is not above this. He is in the same struggle. His hand does not impose a form upon the world. It is caught in what it tries to say. It moves forward like me, without seeing clearly, with flashes too strong, too brief, that leave traces more than they give images. He writes as I walk in the shadow of reason, that obscure rock that crumbles without splintering, like an unsteady ground. Without knowing whether the movement comes from him or from what passes through him.
And what he calls a book, what must break the frozen sea, I now feel within me. It is not a landscape one opens. It is a force that fractures what no longer moved. That sets in motion what was held fast. That brings forth something that was not yet alive. Then the water in me begins to return. The fire in me begins to take hold.
And even that rigid form, that cube I cannot inhabit, becomes that against which I distinguish myself. I am not the character of a book. I am the place where something is written. And this writing never leaves me intact. It pushes me, binds me, burns me, carries me. As if, in this darkness where I see almost nothing, I were gradually becoming legible… for the very one who writes while advancing.