(46) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

At first glance, what Lucian knew about characters such as the Moon Child, Don Carotte, Pinocchio the Other… and so many others… depended on what Igniatius had told him… That is to forget that knowledge does not depend solely on what we hear… or else… one would have to hear both meanings of that verb. Thus we must understand that these various characters appear on… or perhaps one should say within the drawings. The way one reads the drawings, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, always produces a form of knowledge. Whether it is good or bad… that is another matter. Lucian therefore does not have only the words of Igniatius as his source; he has these images. It matters little, for now, who produced them. What is equally certain is that no part of what he learns can be considered as truth. At most, it might reach the stage of the true… knowing that at this stage, even certain facts might be nothing more than constructions of his own mind… Lucian knows this. It does not prevent him from formulating hypotheses… which, clustering together by affinity, form a kind of truth closer to vertigo than to virtue. That is why he addresses them to Félix, in order to impose some order… he himself standing at the edge of the same dangers when, faced with the images and words Lucian offers him, the various movements of the mind familiar to the human species, gathered under the name of “imagination,” begin to stir.

I have been looking at this drawing for some time now, and I could not say at what moment it began to speak to me. For it does speak to me, there is no doubt, but in a way I do not grasp at once, as if what it says stood slightly behind itself, or rather ahead of itself, compelling me to follow it without ever allowing me to fully catch up.
At first, I saw with horror nothing more than a child’s head, placed at the edge of the water, or in the water, I no longer know. This hesitation lasted; it still lasts. For nothing clearly indicates where the world ends and where this face begins. And very quickly, another thing held me: this head has no body. I did not at once find it strange. I had to return to the drawing, to look at it again, to understand that this lack was not an omission, but a given.
The body is not there… or else it is elsewhere.
Only then did I begin to pay attention to the waves. They do not merely border the head; they seem to extend it, or at least to receive it into a movement that has neither beginning nor end. And I thought, too quickly no doubt, that all of it belonged to the same flow, that the distant, elongated form took part in that movement.
But I was mistaken.
This form, I now see more clearly: it is a cloud. It is in the sky, and yet it is also in the water. Or else it is its reflection, but then the reflection has as much presence as what it reflects. I cannot decide which precedes the other, and this indecision forces me to look otherwise. What I believed to be a continuity becomes a passage.
It is at that moment, I think, that the drawing began to insist.
For my gaze returned to the face, and more precisely to the nose. I had not wanted to linger there. It seemed too visible, almost too obvious. And yet, it commands everything. It is elongated, projected, as if it were advancing in place of the rest of the body. And suddenly, without quite knowing why, a name came to me: Pinocchio, but that only half fit.
For this nose does not tell a lie.
It bears its trace otherwise. I understood… little by little, or rather I felt, that this nose had grown not because the one who speaks lies, but because he hears. And to hear, here, does not simply mean to receive words. It means to understand them, and in that very understanding to find oneself exposed, affected, almost implicated.
There is here a kind of discomfort, difficult to name. As if recognizing what does not hold within a statement were to bear its weight. And this weight, the face does not reject. It lets it pass through it.
Then the nose inclines.
This movement is almost imperceptible, yet it changes everything. It does not rise, it does not assert itself. It sinks into the water, slowly, as if seeking to leave the surface, to withdraw from that place where everything circulates, where everything is said too quickly. In sinking, it ceases to be a simple form and becomes a line, a direction.
I found myself thinking that it resembled the drift of a boat.
Not the visible hull, but that which, beneath, cuts through the water, gives orientation, allows one to hold within the movement. And this thought stopped me. For it made something else appear: if the nose becomes a keel, then the head floats. And if it floats, of what matter is it made?
Of wood, perhaps.
I do not know whether I should say it, but it imposes itself: this head could be that of a puppet. Not the one we know, or at least not entirely. Something has been displaced. As if the origin persisted, but altered, returned to another experience.
And what troubles me is that nothing is dramatic.
There is no fall, no cry, not even resistance. The body has withdrawn without any other violence than a kind of deconstruction. The face remains, eyes half-closed, as if in a state of inner vigilance, and the world, the water, the sky, the cloud and its reflection, continues to pass.
I look at this drawing, and I have the feeling that it does not ask me to understand, but to remain where it places me: in that in-between where seeing and hearing merge, where what appears never gives itself from a single side.
It speaks to me, yes.
But what it says, I can only follow.