(48) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“[…]
being, indeed, which is also intelligence and the good, is above all corruption and all change. From it flow the images shaped in bodily and sensible matter; this matter receives from it determinations, forms, and likenesses, as wax receives the impressions of a seal. But these impressions do not always endure. They are seized by the disordered and tumultuous principle which, relegated down here far from the higher regions, struggles against Horus, against that god engendered by Isis to be the sensible image of the intelligible world […]”

Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

The mechanism of any puppet can be disturbed… sometimes even dismantled. The various parts are subjected—whether by accident, by wear, or by malice, all possible sources…—to such disruptions. Pinocchio the Other does not escape the rule… and certainly not wear… if not outright dismemberment… It is thus that Nounours, in a surprising face-to-face, came to a partial acquaintance with Pinocchio the Other.
Félix is Lucian’s supervisor; Lucian is a psychiatrist whose patient is Igniatius. The latter came to sessions with Lucian bringing images that he claims to have found and purchased in a gallery located at the foot of Lucian’s building. Igniatius does not know the author of these images. He acquired them because, as he says, they speak to him… even though, during his first sessions with Lucian, he scarcely spoke at all and struggled to find even the slightest word. It is through these drawings that he was able to utter his first words. For his part, Lucian, faced with these drawings, learns a great deal about the stories Igniatius develops from them. Understand that what Igniatius says is not directly the description of what can be seen… for example by Lucian. Speech and images correspond only through subterranean channels… and sometimes… often even, submarine ones. Lucian will say that, faced with these images, which he struggled to analyze, he himself began to draw… copying them into his notebooks. “When I copy them, through the very movement of drawing, ideas appear to me that I would never have had… or discovered otherwise. It then belonged to me, in a wholly personal and private way, to put them into words… as one might set them to music…”
An incident, which one may without risk call revealing, then took place in Lucian’s office. Igniatius had arrived with his drawings and had settled in front of Lucian’s desk when Lucian, after greeting him, said he had an urgent need that required him to step out for a few moments. Nothing unusual up to that point. But… as he left, Lucian had not closed his notebook… not one of those that can be slipped into a pocket, no, a rather large one… the kind painters use when working outdoors… And the notebook lay wide open… offered to Igniatius’s gaze, who could not resist… who could have… the desire to look more closely. Igniatius was astonished to see how great the resemblance was to the drawings he had bought in the gallery. For him, there was no doubt… the author of the drawings was Lucian. Imagine his surprise… Lucian could explain all he wanted what has been said above, Igniatius retained his doubts. Doubts that Félix, almost in spite of himself, began to share… though the two knew each other only… through Lucian. Doubts all the stronger since he, unlike Igniatius, had the duty to note that Lucian’s absence, leaving open what should have remained private, led him to think that, by this gesture, he had at the very least shown a lack of tact… unless this action had been deliberate, in order to set in motion a mechanism known only to him. A sort of slight electric shock…
Letter from Félix to Lucian
You tell me that Igniatius no longer comes to your sessions and is content to send you drawings and letters… This leaves me thoughtful… just as your own absence from our sessions does, despite the drawings and letters you send me. I remain all the more thoughtful because the last drawing you sent me, asking me to comment on it after it had, according to your own words, produced astonishment… also provoked in me a kind of tidal wave…
I looked at this drawing for a long time and now, several days later, I understand what I named, not without restraint, a tidal wave. It is not a violent shock, but a progressive inundation, as if the image, instead of yielding itself, were gaining ground within me as I attempted, as I do now, to grasp it.
One sees… at first glance… a boat, resting on water that is not entirely calm, yet not hostile either. In this boat, a massive figure… easy to recognize: Nounours. He leans forward. He acts. And what he holds between his paws is not an ordinary object, but a head… I recognize it as well: that of Pinocchio the Other.
I say “head” and not “child,” for, as in the previous drawing, something has been separated. But here, the separation is no longer silent. It is given to be seen, almost staged. The head is separated from the body, and that body is invisible to us. It is absent, or… perhaps it has been dispersed, or, since this is a puppet… still to come. This absence, far from simplifying the reading… opens it. For at once, another scene imposes itself, older, more buried… Osiris.
In the myth, Osiris’s body is dismembered, scattered across the world, and it is through a patient work of gathering, of recomposition, that something like a presence can be restored. But this restoration is never complete. There is always a part missing, irreducible, which compels one to think of unity as unfinished.
Here, Nounours does not yet gather. Perhaps he begins… He holds. He looks at this head with an intensity that is neither pure tenderness nor simple curiosity. There is in this face-to-face a strange gravity, as if what he held were not merely a part of a whole, but already, for him as for us, an enigma.
I cannot help but see in this scene an inversion of Isis’s gesture. Where she travels the world to recover the fragments, Nounours finds himself immediately in the presence of a fragment… but this fragment looks back at him. And this changes everything. For the head of Pinocchio the Other is not inert. Its eyes are open, it meets the gaze, and that gaze introduces a troubling reciprocity… It is alive…
Who recognizes whom?
Nounours, bent over this head, might appear as the one who saves, or gathers. But this position is unstable. He might just as well be the one who discovers, for the first time, what constitutes him. For Nounours—and this strikes me here—belongs to that same regime of animated objects, beings at the threshold, who owe their life only to a gaze that invests them. A gaze from another world…
Thus, the face-to-face becomes a displaced mirror.
And the water, always, surrounds the scene.
But it is no longer merely a medium of drift. It becomes here the place of dispersion. What floats could be what remains after a dismemberment. What surfaces would be only fragments, a few signs. And the boat itself, I pause on it, immediately evokes those funerary vessels which, in Egyptian imagery, transport bodies, or what remains of them, toward another regime of existence.
We are not in a scene of rescue. We are in a crossing.
The nose of Pinocchio the Other, still elongated, sensitive to falsehood and illusion, persists in this situation. But here, it is no longer oriented toward depth. It is caught in a relation. It points toward Nounours, or rather toward the space between them. As if, even in dismemberment, something in it continued to seek a direction, a meaning that might guide it.
I return to Pinocchio the Other… the puppet… and its mechanism. What is at stake here is not merely a malfunction or wear. It is a more radical disarticulation, which touches the very possibility of holding together. And yet, this disarticulation does not produce chaos. It draws open the curtains of a curious theater.
A scene where a fragment of a wooden puppet meets a stuffed toy… where an absent body calls for a recomposition that has not yet begun.
It is in this, perhaps, that the reference to Osiris operates. Not as a mythological illustration, but as an underlying structure… where something has been dispersed… where something must be found again… But what will be found will never fully coincide with what was lost.
And in this interval, between loss and recomposition, the drawing stands.
You copy these images to understand them, and, in copying them, they make ideas emerge that had until then escaped you. I believe I understand why. For these images do not ask to be interpreted from the outside. They ask to be remade, replayed…
They do not deliver their meaning… they disperse it.
And perhaps that is what has affected you as well. Not what the drawing shows, but what it begins to undo.