(54) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

The terrain is brutal. Rocky needles rise without transition, like the teeth of giants, witnesses to tectonic pressure still active. Here one senses the thrust of plates, there an ancient fracture filled with more recent basalt. From afar, these forms seemed stable to me, but as I approached, I discovered a living ground, slowly fissuring, sometimes cracking beneath its internal heat, exhaling dull rumblings perceived more with the feet than with the ears. It was also… somewhat… how I perceived myself… if, after yet another fall or from exhaustion, which happened to me often, I found myself lying on the ground, when it was not in the water… where it was impossible for me to remain. At once, the same movement that had made me fall caused me to rise again and stagger onward. I had become the new Sisyphus, condemned endlessly to roll my body up to the summit of my head, from which it would fall again under its own weight, dragging that head down with it. Who could have thought, and for what reason, that there is no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless labor…
To remain standing was a long apprenticeship. In the deep night that was mine, the slightest particle of light, the faintest spark, acted like a trigger and, within obscure meanders, lit an invisible fuse. It sufficed that, almost by chance, after endless turning, my gaze should fall upon it for it to grow. My gaze, like a magnifying glass left too long in place, burst into flame, and I risked blindness. My eyes would close. Then the image, little by little, recovered a kind of clarity. It was as though it were being born from within. And then everything began again… I know neither how long this lasted nor how it eventually quieted.

If many times, broken by some uncertain breath,
I fell upon the ground, dispersed and indefinite,
Never did I remain there: an invisible force
Raised me endlessly again with irrepressible course.
I rolled on, condemned, without rest and without might,
Bearing a nameless weight, laden with strange blight.
Like Sisyphus, forever bound to endless pain,
I climbed without cease my own fall through agony’s domain.
My unfinished form, like a toy too worn with age,
Bore witness to a struggle imposed upon my frame.
My skin, through the effort, cracked beneath torment,
Whence sometimes emerged strange moans and lament.
To stand upright a moment, this laborious art,
Was like a hope suspended somewhere beyond the stars.
Within my starless night, a wavering reflection
Pierced the obscurity, furtive, almost a spark’s impression.
A thread… A light… A strange and distant promise?
I felt within the surge a force that inward presses,
And that absent hand, or that faraway breath,
Animated me despite myself, pulled me back from death.
My gestures, uncertain, followed obscure laws,
As though they answered rules that possessed no voice.
And when upon that gleam my eyes lingered too long,
A sudden blaze consumed my ruddy nose at once.
I feared the conflagration, that interior fire
Which seemed to devour the fibers of my heart entire.
Then, within silence, an image would arise,
It vibrated within me, then faded, wind-swept, from my eyes.
This eternal cycle, in my senseless turning round,
Each evening resumed its measured battleground.
And I do not know, lost within this bitter ballet,
Who guided my impulses, what threads guided my way.