Upon the sea, around the islands of the Archipelago, battered by storms, might it be a mirror raised before the ocean of our uncertainties… A makeshift theater, yes, but a living one. Peopled with fragments and fables.
Where the wind itself becomes a character, or the author of a wandering speech drifting through worlds.
Lucian, following in Don Carotte’s footsteps, tracing the half-submerged roots, found himself in turn face to face with the Leviathan… Yes. The scene must then grow darker still, and become less dramatic in the theatrical sense than nocturnal in the sense that something shows itself while withdrawing, where presence offers itself only together with its share of absence, where the subject encounters not a hidden content but the very ordeal of a visible that never gives itself entirely.
The Leviathan speaks first:
— Do you see, Lucian?
— I do not know what I am supposed to see…
— It is not a question of being supposed to…
— The question, you see… is not what I see… but what do I see… Who are you?
Lucian, standing before the monster, has not lost his reason and does not display the fear he ought to feel…
He resumes, bending his discourse in another direction.
— What happened during your encounter with Don Carotte?
— First of all… who told you that I met him?
— It is written in his notebooks… which were brought to me by Igniatius.
— Did Igniatius tell you that he too came to me?
— No… not yet…
— To return to your question… no, it did not go well. I remember it very clearly. I proposed a riddle to him… according to the protocol… as is proper…
— And then?
— He did not reflect for very long… before brandishing his staff in every direction… convinced it was a sword… it was, I confess, perfectly pathetic, and it required of me — I tell you this with great modesty — much skill and almost magic… to make, within and from all that movement of language, words he might hear.
— And what did he understand?
— Everything backwards… but…
— What resulted from it?
— Persuaded that he could shove me aside, fencing endlessly, believing himself to conquer fires only he could see, he entered… at least he is convinced of it… though it would be more accurate to say that, having had me upon the tip of his tongue, it was enough for me merely to withdraw for him to find himself, like a child… within my palace…
— Stop… stop, please… You just said… you speak to me of a child… Could it be a question of…
He cannot finish his sentence, unable to find the words.
— This child of whom we speak did not… does not… dwell solely within language… as you do… within a destiny…
As anyone may understand, Lucian is profoundly disoriented. Faced with this enigma, no matter how he reflects, words and ideas fly away as he hears the Leviathan’s words… which continue… pursue him… and thus he too finds himself… the word seems well chosen to him… he too penetrating through the tongue into a palace glittering with a thousand lights… and it is from the depths, as though they were his own, that the voice continues… or pursues him…
— He dwells also within the visible as within an enigma that never resolves itself into an object. What he sees, what he believes he sees, what he senses behind what he sees, none of this composes a world of objects simply placed before him.
How can the Leviathan formulate so well that against which I myself collide, or… in the best of cases… merely circle around?
— The visible, for him, is never full. It is traversed by withdrawal. It always allows one to perceive that, at the very heart of what appears, something does not come into presence.
That is why, by day as by night, this child is nocturnal.
There is no longer any doubt in Lucian’s mind: he is speaking of the Moon Child…
— This does not mean that he belongs to the night as to an easy symbol, nor that he is some romantic figure of shadow. I say that he inhabits a modality of appearing in which what shows itself does not abolish what withdraws. He never simply sees things. He sees things slightly withdrawing from themselves. He sees forms that seem to emerge from a depth older than their contour. He sees, within the world, that discreet trembling through which the visible lets it be heard that it possesses a reverse side, not elsewhere, but within itself.
It is here that truth must be reconsidered.
For if truths are spoken, arranged, transmitted, truth itself may perhaps be nothing other than that perpetually unfinished relation between what appears and what, within that very appearing, remains unapparent. Truths belong to the side of what may be fixed. They carve out a content, secure it, render it available. Truth, however, is not what becomes fixed. It resides in the very vibration through which every fixation lets something essential escape.
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