(78) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“I understood then that something was no longer functioning properly. Not within the events themselves — they had always been strange — but within the very way they held together. As though an invisible crack had passed through the narrative itself. One of those silent fissures that do not break anything immediately, yet imperceptibly shift every line of a landscape.”*

He pulls himself together and begins once again to leaf feverishly through Lucian’s notebooks, then through those of Don Carotte. The dates fluctuate. Certain fragments seem to answer one another across a distance. Others appear to have been written before the events they describe. Even the parrots themselves sometimes confuse the sequences when they recount them.
At last he finds the passage he had been searching for. That is it… Don Carotte’s initiatory journey began in the clearing… always that clearing.

The gigantic tree appears there at the center, with its immense roots plunging into the earth as though they sought not the soil itself, but depths anterior to the visible world. Don Carotte decides to follow these roots. Not only in their horizontal extension, but toward their descent as well. The notebook even insists upon this strange impression: the roots seemed to lead less beneath the earth than outside the ordinary world. And it is by following them that the voyage toward the islands begins.
Yet suddenly Félix begins to understand the problem. This tree already stands upon one of the islands of the Archipelago.
Slowly, he sets the notebook down and remains motionless for a long time. For this contradiction destroys every stable geography.
If the tree already belongs to the Archipelago, then Don Carotte does not travel from an exterior world toward the islands. He is already within them at the very moment he believes he is departing.
The idea produces in Félix an almost physical sensation of vertigo.
He looks around him as though the walls themselves had shifted slightly out of place.
Then a hypothesis slowly begins to emerge.
What if initiation consisted precisely not in reaching another place?
What if the true function of the journey were to reveal that the traveler already inhabited the very space he was seeking?
Then many elements suddenly become more coherent.
The Archipelago ceases to be a conventional geographical destination. It becomes a structure of reality in which the characters are already caught before they become conscious of it.
The gigantic tree would then play an essential role.
It would no longer be merely a marvelous tree placed within the landscape. It would function as a kind of living axis linking several depths of the narrative together.
Félix rereads the description:
“The trunk rose so high that its uppermost branches disappeared into the mists suspended above the clearing. Yet it was not its height that disturbed one most. It was the roots. They lifted the earth around them as though the ground itself breathed beneath their slow pressure. Some disappeared into black fissures where one thought one could hear water — or perhaps wind — moving far beneath the stones.”
Félix then understands why Don Carotte follows the roots rather than the trunk.
The trunk rises toward the visible sky.
The roots lead toward the buried invisible.
And it is precisely there that the true initiatory displacement occurs.
Not within a change of place.
Within a modification of depth.
Then the paradox slowly ceases to be one.
Don Carotte already begins upon an island because no one truly enters the Archipelago from the outside. The characters gradually discover that they had already been living there, though in an incomplete or unconscious form.
This would also explain why Lucian speaks of “having made the journey” while sometimes giving the impression of never having left certain spaces of the theater-circus.
The displacement is perhaps not primarily horizontal.
It resembles instead a descent into the subterranean layers of the narrative world itself.
As though the Archipelago possessed several levels of visibility.
Certain islands would be immediately perceptible.
Others would remain hidden beneath the habits of perception.
And the gigantic tree would become one of the rare structures allowing passage between these different regimes of the world.
Suddenly Félix writes this in the margin:
“The roots do not lead toward another place. They lead toward the hidden thickness of place itself.”
Then another thought appears, even more troubling still.
If Don Carotte begins his journey already inside the Archipelago without knowing it, perhaps the same is true for all the characters.
Perhaps even for Lucian.
Perhaps even for the one reading the notebooks.
Then the Archipelago definitively ceases to be a setting.
It becomes a condition.
A secret way of inhabiting the world before even understanding that one already inhabits it.

*Inspired by The Tartar Steppe