(85) The arcanadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Félix attempts to understand how the Moon Child’s mind and relation to the world function.

Félix’s Notebook

This image shows less a landscape than a living system of perception. Everything appearing within it seems to belong to a circulation where seeing, projecting, projecting oneself, receiving in order to interpret become inseparable.
The Moon Child, tiny before the nocturnal immensity, advances toward a gigantic apparition that seems to float above the sea and the ruins. Yet this apparition is not an external phenomenon in the ordinary sense. The great luminous, vegetal, neuronal, or cosmic proliferation appears to me to be the visible projection of what is occurring inside the Moon Child’s hat.
This hat is not a simple garment. It acts as a disproportionate inner space. A nocturnal chamber of perception where still unstable forms grow: memories, intuitions, visions, sensations, associations, incomplete figures. And this interiority does not remain enclosed. It overflows into the visible world. The landscape thus becomes a projection screen. The sea, the sky, the ruins, the birds receive the diffusion of this inner activity. The luminous ramifications resemble simultaneously roots, lightning, neurons, corals, branches, synaptic networks. But this multiple character does not arise merely from an aesthetic effect. It corresponds to a perceptual state still anterior to fixed categories. The Moon Child projects a thought before it becomes concept.
This logic was already present in a previous image, the one where the Moon Child advanced upon his own hat as upon a boat. The hat already appeared there as an inner territory made navigable. Here the process reaches a further stage: the interior ceases merely to be inhabited; it begins to spread into the world. And this projection is not a one-way movement. The luminous proliferation acts as an exteriorized sensory organ. This organ, momentarily visible, emits and receives simultaneously. It projects forms into reality, yet those forms in return produce new information that comes back toward the Moon Child.
Thus the ramifications function almost like a neuronal network made visible outside the body. They construct sensitive hypotheses about the world, receive responses, modify themselves, reconfigure themselves.
The image therefore shows less an imagination than a living perceptual circuit. The Moon Child projects. The world reacts. That reaction returns toward him.
And his perception transforms itself through that return.
This is where the parrots play their role.
The two birds perched upon the ruins both are and are not part of the image. They are visible within the scene, yet they also occupy a position exceeding the scene. They resemble internal readers of the phenomenon and consciousnesses perched upon the frontier between participation and observation.
They recount what they see without ever formally describing the image. Their speech does not name forms as an objective analysis would. It accompanies the apparition. It progressively grants it meaning. Yet this speech itself also acts upon the projection. The luminous forms thus named become images… The images become speech within the parrots.
Speech produces meanings.
And these meanings, through mysterious paths, return to modify the Moon Child’s initial perception.
The parrots therefore cease to be simple commentators. They become active elements of the perceptual system itself. Almost reflexive functions separated from the Moon Child and perched at a distance upon the ruins of an ancient… or future world.
But the most troubling thing lies elsewhere: the Moon Child ignores their presence. He does not know that the image, of which he himself knows nothing, is addressed to them.
And yet the entire projection already seems structured by their possible gaze.
Here the principle of the observer becomes central. The parrots do not observe an already constituted scene. Their observation participates in the very formation of the experience. Yet conversely the projection itself seems to await their gaze. As though it obscurely sought a witness capable of returning it to itself in the form of speech.
The scene then becomes a loop in which the Moon Child projects his interiority. The parrots receive that projection. Their reception produces an interpretation. That interpretation transforms the projection itself.
Thus transformed, the projection returns toward the Moon Child. Perception then ceases to be individual. It becomes circulation.
The parrots resemble almost quantum observers, in the poetic sense. Before their gaze, before being observed, the luminous proliferation remains multiple, indeterminate… at moments hesitant, most often open. Face, tree, brain, sun, memory, marine organism, nervous network coexist simultaneously. Their speech begins to stabilize certain forms. It transforms perceptual proliferation into a narratable world.
But they themselves, the parrots, remain caught within what they recount. They occupy the ruins of former structures: collapsed columns, vestiges of a stable order where separations still seemed possible:
subject and object,
spectator and scene,
inside and outside,
reality and representation.
Yet those frontiers are already disappearing.
The parrots speak from the ruins of those ancient distinctions while the luminous proliferation reveals a world where everything communicates with everything else. Where projections become receptions. Where observers modify the experience they observe. Where speech acts upon the visions that produced it.
This profoundly rejoins the entire logic of this universe…
Lucian is included within the drawings he analyzes.
I myself am included within the structure I supervise, just as the reader forms part of a book he believes himself merely to be reading. Every commentary transforms what it comments upon.
The parrots thus become figures of the reader himself, without whom the book and the story remain closed… enclosed…
The parrots observe the Moon Child without immediately understanding that they participate in his projection. Exactly like the reader who believes himself to be observing an external fiction before discovering that the book is already acting upon his own perception.
Thus the image ceases to be a simple illustration.
It becomes a device for the circulation of the gaze.
The gaze passes… from the Moon Child toward the projection… from the projection toward the parrots… from the parrots toward the words… from the words toward the reader… from the reader back again toward the image.
And within this loop each silently transforms the others.
The immense luminous proliferation then appears as the visible form of this circulation itself: a consciousness overflowing its limits, using the world, the ruins, the birds, the words, and even the reader as extensions of its own perception.