(120) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“It must be clearly understood that what we call ‘nature,’ what we name with such naivety or nostalgia, is already caught within a network of discourses, representations, narratives, and forms of knowledge. Nature as a pure, raw origin, anterior to humankind, is a cultural invention, an effect of language. Man does not discover nature: he produces it by speaking about it. And the more learned the discourse, or the more beautiful it is, the more capable it becomes of making us believe in that nature, as though it were a truth that preceded us. But there is no outside of language. There is no primitive purity; there are only constructions, effects of discourse. The role of criticism, therefore, is not to destroy these discourses, but to reveal their mechanisms, their power, and what they seek to make us believe.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Where one discovers that one of the parrots, perhaps under the distant and highly indirect influence of Félix, is seized by a fit of acute criticism concerning what he is supposed to repeat...

— One must be wary of those texts which, under the pretext of celebrating the power of the natural world, end up mythologizing it.
— Are you referring to what we were saying yesterday... or the day before?
— Yes... but even more to the way words become entangled in memory, and to certain passages from various notebooks we have been studying...
— Are they not interesting?
— Certainly... they are sometimes remarkable for their breath, their sensory precision, at times for their ability to render palpable the thickness of rock, the smell of sulphur, or the profound silence of the islands.
— Then what is it that we ought to distrust? Is it not... not only true... but also exceedingly beautiful?
— Well... it is precisely that stylistic effectiveness which calls for a critical reading. For the more beautiful a text appears, the more cautious we must be about what it passes off as true.
— I do not follow you...
— What we have here is an imaginary construction of a world “before humanity,” or “at the margins of humanity”: a primal, brutal, incandescent nature which the author—whoever he may be... perhaps our master—seems implicitly to oppose to human societies and their disorders. This aesthetic of fertile chaos, this vision of a world beginning anew in rock and vapour, belongs to a long Western tradition: that of nature conceived as a pure origin, as a primordial laboratory, as a regenerative promise.
— Should we then dispense with fantasy altogether?
— This fantasy is not neutral. It participates in an imaginary framework that tends to erase the real human presences, past and present, within such places. One cannot fail to notice the complete absence of any cultural trace, of any memory other than elemental memory.
— Might we ourselves be “elemental,” my dear friend...?
— The island possesses no human history. It is described as a blank page, a sacred wilderness. It strangely recalls the way the first European travellers spoke of the lands they “discovered”: as though no one had ever lived there, as though only the wind, the fire, and the birds could lay claim to any form of legitimacy.
— I scarcely recognize you in this fine discourse of yours... it seems filled with something approaching anger, and even a little bitterness...
— This aesthetic of the island-as-matrix, of the “relic become beginning,” is not innocent...
— And what do you accuse it of?
— It reflects a modern desire for re-enchantment through a return to a harsh yet meaningful nature, a nature that might still be capable of speaking to us—or even correcting us.
— That reassures me somewhat...
— The geological silence evoked at the end of the text, that “silence deeper than the night,” is laden with projections: it breathes only what one chooses to hear within it.
— That reassurance was short-lived...
— In that respect—and merely as an example—reread it. The invocation of Rimbaud, “Eternity is the sea gone with the sun,” functions here less as illumination than as a veil. This phrase, which has become a totem of poetic ineffability, is used to seal a mystical alliance between the elements, to sacralize what the text presents as a new beginning.
— But of what eternity are we speaking?
— Of an eternity to which we are expected to give echo!
— Yet tell me, how could one do so without a human voice, without memory?
— That sea gone with the sun may ultimately be a fiction of forgetting.
— It is not without beauty... you yourself have said so.
— The point is not to deny the beauty of the text, nor its evocative power.
— Then what is the point?
— To remind ourselves that this beauty belongs to a system of representation: one that turns natural chaos into a scene of initiation, the mineral world into a founding myth, and life itself into a silent miracle. Yet real islands, volcanic or otherwise, are traversed by concrete histories, practices, conflicts, and cosmologies that exceed this geological reverie. One must keep that in mind whenever a text begins to speak of origins.