(128) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“These islands, now rocks, now meadows, now valleys, now towers, now ruins, now houses, now tombs, are like stranded ships; yet ships of stone, filled with shadow, filled with silence, filled with solitude, encircled by the sea and spoken to by the wind. At times one thinks one hears voices in the gusts; whether they are the souls of shipwrecked sailors or the cries of gulls, no one can tell.”

Victor Hugo, The Channel Archipelago

The rocky island, lashed by the winds, rises black and rugged like a clenched fist raised against oblivion in the midst of a disenchanted ocean. Around it the sea growls without respite, the breathing of the world—or the rumbling of some ancestral beast. The sky is never quite the same. At times livid, at times a pitiless blue, at times crimson, and at others suffused with an almost supernatural gold. There are no seasons here, only an endless succession of tempests, calms, and sighs. The light skims the rocks like the weary gaze of an old traveller.
Upon this island, whose very flanks are beaten by the sea, stands a strange theatre. Not built, but gathered together—gathered as one might gather the fragments of a dream washed ashore. Broken planks, tattered sails, leaning masts, the rust of dead anchors, loosened ropes: everything is fragment, ruin, trace. And yet everything appears ready. Ready for a performance that no one will ever come to witness. A circus, yes—a circus without laughter or applause, erected for the winds and for the spirits.
Very strange figures inhabit it.
A donkey, slender and lively, whose deep eyes bear the wisdom of creatures that know how to listen. His gaze is fixed upon the horizon, as though awaiting a return that will never come.
A child, almost invisible, wrapped in an oversized cloak. He stands upright, unshaken, like a general fashioned from clay. Whence came this garment? Behind him, beyond the limits of possibility and sharing that same cloak, stands Don Carrot... unless it is Pinocchio the Other, with a little blue dog resting at his feet. What loving—or ironic—hand clothed them thus and continues to hold them together by the tangled, fragile threads of life? No one knows.
They scarcely move, yet something passes between them. A murmur. A breath. An expectancy. They are like the guardians of an enigma. Their mere presence lends this island of a thousand echoes the aspect of a sanctuary, a place where the imagination has run aground and begun to breathe.
The wind moves among them like a messenger. It plays upon the ropes, whistles through the joints, speaks within the stones. And sometimes—yes, sometimes—it carries voices. Voices that come neither from the island, nor from the sky, nor even from the depths of the sea.
Voices arriving from a here—or an elsewhere—without shore: the voices of the author, the character, the reader, shifting entities, conscious, troubled, calling to one another across the dimensions of page and silence.
They speak... at times they question... and above all—forgive them—they doubt.
And often those voices reach the island.
Carried not by chance, but by some mysterious design. As though this island, these improbable travellers, this ruined theatre, were the vessel prepared to receive their wanderings, the tangible echo of their drifting consciousness.
The doll inclines its head. Its mouth does not move, yet its words resound inwardly, as clear as the murmur heard when one holds a seashell to the ear:

— Have you heard, companions, this curious tumult?
These voices from elsewhere that the wind exchanges among us?
An author... readers... silhouettes dissolving into sentences...
But why such clamour? Why such ecstasies?
Are they as lost as we are upon their own archipelago,
Wandering through discourse as birds wander through their chapel?

The little dog whimpers softly. The donkey lowers his eyelids. As for the wind, it rises once more—not to answer, but to prolong the enigma. Then one begins to sense that this island is not alone. Others emerge here and there, invisible perhaps, yet forming other places of the same kind: archipelagos of thought, archipelagos of memory. Between them the winds circulate, bearing fragments, pages, silent words, unreadable words.
Perhaps we are all like them, each in our own fashion, cast ashore somewhere. Perhaps our readings, our writings, our thoughts, our dreams—these are the winds that bind us together, that speak to us.
And this island, battered by storms, is nothing more than a mirror raised before the ocean of our uncertainties.
A makeshift theatre, certainly, yet alive and inhabited by fragments and fables, where the wind itself has become a wandering voice moving through the pages that give birth to worlds.