(95) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“The many criticisms to which the theatre has given rise throughout its history can indeed be reduced to one essential formula. I shall call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox perhaps even more fundamental than the famous paradox of the actor. This paradox is simple to state: there is no theatre without a spectator (even if it be a single, hidden spectator, as in the fictional performance of Le Fils naturel that gives rise to Diderot’s Entretiens). Yet, say the accusers, to be a spectator is an evil, for two reasons. First, looking is the opposite of knowing. The spectator stands before an appearance while remaining ignorant of the process that produced that appearance or of the reality it conceals. Second, it is the opposite of acting. The spectator remains motionless in his or her place, passive. To be a spectator is to be separated both from the capacity to know and from the power to act.”

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

… silhouettes dissolved into sentences… memories buried within mirrors…

The weary reader raises his eyelids and opens his eyes wide. His gaze, stretched toward the horizon as though awaiting a return that no longer comes, lowers itself once more toward words and images. The wind, arriving from the open sea, swells—not to answer or resolve, but to prolong the enigma.
Then one senses that this island is not unique. Others emerge here and there, invisible. Other places… born from the same story: archipelagos of thought or memory. Between them circulate the winds, bearers of silent letters, broken lines, and torn pages… through which Lucian travels.
Perhaps all of us are stranded somewhere, each in our own way. Perhaps our readings, our writings, our dreams are winds that, from afar, connect us and speak to us.
Do the islands of the Archipelago belong to reality?
The question has long since overflowed the boundaries of Igniatius, of the Moon Child and his Teddy Bear, of Don Carotte, and even of Félix. It remains for Lucian, who in his dreams becomes Lucien Joyeux…
 

“Is this dream… mine?
Could it be that the replacement of the child by this masked figure signifies a stage in my own inner journey? Innocence fades, giving way to a sharper awareness of the complexities of existence. This new light… is it the dawn of a new understanding, or the first gleam of a coming crisis?
I must continue to observe,” Félix thinks, “to feel, in the deepest part of myself, the echoes of these images. This oneiric journey, whether it is mine or another’s, continues to unfold, and every detail of this new scene carries within it a potential meaning, a key for deciphering the mysteries of the mind… theirs or my own…”