(146) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“ One can certainly write without asking why one writes. As a writer watches his pen tracing letters, does he even have the right to stop it and say:
"Stop! What do you know about yourself? Toward what end are you moving? Why do you fail to see that your ink leaves no trace, that you move freely forward, but into emptiness, that if you encounter no obstacle, it is because you have never left your point of departure? And yet you write: you write without respite, revealing to me what I dictate to you and disclosing to me what I know; those who read you enrich you with what they take from you, and give you what you teach them. Now what you did not do, you have done; what you did not write is written: you are condemned to the indelible."

 Maurice Blanchot, From Kafka to Kafka
Literature and the Right to Death

 

 

Where Félix discovers that every true image is an expression that has not finished expressing itself. It is a fragment of time that refuses to be confined within its own age, because every gaze renews within it the creative pressure from which it first emerged. It does not carry the past toward us... it continues to bring the present into being. It is a fragment of time that refuses to be imprisoned in its own epoch and remains alive precisely because, with every new gaze, it continues to displace the present.

Félix's Notebook

As I closed my notebook, I realized that I had used the word expression several times, with the quiet carelessness reserved for words whose meaning we imagine we know simply because we have lived beside them for so long. I turned back, not to correct a sentence, but because it seemed to me that the word was still resisting. It remained there, in the middle of the page, like those volcanic stones that appear perfectly smooth until the light, by altering its angle almost imperceptibly, reveals a hidden vein one had crossed without ever seeing.
Exprimere.
I wrote the word in the margin and then looked at it for a long time, without quite knowing what I expected from it. I knew—or at least believed I knew—that it meant to press out, to bring forth by compression, as one presses the juice from a fruit or the oil from an olive. At that moment, I already found this origin appealing... it suggested rather well that nothing genuine comes into view without a certain pressure, without that slow insistence through which something finally consents to leave the night in which it had remained indistinguishable from itself.
And yet... while my eyes returned again and again to those few letters, one of those distractions overtook me, the kind I sometimes wonder whether they are not simply another form of attention.
I no longer saw—or read—premere.
I also saw primer.
I know perfectly well that I was mistaken.
Or rather... I know that Latin proves me wrong.
Primer, in the sense of primacy, belongs to an entirely different family. I could close this parenthesis here and return to a more respectable etymology. Yet something prevents me from doing so. For language sometimes thinks differently from dictionaries. Through mere proximity it produces associations that history rejects but imagination immediately recognizes, as though it had been awaiting them all along.
So I could not stop seeing this primer that was not there.
And immediately another primer came toward me: the one painters use to designate that almost invisible coat applied to canvas or wood before the painting itself can begin. What a curious way to prepare an image... that which will make every color possible is precisely what is never meant to be seen. This first layer represents nothing. It does not even seek to exist for itself. It merely makes possible the adhesion of everything that will come afterward.
I begin to wonder whether the body is just that.
For some time I had been thinking of it as an image that never ceases becoming an image of itself. Now I wonder whether I arrived there too quickly. Perhaps the body is first of all that grounding layer upon which images gradually begin to take hold. Not an inert surface, but a living preparation. The world settles upon it. Encounters adhere to it. Wounds do as well. Joys no less. And little by little, without our ever knowing the precise moment when it begins, a figure appears that we naïvely call our face, our way of being, our identity.
But perhaps it is never identity that appears...
Perhaps it is adhesion.
I think again of the drawings I have been observing for weeks. I often had the impression that they represented characters... today I find myself wondering whether they are instead the successive layers through which those characters slowly learn—first to stand upright... then to rise. Don Carotte is not waiting somewhere, fully formed, before he is drawn. The Moon Child does not exist already, awaiting someone to reveal him. Each drawing may well be that first coat upon which their existence simply begins to take hold.
Perhaps the same is true of me... perhaps... it may be...
I believed I was writing in order to express what I thought...
And then, suddenly, I found myself wondering whether I write first of all to prepare that still invisible surface upon which a thought may one day finally find something to cling to. It is strange to discover that one sometimes labors long before the work itself begins. Like those painters who know that the first coat is the one no one will ever see.
Only then did I return to the Latin word.
Exprimere.
I smiled as I recognized my mistake...
Or rather... my detour.
But there was nothing disappointed in that smile. It resembled instead the smile one feels when a child, by confusing two words, unexpectedly discovers a truth that no grammarian worthy of the name would ever have thought to write. For perhaps languages do more than transmit their history. Perhaps they dream as well. Sometimes they bring together words that are not related in order to give birth to a kinship deeper than that of common roots. Etymology tells us where words come from. Imagination tells us where they long to go.
And suddenly I wonder whether my entire reflection has proceeded in precisely this way. I am forever pursuing characters who seem to merge into one another, events that answer one another without ever becoming identical, images that appear to arise from one another although no genealogy can fully account for them. I believed I was searching for origins, and it may well be that, from the very beginning, I have been searching only for what is capable of adhering.
In the end, perhaps it was not an error to glimpse primer within exprimere. It was a way of reading. And perhaps every genuine reading begins in just this manner: when, within a word that resists, one discovers a possibility that no one had yet noticed... without ever claiming to have faithfully recovered what was originally written. At that moment, the text ceases to be merely the past of the one who wrote it. It becomes the ground upon which another thought, in its turn, seeks somewhere to take hold.
Perhaps this is what every true image has always accomplished... it does not ask us to understand it, but to offer it enough of our presence that, within us, it may once again find its footing... and allow us, in turn, to adhere to it.