(155) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

— Do you hear that voice from long ago?
— It seems to me, if I do not linger over its timbre... that I hear our master's.

“And yet, O Lord, I already existed, and I lived, and I felt, and I cared for my own preservation—a dim testimony to that mysterious unity from which I had come. By an inward sense I preserved the integrity of my senses, and even in the smallest things, in my least thoughts, I delighted in truth; I did not wish to be deceived; my memory was strong; I was armed with speech; the sweetness of friendship bound me to others; I understood ignorance... but I fled from pain and humiliation.
What is there in all this that is not admirable and astonishing? Yet all these were the gifts of my God. I did not give them to myself; they are good, and from them I am what I am.
I do not remember having begun to be a child; and yet I was a child. Where, then, was I, and whence did I come here? Who can tell me? Neither my father nor my mother can teach me, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Perhaps You smile at me for asking such questions, and command me instead to praise You and confess You for what I do know of myself.”
Saint Augustine, Confessions

— Have you, in all honesty... understood everything, now that the voice has fallen silent—a voice which, I am quite certain, is not our master's?
— What is striking here, you see, is that anteriority is not merely an abstract idea...
— Then what is it?
— It is experienced as a lived enigma.
— Rather like ourselves...
— Augustine does not merely say, "I come from before myself." He discovers that he already lives within capacities—to speak... to love... to remember... to discern...—which he himself did not establish.
— Very much so—if you will forgive the impertinence... just like us...
— There is here a kind of debt without guilt, exactly as with the Moon Child: not culpability, but precedence.
— I did not know that word...
— It is hardly our office to invent them.
— As he says: "I did not give them to myself."
— One could almost transpose those words, word for word, to language itself.
— Yes... but for him, speech is already within him before he can answer for it as its origin. It is given, yet without any identifiable giver in the human order.
— Then it would already dwell within him... before he even heard it...
— It circulates, it inscribes itself, it is experienced... and he experiences it... all this without any assignable point of departure.
— That runs contrary to our nature... and might give us ideas...
— It is precisely within that gap that the limit of every absolute freedom resides...
— He always speaks from a place that has preceded us.
— It is from that place, perhaps, that the final slipping of the voices appears here—voices no longer truly seeking an explanation.
— They might well be ours... save for the search itself...
— They move from the question "Where do I come from?" to the experience of wonder itself.
— Our master often proceeds in much the same way... so long as a question remains unresolved, it becomes praise.
— And we ourselves might remain forever within that in-between, where one no longer knows whether we are conversing and thinking together...
— ...or whether a single voice is reflecting itself in two mirrors.

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Where one may observe that the parrots still remain characters. Yet here, for the proper unfolding of the work in progress, they ought almost to become voices without faces—responses answering one another within a single consciousness. The reader should no longer be able to distinguish clearly who is speaking. Little by little, if such a thing can be achieved... their master should begin to appear behind them, like an image within an image, a ghostly portrait passing through the drawing.
I have therefore brought the language closer to that of the Confessions, while giving it greater breadth and breath.

---

— I never cease to marvel... do you see...
— At what?
— At being.
— Being where?
— At simply being here.
— That strikes me as a very ancient wonder.
— More ancient than myself, precisely. For I already was before I knew that I was. In those days I lived and I felt. I dimly distinguished what suited me from what wounded me. I sought the truth... while fearing error. I became attached to what I loved... and yet I do not remember having chosen any of those things.
— You wish, I suppose, to remember your beginning.
— Who would not?
— I turn back toward my earliest years as toward a shore veiled in mist. I know that I lived there... yet I cannot say how. I know that I spoke... yet I can never hear again my first word. I know that I loved... yet I cannot recover my first love. All this dwells within me as light dwells within the dawn...
— Present before it is perceived.
— Perhaps that is our condition.
— Which would be...?
— To inhabit riches whose origin we do not know.
— Memory... like language, precedes us.
— As does desire...
— We arrive in the middle of a work already begun.
— Yes.
— And that is what unsettles us.
— For everywhere we discover the marks of an anteriority.
— As though we found paths before we knew how to walk.
— And words before we had spoken.
— Thoughts come to us before we know how to think.
— And yet they all become yours... or ours...
— How can that be?
— They become ours... as an inheritance comes to an heir.
— Who receives it... bears it...
— And transforms it... but does not invent it.
— You speak as though the soul itself were preceded.
— How could it not be? Look at the Moon Child.
— I see him walking through landscapes he does not seem to have built.
— See how the images, like the stories, come to him.
— Everything comes to him.
— He welcomes them.
— Then, how could one fail to hear it? Those very images speak through his voice.
— But who will tell where they were... before they came to him?
— Perhaps nowhere...
— Perhaps everywhere... For the deepest things possess this strange quality: they seem to wait for someone in order to appear...
— And yet they already existed!
— So it is with speech.
— Yes... that speech which no one gives to himself...
— We receive it before we understand it.
— We serve it before we possess it.
— We dwell within it before we know that it dwells within us.
— That should considerably diminish our pride...
— More importantly, it illuminates our freedom.
— How so?
— Because freedom is perhaps not the power to begin.
— Then what is it?
— To respond.
— Respond to what?
— To what was already there. To what was waiting in the shadows.
— Are you speaking of that ancient light of which we are neither the source nor the destination?
— Then we are never the origin.
— No.
— But we may become the passage.
— The passage only?
— Do not say only. A hidden spring needs a riverbed if it is to become a river.
— As light needs a window to enter a room, so a word needs a voice if it is to pass through time.
— Then we are not the authors.
— Perhaps not.
— Nor the owners.
— Certainly not.
— Then what are we?
— Places.
— Places?
— Yes. Places where something appears. Places where something remembers...
— I understand... places where something seeks to return.
— Return from where?
— That is precisely what I do not know... and that is why I marvel. For the nearer I draw to my origin... the farther it recedes.
— Allow me to continue... And the farther it recedes,
the more brightly it illuminates the path.
— Like a star.
— Or like a memory that no one remembers,
and which, nevertheless, remembers us.