(171) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where marine movements and the pyrocumulonimbus become more than metaphors... Here they constitute almost a physics of thought. But above all, it seems, there is something to pursue in this sentence: “what was may not yet contain all that it will have been.” It introduces a temporal paradox that connects very directly with what we have been approaching through writing, reading, and that past which, though it cannot be changed, nevertheless continues to change in meaning.

 

 

 

 Where an old burn produces a memory; that memory gathers around itself its vapours, its stories, its necessary or accidental lies; little by little it becomes a climate... and one day, long after the original fire seemed to have gone out, lightning falls from a sky we ourselves had fashioned without knowing it.

Félix notebook 

We call this: an event. We might sometimes call it: a return.
But return would still be misleading, for nothing ever returns to the exact place from which it departed. The sea knows this better than we do. The current may return, but the water is no longer the same; the wave seems to begin its gesture again, and yet no wave has ever been charged with reproducing the previous one exactly. Movement preserves a form while incessantly changing what composes it.
Perhaps that is what we are.
Not a thing that endures, but a provisional form assumed by what passes.
And what passes does not simply pass.
It swirls, descends, rises, warms, cools, evaporates, falls again, sinks once more; it carries away a few fragments, leaves a few sediments elsewhere, hollows out what resists it and is simultaneously altered by what it hollows out. It would take a peculiar vanity to demand of a human being greater rectitude than we demand of the ocean.
And yet we have invented a magnificent word for this: identity.
And then spend a considerable part of our existence trying to resemble that word.
Fortunately, we fail.
Not always enough, but often enough to go on living.
For if life were only memory, it would be repetition; if it were only falsehood, it would be dispersion; if it were only a jolt, it would be convulsion. But these three powers mingle, thwart and alter one another, like the currents in the ocean that endlessly displace the invisible boundaries between different waters, or like, in the burning sky, the updrafts that meet the downdrafts and manufacture from their very opposition a meteorological organism that did not exist a few hours before.
Then something begins.
Not despite what came before.
With it.
With the errors, with the false memories, with what was truly lived and what perhaps never was, with what we did, what was done to us, what we believed was being done to us, with the stories we invented in order to make our way through the stories we had not chosen, and even with those lies of which we discover belatedly that they were protecting something true that truth itself, at the time, might perhaps have destroyed by trying too quickly to bring it into the light.
A beginning, then, is not necessarily the opposite of an ending.
Sometimes it is its inner movement.
The forest burns, and we see destruction; yet above it something forms that could not exist without that destruction and that in no way justifies it. These two propositions must be held together, for mysticism becomes obscene the moment it claims that suffering was necessary in order to produce what follows it. No. Fire does not become good because a cloud came out of it. Loss does not become fortunate because one day something grew within its vicinity.
But the worst is not always certain because the worst itself does not entirely possess its own future.
Perhaps this is where hope resides, if one insists on using that dangerous word: not in the conviction that everything will end well, which would be a particularly ingenious way of lying to misfortune, but in the inability of what happens to decide once and for all what will be born from it.
The event does not possess the entirety of its consequences.
The cause does not reign over its descendants.
The past itself thus loses something of its sovereignty.
Not that it can be undone. What happened happened, and even God, people once said when seriously disputing such matters, could not make what had been cease to have been. But perhaps what was does not yet contain everything that it will have been.
For the memories remain.
And their lies.
And their children.
And their children's children, who will read differently what their ancestors believed they had understood, shift a comma, turn over a stone, open an old box, pronounce a name with a different intonation, and suddenly what seemed finished will begin again—not intact, not innocent, but alive precisely because it has been altered.
Thus life might be less a line than an immense system of currents, with its cold depths, its upwellings, its surface waters warmed by a sun that has no idea of our metaphors, its storms, its almost motionless zones, and those movements so slow that an entire lifetime is not enough to perceive them; while above, in the atmosphere, fire raises what seemed destined to remain on the ground, transforms it into cloud, and the sky restores elsewhere, in another form, what it had received.
Perhaps we call beginning the moment when we recognise something that had begun without us.
And we call ending the moment when we cease to be able to follow what continues.
Between the two, with admirable seriousness, we say: my life.
The world, which fortunately possesses a rather poor sense of private property, continues on its way.
So yes: jolts, memories and lies marry, divorce, remarry, deceive one another and mistake their time, sometimes taking for a memory what was an expectation and for a catastrophe what had not yet finished beginning; and from this immense error in motion, which is neither pure error nor pure truth because it is made of living matter caught in time, there sometimes emerge those beginnings we believe to be new because we arrive just in time not to have witnessed their birth.
And perhaps that is fortunate.
For if we had to witness the beginning of all our beginnings, we would no longer have time to live.
The worst is not always certain.
Nor is the beginning.
And that is precisely why, sometimes, it begins.
I have deliberately allowed the movements of the sea and the pyrocumulonimbus to become more than metaphors: here they constitute almost a physics of thought. But above all, it seems to me, there is something worth pursuing in this sentence: “perhaps what was does not yet contain everything that it will have been.” It introduces a temporal paradox that connects very directly with what we have been approaching through writing, reading, and that past which, though it cannot be changed, nevertheless continues to change in meaning.