(172B) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“The walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the château rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.
Long—long I read—and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought—to make sure that my vision had not deceived me—to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.
That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at once into waking life.”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait”

Where one may see that, with perseverance, an image can conceal more than one imagines…

[…] and I understood then that Don Carotte, now a man and now capable of speech, was closing his eyes not in order to recover the words of the child he had once been, since perhaps there had been none, but in an attempt to hear what that child had heard when no one yet could ask him to explain it.

Félix’s Notebook (Part Two)

It was then, I think, that the cage too began to change its nature, without losing any of its bars… it had all the appearance of a prison, and when faced with a prison one feels an almost moral temptation to open its door at once, to release, to set free, to place oneself on the right side of the bars; but its rounded shape, the curled position of the little body, and above all the way Don Carotte carried it before his belly introduced another possibility, one far older than the prison and perhaps more disturbing still to our need to know who is free and who is not: an unborn child is contained, it is not imprisoned… the boundary that separates it from the outside is also that without which it could not yet live, and freedom, if that word must absolutely be used, will consist precisely, one day, in leaving what until then had protected it, at the risk of dying… or of living… through that very emergence.
The rope, which had been before my eyes from the beginning, only then reached my mind.
I could almost say that it took me by the hand, were I not afraid of lending a rope intentions it obviously does not possess, but it compelled me, at least, to follow it, from the ring by which it supports the cage to Don Carotte’s body, around which it passes before descending again towards his waist, where this same rope, in other images, serves to hold up his trousers, roughly level with that little hollow we all carry and which may well be our first scar, the scar of a bond whose very disappearance leaves behind a shape: the navel.
The connection with the umbilical cord then became almost too obvious and, precisely because it was too obvious, I distrusted it; yet the image persisted: a man carrying before his belly the child he had once been, joined to him by a rope that returned towards the place where his own body retains the mark of what had once joined him to another body, and I was already beginning to believe that I had found the direction of the image when I saw—or rather, when I finally consented to see—that the rope, before descending again towards the belly, passed almost around his neck.
For a second, everything I had just understood might have come undone, but the opposite occurred: the rope did not cease to be a cord because it approached the neck; it became more fully a cord, since there are few greater dangers for a child at the moment of birth than coming into the world with that cord wrapped around its neck, and birth itself, which we like to represent as life’s triumphant entrance, is in reality that extraordinarily narrow passage in which a being already alive must relinquish one way of living in order to inaugurate another, in which it must begin to breathe differently, in which the bond that until then had nourished it may, at that very instant, strangle it.
I then thought, speaking to myself, how lightly we speak of the beginning of life when we speak of birth… since the child is already alive… Birth is not the opposite of death; it is one of those places where life and death draw so close that it becomes difficult to trace anything between them other than a line, and that line, precisely, might be a hyphen… that almost ridiculous little sign which does not merge two words but holds them together, separating them by joining them, so that birth suddenly appeared to me less as a beginning than as that living, dangerous hyphen between a life that must cease in one form and a life that does not yet know whether it will manage to continue in another.
And since the rope was at his neck, another image soon had to arrive, not to replace the previous one but to knot itself into it: the hangman’s rope, the rope of the condemned man, and also the rope of the man who condemns himself, which does not mean merely that a man may one day become his own executioner, but that there are sentences whose words we ourselves pronounce and which we then tighten around ourselves with admirable perseverance—I am the one who was abandoned, I am the one who was not recognised, I am what others made of me, I can never be anything else—perfectly proper sentences, grammatically irreproachable sentences, sentences that are sometimes even true, and whose truth in no way prevents them from becoming a rope as soon as we ask them to say, once and for all, what we are.
But the little Don Carotte stopped me there.
He was not hanging… but suspended.
I do not know why this difference, contained in so small a shift of words, moved me more deeply than everything else, unless because it preserved within the same gesture what I was still struggling to separate: the rope that suspends does not abandon the body to its fall, it bears it; it holds what has not yet reached the ground; it postpones, it reserves, it leaves something without a final decision, and we also say that we suspend judgment, as though language had understood long ago what I was laboriously discovering before this image.