(172C) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 
Where we discover that beyond the utmost perseverance, there are still strange paths to travel…

[…] and we also speak of suspending judgment, as though language had long ago understood what I was painfully discovering before this image.

Félix’s Notebook (Part Three)

Then the Moon Child appeared to me in all the strangeness of his condition: abandoned, unacknowledged, yet nourished, and by a she-donkey who could obviously offer him no recognition in the sense human beings give to the word, no name, no declared parentage, no legitimacy, but who gave him what his body needed: milk—that is, life simply answering life, without tribunal and without certificate… He had therefore already lived before being recognized. He had grown despite that recognition which never came, and something of his birth, accomplished in the body, had nevertheless remained suspended within the human order.
I understood then why it would have been almost an act of violence to open the cage immediately and call it deliverance.
What had remained suspended for so long perhaps did not need to be torn from behind its bars, but finally to be carried; and the verb to carry itself began to acquire a breadth that at first seemed almost excessive to me, before I understood that it was precisely this richness that was at work within the image: one carries clothing, and these clothes are too large… one bears a name, and this child has not been recognized… one carries a wound, a secret, a responsibility, a grief… one carries a child before birth… one carries someone when they cannot move forward alone… and Don Carotte now carries before him what he once was, what he still remains, and perhaps what he had not yet become, as though, years later, he had to accomplish that impossible gesture of carrying himself all the way to a birth that had already taken place.
Only then did I dare to restore the word I had first written and then crossed out: rebirth.