(172D) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 “My soul was wholly on my lips just then,
To savour the honey that was upon yours.
But as I drew away, it lingered behind,
So strongly did the lure of that sweet pleasure hold it there.
Straying from my mouth, it entered yours,
Drunk on that nectar which had enchanted my reason;
And doubtless it mistook one door for the other,
No longer remembering which house was its own.
Since then, my tears have been unable to persuade that faithless soul
To leave a dwelling it found so sweet;
And I languish, without rest and without it,
And without myself as well, whenever I am without you.”

Vincent Voiture, “Le Baiser” (1855)

Where, by forever turning back, one returns nowhere…

Only then did I dare to restore the word I had first written and then crossed out: rebirth.

Félix’s Notebook (Part Four)

This rebirth which, above all, is not… a return.
There was, as I saw it, nothing intact behind oneself to recover, no pure childhood waiting beneath the dust for some sentimental adult to come and set it free; and Don Carotte, moreover, is moving forward; he is returning nowhere. What he is doing is far stranger: he carries his origin before him so that this origin may still become; he carries the one he once was not towards the place from which he came, but towards a place where neither of them has yet arrived.
Perhaps this, in the end, is what holds me before this image and prevents me from closing my notes as I ordinarily would after describing the observable elements with sufficient precision: the recognition that the Moon Child lacked can no longer be given to him at the place where it ought to have been given; no one travels back through time to acknowledge a child at the exact moment when he was abandoned, and yet what did not take place is not thereby condemned never to take place in any form whatsoever, because certain things, when they have not been accomplished, do not necessarily disappear: they remain suspended.
And perhaps this is why Don Carotte closes his eyes.
Not in order to know, or even to remember, but because, at the moment when he finally carries this child whose existence had never depended upon the recognition denied him, he must perhaps relinquish for an instant that old human habit of recognizing by first identifying, of looking at someone and saying: I know who you are.
The child has nothing to answer… he does not yet speak.
He is there, in his oversized clothes, carried by the same cord that can nourish or strangle, suspend or hang, hold together or condemn, and that cord returns towards the belly of the man who carries him, as though it too refused to choose once and for all what it means, as though its true meaning lay precisely in linking these opposites without resolving them.
And I find myself thinking that rebirth, if the word is to remain, perhaps begins there, in this impossibility of too neatly untying what has bound us, wounded us, nourished us and threatened us, when the one who has learned to speak finally consents to close his eyes in order to hear the one who, long before him, already had ears, a body, a hunger, perhaps a fear, but as yet no words with which to pronounce his own sentence.
The Moon Child is not waiting for Don Carotte to give him back his life.
He has never ceased to live.
Perhaps he is not even waiting to be recognized, since waiting itself would already attribute to him a demand of which we know nothing.
He is simply there, suspended within that strange anteriority which the man now carries before him… And as Don Carotte moves forward, it becomes difficult to know which of the two carries the other, which of them has yet to be born, or even whether the cord that seems to connect them does not, far more simply and far more mysteriously, trace the continuity of a single body through time.
Thus, at the end of my notes, I could retain my first sentence: “an adult figure moving towards the left.” If, for a reader, it remains exact… or factual… if I dare use such a word of an image… I now know that a man may move forward for a very long time before reaching the one he has always carried… and even there, I still hesitate to write… I now know that a man may move forward for a very long time before reaching the one who has always carried him…