(175) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“The sea, of a deep green, was then resplendent over a wide expanse, directly struck by the radiant light. The wind now came only in wild gusts, edging the crests of the swells with a light fringe of foam, and the lower sails were unfurled.
Strictly speaking, the sea no longer rose in actual waves, but only in long undulations that gently rocked the steamer.”

Jules Verne, The School for Robinsons

There are also rivers that know no banks. They cross the oceans with a constancy even more astonishing than their power. They change in depth, in breadth, in temperature; and yet they remain themselves. They carry with them a memory that nothing writes down and everything transports.
Where Don Carotte, certain that he recognizes what he has never encountered before, no longer concerns himself with what, until then, had guided him…

Don Carotte’s Journal

In certain places, the water descends as though the sky itself had been turned upside down. Elsewhere, it rises from the depths with a slowness reminiscent of breathing during sleep. Nothing rushes. The most decisive movements are often those that cannot be distinguished from prolonged stillness.
Sometimes all it takes is an underwater mountain, invisible from the surface, to deflect a current and cause it to generate vast eddies in its wake. They arise, persist for months, sometimes years, before disappearing without leaving any trace other than the displacement of water that has become subtly different.
Above the sea, the clouds perform a work resembling theirs. There too, differences in temperature set the air in motion. There too, the invisible builds shifting architectures. Updrafts answer downdrafts; warm masses encounter cold ones; boundaries move without cease. Between sky and ocean, the same conversation continues, as though gravity had merely changed direction.
Sometimes, when currents accelerate near a relief no one can see, the finest particles are lifted and remain suspended in the water for a long time. Nothing explodes. Nothing breaks. And yet a slow storm begins. It has neither wind nor horizon. It advances as desert dust advances when it forgets the ground that once bore it. These are no longer grains of sand carried by the air, but water made momentarily visible because it carries what, only moments before, had rested in its silence.
Then it becomes difficult to know what is moving. Is it the water carrying the matter? Or is it the matter that finally reveals the movement of the water? Do not clouds make visible a wind that, without them, would remain invisible? Are not the dunes themselves the provisional drawing of a breath that exceeds them?
Perhaps the depths have never been dark. Perhaps they are simply the place where movements cease to need light in order to exist. There, the world scarcely shows itself anymore; it circulates. And this circulation, so slow that at times it seems older than time itself, continues to bind the oceans together like a single breath of which each drop knows only a fragment, while the whole, silently, has for millions of years been composing one and the same body.