(177) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“The storm strikes up a dance tune; it whistles, creaks and roars. Look! there! how the tiny boat dances! The night is joyous and terrible.
Mountains of water form the roaring sea. Here a dark abyss opens, there a white tower rises.”

Heinrich Heine, Return

Where Lucian tells how, after embarking on a ship, he begins to feel a strange bond with the sea… and where, together, they begin to dance…

It was only after several days at sea, when there was no longer any coast behind us whose sight might still preserve the illusion of a measurable journey between a point left behind and another yet to be reached, that the expression came to me: I had made the journey, as people once spoke of making a pilgrimage, a phrase that at first seemed so disproportionate to my undertaking that I smiled at it, since I was seeking neither shrine nor relic, and would doubtless, had I been questioned, have spoken more reasonably of a verification, a confrontation between drawings and the places they purported to represent, perhaps even of the necessity of placing certain images once again within the concrete conditions from which they might have arisen; but beneath these precautions, which were also the habits of a man who had long ago learned not to confuse what he supposed with what he knew, there remained something far simpler and far less defensible, which was that I wanted to see, as though sight, summoned to the aid of a difficulty born of images, might still provide me with that fixed point from which I could finally distinguish what belonged to the world, what belonged to the drawing, and what, between the two, should be attributed to the one who had held the pencil.
During the first few days, the ocean liner itself had seemed to encourage this confidence, so greatly did its considerable mass appear to establish between the sea and me a mediation powerful enough to allow me to forget what was carrying us; from walking its decks, its stairways and its long illuminated corridors, I had ceased to think of the enormity of this floating architecture, just as, inside a house, one ceases to think of the weight of the walls or the thickness of the roof, and the rows of glowing portholes that accompanied us through the night, the half-open doors, some armchair abandoned in the corner of a lounge, a chair that occasionally slid a few inches when the rolling grew stronger, were enough to give the ship that appearance of life which it had never occurred to me to question, although today I can recall scarcely a single face, a single conversation, any of those thousand human movements by which I ought to have been surrounded; but there are absences we notice only after we have left them behind, and perhaps the very abundance of human traces, all that light spread everywhere, those doors, those stairways, those chairs, those tables, had spared me the need to look for those who should have inhabited them, as though the dwelling, having grown vast enough, had eventually taken the place of those for whom it was intended.
The sea, however, had begun to make its presence felt so gradually that it took me some time to understand that something was changing, for at first there was none of that convenient violence which, by declaring itself, allows a man to name what he is facing, but rather great movements whose amplitude seemed to exceed any individual wave the eye could follow, and which caught the whole ship within an immense breathing motion in which it rose with an almost solemn slowness, sometimes continuing to climb after my body, believing the movement complete, had already prepared itself for the descent, then remaining for an instant suspended in some uncertain region where my own weight seemed to alter before the entire mass descended again along a curve so vast that I no longer knew whether we were falling or whether the sea, withdrawing beneath us, was simply allowing us to recover a level it had momentarily displaced.
To this first movement another was added, coming from the side, tilting the ascent at the very moment when I tried to respond to it, and soon it became impossible for me to maintain that almost prideful bearing we adopt when we insist on continuing to walk normally upon a floor that is no longer normal, for I had to widen my stance, shift my weight from one leg to the other, bring one shoulder forward only to draw it back at once, put out a foot to correct an inclination which, by the time I set it down, had already begun to reverse itself, so that each of my movements, at the very moment I had decided upon it, became the cause of the next imbalance; and thus, despite myself, I found myself drawn into a kind of dance whose steps and measure I knew nothing of, while an invisible teacher, had some ironic imagination absolutely insisted on placing one beside me, would have had no need to count the beats or demonstrate the movement, since it would have been enough for him simply to shift the floor beneath my feet to obtain from my body an awkward turn, a hurried step backwards, a bending of the knees, an involuntary bow, or that sudden opening of the arms by which I was not in the least attempting to perform a figure, but merely to keep myself from falling.