(189) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.”

 

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter XXXII, “Cetology”

 

Where the extraordinary thing was therefore no longer that ice had been taken into consideration… but that, having taken it into consideration, one had still managed to assign it a place. The very object that the liner could not entirely master thus found its compartment within the thinking that had built it…

 

It became an amount of torn plating, a possible volume of water, a succession of bulkheads, each of which placed a new limit upon the danger, and catastrophe, instead of remaining that brutal transformation by which a world suddenly ceases to obey the rules that had until then organised it, became a sum which merely had to remain below a certain total.

The brain often proceeds differently, and yet perhaps not so very differently. It too seeks thresholds, distinguishes what demands a response from what may be left without consequence, contains a sufficiently slight disturbance within one region of the possible so that the whole may continue its activity… and this ability is so effective that one may live for a long time with small contradictions, minute anomalies, sensations that do not quite agree with the story one tells oneself, each remaining enclosed within its own compartment as though invisible bulkheads prevented their waters from communicating.

But water has this peculiar quality: it knows nothing of compartments.

It does not know that it is supposed to stop.

It rises as high as things allow it to rise, seeks out the slightest difference in level, presses against whatever holds it back and, if a passage exists, has no need to know of it in order to take it.

Perhaps the same was true of certain perceptions still without a name, of certain images, certain memories whose place one believes one has circumscribed and which, after remaining separated from one another for a long time, nevertheless end by finding a fissure between them. Then what seemed to belong to several different stories begins to circulate from one chamber to another, an impression joins a face, a drawing joins a gesture, a movement glimpsed long ago returns in the movement the body is making now, and the entire architecture discovers, somewhat belatedly, that what it believed it had contained was not motionless.

For the moment, nothing of the kind had yet happened. Or nothing, at least, that deserved the name.

The hull rose and fell, the engines continued their work, the course remained ahead of the bow and the sea all around continued its immense exercise in forms… but somewhere between what was seen and what was not, between what calculation already knew and what a body was perhaps beginning to feel without knowing that it felt it, an infinitesimal difference may have appeared, still so slight that it called for no decision, only a little more attention.

And perhaps this is always how what later seems to us to have been announced long before first begins… not through a sign large enough to be understood, but through something small enough for the world to be able to continue exactly as before.

 

Very freely inspired by

Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898