(193) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Lurking in the white of the page and the black of the ink, the secrets of the story wait to be tracked down.

Where Félix, without abandoning his rational scruples, allows his thought to lengthen, double back upon itself, and gradually be altered by what it examines.

Félix’s Notebook

It took me some time yet to realise that the difficulty might lie precisely in the simplicity of the procedure, so intent had I been on finding some transformation that had been applied to the text after the fact, a mirror, a rotation, some operation capable of distorting what had originally been ordinary writing, when all that was required was to imagine that the order itself had been displaced from the very moment the characters were entered. What I had taken for a complication was thus reduced to an almost childish rule, yet its consequences seemed strange enough that I remained for a while considering it before daring to put it into words: the last letter was the first.

Not, obviously, the first to be read, but the first to have been placed there, if my hypothesis was correct, so that the writing had begun at the very point where the reading was meant to end, then proceeded backwards towards its own beginning. Whoever had made this page had therefore not merely written a sentence and then reversed it… He had undertaken the text from its far end, preserving at every moment an order whose continuity the reader could recover only by retracing the path in the opposite direction. I followed several lines to make certain of it and, as the mechanism became obvious, I felt something more troublesome than the solving of a puzzle enter into my reading, for I now had to admit that, in order to reach the beginning, I had to set out from what had been the end.

I almost felt like smiling at the ease with which a mere arrangement of letters could give rise to such grand thoughts, and the reaction seemed reasonable enough for me to dwell on it. After all, it was only writing, one order of keystrokes substituted for another, and to speak in this connection of a reversal of time would once have struck me as an excess I would have dismissed without further consideration. Yet the idea persisted, not because I suddenly imagined that time might actually reverse itself, but because this page compelled me to experience a situation in which before and after ceased to coincide according to the point from which they were considered. What had come first for the person writing became last for me as I read; what constituted the completion of the text had been the starting point of its execution, and, in order to recover the order to which I was accustomed, I had to travel in the opposite direction through the actual succession of gestures that had produced it.

So I began again, this time following the rule, and the first words that came back to me were:

“In a beginning…”

I remained with those three words longer than I would have wished, no doubt because I had had to reach the other end of the text in order to encounter this beginning, and because it was becoming difficult, even while remaining wary of the always suspect elegance of coincidences that fit too perfectly, not to hear what this encounter was producing. The beginning was no longer merely that which stood before the rest… it became something one could reach after discovering how to return to it. Perhaps there had been no intention behind it; perhaps Igniatius had attributed to the Moon Child something composed by someone else; perhaps Lucian had once again altered what he claimed merely to transmit, and I knew well enough what becomes of lineages once they begin passing from hand to hand not to treat such reservations lightly; yet those reservations alone were no longer sufficient to exhaust what was taking place before my eyes.

I continued reading, and the eye which, “in a beginning”, opened upon that which saw it… then that world containing other worlds, the hollows in the rock, the palaces, the gods, the Master, the one who “on the path of writing, walks and loses his way”, all the way to that sentence, “Death, already, was there before my eyes,” suddenly seemed to belong to a page far less innocent than I had first supposed. What lay before me was precisely a form of writing in which the end had been present from the very first gesture, since the final letter of the text must have been the first one written, and that death “already there” ceased then, at least for the duration of my reading, to be merely a turn of phrase. Materially, in the very making of this page, what was destined to come at the end had preceded everything else.

I reproached myself almost immediately for making the connection, knowing how easy it is, once form and content begin to answer one another, to turn their encounter into intention and their proximity into proof, but the text seemed to take malicious delight in making my caution more difficult. “What happened that day is not simply what could have happened. It was. It came to pass.” Then came that doorway crossed, entered in one direction and left in the other, “or the reverse,” and that assertion that History possessed a direction that stories did not; further on still came the questions about what had happened the instant before, about what was going to happen the instant after, about those chains of causes to which we perhaps too readily attribute the faithfulness of always producing the same effects, before there emerged the hypothesis of an Order established “from always and for ever.”

To be continued…