(194) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Continued from (193)

Where Félix, still without relinquishing his rational scruples, pursues a train of thought that has already begun to lengthen, to turn back upon itself and, as it advances, to allow itself to be altered still further by what it examines.

Continuation of Félix’s notebook

I reread these passages several times, and it then occurred to me that what had until then prevented me from understanding certain meanderings of this story might lie precisely in my need to put causes before consequences, authors before characters, events before the accounts given of them, as though any genuine act of understanding must ultimately restore a single temporal order whose disturbances could only ever be errors, omissions or artifices. Yet this page was forcing something more troubling upon me: an effect could become the path by which its cause was recovered, what came afterwards could awaken what had taken place before, and a present gesture could restore to memory an earlier gesture which, without it, would have remained inaccessible. This was not a matter of actually reversing time; I had not, after all, gone that far. But it was becoming more difficult to maintain that our access to the past must necessarily respect the direction in which that past had occurred.

For that was precisely what had just happened to me. I had not recovered a memory that then allowed me to reproduce a gesture; I had reproduced something of the gesture, or at least something resembling it, and the memory had returned in its wake. What came after had reopened what came before, a formulation I immediately mistrusted, perhaps precisely because I liked it too much, yet one which I could not, for all that, manage to dismiss.

Memory had not obediently worked its way backwards through a chronology to retrieve the event from the place assigned to it; something in the present had encountered the trace of an earlier action, and that encounter had caused the past to emerge from the very point at which I stood. I then thought of the Moon Child and of the way he seemed to arrive at reflection through what he did, without needing first to establish what it was he would have to understand, as though gesture and thought could answer one another before any sufficiently stable boundary had even been drawn between them. I still did not know whether he had actually written this page, nor even to what extent that question retained the meaning I had so long attributed to it, but I was beginning to understand why it might be attributed to him without such an attribution necessarily being reduced to a search for an author.

When at last I reached the final lines—which had therefore, materially speaking, been among the first to be written—and read “Time Having Been Told to Me,” followed by the evocation of the chamber of reflection where the mirror, in “the dark brightness of the candle,” cast “a bridge from self to self,” something fell into place without thereby closing itself off. The word reflection stood almost exactly where the page had led me, between a thing and its return, between the one who looks and that which returns his gaze, between a movement setting out and another that seems to come back, together with this new difficulty of deciding once and for all which of the two should be regarded as first, once each transforms the one that answers it.

Even the “comings and goings, often impertinent, certainly impermanent” with which the passage ended then seemed to me to describe less a conclusion than a method, since the page did not simply proceed from its beginning towards its end: it had been produced from its end towards its beginning, and then had to be won back in the opposite direction by whoever wished to read it, as though it needed several directions in order to become itself, and as though its meaning resided fully neither in the path taken by the one who had written it nor in that taken by the one deciphering it, but somewhere in their crossing, at that unstable point where each begins to depend upon the other.

I understood then, perhaps, why this idea of a reversal of time, which at first I had judged disproportionate, nevertheless continued to accompany me. I no more believed than before that the past could become present again, or that consequences could actually precede their causes; what now seemed less certain was the conviction that thinking always requires us to follow the same direction as the things we are trying to account for. Perhaps some things become visible only on the way back; perhaps one must sometimes reach what appears to be the end in order to discover what, from the very beginning, had already been there.

And it then struck me as rather curious that a page attributed to the Child Moon should have been able to teach me this without, at any moment, teaching it to me.