(202) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where, taking advantage of Lucian’s journey, no frontier traced by perception bound the real any longer… and where… if one is attentive, a phenomenon held within the image appears to us… it is not bound by our photographic slicing of the instant. An image can make several moments coexist or, more subtly still, make a central event appear together with its immediate “before” or “after.” Thus the ocean liner, like the ocean itself, after having been kept at a distance by steel, still found itself divided by calculation. Limits had been assigned to it, compartments, almost chambers, and so long as it remained within those that had been նախատեսived for it, nothing was supposed to occur that technology could not contain.

This manner of partitioning that which, outside, knew no separation still recalled the silent work of the other architecture, the one which, in order not to be submerged by the world’s incessant profusion, had itself to draw boundaries where nothing had necessarily drawn them for it, distinguish a form from its ground, one noise among others, one movement within the apparent disorder of all movements, recognise here one thing, there another, and then keep them separate for long enough that it became possible to think that each existed on its own. Without this faculty of cutting things up, the world might have been as uninhabitable for the mind as the ocean was for the body. Yet within this very necessity there was a strange kinship with the ship’s partitions, since what made it possible not to be overwhelmed rested precisely on the assurance that certain things could remain on the other side.

Now, no frontier traced by perception bound the real any more than the steel walls bound the sea to acknowledge the name of the compartment against which it came beating. The brain could call object what it had managed to detach from what surrounded it, memory what it had separated from the present, danger what it had learned to distinguish from the rest, and these divisions were effective enough that one sometimes forgot they were also a way of rendering practicable that which, before their intervention, had presented itself under none of those names. Its power came in large part from there… not only to receive, but to organise or preserve… to bring together… to separate… to transform the immense continuity of what happens into a world in which something can be recognised, awaited, avoided, sought. And yet, as with the ship, the very effectiveness of the compartment could one day lead one to believe that what had been distinguished would never communicate with that from which it had been separated.