(216) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Once fallen… night breaks into confession…

Where one may observe Félix’s progress as, travelling in his own way… with great simplicity, he now copies and colours Lucian’s and Igniatius’s sketches and drawings, almost perfectly recovering the lines of one or the other…

Félix’s Notebook

I think what troubled me, when, once again, I took up these drawings that I had first looked at with that professional caution which I now realise may have been nothing more than a more elegant way of keeping my distance, was not so much that I found in them certain forms I already knew… the oversized coat, the hat falling over the face, that way the Moon Child has of occupying space as though he were at once completely exposed within it and yet somehow withdrawn from whatever would allow one to say that he was truly there, but rather that, after a while, I could no longer decide whether I recognised these forms because I had encountered them before… elsewhere, or whether, on the contrary, what I called their recognition arose from the fact that the drawing, by making them appear before my eyes, was in the very process of creating within me the memory of a familiarity that perhaps had never existed in that form before I saw it.

The difference seems slight when stated like this, almost a subtlety I would once have dismissed by placing it among those problems the intellect likes to produce when it has nothing more urgent to solve, but it ceases at once to be slight as soon as one understands what follows from it, for if I recognise something that the drawing has only just made recognisable, then what I call the past of that thing is no longer entirely behind it; it may be coming into being at the very moment when I believe I am recovering it, and I then find myself confronted with the possibility, whose consequences I can barely measure, that some of these characters were not drawn because they already existed somewhere, in Igniatius’s mind, in Lucian’s stories, in some still more obscure region from which one or the other had drawn them, but that they began to exist because a line, which perhaps had no right to know what it was doing, gave them their first opportunity to appear.

I could, of course, stop there and say that all creation works in this way, that a figure becomes more precise in being drawn, that an idea grows clearer when one writes it down, and I would immediately recover that sense of safety offered by general explanations when they take care not to touch anyone, but something, this time, prevents me from being satisfied with a formula that would remain true only on condition that I myself were not included within it, for what I have seen happening in these drawings has become impossible for me to keep at the proper distance of a phenomenon I might describe without being involved in it, and I can even feel, as I write these words, a very slight tension returning to my hand, not pain, barely a contraction around the fingers, as though the memory of the pencil were now enough to bring back, all the way to the wrist, that sensation I had felt when, allowing a line to run on though I no longer quite knew why I was following it, I had seen appear, not after deciding upon it, but before I could even ask myself whether I was deciding, something that resembled the curve of the Moon Child’s hat.

I say “resembled” because I am still defending myself with words, and because it still seems less dangerous to me to write that a line resembled that hat than to admit that, at that moment, the hat had begun to draw itself beneath my hand, although this second formulation corresponds more exactly to what I experienced, for I do not remember wanting to trace it, and it was only after the curve had taken on a certain inclination, after another line, almost perpendicular to the first, had created between them a space that might become the edge of a face, that I felt something tighten within me and the name of the Moon Child came to me, with that singular obviousness of things one believes oneself to recognise when perhaps they are, precisely, in the very process of being born.

It was there, I think, that the vertigo began, not in the idea that I might involuntarily have drawn a character about whom I had heard a great deal, which would after all be quite ordinary and could be explained by a thousand infiltrations of memory of which I would simply have been the last to become aware, but in the impossibility I found myself in of knowing whether that name, Moon Child, had come to identify what my hand had drawn or whether, arriving after the line, it had retroactively transformed that line into something I could now see as the Moon Child, so that I no longer had before me a sequence as simple as a memory guiding a hand, then a hand executing a drawing, then a gaze recognising the result, but rather a circulation in which the drawing altered what I believed I remembered, memory altered what I saw, what I saw bent the next movement of my hand in a new direction, and that new movement, in turn, made the existence of what I had perhaps only begun by imagining that I recognised seem more convincing still.