(225) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Between what we believe... what we know and what we think we know, untamed knowledge winds its way...

Strange seems the moment when Damon comes into view, Damon whom we have learned to know as a small blue dog who accompanies Child Moon above all, though he also accompanies other characters, without anyone knowing where he comes from. He seems to accompany rather than to guide, his presence remaining discreet and never confined to moments of crisis alone. Whatever help he may provide often reveals itself only afterwards, in a detour, a pause, or a resumption of the journey. Yet nothing allows us to say that he knew what he was doing, or even that he was acting intentionally. His effectiveness therefore remains retrospective and undecidable... a secret form of assistance perhaps... or simply a presence...

Félix’s Notebook

Damon will have walked wherever he wanted to walk, waited because he felt like waiting, retraced his steps for a reason that concerned no one but himself, and yet something, through this succession of almost insignificant acts, will have been made possible. It then becomes difficult to know whether he helped, or whether the others simply made use of his presence in order to help themselves, a distinction that at first seemed important to me and that matters less and less.

Daemon is more difficult still to introduce. He too is a small blue dog. Or, to be more exact, he possesses Damon’s appearance with such fidelity that the drawings do not always give me the means to decide which of the two I have before my eyes. Only the name introduces a difference, that additional letter which barely disturbs Damon and yet is enough to make something else heard: Daemon. I do not know whether I ought to say that he resembles Damon, that he imitates him, that he is some sort of double, or, as I have gradually come to think, that he has taken on his appearance. “Taken” is, moreover, a word I distrust here, because it might suggest a substitution or a theft, whereas it sometimes seems to me that this appearance merely allowed him to enter the story without having to bring a new form into it.

And the idea becomes stranger still now that I have begun to realise that Damon himself has no known origin, for Daemon would therefore not have chosen the appearance of a perfectly identified being, belonging to someone or coming from some place that could be traced... He would have taken on the appearance of a being who was already there without anyone knowing where he came from, as though the unknown had borrowed the face, if I may put it that way, of another unknown... one who had, paradoxically, become familiar.

I return, then, to Damon and Daemon, or rather to that very particular uneasiness that comes over me whenever I try to distinguish between them with too much certainty, for I do indeed have two names, one of which seems to belong without difficulty to the small blue dog I encountered first, while the other, almost identical, is distinguished only by that letter which introduces into the first name the slightest deviation, a difference small enough to pass unnoticed and yet sufficient to prevent me from reading in quite the same way whatever now appears before me... but beyond that, if I confine myself to what the drawings show, nothing truly comes to my aid, since Daemon has Damon’s appearance, to such a degree that I sometimes find myself wondering whether this resemblance is merely intended to deceive me, or whether instead it is compelling me to abandon a question I am still too quick to ask: which of the two is before me?

For, after all, if Daemon could be recognised by some particular sign, if he were larger, darker, more luminous, if he bore some attribute marking him out as the one who knows, who keeps watch, who leads, it would be easy for me at once to assign him the function of guide and to read each of his gestures as the visible consequence of a knowledge to which the others had no access; but nothing of the kind is granted to me, and I am beginning to suspect that this absence of any attribute is not something lacking in his representation but, on the contrary, its very necessity, as though Daemon could accomplish whatever it is he has to accomplish only on condition that he does not bear upon himself the sign of his function, that he does not appear as a guide before having guided, and perhaps even that he can never be recognised with certainty as one.