Having learned that Damon may act without any intention of guiding, and that his mere presence is sometimes enough to make something possible, we now find that Daemon, almost indistinguishable from him, shares his appearance to such an extent that only his name introduces the slightest deviation. He thus seems to borrow the form of a being who has already become familiar, but whose own origin remains unknown. This resemblance makes any distinction uncertain and forces us to give up trying too quickly to identify which of the two has appeared. Daemon bears no visible sign of his function: if he guides, he can do so only by remaining unrecognisable as a guide.
Félix’s Notebook
The difficulty becomes greater still when I realise that Damon, too, may have guided without my ever seeing him guide. Perhaps this is precisely what his presence teaches me: we readily recognise the guide when he places himself before us, points out a direction and leads us from one place to another, but we are far less capable of recognising what has accompanied us discreetly enough for our own movement to seem entirely our own. Damon may have walked there, waited here, disappeared and then reappeared elsewhere; nothing spectacular has happened and no one has needed to speak his name. And yet, when I retrace the sequence of events, something falls into place differently. I cannot say that he was leading, but neither can I any longer quite say that he was not.
Perhaps that is where Daemon begins.
Not above Damon, as some superior and knowing version of this little blue dog, but almost within that same uncertainty, in the impossibility of determining exactly at what point a presence becomes an accompaniment, at what point a movement becomes an orientation, at what point a wait that seemed insignificant acquires, several pages later, the value of an indication. At first I had thought that Daemon must necessarily know something Damon did not, and I now discover that this difference, if it exists at all, may lie elsewhere. Daemon does not necessarily know the way any better. Perhaps he simply belongs more intimately still to this strange manner of leading which becomes visible only after the passage has taken place, when the one who was led might just as well maintain that he walked alone.
This possibility troubles me, because it deprives the guide even of the proof that he has acted. When he stops, is it because he knows that one must stop, or simply because he has no reason to go any farther?
When he comes back, is he coming back to find Child Moon, or is he returning for a reason of his own, from which Child Moon happens to benefit without knowing it?
When he leaves the path, is he opening up a way, or pursuing something that has nothing whatsoever to do with those who follow him?
And if, much later, we discover that this deviation made it possible to glimpse what would otherwise have remained hidden, must we attribute to Daemon a prior knowledge of what he was doing, or accept that help may have been real without ever having been intended?
I think this is where something begins to escape me in a way I find more pleasing than any of the explanations I might give for it, because I had no doubt retained, without realising it, a very ancient image of the guide: he had to be in front, he had to precede, to know, to show, while the one he led had to follow, so that the entire relation could be understood according to the place each occupied along the path. But if Damon or Daemon can walk behind, wait alongside, disappear while Child Moon continues alone on his way, then reappear without our being able to say whether they have found him again or whether it is he who has caught up with them, then I must admit that guiding may depend neither upon the position one occupies nor even upon the visible continuity of accompaniment, and that there may exist a form of help discreet enough perhaps never to be certain that it was help at all.
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