(227) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Félix discovers that Daemon is not a more knowledgeable version of Damon, but a presence caught within the same uncertainty. He knows the way no better, and whatever help he offers becomes visible only afterwards. His gestures remain ambiguous... Does he stop in order to guide, return in order to help, move aside in order to open a path? Nothing allows us to say... This forces us to abandon the traditional image of the guide who knows and points the way. Guiding might then consist in a discreet influence whose beneficiary may believe that he walked alone...

Félix’s Notebook

The confusion between Damon and Daemon goes much deeper than that between an original and its double. This idea brings me back to something I have already encountered elsewhere and perhaps never understood sufficiently: the guide can be guided.

I write it down and the sentence immediately seems too beautiful, too neat, almost too easy, for all we would have to do then would be to reverse the roles and we would have gained nothing... the one who was behind would move in front, the one who knew would become the one who does not know, and we would merely have exchanged places. Yet what interests me here is precisely that the places themselves cease to remain... in place... Daemon may follow Damon... Damon may draw Daemon along... Child Moon may follow one of them and then cause both of them to veer away without ever having intended to show anything at all... and whoever watches the scene may pass through all of this without noticing that a relation of assistance has taken place, until a later image, a sentence, or simply the memory of a detour forces him to go back.

I even notice that the resemblance between Damon and Daemon protects the latter from what always threatens figures to which a function is too quickly assigned: an excess of meaning.

If he lies down, nothing allows me to decide that he is guarding a threshold. He may simply be tired. If he scratches at the ground, there is no need for him to be uncovering a trace from another world... Something may simply have caught his attention, as happens with any dog. If he gazes at Child Moon for a long while, that gaze may move me, unsettle me, or draw me towards an interpretation, but it remains possible that he is merely looking, and that possibility has become precious to me because it prevents each of his gestures from immediately turning into a message, while still leaving open that other possibility, far more uncertain, that I may understand the significance of the gesture only long after I have seen it.

I am beginning to understand that whatever passes through Daemon must perhaps remain exposed to this very triviality, because the sign must still be allowed to be no more than a gesture, and the guide no more than a dog, otherwise everything would become readable too quickly and Child Moon himself would be drawn into that regime in which each thing would immediately be required to signify something other than itself. Yet it seems to me that this is never quite how things happen around him: his stick is a stick before it becomes a boat hook, a pole, or the instrument of a passage; his hat is a hat, however outsized it may be, before it becomes a vessel or a space to be crossed; his coat hangs from his body before I can decide whether it is a skin, a shelter, or the inheritance of someone else. In the same way, Damon or Daemon should be able to run, sleep, wait, or disappear long before I can decide whether, throughout all that time, they were leading someone.

Perhaps this is even the reason Daemon took on, if I may use the verb, Damon’s appearance. Took, as one might take something that was already there, not in order to steal it, but because there was no need to invent another form.

This hypothesis gives me pause, because Daemon would therefore not have chosen the appearance of a guide, but that of a small dog whose origin is unknown, who already accompanies without anyone knowing quite what his accompaniment produces, and whose possible effectiveness appears only afterwards, when someone takes the trouble to look back at what has happened. He would have found in Damon a way of being in the world discreet enough for help to slip into it without declaring itself as help, and I then find myself wondering whether Daemon does less than I had imagined, and more at the same time, for he would not be adding a new power to the world: perhaps he would merely make more perceptible a possibility that was already there, that of a presence which acts without occupying the foreground and whose effects may remain for a long time entangled with whatever would have happened anyway.