(211) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Félix, a weary traveller… but with his mind alert, rereads what he once wrote about those islands appearing one after another through the mist… and diligently continues copying… 

 Félix’s Notebook

I have just reread what I once wrote about this story that wearied me as much as it held me, about those islands appearing one after another through the mist, about that foot suspended above the void, seeking less the idea of the ground than the ground itself, and I can still hear in those pages the man I was then, the man who already believed he had drawn close enough to what was happening to him to be able to follow it without protecting himself too much from it, even though he was still walking along the edge, watching his own footsteps as though they belonged to someone else, wondering where they were leading and what kind of ground might finally receive them, without understanding that what held me suspended in this way might not be waiting for any already formed ground at all, and that one day I would have to accept that passage itself, when it truly occurs, alters even within the body the very manner in which one bears one’s weight.

What Igniatius has just written brings me back there… but from that moment on… the old page no longer holds quite as it held before… and I could not say that it has become false, since I still recognise what I had felt there, that advance above a void in which each foothold seemed as though it would have to be discovered at the very last moment… Only something has entered the image and worked upon it from within, like a root that does not merely find the crack through which it can pass but, as it makes its way into it, pushes the edges apart, retains a little water there, a little dust, and perhaps ends by making, out of the very place where nothing seemed capable of taking hold, a place that did not exist before it.

That is how I now read what Igniatius tells of Pinocchio the Other, not as the story of a man who had lost the power of speech and, through some fortunate detour, recovered it thanks to a puppet, for it seems to me that this would still be an attempt to put back into order something that did not, precisely, happen in that order, but as something far more uncertain and, for that very reason, far more alive, since the pieces return first, one by one, without Igniatius knowing what they form, the puppet beginning to compose itself before its name is there to hold it, resembling the familiar Pinocchio closely enough to be recognised and yet little enough for it already to begin escaping him, and then, at the very moment when the Other imposes itself, not as an adjective added to a figure already complete but as the name of a kind of uprising of that figure against a first name that would lead it back too quickly towards what it is no longer… something speaks… I do not know how else to say this without taking away what reaches me in it. Something speaks, and that something has no mouth, or rather the mouth that ought to have been there… must never have been drawn… must have been erased… while the one through whom this speech passes could no longer speak himself, so that the scene turns itself inside out in a manner so simple that it becomes almost impossible to grasp as soon as one tries to reduce it to an explanation: the puppet speaks through the person who was supposed to make it speak, and it is by giving it — or allowing it to take, I no longer even know which of those two verbs is the right one — this voice that Igniatius discovers himself speaking, without first having had to ask whether he was still capable of doing so.

I can feel how much this sentence displaces me because it touches precisely on what I had thought I understood about passage, on that instant when the body leaves one support before the next is assured, except that here perhaps there is not even any support waiting somewhere, no bank towards which one might reach and of which one could say afterwards that it had already been there, merely invisible, since speech itself seems to bring into being the space in which it becomes possible, and I begin to wonder whether what I once called the in-between was not still too poor, too obedient to the geography I knew, as though the between necessarily had to be an interval between two things already constituted, when it may be that the things themselves become other within the space that opens between them.

Igniatius is no longer exactly what he was before Pinocchio the Other speaks, but Pinocchio the Other, too, is no longer merely the puppet his hands had reassembled, and I can no longer decide which of the two carries the other along because the question comes apart at the very moment I ask it, the movement having already displaced what I would have liked to take as a point of departure.

I return to that name, the Other, and it seems to me now that it has not merely separated the puppet from Pinocchio but has opened something larger, something that could pass through Igniatius as well without belonging to him, as though saying I am other did not yet require one to know what one is other than, or even whom, and as though the gesture of naming oneself in this way had been enough to set in motion around him boundaries that neither of them had consciously drawn.

I think then of the Moon Child, of course, but this thought no longer comes to me as a comparison I could calmly develop from my desk; rather, it reaches me like a sensation already known whose origin I had forgotten, something in the way a being names itself and, in doing so, withdraws slightly from the hand that would claim to hold it entirely… not in order to become independent in the ordinary sense of the word, still less to erect against its origin some new sovereignty, but to reveal that there was already more within it than the person looking at it believed he had put there.

And suddenly I understand why my old maps exhausted me. The explorer in me kept telling me that all I had to do was complete them. I did not yet know that every new island could alter the sea. I believed that the Archipelago was gradually revealing itself, that one land appeared here, then another farther away, and that I might eventually connect them all on the same sheet, whereas I am beginning to feel now that no map can remain intact when what it receives changes the distances, the currents, perhaps even the orientation of the person holding it in his hands. Pinocchio the Other does not simply add something to what I knew of Igniatius. His presence displaces Igniatius… and Lucian with him. And now I find myself displaced in turn, not because I have learned something more, but because what I already knew is no longer situated in quite the same place.

I reread that old sentence:

Sometimes a single root is enough.

I thought then that I was speaking of the rare chance a root might have of finding, in the basalt, a fissure deep enough to receive it, and I see now that I was still giving too much importance to the place, as though it had to be ready before the root arrived, as though the root merely occupied a possibility already offered to it. I see it differently now. It enters where almost nothing seems able to enter, insinuates itself there without knowing what it will find farther down, grows because it is growing, and the stone, without ceasing to be stone, begins in its turn to become differently what it was, while the minute space between them is already no longer a mere void but something that takes shape as they encounter one another… Perhaps that is what I had not yet understood when I wrote that a foot seeks the ground. It may sometimes happen that, in setting itself down, it helps to bring into being the place where it will be able to stand.