(212) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Lucian discovers that paths have a singular way of eluding all prediction: they climb and descend towards a sea one might believe to be near, before losing you as they narrow between two stone walls, then suddenly opening onto a space so vast that one no longer quite knows whether one is still moving towards something, or whether it is the landscape itself which, endlessly rearranging itself around us, carries us along in its movement…

Lucian’s Notebook

I do not know how long I have been walking, and this ignorance, which once would have troubled me as though every experience needed, in order to become fully real, to be measured, situated, restored to a sequence I might later be able to account for, seems on the contrary now to belong to what is happening to me here, in the Archipelago, where the paths have a singular way of eluding all prediction, descending towards a sea one had thought close before losing it behind a slope, narrowing between two stone walls whose heat rises as far as the legs, then suddenly opening onto a space so vast that one no longer quite knows whether one is still advancing towards something or whether it is the landscape itself which, ceaselessly rearranging itself around us, carries us along in its movement, and little by little I feel that this uncertainty is no longer outside me, that it enters into the very way I walk, even into that almost involuntary attention with which my bare feet seek their place among the stones, avoiding an edge that is too sharp, lingering on a smooth slab still warm from the sun, sometimes finding in the shade an unexpected coolness, while the dust gives way beneath the weight of the body, while far off the waves, whipped by the wind, spread their smell of salt, and thought, though still continuing somewhere, is no longer so clearly distinguishable as it once was from everything that rises through the legs, crosses the skin, alters the breathing or forces the body to shift its balance slightly before I even know that it has done so.

And it is in this way, with nothing really announcing it, that at a bend the sea suddenly gives itself entire, although it had already been there for a long time, glimpsed between scorched roots, found again at the end of a slope, lost behind a rise in the land and then offered once more through the gap between two rocks; but this time something in its appearance is different, perhaps because it is no longer merely one of those fragments the path grants and then withdraws, perhaps also because I am no longer exactly the person who, a few hours earlier, still believed himself to be looking at a landscape placed before him; it suddenly occupies the opening, very low between two outcrops of dark rock, and the descent begins almost with it, without my being able to say at what moment I left the path or whether I truly decided to do so, for a few stones presented themselves, then others, a steeper slope required the body to lean farther forward, the sound of the water, until then mingled with the wind, drew closer, and when the warm rock came to be behind my back, I found myself sitting against it as though the place had slowly accomplished what I would once have attributed to my will.

I could now write that I felt good, but that sentence, precisely because it comes afterwards, already seems too certain to me, almost indiscreet, as though it claimed to gather beneath a single word what, at that moment, had no need whatsoever to be gathered, since the warmth of the stone was entering my back, salt had settled on my lips, the soles of my feet still retained, not the memory of the path, but something of its roughness and of the dust that had remained in the skin, while a small wave kept returning against an invisible stone, rolling it for an instant before withdrawing, and my breathing slowed without anything in all this requiring a name, still less the name of happiness, which would have implied that somewhere there existed a distinct state that I could recognise as mine, whereas it seems to me now that nothing belonged to me sufficiently to be separated from the rest in that way.

Then the sentence came, gently, almost innocently, without my even knowing what had summoned it: I am happy here…and what still surprises me when I return to it is not that it was false, for it was not, but that it was enough to alter almost imperceptibly what it had intended merely to acknowledge, as though the simple fact of recognising what was taking place had opened between me and it a distance so slight that it might have passed unnoticed had my stomach not tightened, had the light on the water not suddenly become a light that would soon begin to fade, had this cove, which nothing yet compelled me to leave, not become, through the mere fact that I knew I was happy there, a place I would necessarily leave, and I understood then, less through thought than through that very slight contraction of the body, that happiness, if there had been such a thing until then, had perhaps begun to change at the very moment when I had tried to recognise it.

The Moon Child then formed in my mind without my having called him, sitting almost in the same place, the oversized coat spread around him on the rock, his bare feet slipped between the stones, the hat falling as always over part of his face, and I could see him remaining there, following the movement of the water with his eyes, taking a stone between his fingers, turning it over for no particular reason, letting it fall when another drew his hand towards it, shifting one foot slightly because the rock had retained too much heat, then turning towards a bird or some sound rising from the grasses; but the moment I tried to place within him the sentence I myself had just spoken, the moment I wanted to make him think that he was happy here, something in the image came apart, not because the thought would have been too complex for him, still less because some form of innocence would have kept him below the threshold of consciousness, but because it introduced into him the same separation I had just felt coming into being within myself, and it suddenly became impossible for me to believe that what he lacked was precisely that knowledge which, only a few moments earlier, I myself had possessed no more than he did.

For nothing was lacking before the sentence came, and perhaps that is what troubled me most:

I was not deprived of the awareness of my happiness, as though something had been there, very close, merely waiting for me to discover it; there simply did not yet exist, on one side, a happiness that I might recognise and, on the other, the person who would have to recognise it; there was the warm stone, the salt, the fatigue, the water, the light, the feet still sensitive from the path, and that centreless mixture in which I participated so completely that the very idea of saying “I am happy” would at that moment have required me to withdraw slightly from what was taking place in order to be able to look at it.