Origin

Where Félix’s thought moves forward in a single movement, with its reprises, its drifts and its returns.

Félix’s Notebook

It seems to me now that I was mistaken from the very moment when I thought I ought to seek the origin of the Child Moon as one follows a river upstream towards its source, with that reassuring idea that, by going far enough backwards, I would eventually reach a point where everything began, a first appearance, a first image, perhaps even a first sentence, something that had not yet passed through anyone and that would bear upon it the intact mark of the one who had conceived it, but the more I search for that point, the more it recedes, not as though it were hiding from me, but as though the search itself were gradually revealing that it may never have existed in the form I had attributed to it, for that would require a being, Igniatius for instance, to have been there first, alone with himself, and then, one day, for the Child Moon to have come to him, after which he would have passed him on to Lucian, Lucian in turn would have received him, and I would finally have come to gather from their hands a creature already fully formed, merely passed from one to the other like an object each of them might have held without its changing otherwise than through some accident along the way, whereas everything I observe shows me exactly the opposite, and what passes seems always to be transformed by the passage, just as water takes something from the stones it touches and leaves something upon them as well.

I no longer know very clearly, then, what it means to say that Igniatius created the Child Moon, for if he did create him, one must immediately add that this child, from the moment he began to exist in his gestures, in his drawings, in his stories, altered the man who was bringing him into appearance, perhaps imposing upon him paths he had never imagined, certain fidelities of which he was not yet aware, even certain impossibilities, since what we have begun to make sometimes becomes present enough to prevent us, afterwards, from doing just anything, and I understand better now that strange experience in which the person who believes he is inventing a form suddenly discovers that he must obey it a little, not because it would exist somewhere independently of him, but because, from the moment it is there, something in the world has shifted and this new presence acts upon the possibilities that remain.

The Child Moon may have been born in this way, not at one precise instant, but within that shifting space where a form begins to turn back towards the one who is giving it form, where what has just been produced becomes in its turn productive, and this would explain why I find it so difficult to assign this child an origin without immediately feeling that I have just simplified something which, on the contrary, never ceases to grow more complex, for I might indeed discover that Igniatius was the first to draw him, and know with almost administrative certainty the date of that first drawing, but even that would still not suffice to answer the question that occupies me, since the Child Moon I know today also contains everything Lucian saw in him, everything I myself have begun to see there, everything the other characters have displaced around him, and perhaps already something of what a reader whom I do not yet know will one day see in what I am writing now.