(230) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

 

Félix realises that what he observes in the notebooks eventually calls into question his own way of reading. He believes he is gathering documents, comparing handwritings, following the passage of a figure or a motif from one notebook to another... but the connections he makes themselves produce meaning. Two fragments placed side by side begin to answer one another, a drawing transforms the reading of an old letter, a sentence suddenly gives an image a new depth. Félix can therefore no longer regard himself as merely discovering what was already there... His gaze, the order in which he reads, the relationships he establishes... and even his mistakes... take part in what appears.

Félix’s Notebook

I find myself disoriented... I am faced with the same difficulty I attribute to the others... I am doing something whose consequences exceed what I had decided to do... I was searching for the origin of their movement; in the very course of that search, my own origin began to move...

This astonishing realisation explains why the memory, however vague, of a passage from Blanchot returns to me and brings me to a halt... The work that suddenly becomes invisible is not a work that disappears. A work, like the one I hold in my hands and which spreads far out before me... ceases to coincide with the place where I thought I could situate it... It is no longer contained solely in a drawing, or in a sentence. At this moment... something passes between these elements and I cannot distinguish it. I suddenly have the impression that everything is withdrawing... or that it is I who have been withdrawn.

But this withdrawal is not a loss... On the contrary, it is what allows the movement to continue. I then understand a little better why Blanchot needed Orpheus in order to speak of the work. It is not enough for Orpheus to lead Eurydice back towards the light: there is that instant when he turns around and compromises precisely what he wanted to save. Because failure would secretly be superior to success? Certainly not... Because we must lose what we love in order to make a work of it? That would be far too moral... But because the movement towards what we seek contains a demand that cannot be entirely subjected to the result we had foreseen... and because, at a certain point, that towards which we are advancing demands of us a gesture that places in jeopardy the very project that had brought us this far.

I do not yet know whether I am ready, or capable, of following Blanchot all the way. I am beginning to understand why this idea troubles me: it forces me to consider that what I am looking for does not lie behind me, in a beginning that would merely have to be reconstructed. It is also taking shape before me, as I advance... An origin would be, I venture despite the awkwardness of the formulation, something that continues to take place.

It would no longer be enough to ask: Who began? We would have to ask what, in passing through him, was able to begin, and then what that made possible. And, far less comfortably, what my own reading is, in its turn, making possible... I began with a problem concerning creation and now find myself returned to reading, as though the two were less separate than I had believed. The one who writes or thinks advances between what he wants and what his gesture teaches him... The one who reads advances between what he seeks and what his reading causes him to encounter. Both need an intention in order to begin. But both risk turning it into an obstacle if it demands that nothing happen that it has not foreseen.

This, I think, is where what I was clumsily trying to understand beneath the words will, surrender, mastery, or inspiration is to be found... a much more intimate circulation in which the gesture, precisely because it is mine, can nevertheless teach me what I did not yet know about it. There where what I produce begins to act upon me before I have even fully understood it, and where continuing does not require me to renounce mastery, but perhaps to change what mastery means...

To become attentive enough to recognise what has just happened without immediately cancelling it in the name of what I had intended. I still do not know whether this deserves the name inspiration, and in the end the word matters very little to me... For the moment, it is enough for me to observe that there are gestures of which we are unquestionably the authors and of which, nevertheless, we are not entirely the contemporaries, because we make them before we fully know what they will bring about. Sometimes years are needed, or the help of someone else who brings another gaze to the same trace... for what had remained in shadow to become visible... then invisible again, and... visible otherwise.

Félix

P.S. — I owe these thoughts, and this uneasiness, chiefly to Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, Gallimard, 1955, particularly the pages devoted to “Orpheus’ Gaze” and to inspiration. The sentence that brought me to a halt — “the work suddenly become invisible again, which is no longer there, has never been there” — appears on p. 230 in the edition I am referring to here; Blanchot also allows to surface there that “uncertainty of origin” which now seems to me to designate less a lost beginning than a beginning that was never as simple as we would like to believe.