(237) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where Pinocchio the Other, long before Igniatius, likewise caught in the amplitude of oversized clothes, in the meanderings of his thought and the traps of language, tries to find a way out through drawing and writing.

Pinocchio the Other’s Notebook

The forest no longer contains me. It gives part of its weight to the stones, part of its warmth to the humid air. It spreads its lines into the roots. Gives voice to the stream. Nothing is lost. Nothing yet knows what its whole is. Matter plays and discharges itself of me.

A dark branch bends over a pale stone. For the flash of a single instant, a shoulder comes into being. The current shifts and the shoulder disappears. Two parted ferns preserve between them a small dark vertical. Beneath, the light places two thin legs, the shadow falls over them like an immense garment. Something stands there for a second before the wind tears it apart and reveals a flesh-coloured lining. It is not a child. Not yet. Only a tiny standing upright, held there by invisible threads.

Elsewhere, a straight root prolongs an arm that refuses to exist. A mere piece of wood seems to be waiting for a hand. A dark mass beneath the leaves acquires the slow obstinacy of an animal’s back before becoming stone again.

In the shifting shadow of its foliage, the forest tries out beings. It fails and begins again. It attempts to bear and to walk. It tries to be drawn by something invisible. It ventures to follow... then to refuse... before laughing with a face that does not laugh.

Then the water takes everything back. The forms die before they can even be named. Another already appears. In this furious workshop something else again suddenly passes through the stone against which a hand has been placed. The support of a palm that is not there and is seeking to become incarnate. A weight or a caress that is not yet there or, already, is no longer there. The moss is slightly pressed in a direction perfectly suited to the absent hand. The gesture repeats itself with a strangeness as exact as two times superimposed upon one another.

A man placed his hand here. Another being, tomorrow, will place it here as well. The forest tries, but does not choose. Neither does the water. The reflected sky has already received his gaze and yet awaits it. This absent body possesses neither face, nor name, nor story. It is nothing but an inclination towards the water. A head bowed. A hand on a stone. A gaze caught by the same constellations and yet never seeing the same stars.

A sudden flood carries these presences away... Something begins to die. A colour withdraws and evaporates. A leaf, accepting the loss of its thousands of details, once again becomes simply what it had been before. The stream takes back its scattered sounds and gathers them into a murmur. The stone, emerging from the centuries of which it is made, consents to become once more that small damp block against which a body may lean. Something else would like to live.