(240) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

 

Where Félix comes to understand that what matters lies less in what Lucian and Igniatius put into their characters than in what those characters allowed them to discover. In turn, he lets himself be displaced by what he observes and sees his own way of reading transformed. Pinocchio the Other becomes a place of passage, Child Moon a form that is still provisional. The “prison of the self” then comes to mean remaining oneself without allowing one’s habits to decide everything. Writing becomes, for Félix, a way of seeing how far this discovery may lead him.

 

Félix’s Notebook

Recognising what one has never seen. Another sentence I would once have distrusted, and which now imposes itself upon me.

If Lucian and Igniatius had merely expressed what they already carried within themselves, I could, with enough patience, trace each of their characters back to an intention. A memory leads to a fear, to some old content of which the drawing would be no more than a translation. I know far too well how to do that. I even made my living doing it, with enough caution not to call it a reduction. But the more I look at what took place between Pinocchio the Other and Child Moon, the more this explanation seems to miss what is essential. And what is essential is not what they put into their characters, but what their characters allowed them to encounter.

With what they were, they made something that obliged them no longer to be exactly what they had been. I write this sentence while already sensing its meaning turn back upon itself. For some time now I have been doing the same thing with them. I thought I was observing Lucian, understanding Igniatius, establishing what had circulated from one to the other, and now I find myself physically following their gestures, as Lucian followed those of Igniatius. I reread their drawings with my own sentences. I let Child Moon enter this notebook without claiming to explain where he comes from. I am even beginning to wonder whether understanding something consists, at least in part, in allowing ourselves to change our point of view.

This worries me less than it once did. Or rather, the nature of the uneasiness itself has changed. I no longer see before me the danger of losing myself in what I study, as though my first duty were to preserve intact the distance that would allow me to know who is observing and who is being observed. I am discovering the possibility that this distance might shift without disappearing. And that this very displacement may be what finally allows me to see.

Did Lucian and Igniatius ever conceive their characters in the sense in which I once understood the word? Did they begin something, then allow it to act for long enough that they finally found themselves before a form containing more possibilities than they had consciously placed within it? Pinocchio the Other would then have been less Child Moon’s predecessor than the place of his passage. Child Moon himself might be no more than the provisional place where something continues to seek a form.

Suddenly I understand why this matter of the prison of the self affects me far more than I would have wished. It is not a matter of denying oneself, nor of becoming someone else. Nor even of hoping to reach some improbable outside where I would cease to be Félix. It is enough for something in which I participate to become real enough that I can no longer impose all my old habits upon it. Then the self remains, but for a moment it ceases to be the keeper who possesses every key.

I thought I was studying the way Lucian and Igniatius had created their characters. I am beginning to suspect that, through them, they had above all discovered how to let a creation lead them somewhere neither of them would have known how to reach alone. And if I am still writing tonight, it is not merely to record this discovery. It is to see how far it will lead me.