(242) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Where one can observe Lucian’s almost obsessive caution, and the gradual shift of the “prison of the self” towards a critique of his own way of thinking.

[ Continuation of Lucian’s letter to Félix (241)]

I arrived in this Archipelago with both the ocean liner and my mind intact. At least intact enough for me to continue recognising myself. Which already seems fairly remarkable when I consider how little I know about what happened between the last moment when I remember with certainty being on board and the first when I had to admit that I no longer was. You can see how even this convoluted sentence forces me into an almost ridiculous degree of caution. I could simply write that the ship sank. That would simplify things enormously and give my account the clear line readers are so fond of. All I know is that it is no longer with me, or that I am no longer with it. Each time I write down this distinction, I discover how much greater it is than it first appears. My mind, naturally, wants to reduce it. It joins things together. Fills in the gaps. Tries to make what came before the cause of what follows, and what follows the intelligible consequence of what came before. There is nothing in this, no doubt, that is not entirely necessary. Without this obstinacy in manufacturing continuity, I might not even be capable of writing to you. I am beginning to perceive how quietly tyrannical this necessity can become when it transforms what remains open into something that seems always to have been closed.

You will have noticed that I do not speak, or no longer speak, of Igniatius. Perhaps you find that regrettable. But you see, I have had no news of him since I decided to follow the many traces he left behind. It was precisely during that crossing that I thought again of this phrase about the prison of the self. In these circumstances, curiously enough, it loses for me some of its rather spectacular quality. At first I heard in those words the idea of an escape. As though writing allowed us momentarily to leave behind the person we are, to rid ourselves of our memories, our petty vanities, our habits and all those things that are fairly easy to recognise as personal. That would still be too simple. We write precisely with all of that: with our memory, our own words, our old fears, our particular way of bringing together two things that someone else might never have thought to connect. Even when we try to become someone else, something in our way of being continues to choose the paths by which we attempt to move away from ourselves. It cannot therefore be a matter of leaving oneself as one might disembark from a ship that has reached port. What interests me more now is the far less heroic possibility of noticing, while it is happening, how this self constructs the passages it uses. How it almost immediately repairs those that threaten to collapse.

I think this is where writing can intervene. Provided, of course, that we do not ask it merely to confirm what we knew before we began. If I sat down to recount my journey as I already believe I understand it, I could probably put everything back in its proper place. I could give the ocean liner a destination. The disaster a cause. The Archipelago a function, and my presence here a continuity plausible enough for all this soon to become an episode in my biography. I could even do so with great scrupulousness. I could multiply the reservations, examine several hypotheses, and thus preserve the appearance of doubt while reconstructing with great precision the very world whose coherence that doubt seemed to threaten. I am discovering that caution itself can become a habit. One of the strongest. It occurs to me that there is an extremely refined way of remaining a prisoner of oneself. It consists in making each of one’s thoughts so complicated that their very complexity ends up serving as proof that they cannot merely be reproducing what we already are.

I recognise in this something that belongs to me rather well, and which I would probably prefer not to recognise quite so easily.

Lucian