(243) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

 

“I have wandered so far into Leonardo that suddenly I no longer know how to return to myself... Bah! Every path will lead me back there: that is the definition of this self. It cannot absolutely lose itself; it loses only its time.

Let us therefore follow a little farther the slope and temptation of the mind; let us follow them, unfortunately without fear, for they lead to no true depth. Even our ‘deepest’ thought is contained within the invincible conditions that make all thought ‘superficial’. We penetrate only into a forest of transpositions; or else it is a closed palace of mirrors, made fertile by a solitary lamp which they engender to infinity.

But let us nevertheless try, through curiosity alone, to illuminate for ourselves the hidden system of some individual of the first magnitude; and let us imagine, approximately, how he must appear to himself when, from time to time, he pauses in the movement of his work and considers himself as a whole.

He first considers himself subject to common necessities and realities; then he returns to the secrecy of separate knowledge. He sees as we do, and he sees as himself. He possesses a judgement of his nature and a sense of his artifice. He is absent and present. He sustains that kind of duality which a priest must sustain. He is well aware that he cannot define himself entirely to himself through ordinary facts and motives.”

Paul Valéry, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci

 

  

Where Félix, himself travelling in his own way, reads and rereads the letters and drawings Lucian has sent him. He comes to understand that the “banalities of the self” do not reside only in conventional opinions, but can lodge themselves in our very ways of thinking. He senses that one may believe oneself to be escaping the self while endlessly repeating the same detours. Igniatius’s drawings remind him of a comparable experience. Reproducing certain gestures, just as Lucian had done before him, in order to understand them better, he discovers that his hand introduces differences despite himself. Some of them soon seem to him more right than the corrections intended to restore the original. He understands that a gesture can produce consequences that were contained in no prior intention.

Félix’s Notebook

I continue reading Lucian’s letter, which I was unable to finish yesterday. The banalities of the self, then, are not merely conventional opinions. The memories this self caresses until they have been worn smooth can be far more difficult to uncover once they have assumed the very form of our intelligence. Once they have become our way of understanding a judgement, or of preferring one explanation to another. Certain uncertainties reassure us because they have long been familiar to us. I could very well end up recognising Lucian by the way he doubts himself, and go on indefinitely moving through the same space, taking the refinement of my detours as proof that I have escaped it.

It is for this reason that the drawings too return to me as I walk here. Something comparable happened with them, although by a route that at first seemed much more concrete. I thought I was looking at Igniatius’s drawings, then I wanted to understand how they had been made, not merely by observing the result but by reproducing some of the gestures that had produced them. This decision, which seemed to me an entirely reasonable method, rather quickly led me to a place where the distinction between understanding and doing became less comfortable. My hand followed a line, but it never followed it exactly. It introduced small differences which at first I corrected with the satisfaction of someone who knows which is the original and which the copy, until some of those differences began to produce something that seemed to me more right than the correction itself. I could not have said according to what rule it was more right. Precisely because that rule did not yet exist for me. It was there that I understood, without yet being able to formulate it fully, that a gesture could produce a consequence which the person who had undertaken it had not placed before himself as a goal to be reached.