(251) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

  

Where Igniatius, having discovered that the landscape does not lie merely before his gaze, observes one of its details and, seeing it come alive, finds himself looked at in return.

Igniatius’s Notebook

My brain was one of the things the world had eventually brought into being. This thought almost made me lose my familiar foothold in the word “I”, for the one contemplating the water was suddenly no longer merely the individual I knew through his history, his name, his memories, and the path he had taken that morning. He was also, in a far more ancient and material sense, that possibility which had emerged somewhere in the world: that one part of matter might become sensitive to another. Light received by an eye becomes a sky or a star. Water does not merely flow; encountered by this particular organism, it appears as a shifting universe and, in turn, gives rise to an awareness of its own appearance.

I slowly raised my head towards the branches and, in the very movement that lifted my gaze, I felt how deeply this gesture belonged to the situation as a whole. It was their height that made me look upwards. Their interlacing sought out the sky on my behalf. Their density almost immediately denied it to me. Then my eyes descended again towards the water, where that same sky reappeared. My body found itself caught between two directions, stretched vertically between a sky concealed above and its presence offered below.

The little constellations began forming again in the current. I could no longer look at them as I had before. Each now seemed to contain the whole of this passage: the sky from which the light came; the leaves that had allowed it through; the water that bent and fragmented it; my eye that received it; my brain that brought forth a sense of depth from it; and that consciousness which, belatedly, discovered that it was itself participating in what it contemplated. A star appeared, stretched, vanished into a ripple, and with it the space I was seeing changed ever so slightly. And since that space existed for me through an activity taking place within my own body, its transformation was also occurring within me. The boundary between the event taking place in the stream and the inner event that answered it was becoming impossible to draw without mutilating what was actually happening.

I was beginning to understand why I had been able to remain motionless before the water for so long without feeling the slightest need to go elsewhere. I had never ceased travelling. Spaces succeeded one another in the stream, but other spaces were coming into being alongside them within my perception, and the one I believed myself to occupy physically in that gorge was becoming only one among the possible spaces of experience, the one my feet could measure and my hands could touch, while another opened in the mirror, yet another was born of the constellations, and a stranger space was now appearing, situated neither before me nor behind my eyes, but within that very relationship through which the world became visible and, in becoming visible, revealed to me the workings of the one who saw it.

I was thus discovering that the landscape did not merely show me things; it showed me my capacity to see them, and that capacity, in turn, no longer appeared to me as some private possession enclosed within my skull, since it depended at every moment upon what was given to it. Without those contrasts, without those movements, without the resistance of the ground, without the light of the sky, without the shifting surface of the water, a part of what I was, there and then, would simply never have come into being. I could therefore no longer merely say that my brain manufactured space, as though it exercised sovereign power over some passive raw material; the space it brought into appearance also set it to work, supplied it with differences, directed my eyes, summoned my gestures, transformed my expectations, and through this ceaseless interplay it became almost impossible to determine which of us, the landscape or I, was in the process of shaping the other.

I remained there long enough for this impossibility to cease demanding a solution. I had begun the crossing with the entirely natural desire to distinguish, identify, record, and understand what lay before me, and I continued to recognise the trees, the ferns, the rocks, the movements of the water; none of these things dissolved into some confusion in which everything would have become one. On the contrary, they seemed more distinct than ever, because I no longer needed to tear them away from the relationship within which they appeared to me in order to believe that they truly existed.