(252) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 The image of the invisible is itself invisible; otherwise, it would not be its image.

John Chrysostom, Homily on the Epistle to The Colossians

Where Igniatius, having remained motionless for a long time, finally emerges from a disheartening state of in-betweenness and resumes his journey.

Igniatius’s Notebook

The gorge remained other than myself, even as it ceased to be foreign to me. I remained that particular man bending over the water, while discovering how little of what he was could be separated from the world that enabled him to breathe and think. There was a difference here that no longer required separation. I felt that thought, if it wished to accompany what I was experiencing rather than replace it with its own categories, had to remain within this in-between without immediately seeking to close it.

The water continued to flow between the stones. The foliage stirred ever so slightly above it. Its movements shifted the constellations trembling at my feet. My breathing maintained its rhythm amid all these other rhythms, without knowing which of them might serve as a measure for the others. And yet I felt no sense of loss in no longer knowing exactly where the landscape ended and where I began. Had that boundary ever existed?

I looked once more at the man I was, unable to see him except through everything that surrounded him, and this time he no longer appeared to me as a visitor placed within the gorge. The same light fell upon him as upon the stones, the same moisture touched him as the leaves. He occupied a temporary place among the trees, one that the following instant would leave empty. He was subject to the same time that transformed the banks, carried away the leaves, and ceaselessly rearranged the stars upon the water. Only, within him, for a span of time about which he knew almost nothing, something could experience this belonging and see itself through it.

The landscape I had believed myself to be looking at since my arrival was therefore also, in a way that required no additional mystery to be imposed upon the world, that through which I could see myself. I am not speaking of my face, nor of my history, but of what I was even before I could say “I”. A living being exposed to everything around it. A living being made of what surrounded it. Transformed by what it perceived, and transforming whatever reached it into perception, until the old distinction between observer and observed became too impoverished to contain the experience.

At last I resumed walking, but that first step held a strangeness I had never experienced when simply moving from one place to another. It no longer seemed to me that I was merely carrying my body through the gorge. By moving that body, I was also moving the place from which the gorge could become this landscape. The slightest shift was enough for everything to begin anew, outside and inside at once. If, indeed, those two words could still describe what I was experiencing.

I was passing through the gorge as it passed through me, and I could no longer say which of these two passages contained the other, since the gaze through which I followed it was already one of its events. The landscape through which I walked had become, for a moment, the immense and shifting form in which I could see myself living.