(261) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Where Félix, slowly weighing things up, like an implacable pendulum, discovers how much a point of view depends on the position from which it is taken… and how much that position depends on what it observes.

Félix’s Notebook

A small light has come on in my mind. I am slowly beginning to understand why the parrots had seemed so secondary to me for so long. That is why I now return to them with renewed attention. I believed that their concern was repetition. I thought they brought into the narrative a kind of auditory memory. They were meant to show how certain words continue to be heard long after the one who uttered them has disappeared. I now see that no repetition, however faithful, is ever quite a repetition once another voice, however close to the first, takes it up. The imitated tone changes, however slightly, and changes everything with it. And when circumstances change, the one who hears is no longer the one who heard those words the first time. The same words, slightly displaced, may suddenly come to mean something they did not mean when first spoken.

The parrots in the drawings know this before I do. Their observation and their listening reveal it without their needing to be fully conscious of it. An utterance passes from one to another and is barely altered. That almost imperceptible difference is enough for another world to begin forming around it.

The same is true of Lucian and Igniatius. I have stubbornly persisted in comparing their voices, hoping to discover some proof, some imprint, that would finally allow me to determine whether one was imitating the other or whether both voices came from the same man. I now wonder whether their resemblance becomes interesting precisely at the moment when it ceases to serve as evidence. When it shows only that something has passed between them. It would be a way of looking at and recounting what happens when a sentence wanders off until it encounters something it was never seeking. This movement brings them close to one another without, however, making it possible to know which of them might have preceded the other.

I imagine them, as they so often appear in the drawings, placed side by side… Something would begin in one, pass into the other, and eventually reach me.

What I now see is a far less compliant configuration… What Lucian receives from Igniatius returns to Igniatius, altered by Lucian. What Igniatius brings into being transforms the way Lucian listens to him. What I read in Lucian changes the way I understand Igniatius. Then this new understanding comes back to alter the Lucian I thought I had already read. Before long, I can no longer even tell which of the two illuminates the other. Each seems to cast ahead of himself the very light he receives from what comes after.

At times, I find myself thinking that time itself no longer behaves normally in this affair. An old sentence comes to mean something different because of a sentence that did not yet exist when it was written. A drawing seems to foreshadow a scene that no one could then have known would take place. A character suddenly acquires an importance he did not yet possess when he first appeared. I am compelled to return to the past with what the present has just taught me, so that this past, without ceasing to be past, nevertheless never stops changing.

This, no doubt, is how whoever reads me, if anyone should ever read me, will deal with me as I now deal with Lucian. That reader will know something I do not yet know. Perhaps they will have seen Child Moon after the moment in which I am writing these words. They will know events that I cannot possibly know. That knowledge will return to these present pages and bring to light signs to which I am paying no attention. Awkward passages will emerge to which the reader will attribute a depth I had never intended. They will pass over without seeing sentences I believe to be important. Meanwhile, a detail placed almost absent-mindedly at the edge of a page will catch their eye and become, for them, the passage through which everything else falls into place.

This thought ought to have irritated me. As it would once have irritated me…

I think I would have wanted to defend what I had meant to say, to invoke my intention, to restore the sentence to its context, to close around it the circle of what I knew when I wrote it. But I am no longer certain that my intention possesses the right of ownership I once granted it. It, too, is only a moment in what comes to pass, necessary perhaps, even irreplaceable, yet incapable, on its own, of containing everything the sentence may become once it has left my hand. That does not mean I cease to be responsible for what I write. Quite the contrary, almost. If words can travel further than I can, their departure commits me all the more, just as the act of opening a door commits the person who opens it, precisely because that person cannot decide everything that will subsequently pass through the opening.