(262) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Where Félix, entangled in the documents piling up on his desk, while Lucian travels aboard a drifting ocean liner, contemplates a future and elusive reader.

Félix’s Notebook

I then begin to understand something that had seemed obscure to me in the wanderings of all those I have followed so far. I observe with both interest and unease these embarkations, these shipwrecks, these forests traversed, these circus tents into which one can never quite tell whether one has just entered or whether something inside is already watching us. Do their visible movements merely give form to what is constantly taking place within this jumble itself? No one simply carries what they know from one place to another. Each arrives transformed by the journey and, in turn, transforms the place at which they arrive, so that the journey no longer connects two pre-existing points but helps bring into existence the very points it connects.

I wonder what will become of the person who opens these pages and manages to connect them. I do not know this person, and that ignorance suddenly seems essential to me. If this reader already had a face, an opinion, a definite place, I might write for them as one addresses a letter to someone, whereas their absence leaves me only this vague opening through which they might enter, without my being able to prepare for their arrival.

This reader will enter here with as little assurance as I myself possessed when I first began reading Lucian. They will try to understand who is who. They will learn to distinguish the voices, to put back in order what seems to have become entangled. I could hardly reproach them for doing so, since that is exactly what I did. Perhaps they will even laugh at some of my hesitations. They will see more clearly than I do how deeply I was already caught up in what I claimed to be examining. They will recognise the moment when I might still have believed that I remained outside it, and the moment when that belief had already become impossible. But if they continue long enough, something may happen to them resembling what happened to me, not because the story would repeat itself, but precisely because it never quite repeats itself.

As they watch me searching for Lucian, they will gradually begin searching alongside me. As they see my suspicions shift from Igniatius to Lucian and back again, they will form suspicions of their own. They will notice a correspondence I failed to see, bring together two drawings I had left far apart, hear in a sentence spoken by the parrots the echo of words whose origin I have forgotten. They will still believe themselves perfectly free to make these connections, without immediately realising that the work is already continuing its journey through that very freedom.

Then Child Moon will have crossed another threshold. He will no longer merely have passed from Igniatius to Lucian, from Lucian to me. He will have passed into a place where I cannot follow him. And I find myself experiencing, at the thought, something closer to relief than to anxiety. As though the child could finally continue on his way without any of us having to know where he is going. Yet one difficulty remains, and it returns at precisely the moment when I believe I have found one last outside, this unknown reader to whom I might entrust what eludes me. Why should this reader be the last? Why should the person who reads me finally possess the position I have sought in vain, that outer shore from which they might contemplate the whole without being touched by it?