(269) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“It was as though the light were plunging into the Pacific Ocean, causing an enormous curvature in space.”

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“I think of a curve of sky fading into the night: as though I were writing to you. At once, it comes back to you.”

Philippe Sollers, Drame
Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1965, pp. 25–27

Wherein Félix discovers that writing does more than preserve a thought: it allows something to take shape that, without this act, might never have existed. Writing seems to arise from a relationship with someone else, and this relationship immediately enters into thought. The imagined landscape is already no longer quite the same once it is considered as something one might write to someone about.

Letter from Lucian to Félix

Writing is a very strange thing in itself. As I practise it, I notice that certain things become possible. Without the act of writing, they would have vanished at once. The hand moving across the page already seems to be addressing… reaching towards someone who will come later. This still-imaginary presence is enough to alter the course of thought. I no longer know, then, whether I write to convey what I think, or whether the possibility of conveying it is precisely what helps me to think it.

What passes is not merely transformed by those through whom it passes; at times, it seems to need this passage to become what it is.

The Moon Child appears to me in yet another light when I think about this. Was I wrong to seek what he means independently of all those before whom he appears? I wanted to reach his own form, stripped of the successive interpretations that might eventually have covered it over. I wanted to rediscover the child as he was before Lucian, before me, before Igniatius. I am beginning to suspect that this original purity might be the very form in which he has never existed. He has always been looked at, and told of, through text and drawing. Someone gave him that coat, which seems to be waiting for a body larger than his own. Someone placed upon his head that hat whose shadow conceals much of his face. Someone saw him walking barefoot and connected his gestures with other, older gestures. Then someone else took up that connection and led it elsewhere. So that, in trying to remove all these layers to find the Moon Child himself at last, I might risk finding nothing left.

And yet he remains there before me. Perhaps that is the strangest thing of all. As he is… without being identical. Something persists, recognisable through all the transformations to which the drawings bear witness. Enough for me to call him the Moon Child and know towards whom or what this name leads me. But this permanence is not that of an object preserved intact. It resembles a path whose existence depends precisely on different footsteps continuing to make their way along it in turn. A character… or even an entire work exists in just this way.