(273) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

“For you alone, sons of doctrine and wisdom, have we written this work. Scrutinise the book; gather yourselves in contemplation of the intention we have scattered throughout it and placed in several locations; what we have concealed in one place, we have revealed in another, so that your wisdom may comprehend it.”

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim,
De occulta philosophia, III, 65.

– Will the sun rise?

– Time that passes and time that is lived are not interchangeable.

Wherein what happens is never entirely separate from what has already taken place, and the reality of a phenomenon does not imply the truth of our interpretation of it.

– When we say that the sun rises today and will rise tomorrow, we are not simply describing two distinct events that we relate to the same phenomenon. We have already interpreted what is happening before we even begin to compare it.

The sun does not rise in the sense our language seems to suggest. It is the Earth’s rotation that makes the Sun appear above our horizon. Yet we do indeed see the sun rise. What we see is not a mere illusion: it is a real phenomenon, but its reality does not correspond to the explanation its name provides.
When we assert that the sun rises again, we assume not only that it has risen before, but also that what happens today can be recognised as a repetition of what happened yesterday.
Yet today’s sun does not occupy exactly the same position in space as yesterday’s. The Earth has continued on its course, and so has the solar system. The light passes through an atmosphere whose conditions have changed. The observer has changed too, if only by having lived through another day and another night.
Night, too, has its duration, its events, its transformations. It is not an empty stretch of time between two appearances of the sun.
Nothing in this event repeats itself exactly.

There are words that close the world. Others, on the contrary, can open it to an infinity of transformations.

– It is a very strange thing to see the world through words. I am not speaking of the concept of a word; I am speaking of words physically present, of black shapes that let light appear only through their bars of black ink. – But words are not only that. They are spoken. It is no longer the same prison. They blow hot and cold.

– Mingle the humours, fan the fire, bring chimeras back to life and push things into the hands of the beings who seize them.