Dear Patrick,
The other evening, it seems I understood something about Pokémon. I was sheltered, in the forest to the west of Guyana (yes, I see that this postcard starts like a song by Bernard Lavilliers); I was with a naturalist and friends familiar with the country, and in the whispering of the lamp, trying to accommodate the deafening sound of the frogs, the conversation revolved not entirely about the animals but more precisely about beasts – the beasts, meaning those that bite, sting, pinch, irritate, poison, and make the words exchanged shiver. From story to story, we ascended in degrees on the ladder of terror: scolopendras that still wiggle when cut in half, fluffy matutus with eight legs perched above doors, big grage windows whose name sounds like a notebook but much deadlier. Each casually displayed those they had seen or admitted they were still worried to see. And as a melody cannot fail to return to its key tone, in the Amazonian land, such a discussion could not avoid coming to its first principle, that is, the jaguar: “And the jaguar? – “Oh, we saw one near Javouhey a year and a half ago, but here, no, they are not around”; the remark was almost immediately followed by the alarmed barking of the group dog, barking as in an altercation where the participants would interrupt each other in a hoarse growl, the kind of throat clearing that the night itself would emit if it were to start growling, if it decided to silence the frogs and make everyone stand halfway between wonder and terror, torn in different directions by the desire to go see and the desire to run in the opposite direction.
And it was then (at least, when my heart rate returned to normal) that it seemed to me I understood something about Pokémon, that universe of which no one is unaware it is celebrating its thirty years and has imposed itself as a global bestiary from video games to collectible cards and animated series. Where does such success come from? What nerve must be touched to so repopulate the entire human imagination? At a certain level, of course, the intelligence of the creators of Pokémon consisted in intertwining the desire to “know” and the desire to “have”: just as my Guianese conversation braided together enumeration and anecdote, arborescence and testimony, the Pokémon have intertwined for several generations the proliferation of species with the hope of encounters, the proliferation of types with the rarity of specimens and the cards that depict them, the taste of references (Salameche, Reptincel, Dracaufeu) and that of capture.
That all this coincides with the sixth extinction, where on the horizon of these childhood desires looms speculation (16 million dollars last month, however, for a Pikachu illustrator card) would suffice to grieve me if it were not for the hint of something else, of a very deep reason that leads our childhood part to turn towards other living beings, in the same movement where we become beings of language. Hearing the jaguar reply the other evening, probably stung by a question that doubted its presence, I remembered that each Pokémon has its own cry – Pikachu cries “Pika,” Mélofée sings “Melo.” And that is what I understood: beneath the desire to complete the collection, what Pokémon have managed to awaken is the desire for an Adamic language, a poetic power not of designation but of convocation where each beast would respond both to its name and with its name. From the depths of the jungles to the console screens, one dream holds us, Patrick: that of calling the animals, in all senses of the verb.
