Agua Viva Read online

  I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music—I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.

  And so I realize that I want the vibrating substratum of the repeated word sung in Gregorian chant. I’m aware that I can’t say everything I know, I only know when painting or pronouncing, syllables blind of meaning. And if here I must use words, they must bear an almost merely bodily meaning. I’m struggling with the last vibration. To tell you of my substratum I make a sentence of words made only from instants-now. Read, therefore, my invention as pure vibration with no meaning beyond each whistling syllable, read this: “with the passing of the centuries I lost the secret of Egypt, when I moved in longitudes, latitudes, and altitudes with the energetic action of electrons, protons, and neutrons, under the spell of the word and its shadow.” What I wrote you here is an electronic drawing without past or future: it is simply now.

  I must also write to you because you harvest discursive words and not the directness of my painting. I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work. This isn’t a book because this isn’t how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single climax: I live on the edge.

  In writing I can’t manufacture something as in painting, when I use my craft to mix a color. But I’m trying to write to you with my whole body, loosing an arrow that will sink into the tender and neuralgic centre of the word. My secret body tells you: dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs, meaning nothing but their sound, though this doesn’t dry them out like straw but moistens them instead. I don’t paint ideas, I paint the unattainable “forever.” Or “for never,” it amounts to the same. More than anything else, I paint painting. And more than anything else, I write you hard writing. I want to grab the word in my hand. Is the word an object? And from the instants I extract the juice of their fruits. I must deprive myself to reach the core and seed of life. The instant is living seed.

  The secret harmony of disharmony: I don’t want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air—I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only gives me the full measure of silence.

  And if I say “I” it’s because I dare not say “you,” or “we” or “one.” I’m forced to the humility of personalizing myself belittling myself but I am the are-you.

  Yes, I want the last word which is also so primary that it gets tangled up with the unattainable part of the real. I’m still afraid to move away from logic because I fall into instinct and directness, and into the future: the invention of today is the only way to usher in the future. Then it’s the future, and any hour is your allotted hour. So what’s the harm of moving away from logic? I deal in raw materials. I’m after whatever is lurking beyond thought. No use trying to pin me down: I simply slip away and won’t allow it, no label will stick. I’m entering a very new and genuine chapter, curious about itself, so appealing and personal that I can’t paint it or write it. It’s like moments I had with you, when I would love you, moments I couldn’t go past because I descended into their depths. It’s a state of touching the surrounding energy and I shudder. Some mad, mad harmony. I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.

  I pin down sudden instants that carry within them their own death and others are born—I pin down the instants of metamorphosis and there’s a terrible beauty to their sequence and concurrence.

  Now day is breaking, a dawn of white mist on the sands of the beach. Everything is mine, then. I barely touch food, I don’t want to awaken beyond the day’s awakening. I’m growing with the day that as it grows kills in me a certain vague hope and forces me to look the hard sun straight in the face. The gale blows and scatters my papers. I hear that wind of cries, the death rattle of a bird open in oblique flight. And I here impose upon myself the severity of a taut language, I impose upon myself the nakedness of a white skeleton free of humours. But the skeleton is free of life and while I live I shudder all over. I won’t reach the final nakedness. And I still don’t want it, apparently.

  This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has.

  I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.

  And then I shall know how to paint and write, after the strange but intimate answer. Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness. One instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.

  I slowly enter my gift to myself, splendor ripped open by the final song that seems to be the first. I enter the writing slowly as I once entered painting. It is a world tangled up in creepers, syllables, woodbine, colors and words—threshold of an ancestral cavern that is the womb of the world and from it I shall be born.

  And if I often paint caves that is because they are my plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with brightness, and I, blood of nature— extravagant and dangerous caves, talisman of the Earth, where stalactites, fossils and rocks come together, and where the animals mad by their own malign nature seek refuge. The caves are my hell. Forever dreaming cave with its fogs, memory or longing? eerie, eerie, esoteric, greenish with the slime of time. Inside the dark cave glimmer the hanging rats with the cruciform wings of bats. I see downy and black spiders. Mice and rats run frightened along the ground and up the walls. Between the rocks the scorpion. Crabs, just like themselves since prehistory, through deaths and births, would look like threatening beasts if they were the size of a man. Old cockroaches crawl in the murky light. And all of this is me. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us.

  I want to put into words but without description the existence of the cave that some time ago I painted—and I don’t know how. Only by repeating its sweet horror, cavern of terror and wonders, place of afflicted souls, winter and hell, unpredictable substratum of the evil that is inside an earth that is not fertile. I call the cave by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror, I, creature of echoing caverns that I am, and I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.

  But the instant-now is a firefly that sparks and goes out, sparks and goes out. The present is the instant in which the wheel of the speeding car just barely touches the ground. And the part of the wheel that still hasn’t touched, will touch in that immediacy that absorbs the present instant and turns it into the past. I
, alive and glimmering like the instants, spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out. It’s just that whatever I capture in me has, when it’s now being transposed into writing, the despair that words take up more instants than the flash of a glance. More than the instant, I want its flow.

  A new era, this my own, and it announces me right away. Am I brave enough? For now I am: because I come from the suffering afar, I come from the hell of love but now I am free of you. I come from afar—from a weighty ancestry. I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness. I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also want inconsistency. Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free. And I want the flow.

  What I write to you is not comfortable. I don’t impart confidences. Instead I metallize myself. And I’m not comfortable for you and for me; my word bursts into the space of the day. What you will know of me is the shadow of the arrow that has hit its target. I shall only vainly grasp a shadow that takes up no room in space, and what barely matters is the dart. I construct something free of me and of you—this is my freedom that leads to death.

  In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden all ripe with perfumes, garden and shadows that I invent right here and now and that are the concrete means of speaking in this my instant of life. My state is that of a garden with running water. In describing it I try to mix words that time can make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.

  Now it’s day and suddenly again Sunday in an unexpected eruption. Sunday is a day of echoes—hot, dry, and everywhere buzzings of bees and wasps, cries of birds and the distance of paced hammer blows—where do the echoes of Sunday come from? I who loathe Sunday because it’s hollow. I, who want the most primary thing because it’s the source of generation—I who long to drink water at the source of the spring—I who am all of this, must by fate and tragic destiny only know and taste the echoes of me, because I cannot capture the me itself. I am in a stupefying, trembling, marvel expectation, my back turned to the world, and somewhere the innocent squirrel escapes. Plants, plants. I snooze in the summer heat of the Sunday that has flies circling the sugar-bowl. A boast of colors, that of Sunday, and ripe splendor. And all this I painted some time ago and on another Sunday. And here is that once-virgin canvas, now covered by ripe colors. Bluebottle flies glitter in front of my window open to the air of the torpid street. The day seems like the smooth stretched skin of a fruit that in a small catastrophe the teeth tear, its liquor drains. I’m afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me.

  To remake myself and remake you I return to my state of garden and shadow, cool reality, I barely exist and if I exist it’s with delicate caution. Around the shadow is a heat of abundant sweat. I’m alive. But I feel that I have yet to reach my limits, borders with what? without borders, the adventure of dangerous freedom. But I take risks, I live taking risks. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I who have barely started my journey, I start it with a sense of tragedy, guessing toward which lost ocean my steps of life are leading. And madly I take control of the recesses of myself, my ravings suffocate me with so much beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.

  I write to you as an exercise in sketching before painting. I see words. What I say is pure present and this book is a straight line in space. It’s always current, and a camera’s photometer opens and immediately closes, but keeping within it the flash. Even if I say “I lived” or “I shall live” it’s present because I’m saying them now.

  I also started these pages with the goal of preparing myself for painting. But now I’m overwhelmed by the taste of words, and almost free myself from the dominion of paint; I feel a voluptuousness in going along creating something to tell you. I’m living the initiation ceremony of the word and my gestures are hieratic and triangular.

  Yes, this is life seen by life. But suddenly I forget how to capture whatever is happening, I don’t know how to capture whatever exists except by living here each thing that arises and no matter what it is: I am almost free of my errors. I let the free horse run fiery. I, who trot nervously and only reality delimits me.

  And when the day reaches its end I hear the crickets and become entirely replete and unintelligible. Then I live the blue daybreak that comes with its bulge full of little birds—I wonder if I’m giving you an idea of what a person goes through in life? And every thing that occurs to me I note to pin it down. For I want to feel in my hands the quivering and lively nerve of the now and may that nerve resist me like a restless vein. And may it rebel, that nerve of life, and may it contort and throb. And may sapphires, amethysts and emeralds spill into the dark eroticism of abundant life: because in my darkness quakes at last the great topaz, word that has its own light.

  I am now listening to a sylvan music, almost just drumming and rhythm that comes from a neighboring house where young junkies live the present. Another instant of incessant, incessant rhythm, and something terrible happens to me.

  It’s that I shall pass because of the rhythm into its paroxysm—I shall pass to the other side of life. How can I tell you this? It’s terrible and threatens me. I feel that I can no longer stop and I’m scared. I try to distract myself from the fear. But the real hammering stopped long ago: I’m being the incessant hammering in me. From which I must free myself. But I can’t: the other side of me calls me. The footsteps I hear are my own.

  As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots of a rare tree, that’s how I write to you, and those roots as if they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires for fulfilment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and needs the approval of God: that is creation.

  Could I have gone without feeling it to the other side? The other side is a throbbingly hellish life. But there is the transfiguration of my terror: so I give myself over to a heavy life all in symbols heavy as ripe fruits. I choose mistaken resemblances but that drag me through the tangle. A trace memory of the common sense of my past keeps me brushing against this side here. Help me because something is coming toward me and laughing at me. Quick, save me.

  But no one can give me their hand to help me out: I must use great strength—and in the nightmare, with a sudden wrench, I finally fall face-down on this side here. I let myself lie tossed upon the rustic earth, exhausted, heart still beating madly, breathing in great retchings. Am I safe? I wipe my damp brow. I get up slowly, try to take the first steps of a weak convalescence. I’m managing to get my balance.

  No, all this isn’t happening in real facts but in the domain of—of an art? yes, of an artifice through which a most delicate reality arises which comes to exist in me: the transfiguration happened to me.

  But the other side, from which I barely escaped, became sacred and I confide my secret to no one. It seems to me that in a dream I swore a pledge on the other side, a blood oath. No one will know anything: what I know is so volatile and nearly inexistent that it is between me and I.

  Am I one of the weak? a weak woman possessed by incessant and mad rhythm? if I were solid and strong would I even have heard the rhythm? I find no answer: I am. This is all that comes to me from life. But what am I? the answer is just: what am I. Though I sometimes scre
am: I no longer want to be I! but I stick to myself and inextricably there forms a tessitura of life.

  May whoever comes along with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived. Because now I am speaking to you seriously: I am not playing with words. I incarnate myself in the voluptuous and unintelligible phrases that tangle up beyond the words. And a silence rises subtly from the knock of the phrases.

  So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word—between the lines— takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.

  I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.

  What shall I tell you? I shall tell you the instants. I go too far and only then do I exist and in a feverish way. What a fever—will I one day manage to stop living? woe is me, who dies so much. I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth, I have a gift for passion, in the bonfire of a dry trunk I contort in the blaze. To the span of my existence I give an occult meaning that goes beyond me. I’m a concomitant being: I gather in me time past, the present and the future, the time that pulses in the tick-tock of the clocks.