Agua Viva Read online

  To interpret myself and formulate me I need new signs and new articulations in shapes found on this side and beyond my human story. I transfigure reality and then another dreaming and sleepwalking reality, creates me. And all of me rolls and as I roll on the ground I add to myself in leaves, I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then? then all that I lived will be a poor superfluity.

  But for the time being I am in the centre of everything that screams and teems. And it’s subtle as the most intangible reality. For now time is the duration of a thought.

  This contact with the invisible nucleus of reality is of such purity.

  I know what I am doing here: I am telling of the instants that drip and are thick with blood.

  I know what I am doing here: I’m improvising. But what’s wrong with that? improvising as in jazz they improvise music, jazz in fury, improvising in front of the crowd.

  It’s so odd to have exchanged my paints for this strange thing that is the word. Words—I move cautiously among them as they can turn threatening; I can have the freedom to write this: “pilgrims, merchants and shepherds led their caravans toward Tibet and the roads were difficult and primitive.” With that phrase I made a scene be born, as in a photographic flash.

  What does this jazz that is improvisation say? it says arms tangled with legs and the flames rising and I passive like meat that is devoured by the sharp hook of an eagle that interrupts its blind flight. I express to me and to you my most hidden desires and achieve an orgiastic confused beauty. I tremble with pleasure amidst the novelty of using words that form an intense thicket. I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thoughts, without any utilitarian meaning: I am alone, I and my freedom. Such is my freedom that it could scandalize a primitive but I know that you are not scandalized by the fullness I achieve and that is without perceptible borders. This capacity of mine to live whatever is rounded and ample —I surround myself with carnivorous plants and legendary animals, all bathed in the coarse and twisted oblique light of a mythical sex. I proceed in an intuitive way and without seeking an idea: I am organic. And I don’t question myself about my motives. I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness— and to adorn me leaves and branches spring up in my hair.

  I don’t know what I’m writing about: I am obscure to myself. I only had initially a lunar and lucid vision, and so I plucked for myself the instant before it died and perpetually dies. This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more a gesture than voice. All this is what I got used to painting, delving into the intimate nature of things. But now the time to stop painting has come in order to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. As I throw myself into the line of my drawing, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.

  I am inside the great dreams of the night: for the right-now is by night. And I sing the passage of time: I am still the queen of the Medes and of the Persians and am also my slow evolution that throws itself like a drawbridge into a future whose milky fogs I already breathe today. My aura is mystery of life. I surpass myself abdicating myself and am therefore the world: I follow the voice of the world, I myself suddenly with a unique voice.

  The world: a tangle of bristling telephone wires. And the brightness however is still dark: that is I facing the world.

  A dangerous balance, mine, mortal danger for the soul. The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want distances. My wild intuition about myself. But my main thing is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I make myself explicit I lose the humid intimacy.

  What color is the spatial infinity? it is the color of air.

  We—faced with the scandal of death.

  Listen only superficially to what I say and from the lack of meaning a meaning will be born as from me a high and light life is inexplicably born. The dense jungle of words thickly envelops what I feel and live, and transforms everything I am into some thing of mine that remains outside me. Nature is enveloping: it entangles me entirely and is sexually alive, just that: alive. I too am ferociously alive—and I lick my snout like a tiger who has just devoured a deer.

  I write to you now, at the very moment itself. I unfold only in the now. I speak today—not yesterday or tomorrow—but today and at this actual perishable instant. My small and boxed-in freedom joins me to the freedom of the world—but what is a window if not the air framed by right angles? I am rudely alive. I am leaving—says death without adding that he’s taking me along. And I shiver in panting breath because I must go with him. I am death. Death takes place in my very being—how can I explain to you? It’s a sensual death. Like a dead person I walk through the high grass in the greenish light of its blades: I am Diana the Huntress of gold and all I can find are heaps of bones. I live from an underlying layer of feelings: I am barely alive.

  But these high summer days of damnation whisper to me the need for renunciation. I renounce having a meaning, and then the sweet and painful weakness grips me. Round and round shapes cross in the air. It’s a summer heat. I navigate in my galley that braves the winds of a bewitched summer. Crushed leaves remind me of the ground of my childhood. The green hand and the golden breasts—that is how I paint the mark of Satan. They who fear us and our alchemy stripped witches and sorcerers in search of the hidden mark that was almost always found though it could only be known on sight for that mark was indescribable and unpronounceable even in the darkness of the Middle Ages— Middle Ages, thou art my dark subjacency and in the glare of the bonfires the marked ones dance in circles riding branches and foliage which are the phallic symbol of fertility: even in the white mass blood is used and there it is drunk.

  Listen: I let you be, therefore let me be.

  But eternally is a very hard word: it has a granitic “t” in the middle. Eternity: for everything that is never began. My small ever so limited head bursts when thinking about something that doesn’t begin and doesn’t end—for that is the eternal. Fortunately that feeling doesn’t last long because I can’t bear it to stay and if it did it would lead to madness. But my head also bursts when imagining the opposite: something that has begun—because where would it begin? And that has ended—but what comes after ending? As you see, it’s impossible for me to deepen and take possession of life, which is aerial, is my light breath. But I do know what I want here: I want the inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at an underlying order. The great potency of potentiality. These babbled phrases of mine are made the very moment they’re being written and are so new and green they crackle. They are the now. I want the experience of a lack of construction. Though this text of mine is crossed from end to end by a fragile connecting thread—which? that of a plunge into the matter of the word? of passion? A lustful thread, breath that heats the passing of syllables. Life really just barely escapes me though the certainty comes to me that life is other and has a hidden style.

  This text that I give you is not to be seen close up: it gains its secret previously invisible roundness when seen from a high-flying plane. Then you can divine the play of islands and see the channel
s and seas. Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language. I’m not transmitting to you a story but just words that live from sound. I speak to you thus:

  “Lustful trunk.”

  And I bathe within it. It is linked to the root that penetrates inside us into the earth. All that I write you is taut. I use stray words that are in themselves a free dart: savages, barbarians, decadent noblemen and gangsters. Does that mean anything to you? It speaks to me.

  But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is.

  I am at its core.

  I still am.

  I am at the living and soft centre.

  Still.

  It sparkles and is elastic. Like the gait of a glossy black panther that I saw and that walked softly, slowly and dangerously. But not caged—because I don’t want that. As for the unforeseeable—the next phrase is unforeseeable to me. In the core where I am, in the core of the Is, I ask no questions. Because when it is—it is. I am only limited by my identity. I, elastic being and separated from other bodies.

  In truth I’m still not quite seeing properly the thread of what I’m writing you. I think I never shall—but I acknowledge the dark in which the two eyes of the soft panther shine. Darkness is my hothouse. Enchanted darkness. I’ll keep talking to you and taking the risk of disconnection: I am subterraneously unreachable by my knowledge.

  I write to you because I don’t understand myself.

  But I’ll keep following myself. Elastic. This forest where I survive in order to be is such a mystery. But now I think things are happening. That is: I’m going in. I mean: into the mystery. I myself mysterious and inside the core in which I move swimming, protozoan. One day I childishly said: I can do everything. It was the pre-viewing of one day being able to cast myself off and fall into the abandon of every law. Elastic. The profound joy: the secret ecstasy. I know how to invent a thought. I feel the commotion of novelty. But I am well aware that what I write is only a tone.

  In my core I have the strange impression that I don’t belong to the human species.

  There is much to say that I don’t know how to say. The words are lacking. But I refuse to invent new ones: those that already exist must say what can be said and what is forbidden. And I can sense whatever is forbidden. If I have the strength. Beyond thought there are no words: it is itself. My painting has no words: it is beyond thought. In this land of the is-itself I am pure crystalline ecstasy. It is itself. I am myself. You are yourself.

  And I am haunted by my ghosts, by all that is mythic, fantastic and gigantic: life is supernatural. I walk holding an open umbrella upon a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of the visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me. I don’t like what I just wrote— but I’m duty-bound to accept the whole section because it happened to me. And I have much respect for what I happen to myself. My essence is unconscious of itself and that’s why I obey myself blindly.

  I’m being antimelodic. I take pleasure in the difficult harmony of the harsh opposites. Where am I going? and the answer is: I’m going.

  And so when I die, I’ll never have been born and lived: death washes away the traces of the sea-foam on the beach.

  Now it is an instant.

  Here is another now.

  And another. My effort: to bring now the future to here. I move inside my deep instincts which carry themselves out blindly. I feel then that I’m near springs, pools and waterfalls, all with abundant waters. And I free.

  Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world. It captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot. Read the energy that is in my silence. Ah I fear God and his silence.

  I’m myself.

  But there’s also the mystery of the impersonal that is the “it”: I have the impersonal inside me and isn’t something the personal that sometimes floods me can corrupt or rot by the personal that sometimes floods me: but I dry myself in the sun and am an impersonal of the dry and germinative pit of a fruit. My personal is humus in the earth and lives from rotting. My “it” is hard like a pebble.

  The transcendence inside me is the living and soft “it” and has the thought that an oyster has. Could the oyster when torn from its root feel anxiety? It is disturbed in its life without eyes. I used to drip lemon juice onto the living oyster and watched in horror and fascination as it contorted all over. And I was eating the living it. The living it is the God.

  I’ll stop for a bit because I know that the God is the world. He is whatever exists. I pray to whatever exists? It’s not dangerous to approach whatever exists. Profound prayer is a meditation upon the nothing. It’s the dry and electrical contact with oneself, an impersonal oneself.

  I don’t like when they drip lemon upon my depths and make me contort all over. Are the facts of life lemon on the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?

  What is the first element? immediately there must have been two to have the secret intimate movement from which milk gushes.

  I have been told that the cat after giving birth eats her own placenta and for four days eats nothing else. Only then does she drink milk. Let me speak strictly of breast-feeding. People talk about the milk rising. How? And it wouldn’t help to explain because the explanation demands another explanation which would demand another explanation and which would open again onto the mystery. But I know it things about breast-feeding a child.

  I am breathing. Up and down. Up and down. How does the naked oyster breathe? If it breathes I can’t see it. Does what I cannot see not exist? What moves me the most is that what I cannot see nonetheless exists. For then I have at my feet a whole unknown world that exists entire and full of rich saliva. The truth is somewhere: but no use thinking. I shall not discover it and yet I live from it.

  What I write to you does not come gently, slowly rising to a peak before dying away gently. No: what I write you is aflame like fiery eyes.

  Tonight the moon is full. Through the window the moon covers my bed and turns everything a milky bluish white. The moon is gauche. It’s to your left as you go in. So I escape by closing my eyes. Because the full moon is light insomnia: numb and drowsy like after love. And I had decided to go to sleep so I could dream, I was missing the news that comes in the dream.

  So I dreamed something I’ll try to reproduce. It was about a film I was watching. There was a man imitating a movie star. And everything this man did was in turn imitated by others and others. The slightest gesture. And there was the advert for a drink called Zerbino. The man took the bottle of Zerbino and lifted it to his lips. So everyone took a bottle of Zerbino and lifted it to their lips. In the centre the man who was imitating a movie star said: this is a film advertising Zerbino and Zerbino is actually rubbish. But that wasn’t the end. The man picked up the drink again and drank. And so did the others: it was inevitable. Zerbino was an institution stronger than the man. The women at this point looked like stewardesses. Stewardesses are dehydrated—a lot of water needs to be added to their powder to turn them into milk. It’s a film about automatic people who are acutely and gravely aware that they are automatic and that there’s no escape. The God is not automatic: for Him every instant is. He is it.

  But there are questions I asked myself as a child and that were never answered, they still echo mournfully: did the world make itself? But where did it make itself? in what place? And if it was by the energy of God —how did it begin? could it be like now when I am being a
nd at the same time making myself? It’s because of the absence of an answer that I get so bothered.

  But 9 and 7 and 8 are my secret numbers. I am an initiate without a sect. Avid for the mystery. My passion for the crux of numbers, in which I divine the core of their own rigid and fatal destiny. And I dream of luxuriant grandeurs deepened in the darkness: whirl of abundance, where the velvety and carnivorous plants are we who have just sprouted, sharp love— slow faint.

  Could it be that what I am writing to you is beyond thought? Reasoning is what it is not. Whoever can stop reasoning—which is terribly difficult—let them come along with me. But at least I’m not imitating a movie star and nobody needs to lift me to their lips or become a stewardess.

  I’ve got a confession to make: I’m a little frightened. For I don’t know where my freedom will lead me. It is neither arbitrary nor libertine. But I am unbound.

  Every once in a while I’ll give you a light story— melodic and cantabile area to break up this string quartet of mine: a figurative interval to open a clearing in my nourishing jungle.

  Am I free? There is some thing still holding me. Or am I holding it? It’s also this: I’m not entirely unbound because I am in union with everything. Moreover one person is everything. It’s not heavy to carry because it simply isn’t carried: it is everything.

  It seems to me that for the first time I’m knowing about things. My impression is that I only don’t go more toward things to not surpass myself. I have a certain fear of myself, I’m not to be trusted and mistrust my false power.