Agua Viva Page 5

  Will I have to die again in order to be born once again? I accept.

  I’ll return to the unknown part of myself and when I am born shall speak of “he” or “she.” For now, what sustains me is the “that” that is an “it.” To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter.

  As the God has no name I shall give Him the name of Simptar. It belongs to no language. I shall give myself the name of Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language before Sanskrit, it language. I hear the tick-tock of the clock: so I make haste. The tick-tock is it.

  I think I am not going to die in the next instant because the doctor who examined me thoroughly said that I am in perfect health. See? the instant passed and I didn’t die. I want to be buried straight in the ground though inside a coffin. I don’t want to be filed in a wall as in the São João Batista cemetery where there’s no more room in the ground. So they invented those diabolical walls where you are held as in a filing cabinet.

  Now it is an instant. Do you feel it? I do.

  The air is “it” and has no perfume. I like that too. But I like night jessamine, musky because its sweetness is a surrender to the moon. I’ve eaten jelly made from small scarlet roses: its taste blesses us even as it assaults. How to reproduce the taste in words? The taste is one and the words are many. As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument. Far beyond thought I have a musical background. But even farther beyond there is the beating heart. Therefore the most profound thought is a beating heart.

  I want to die with life. I swear that I shall only die profiting from the last instant. There is a profound prayer within me that will be born I don’t know when. I would so like to die of health. Like someone exploding. Éclater is better: j’éclate. For now there’s dialogue with you. Then it will be monologue. Then the silence. I know that there will be an order.

  Chaos readies itself again like musical instruments that are tuned before the electronic music begins. I am improvising and the beauty of what I improvise is a fugue. I feel throbbing within me the prayer that has not yet come. I feel that I shall ask for the facts just to run off me without getting me wet. I am ready for the great silence of death. I will go to sleep.

  I got up. The coup de grâce. Because I’m tired of defending myself. I’m innocent. Even naive because I surrender without any guarantees. I was born by Order. I’m entirely calm. I breathe by Order. I have no lifestyle: I reached the impersonal, which is so difficult. Soon the Order will command me to surpass the maximum. Surpassing the maximum is living the pure element. There are people who can’t stand it: they vomit. But I am used to blood.

  What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I’m sending you chamber writing.

  And this writing I’m attempting is a way of thrashing myself free. I’m terrified. Why were there dinosaurs on this Earth? how does a race die out?

  I notice that I’m writing as if I were between sleep and wakefulness.

  It’s because I suddenly see that I haven’t been understanding for a long time. Is the edge of my knife growing blunt? It seems more probable to me that I don’t understand why what I am seeing now is difficult: I’m slyly coming into contact with a reality new to me that still has no corresponding thoughts and not even a word that signifies it—it is a sensation beyond thought.

  And here’s where my evil rules me. I am still the cruel queen of the Medes and the Persians and am also a slow evolution that throws itself like a drawbridge to a future whose milky clouds I’m already breathing. My aura is of the mystery of life. I surpass myself abdicating from my name, and then I am the world. I follow the voice of the world with a single voice.

  What I write to you has no beginning: it’s a continuation. From the words of this chant, chant which is mine and yours, a halo arises that transcends the phrases, do you feel it? My experience comes from having already managed to paint the halo of things. The halo is more important than the things and the words. The halo is dizzying. I plunge the word into the deserted emptiness: it’s a word like a slim monolithic block that gives off shadow. And it’s a heralding trumpet. The halo is the it.

  I need to feel again the it of animals. For a long time I haven’t been in contact with primitive animal life. I need to study animals. I want to capture the it in order not to paint an eagle and a horse, but a horse with the open wings of a great eagle.

  I shiver all over when I come into physical contact with animals or simply see them. Animals fantasticate me. They are time that does not measure itself. I seem to have a certain horror for the living creature that is not human and that has my own instincts though free and indomitable. The animal never substitutes one thing for another.

  Animals don’t laugh. Though sometimes dogs laugh. Besides their panting mouths their smile is transmitted by eyes that start to shine and become more sensual, while their tails wag in joyous expectation. But cats never laugh. A “he” I know wants nothing more to do with cats. He’s through with them forever because he had a certain female cat who periodically got frenzied. When she was in heat her instincts were so imperative that, after long and plangent meows, she would throw herself from the roof and injure herself on the ground.

  Sometimes I get electrified when I see animals. I’m now hearing the ancestral cry within me: I no longer seem to know who is the creature, the animal or me. And I get all confused. It seems I get scared of facing up to stifled instincts that I’m forced to acknowledge in the presence of the animal.

  I knew a “she” who humanized animals talking to them and giving them her own characteristics. I don’t humanize animals because it’s an offense—you must respect their nature—I am the one who animalizes myself. It’s not hard and comes simply. It’s just a matter of not fighting it and it’s just surrendering.

  Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and surrender when I paint.

  Holding a little bird in the half-closed cup of your hand is terrible, like having the trembling instants inside your hand. The frightened little bird chaotically beats thousands of wings and suddenly you have in your half-closed hand the thin wings struggling and suddenly you can’t bear it and quickly open your hand to free the light prisoner. Or you hand it quickly back to its owner so that he can give it the relatively greater freedom of the cage. Birds—I want them in the trees or flying far from my hands. I may one day grow intimate with them and take pleasure in their lightweight presence of an instant. “Take pleasure in their lightweight presence” gives me the feeling of having written a complete sentence because it says exactly what it is: the levitation of the birds.

  It would never occur to me to have an owl, though I have painted them in caves. But a “she” found a fledgling on the forest floor in Santa Teresa all alone and bereft of a mother. She took it home. She cuddled it. She fed it and cooed to it and eventually found out that it liked raw meat. When it grew up you might expect it to flee immediately but it was in no hurry to go off in search of its destiny that would be to join others of its mad race: it had grown fond, that diabolical bird, of the girl. Until in a leap—as if
struggling with itself—it freed itself with a flight into the depth of the world.

  I have seen wild horses in the meadows where at night the white horse—king of nature—cast into the high air its long neigh of glory. I have had perfect relations with them. I remember standing with the same haughtiness as the horse and running my hand through its naked fur. Through its wild mane. I felt like this: the woman and the horse.

  I know old stories but that renews themselves now. The he told me that for some time he lived with part of his family in a little village in a valley in the high snowy Pyrenees. In the winter the starving wolves came down from the mountains to the village on the track of prey. All the inhabitants bolted themselves attentive in their houses sheltering in the main room sheep and horses and dogs and goats, human warmth and animal warmth—all alertly hearing the scraping of the claws of the wolves upon the closed doors. Listening. Listening.

  I am melancholy. It is morning. But I know the secret of pure mornings. And I relax in the melancholy.

  I know the story of a rose. Does it seem strange to you to speak of a rose when I am talking about animals? But it acted in a way that recalls the animal mysteries. Every two days I would buy a rose and place it in water in a vase made specially narrow to hold the long stem of a single flower. Every two days the rose would wilt and I would exchange it for another. Until one certain rose. It was rose-colored without coloring or grafting just naturally of the most vivid rose color. Its beauty expanded the heart by great breadths. It seemed so proud of the turgescence of its wide open corolla and of its own petals that its haughtiness held it almost erect. Because it was not completely erect: with graciousness it bent over its stem which was fine and fragile. An intimate relationship intensely developed between me and the flower: I admired her and she seemed to feel admired. And she became so glorious in her apparition and was observed with such love that days went by and she did not wilt: her corolla remained wide open and swollen, fresh as a newborn flower. She lasted in beauty and life an entire week. Only then did she start to show signs of some fatigue. Then she died. It was with reluctance that I replaced her. And I never forgot her. The strange thing is that my maid asked me once out of the blue: “and that rose?” I didn’t ask which one. I knew. That rose that lived from love given at length was remembered because the woman had seen how I looked at the flower and transmitted to her the waves of my energy. She had blindly intuited that something had gone on between me and the rose. That rose—made me want to call it “jewel of my life,” because I often give things names—had so much instinct by nature that I and she had been able to live each other profoundly, as only can happen between beast and man.

  Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine. They sometimes clamor for many generations from afar and I can’t respond except by growing restless. It’s the call.

  This free air, this wind that strikes me in the soul of the face leaving it troubled in an imitation of an anguished ever-new ecstasy, anew and always, every time the plunge into a bottomless thing into which I fall always ceaselessly falling until I die and achieve at last silence. Oh sirocco wind, I do not forgive thee for death, thou who bringest me a damaged memory of things lived that, alas for me, always repeat themselves, even in other and different forms. The lived thing scares me as the future scares me. That, like things that have passed, is intangible, mere supposition.

  I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and never will end. Never.

  I heard about a she who died in bed but screaming: my light’s going out! Until there was the favor of the coma inside which she freed herself from her body and had no fear of death.

  Before writing to you I perfume myself all over.

  I know you all over because I have lived you all over. In me life is profound. The early hours find me pale from having lived the night of deep dreams. Though sometimes I float on a visible shoal that has beneath it dark blue almost black depths. That is why I write to you. On a waft of thick seaweed and in the tender wellspring of love.

  I’m going to die: there’s that tension like that of a bow about to loose an arrow. I remember the sign of Sagittarius: half man and half animal. The human part in classical rigidity holds the bow and arrow. The bow could shoot at any instant and hit the target. I know that I shall hit the target.

  Now I’m going to write wherever my hand leads: I won’t fiddle with whatever it writes. This is a way to have no lag between the instant and I: I act in the core of the instant. But there’s still some lag. It starts like this: as love impedes death, and I don’t know what I mean by that. I trust in my own incomprehension that gives me life free of understanding, I lost friends, I don’t understand death. The horrible duty is to go to the end. And counting on no one. To live your life yourself. And to suffer as much to dull myself a bit. Because I can no longer carry the sorrows of the world. What can I do when I feel totally what other people are and feel? I live them but no longer have the strength. I don’t want to tell even myself certain things. It would be to betray the is-itself. I feel that I know some truths. Which I already foresee. But truths have no words. Truths or truth? I’m not going to speak of the God, He is my secret. The sun is shining today. The beach was full of a nice wind and a freedom. And I was on my own. Without needing anybody. It’s hard because I need to share what I feel with you. The calm sea. But on the lookout and suspicious. As if a calm like that couldn’t last. Something’s always about to happen. The unforeseen, improvised and fatal, fascinates me. I have started to communicate so strongly with you that I stopped being while still existing. You became an I. It’s so hard to speak and say things that can’t be said. It’s so silent. How to translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us? So hard to explain: I looked straight at you for a few instants. Such moments are my secret. There was what’s called perfect communion. I call it an acute state of happiness. I’m terribly lucid and it seems I’m reaching a higher plane of humanity. Or of unhumanity—the it.

  What I do by involuntary instinct cannot be described.

  What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume.

  I’m writing to you seated beside an open window up in my studio.

  I’m writing you this facsimile of a book, the book of someone who doesn’t know how to write; but that’s because in the lightest realm of speaking I almost don’t know how to speak. Particularly speaking to you in writing, I who got used to your being the audience, however distracted, of my voice. When I paint I respect the material I use, I respect its primordial fate. So when I write you I respect the syllables.

  New instant in which I see what is coming. Though to speak of the instant of vision I must be more discursive than the instant: many instants will pass before I unfold and exhaust the single and quick complexity of a glance.

  I’m writing to you in time with my breath. Shall I always be hermetic as in my painting? Because it seems you have to be terribly explicit. Am I explicit? I don’t really care. Now I’m going to light a cigarette. Perhaps I’ll go back to the typewriter or perhaps I’ll stop right here forever. I, who am never good enough.

  I came back. I’m thinking about turtles. Once I said by pure intuition that the turtle was a dinosauric animal. Later I read that it really is. I have the strangest thoughts. One day I’ll paint turtles. They interest me a lot. All living beings, except man, are a scandal of astonishment:
we were modelled and a lot of raw material was left over—it—and so the beasts were formed. Why a turtle? Maybe the title of what I’m writing you should be a little like that and in the form of a question: “What about turtles?” You who are reading me would say: it’s true that it’s been a long time since I thought about turtles.

  I suddenly got so distressed that I might just say enough already and finish what I’m writing to you, it’s more based on blind words. Even for unbelievers there’s the instant of despair that is divine: the absence of the God is an act of religion. At this very instant I’m asking the God to help me. I’m needing. Needing more than human strength. I am strong but also destructive. The God must come to me since I haven’t gone to Him. Let the God come: please. Though I don’t deserve it. Come. Or perhaps those who least deserve Him need Him most. I’m restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs. If I received so much love inside me and nonetheless am restless it’s because I need the God to come. Come before it’s too late. I’m in danger like every person who lives. And the only thing I can expect is precisely the unexpected. But I know that I shall have peace before death and that one day I shall taste the delicateness of life. I shall notice—as we eat and live the taste of food. My voice falls into the abyss of your silence. You read me in silence. But in this unlimited silent field I unfurl my wings, free to live. So I accept the worst and enter the core of death and that is why I’m alive. The feeling core. And that it makes me quiver.