Agua Viva (6 page)

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
.