The Stream of Life (7 page)

But when winter comes I give and give and give. I bundle myself up. I cradle broods of people to my warm breast. And you hear the noise of someone having hot soup. I'm experiencing rainy days now: the time for me to give is close at hand.

Don't you see that this is like a child being born? It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming- into-being is a slow, slow, good pain. It's a full stretching to the point where the person can stretch no more. And the blood is thankful. I breathe, I breathe. The air is
it
. Air with wind is already a he or a she. If I had to force myself to write to you I would become very sad. Sometimes I can't stand the force of inspiration. Then I paint oppressed. It's very good that things don't depend on me.

I've talked a lot about death. But I'm going to tell you about the breath of life. When a person has stopped breathing he's given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: one mouth glues itself onto the mouth of another and breaths. And then the other begins to breathe again. This exchange of breath is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard tell about life. Truthfully, the beauty of this mouth-to-mouth is overwhelming to me.

Oh, how uncertain everything is. And yet its within the Order. I don't even know what I'm going to write you in my next sentence. People never speak the ultimate truth. Whoever knows the truth, step forward. And speak. Contrite, we'll listen.

... I noticed him suddenly and he was so extraordinarily beautiful and virile a man that I felt a joy of creation. It's not that I wanted him for myself, just as I don't want for myself the little boy with the hair of an archangel I saw running after the ball. I just wanted to look. The man looked at me for an instant and smiled calmly: he knew how beautiful he was and I know that he knew I didn't want him for myself. He smiled because he didn't feel at all threatened. It's just that beings who are exceptional in any sense are subject to more danger than normal people. I crossed the street and hailed a cab. The breeze ruffled the hairs on the back of my neck. And I was so happy that I curled up out of fear in a corner of the cab, because happiness hurts. And all this caused by the sight of a beautiful man. I continued not to want him for myself—what I like are people who are a little ugly and at the same time in harmony, but in a certain way he'd given me a lot with that smile of complicity between people who understand each other. I didn't understand any of that.

The courage to live: I leave hidden what needs to be hidden and what needs to spread out in secret.

I fall silent.

Because I don't know what my secret is. Tell me yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us. It's not a defamatory secret. It's simply that: secret.

And there are no formulas for it.

I think that now I'll have to ask permission to die a little. Excuse me, will you? I won't be long. Thanks.

. . . No. I couldn't die. Will I end here this "thing- word" by my own voluntary act? Not yet.

I'm transfiguring reality—what is it that escapes me? why don't I stretch out my hand and grab? It's because I've only dreamed the world but have never seen it.

What I'm writing you is in contralto. It's a negro spiritual. It has a chorus and lighted candles. I'm feeling dizzy now. I'm a little frightened. To what end will my freedom lead me? What is this I'm writing you? It leaves me alone. But I go on and pray and my freedom is ruled by the Order—I'm no longer afraid. What guides me is simply a sense of discovery. Behind what's behind thinking.

What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I'm doing it right now: I'm following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that's still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping.

Now I'm frightened. Because I'm going to tell you something. Wait for the fear to pass.

It passed. It's the following: to me, dissonance is harmony. Melody often bores me. So does the so-called
leitmotif.
What I want in music and in what I write you and in what I paint are geometrical lines that cross in space and form a discordance that I can understand. It's pure
it.
My being becomes completely soaked and slightly intoxicated. What I'm telling you is very important. And I work while I'm asleep: because it's then that I move in the mystery.

It's Sunday morning. On this Sunday of sun and Jupiter I'm alone at home. Suddenly, I've split in two and doubled over, as with an intense labor pain—and I saw that the girl in me was dying. I shall never forget this bloody Sunday. To heal will take time. And here I am, hard and silent and heroic. Without a little girl inside me. All lives are heroic lives.

Creation escapes me. And I don't even want to know so much. I'm satisfied that my heart beats in my chest. I'm satisfied with the impersonal vitality of the
it.

Right now I feel my heart beating wildly in my chest. It's a vindication because during the last few sentences I was thinking only on the surface of myself. So the core of existence comes forth to bathe and erase all traces of thought. The sea erases the wave marks in the sand. Oh God, how happy I'm being. What destroys happiness is fear.

I'm still afraid. But my heart is beating. Inexplicable love makes the heart beat faster. The only guarantee is that I was born. You are a way of my being me, and I a way of you being you: hence the limits of my possibility.

I'm in a joy that one can die from. Sweet exhaustion in talking to you. But there's hope. My hope is to feel voracious toward the future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe and live, from yesterday to today, in happy love. But to remember with yearning is like saying good-bye again.

A fantastic world surrounds me and is me. I hear the wild song of a bird and I crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit gnawed by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant swarm of insects surrounds me, light of a burning lamp that I am. I exceed myself then in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that wrap themselves thickly around what I feel and think and experience and that transform all that I am into something of my own that nonetheless remains entirely separate from me. I watch myself think. What I ask myself is this: who is it in me that remains outside even of thinking? I'm writing you all of this since it's a challenge I'm forced to accept with humility. I'm startled by my ghosts, by what is mythical and fantastic—life is supernatural. And I walk on a loose rope to the end of my dream. Visceras tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of the impulses. Before organizing myself, I have to disorganize myself internally. To experience the first, fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to make mistakes, to fall and get up again.

But if I wait for understanding to accept things—the act of surrender will never take place. I have to take the plunge all at once, the plunge that embraces comprehension and above all incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is give myself over. How do I do that? I know, though, that only in walking does one learn how to walk and then—miracle—one walks.

I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of myself is when I know nothing and manufacture I don't know what.

Behold, suddenly I see that I know nothing. Is the blade of my knife growing dull? It seems to me the most likely thing is that I don't understand because what I see now is so hard: and I'm cunningly entering into contact with a reality that is new to me and doesn't yet have thoughts corresponding to it, and much less a word that names it. It's one more sensation behind thought.

How can I explain this to you? I'm going to try. It's that I'm perceiving a slanted reality. One seen through an oblique slice. Only now have I intuited the obliqueness of life. Before I saw only through straight and parallel slices. I didn't notice the artful, slanted trace. Now I divine that life

is something else. That living is not just unrolling crude sentiments—it's something more magical and more graceful, something that for all that does not lose its fine animal vigor. I've put my heavy paw on that unexpectedly slanted life, thus snuffing out the oblique and the fortuitous that is at the same time the subtly fateful. I've understood the fatality of chance and in this there's no contradiction.

Oblique life is very intimate. I won't say anything more about that intimacy so that I don't harm thought-feeling with dry words. So that I leave that obliqueness in its unbridled independence.

And I also know a way of life that is soft pride, grace of movement, light and continuous frustration, that has a skill at aloofness that comes from a long and ancient path. Like a tiny sign of revolt an irony light and eccentric. There's a side of life that's like drinking coffee on a terrace in winter cold bundled up in wool.

I know a way of life that's a light shadow unfurled to the wind and flapping lightly on the ground: a life that's floating shadow, levitation and dreams in broad daylight: I live the richness of the earth.

Yes. Life is very oriental. Only a few people chosen by the fate of chance have tasted of the elusive and delicate freedom of life. It's like knowing how to arrange flowers in a vase: an almost useless skill. That fugitive freedom of life should never be forgotten: it must be present, like an aroma.

To live this life is more an indirect remembering of it than a direct living. It seems like a gentle convalescence from something that could have been absolutely terrible. Convalescence from a frigid pleasure. Only for those who are initiated does life become delicately real. And it's in the now-instant: one devours the fruit at its peak. Could it be that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore and that everything has escaped me without my knowing it? Yes, I do know—but very carefully because otherwise it will slip through my fingers. I feed myself delicately on the trivial day-to-day and drink coffee on the terrace at the threshold of this twilight that seems sickly but only because it's sweet and sensitive.

Oblique life? I know full well that there's a slight discordance between things, they almost clash, there's a discordance between beings who lose each other between words that say virtually nothing more. But we almost understand each other in that casual discordance, in that almost that's the only way of bearing life at its fullest, since a blunt face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us, would stun its delicate spiderweb threads. We look at each other sideways so as not to compromise what we sense as being infinitely other in that life I'm telling you of.

And I live to one side—a place where the direct light doesn't scorch me. And I speak in a whisper so that ears are forced to stay on the ready and to hear me.

But I know still another life. I know and want it and I devour it ferociously. It's a life of magic violence. It's mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes coil around each other while the stars tremble. Drops of water fall in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In this darkness the flowers grow entangled in an enchanted and moist garden. And I am the sorceress of this mute bacchanal. I feel I'm defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I'm intrinsically evil. It's only out of pure goodness that I'm good. Defeated by myself. That I take myself along the paths of the salamander, genius that governs the fire and lives within it. And I give myself as an offering to the dead. I perform incantations during the solstice, specter of an exorcized dragon.

But I don't know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it's not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full and unintelligible. Then comes dawn with its paunch full of thousands of tiny, clamoring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling nerve of what is today.

I achieve a state behind thought. I refuse to divide it into words—and what I cannot and do not want to express keeps being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm afraid of the moments when I don't use thought and it's a momentary state, difficult to reach that, all secret, no longer uses the words with which thoughts are formed. Is not using words to lose ones identity? is it to become lost in the essential, destructive shadows?

I lose the identity of the world within me and I exist without guarantees. I achieve the achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and of the world and of you is not obvious. It's fantastic, and I struggle with myself during those moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being? is He the abstraction that materializes itself in the nature of what exists? My roots are in the divine shadows. Somnolent roots. Wavering in the darknesses.

And, that's why I sense we shall soon separate. My astonishing truth is that I was always alone, separate from you, and I didn't know it. Now I know; I'm alone. I and my freedom, which I don't know how to use. Huge responsibility of solitude. Those who are not lost do not know freedom and do not love it. As for me, I take up my solitude. Which sometimes becomes rapturous, like looking at fireworks. I'm alone and I have to live a certain intimate glory which, in solitude, can turn into pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets to live.

Does each one of us have—at some moment lost in life—a mission to carry out? Still I refuse to take on any mission. I carry out nothing: I just live.

It's so curious and hard now to substitute for the paintbrush that strangely familiar but always remote thing, the word. Extreme and intimate beauty is contained within it. But it's unreachable—and when it's within reach, behold, it's illusory because it continues being unreachable. From my painting and from these jammed-together words there arises a silence that is also like the eyes' substratum. There's a thing that always escapes me. When it doesn't escape I gain a certainty: life is other. It's a mode of underlying.